The scandal over the alleged purchase of votes to favor the presidential campaign of Iván Duque went from being a journalistic complaint that has caused a political storm in Colombia to become a new formal investigation against the former president and today senator Álvaro Uribe. The Supreme Court Investigative Chamber, the highest judicial instance of the ordinary court, decided to open a previous file against Uribe, mentioned in a call between a deceased drug trafficker and an adviser to the senator.
The court assured that it will investigate him for “alleged conduct against the mechanisms of democratic participation”, due to the complaints by Gonzalo Guillén and Daniel Mendoza, journalists who revealed the transcription of a call in which the late José Guillermo Hernández, known as Baby, and Uribe’s collaborator, María Claudia Daza, spoke of the alleged purchase of votes for the Duque presidential campaign, held in 2018. In it, according to the judicial investigation, both Duque and Uribe are mentioned and there is talk of passing ” money under the table ”, to get votes that will take uribismo back to the presidency of Colombia.
Uribe and Duque have denied that Hernández’s contributions to the campaign were admitted, and they insist that they did not know that the man, killed in Brazil in 2019, was a drug trafficker as reported by the Prosecutor’s Office in the middle of last year. Dozens of photos prove that the relationship was close and that Hernández had power in political and military circles. For the judicial authority, Hernández was a member of a criminal organization and had assets that were the product of drug trafficking activities and was being investigated for a murder. Amidst those legal eavesdropping appeared the conversation that puts uribismo on the ropes.
Faced with the growing scandal, the Prosecutor General’s Office, headed by Francisco Barbosa, a close friend of Duque, asked the Supreme Court to advance the investigations. However, according to the journalist who made the disclosure, the Barbosa document is drafted incompletely and contains falsehoods “so that it does not lead to anything.” “Nothing is going to happen. The Prosecutor General’s Office is from Uribe and the Court is terrified of him. The rest are salutes to the flag,” wrote Guillén, who has denounced follow-ups and interceptions against him and assures that the audios are protected abroad. .
This is just one of the cases that the former president has for various cases. The most advanced, however, is one for alleged witness manipulation in which the senator from the Democratic Center is formally linked to the process for procedural fraud and bribery.
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