Colombia’s President Ivan Duque said Wednesday that he will ask an allegedly criminal former chief prosecutor facing treason charges to join “some commissions” on fighting crime.
In an interview with news program CM&, the far-right president said he would not appoint former Prosecutor General Nestor Humberto Martinez as ambassador in Spain as previously rumored.
Martinez allegedly took part in multiple criminal conspiracies with DEA agents that all but destroyed Colombia’s peace process, ordered corporate spying and obstructed the investigation into the Odebrecht bribery scandal.
Nevertheless, Duque said he considered the alleged criminal “a person who is committed to fighting crime” and will ask Martinez to take part in commissions “to strengthen crime fighting.”
President Ivan Duque
The former chief prosecutor never studies criminal law and is accused of an impressive list of crimes, but this is no objection for the president, who is embroiled in an impressive number of corruption scandals himself.
Opposition Senator Ivan Cepeda (Democratic Pole), one of the government’s most outspoken critics, celebrated Duque’s decision not to let Martinez represent the country in Spain, but deplored the decision to put an alleged criminal on the government payroll to fight crime.
Senator Ivan Cepeda
The president, who was elected with the help of the mafia and questionable regional “clans,” has consistently appointed questionable characters loyal to his far-right Democratic Center party in government position.
Duque’s political patron, former President Alvaro Uribe, is a former Medellin Cartel associate who resigned from the Senate earlier this year to evade Supreme Court investigations into his alleged complicity in two massacres, a homicide, fraud and bribery.
The Supreme Court is still investigating Uribe’s alleged involvement in election fraud in collusion with a drug trafficking organization. Duque is also being investigation for this. but by the notoriously ineffective House committee that has only ruled once since its inception in 1991.