The legal net around former President Alvaro Uribe seems to be closing as documents from the former spy chief of Colombian intelligence agency DAS confirm that “the 1” within the President’s Office gave feedback on illegal wiretaps, newspaper El Espectador reported Sunday.
According to the newspaper, DAS spy manager William Romero wrote in the report that “the 1 knew of the delivered input.” The person referred to by the code “the 1” endorsed the illegal surveillance and congratulated intelligence officials on the results.
Without identifying “the 1,” the DAS executive’s report says that he was called to see former DAS director Maria del Pilar Hurtado in 2008. The director told him and other officials that “the 1 knew about the input delivered by her this morning and he liked it to the extent that she [Pilar Hurtado] congratulated us for this activity.”
According to El Espectador, the documents given to “the 1” were about the “work mission to penetrate the [Supreme] Court, strategies, legal framework, the use of budgets, protocols to ensure the collected information remained classified, just like the sources who provided this.”
In the section of the report called “extended congratulations,” it is revealed that the DAS head obtained files and recordings of cases handled by the Supreme Court, including one that “was the record of the cousin of 1.”
The only known case of a cousin of a Presidential Office official investigated by the Supreme Court is that of jailed former senator Mario Uribe, the cousin of the former president.
The leaked document, which is also in the hands of the Prosecutor General’s Office, is one of a series of documents and testimonies confirming the involvement of the President’s Office in the illegal wiretapping of politicians, Supreme Court magistrates, journalists and human rights workers.
The investigations have already resulted in the barring from public office of Uribe’s chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, while his press secretary Cesar Mauricio Velasquez and personal adviser Jose Obdulio Gaviria are under criminal investigation.
In a series of messages on his Facebook page, Uribe repeated his denial of having ordered the illegal wiretaps.
Uribe’s role in the illegal surveillance is currently being investigated by a congressional commission consisting of three pro-Uribe-party lawmakers.
