Gustavo Petro appoints Angela Maria Buitrago as the new Minister of Justice

President Gustavo Petro announced on Monday afternoon that Angela Maria Buitrago will be the new Minister of Justice of his Government. Buitrago will replace the liberal Nestor Osuna, who had been in office since the beginning of the presidential term. “I thank Minister Osuna for his immense collaboration with our Government. A true progressive jurist. Dr. Angela Maria Buitrago will now accompany us,” the president wrote on his X account. “With you forever, President Gustavo Petro! Thank you for the opportunity to contribute a grain of sand!” the outgoing minister responded. Osuna congratulated Buitrago on the appointment: “My best energy for the tremendous Minister of Justice that Colombia will have. I have known Angela Buitrago since we were classmates at the Externado University and I have always admired her. Justice will be done!” This announcement follows the recent dismissal of the Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco, who still does not have a sure replacement.

Angela Maria Buitrago’s name had already been mentioned last year when she was one of the three candidates nominated by Petro to be Attorney General. Her work in the ministry will have three fundamental objectives: to get Congress to approve the justice reform, which will be presented by the Government in the next legislature after months of dialogue and consultation; to find solutions to the prison crisis that the country has been facing for decades; and to consolidate the new drug policy, which will be in effect for the next ten years, until 2033, and will have an investment of $21 billion.

The new appointment has already generated positive reactions in different sectors of politics. Senator Humberto de la Calle, from the Green Alliance, welcomed the arrival of Buitrago. “Good news in Justice. President Petro appointed Angela Maria Buitrago as Minister of Justice. She is a renowned jurist. She earned respect in the Attorney General’s Office for her integrity and courage. But we must bid farewell with honours to the outgoing Minister, Dr. Osuna. In his tenure he maintained a pluralistic, innovative and respectful attitude that we must recognise.”

Buitrago is currently an undergraduate and graduate professor at the Externado University. The new Minister of Justice completed her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral studies there, but the place where she earned the admiration and respect of academics and colleagues was during her time at the Attorney General’s Office, where she worked as a deputy prosecutor before the Supreme Court between 2005 and 2010. This period was enough for her to achieve unprecedented progress in cases that had been stagnant for decades.

Buitrago was the prosecutor who brought to justice two retired high-ranking Army officers, General Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales and Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega, for the forced disappearances that occurred during the military retaking of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985, after a group of M-19 guerrillas entered the building and took those inside hostage. To achieve this, she had to visit Army brigades and cemeteries, exhume corpses and watch hours of video recordings of those events. But her achievements during that stage are more. Several of her accusations ended in historic convictions, such as that of former prosecutor Guillermo Valencia Cossio, brother of the then powerful conservative politician Fabio Valencia Cossio, for using his position to benefit illegal actors; that of Jorge Noguera, former director of the now defunct Administrative Department of Security (DAS), for his ties to paramilitaries; or Edilberto Castro, former governor of Meta, for his responsibility in the murder of three political leaders from his department.

These results earned her the nickname of “iron prosecutor.” However, in a decision that caused discontent in the Attorney General’s Office, in 2010, the acting Attorney General, Guillermo Mendoza Diago, asked her to resign and called her “inefficient.” That is how the criminal lawyer left the institution. In the following years, she applied to be the ombudsman of Bogotá and joined the interdisciplinary group of experts that formed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to investigate the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa (Guerrero), Mexico, which occurred in 2014.

*News in development