“No one sits down to negotiate to get a sentence of 20 years, or 18, or 10,” said the Attorney General of Colombia to twenty journalists last Monday. Luz Adriana Camargo was referring to the open negotiation with Olmedo López, the former director of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD). The prosecutor has admitted her participation in the largest corruption scheme of the Gustavo Petro government. Five months after the scandal broke out, which consists of the fact that the entity awarded contracts with overprices and sought to divert resources, the indictment of López, his deputy director Sneyder Pinilla and the contractor Luis Eduardo López is scheduled for this Thursday. At that hearing, the first firm results of a judicial investigation will be known, which is a test of fire for prosecutor Camargo, since the case has splashed officials from the first ring of trust of the president who nominated her for that position.
The political impact of the plot has been such that the president has acknowledged it. On July 20, at the installation of Congress for its third year, the president apologized to the country for having appointed López. “I was the one who put him there,” he accepted. And he dedicated the first two minutes of his speech, which with that of August 7 is the most symbolic of the usual schedule of a president, to the corruption case that had its genesis in La Guajira, in the far north of Colombia and on the border with Venezuela. That geographic location is significant, since the president promised to prioritize that department in his administration. In June 2023, he even moved his cabinet there to “govern with the people,” and promised to bring water to the entire region, inaugurate more health centers and consolidate an ethnic university. A year later, the spotlight remains on the impoverished department, but because of the scandal.
At the court hearing on Thursday, the Prosecutor’s Office will charge Olmedo de Jesús López, the leftist politician that Petro appointed to lead the entity that responds to all the country’s emergencies; Sneyder Augusto Pinilla, López’s deputy director; and Luis Eduardo López Rosero, the contractor that UNGRD paid to take 40 tanker trucks to La Guajira to irrigate remote areas without basic services. It was that contract for 46.8 billion pesos (about 12 million dollars) that, at the end of February of this year, Time and W Radio revealed that it was not being implemented. The vehicles that promised to carry 640,000 liters of water had never been operated, but the money had been disbursed.
That was the first sign of the web of corruption that has affected congressmen, mayors, governors and high-ranking government officials. López and Pinilla have declared before the Prosecutor’s Office that they are not the only ones responsible for the resources that were lost in the Unit. Last May, they asked the Prosecutor’s Office to negotiate a principle of opportunity, with which they seek to obtain reductions in the sentence in exchange for providing valuable information about others involved in the scandal. Precisely, the indictment is part of the tug-of-war that will define not only the judicial future of these two but also that of other officials, politicians and contractors.
The cards that the Prosecutor’s Office is playing
Newsletter
Analysis of current events and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your inbox
RECEIVE THE
This case is one of the two most publicized in the Attorney General’s Office related to President Petro. The other is the investigation against Nicolás Petro Burgos, the president’s first-born, for alleged irregularities in the financing of his father’s campaign. The progress that the entity shows on these two fronts, in addition to having judicial impacts, could define the political climate of the two years that remain in the Government and undermine -even more- the credibility of the president.
Prosecutor Camargo, who took office last February, has taken on the role of spokesperson for these two investigations in a discreet and reserved manner. Before the media, she assured that they have carried out 154 investigative activities in the UNGRD corruption case, such as interviews with officials and witnesses, forensic analysis, evidence gathering and analysis of financial records. Now her challenge will be to prove the veracity of the accusations made by López and Pinilla, or to demonstrate that the former officials have lied to seek benefits.
Therefore, the hearing on Thursday will be a face-to-face confrontation between the version of those under investigation and the hypotheses that the Prosecutor’s Office manages to support. Until now, the only known evidence is that revealed by Caracol Newswith chats and audios provided by those investigated and which impacted the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla; his advisor María Alejandra Benavides; and five congressmen: Wadith Manzur (representative to the Chamber of Córdoba for the Conservative Party), Karen Manrique (representative for the peace seat of Arauca), Julián Peinado (representative of Antioquia for the Liberal Party), Juan Diego Muñoz (representative of Meta for the Green Alliance), Liliana Bitar (senator of Córdoba for the Conservative Party) and Juan Pablo Gallo (liberal senator of Risaralda).
To prove that what Olmedo and Sneyder have said is true, the Prosecutor’s Office will have to demonstrate that there was an order from the highest Government to direct UNGRD contracts to divert billions of pesos to contractors allied with those politicians, with the purpose of securing their votes in Congress for Petro’s social reforms, and for the ELN guerrilla, and thus sustain their peace negotiations with the Executive.
López and Pinilla have also mentioned the former Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco; the former regional advisor, Sandra Ortiz (whom the president asked to resign due to the scandal); the Secretary of Transparency of the Presidency, Andrés Idárraga; and the director of the National Intelligence Department (who was previously director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency), Carlos Ramón González.
Although the country has not yet seen the evidence that could support these claims, the Attorney General’s Office has opened a preliminary investigation against Bonilla and González, two high-ranking officials. The Police’s Criminal Investigation Department (Dijín) has even confiscated six computers from officials in the Casa de Nariño to obtain material on the case.
This newspaper learned that, in order to clarify the roles in the scandal, the Prosecutor’s Office will release on Thursday an organizational chart with the names of the officials and their possible role in the corruption network, as a starting point to determine the responsibilities in the irregular contracts. But beyond that, it will show how much it believes in the versions of Pinilla and López, and will define their immediate future: the time they could spend in jail and the value of the information they have given or indicated they can give. The advance of the prosecutor Camargo, with her phrase about the negotiations of the principles of opportunity, seems to show that the request of those investigated to pay only five years of jail, in exchange for collaborating with justice, is not completely ruled out.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and Here on the WhatsApp channeland receive all the key information on current events in the country.
#Prosecutors #Office #reveals #evidence #largest #corruption #case #Petro #Government