Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella appointed retired army General Jorge Andres Zuluaga as director of the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) despite pending criminal investigations.
Zuluaga, who spent 30 years with military intelligence, is best known for his participation in Operation Jaque, which liberated former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American military contractors and 11 soldiers.
Throughout his career, the 61-year-old former general was deputy commander of the now-defunct Charry Solano intelligence school, commander of the Regional Intelligence #5 and the director of the National Army’s Technical Intelligence Center (CITEC).
Zuluaga received training in the United States and was a diplomatic aide at the Organization of American States.
He was removed as CITEC director in 2014 after prosecution investigators found out that he received intelligence illegally obtained from “Andromeda,” a clandestine intelligence unit that operated from a Bogota internet café.
In October 2024, war crimes tribunal JEP ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate Zuluaga for his alleged participation in the extermination of the leftist Patriotic Union party when he was the CITEC’s director between 2004 and 2005.
The prosecution has yet to decide whether or not to formally charge the retired general with the crimes he allegedly committed.
Zuluaga, who became a member of the far-right Democratic Center party after he was ejected from the army, has always sustained that he acted within the boundaries of the law.
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