Editor's Comment: The battle between the Colombian judiciary and Colombia's new president, Juan Manuel Santos continues just as it had under Uribe. Recently an Axis of Logic reader and I had an exchange regarding the judges and prosecutor's office and the Santos government. "Kiosa" commented on our article, Corporate media silent on Colombian paramilitaries' confession to 30,000 murders and asked some questions:

Kiosa: Note that, as of Feb 2010 "The Colombian authorities [were] checking the information that was obtained through confessions". Have there been any updates? We need autopsy reports, muchachos, and lists of names. There are too many numbers, coming in from too many different sources, systematically confusing totals. "Sao Paolo" took an extra, egregiously inappropriate step at the end of Pravda's piece. How is the Prosecutor's Office surviving under the Uribe now Santos Death Squad Dictatorships?

Les: Kiosa, I haven't followed up on the most recent data but think it's safe to bet that we're not going to get any reliable data from the Uribe/Santos regimes. It's also a good bet that Santos will continue Uribe's battle against the judges. One of many examples was Uribe removing judge Jose Nirio Sanchez because of his ruling against Nestle corporation for killing a labor leader. More recently, in June, Judge Maria Jara Gutierrez fled the country in June with her son due to death threats from paramilitaries after she sentenced a retired Army colonel to 30 years in prison for his role in disapperances back in 1985. This tells us that the same death squad operations continue 25 years later despite the attempt to give the government a new face by Washington and Bogota - and the battle with the judges continues today. The world knows Santos is a mirror image of Uribe. It's a tug of war between Washington/Santos and the judges. Uribe turned against his own by extraditing his killers to Washington so they couldn't testify against him in Bogota. If the info you're looking for comes out - it will be from the judiciary. How is the prosecutor's office surviving? With Santos in place now, it's too early to know. Meanwhile, Ecuador has a warrant for arrest of Santos for murder in the cross-border attack in 2008. Santos/Washington are under a lot of pressure. The only way they'll win is with ramped up oppression and fascism and the world is watching.

For background, read how the Colombian Supreme Court decided to go public with the intimidation and harrassment they were receiving from the Uribe regime in 2009: Harrassment of the Colombian Supreme Court

- Les Blough in Venezuela

Colombian president's aides to be quizzed over illegal wiretaps
La Prensa

Bogota, Jul 8 (EFE) - The Colombian Attorney General's Office has called three senior aides to President Alvaro Uribe for questioning as part of its probe into illegal wiretapping of Supreme Court justices, opposition politians and other prominent public figures by the DAS security service.

Attorney General Guillermo Mendoza told RCN radio that prosecutors will question press secretary Cesar Mauricio Velasquez, Deputy Defense Minister Jorge Mario Eastman and presidential counsel Edmundo del Castillo

Former presidential adviser Jose Obdulio Gaviria will also be quizzed.

Mendoza said the proceedings in no way imply that those individuals are linked to the investigation or that they are being accused or arrested.

Prosecutors will hear their statements and, based on that testimony, decide if there are grounds to have them charged as suspects in the illegal wiretapping and surveillance.

Officials and ex-officials of the president's office, in addition to Gaviria, have been mentioned to the AG office by DAS members.

Among other things, the investigation seeks to establish if the order for the illegal wiretaps came from the Nariño presidential palace or was a decision that some DAS officials took on their own.

DAS reports directly to the president's office.

The decision to question the four indivdiuals marks the first time that people close to Uribe, who will be succeeded in August by former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, have been questioned in the matter.

A total of 18 current and former DAS officials and four of that agency's former directors are under investigation over the illegal spying on Supreme Court justices, opposition politicians, human rights activists and journalists.

The illegal wiretapping, which came to light last year, also targeted prominent foreigners such as Iran's Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003; and Chile's Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for the the New York-based Human Rights Watch organization.

La Prensa

Harassment of the Colombian Supreme Court
March 2, 2009

Spying incidents and aggression against family members of Colombian Supreme Court justices is the latest in the security agency scandal.

After a scandal broke out last week, involving the DAS, the Colombian security agency linked with the presidency, that very Monday afternoon Supreme Court justices called a special session to determine the path to follow. The 23 judges unanimously agreed that the time had come to reveal the harassment that they – and their families – had been victims of for about a year, something that had only previously been discussed in private by court members.

Judge Maria del Rosario González is said to be under protection of the Human Rights Commission due to attacks she and two of her children received.

One of the justices who put forward his case was Yesid Ramírez. He said that during the first half of last year he received warning calls from people he knew from Huila, the Colombian department from where he hails. They told him that unknown people were asking about him and wanted to know everything about his life: who his friends were, where he had lived, what was his past. What Ramírez did not know was that he was the subject of spying for several months by the DAS. SEMANA today reveals the last of their many reports that they made about him at the DAS.

The document dated July 2, 2008 and called “Final Report M/T 0142,” shows other surveillance reports on the justice. In it, detailed facts about his wife and his children, where they live, what they do, where they go and with whom they associated are included. One of the most striking points is that it mentions as part of the “activities undertaken” by DAS agents, the information search about the relationship between Ramírez and a man named Ascencio Reyes. It could have been considered insignificant if it were not because both Ramírez and Reyes were at the center of a journalistic scandal which attempted to tarnish the image of Supreme Court justices and it was none other than an advisor at the presidential palace who leaked the scandal and its details to the media.

That scandal involved an accusation that justices traveled to Neiva in a chartered plane supposedly paid for by Reyes, a controversial businessman, to investigate a court matter from 2006.

The DAS document revealed in this edition of SEMANA, directed to the operational general director Luz Marina Rodríguez, shows that this scandal was unfounded. This affair poses many questions. Did the former director of the DAS know about the order to spy on Justice Ramírez? If she didn’t know about it, it is a very delicate situation because it would demonstrate that she was not in control of the agency and that officials under her command obeyed someone else’s orders. If, on the other hand, she did know about it and did order the surveillance, the subject is even more serious as she will have to explain why she ordered to spy on a court justice and, perhaps more importantly, who gave her the order to do so.

Intimidation

But Ramírez was not the only justice who felt strange harassment last year. One of the most dramatic cases of hounding is that of the justice María del Rosario González. She is the only woman on the criminal section of the court and her situation came to a point that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the highest human rights authority in the continent, decided last December 22 to authorize precautionary measures as a person protected by that agency.

The first incident happened the last week of September 2007, just when they were making critical judicial decisions about important supporters of Uribe in the Congress involved in the “para-politics” scandal. An anonymous voice made a bomb threat to the high school of Gonzalez’ daughter saying. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the upheaval was great. Later, in January, a day before leaving on a trip outside of Bogotá, the justice herself noticed that the stabilizing bar on her bulletproof SUV was broken, which could have provoked an accident. It was a very rare problem that was also accompanied by strange movements by her guards. Today the case is under investigation.

The latest incident happened to her son last May as he was going, as usual, to a cancer institute. It was six in the morning and on the well-traveled Circunvalar bypass in Bogotá, all of a sudden three men dressed in black appeared in front of his car and placed a tree trunk on the road. He was able to swerve and miss them, making such an effort that he had to be treated at a hospital. “I have spent 36 years in justice and I have never experienced this type of hostility,” the justice says.

Augusto Ibañez claims 10 men got into his house and stole one computer because they wanted to intimidate him.

The latest movements that raise suspicions in the court happened at the residences of the justices Augusto Ibáñez and Leonidas Bustos. At Ibanez’ home last November 6th, ten armed men arrived and did not steal anything except for the computer. A few days later armed men also arrived in several SUVs at the residential complex in the north of Bogotá and demanded the home of Bustos. They gave them the number of the house, but it was in another part of the complex.

“The purpose was to send a message, to intimidate, to make it clear what they were capable of doing. If that weren’t true, why would so many armed men ransack the house only to take a computer?” asks Ibáñez.

In addition there is the intense following for almost two year by DAS detectives of the head investigator of the para-politics scandal, the auxiliary justice Iván Velásquez. SEMANA has evidence of the registries of the wire tapping by the DAS of more than 1,900 calls that he made which were intercepted by the DAS and the detailed reports of all type of surveillance that they were undertaking both day and night.

Getting to the bottom of things

The justices are not completely sure who could be behind these hostile and repeated acts. But they are sure that never before in their long judicial careers have they felt such harassment. Last year, according to the court, they informed the director of the National Police, General Óscar Naranjo, of the cases. The president of the court, Francisco Ricaurte, during a seminar in Cartagena said, “The court, as it has for more than two decades, has not given in to violent people who want to shut it up and engulf it in flames. Neither will it now facing those who attempt to silence it so that impunity will reign.”

The justices demand that authorities get to the bottom of each of the strange occurrences that have happened between September 2007 and the end of 2008. For them one matter is the surveillance and wire tappings and another is the harassment of family members and a third point is the alleged montages that they were victims of in order to publicly discredit them in order to influence their para-politics decisions.

Since the moment that SEMANA published the accusations about the illegal DAS recordings of the justices, journalists and opposition leaders, José Obdulio Gaviria, a close presidential advisor, in a clear attempt to deflect attention away from the damming acts that have occurred at the DAS, has repeatedly said to the media that this magazine bought information and gives away its sources. But above all Gaviria’s statements have the perverse intention of terrifying sources so that they won’t speak out. With this intention, he called several radio stations and made very striking comments on–air. “I suppose, if my sources are listening to me right now, that they were talking about the revelations and perhaps about their sale.” He was referring to the sources who contributed to the first SEMANA report on wire tappings or people who know what was happening in the DAS.

This new scandal which stains the intelligence agency leaves many questions that need urgent answers. Who was behind the aggression of the justices and their families? Were they seeking aggressions on the justices and their families seeking to terrify them in order to obstruct justice? Did they by chance blackmail the high court with surveillance and illegal wire tappings? Who gave them orders? Finally, is Gaviria’s disinformation strategy a personal or institutional strategy? What is he afraid of?

Source: Semana