Journalists who revealed links between Colombia’s President Ivan Duque and drug traffickers said Saturday and Sunday that they are being illegally shadowed by authorities.
Journalist Gonzalo Guillen, who revealed that a murdered money launderer coordinated the rigging of the 2018 elections in the north of the country, revealed the identity of a prosecution official allegedly shadowing him.
The senior journalist additionally said sources close to the president told him that Duque and his political patron, former President Alvaro Uribe, employed intelligence agents to make “an organizational chart of the people they believed are giving me information.”
Julian Martinez, the journalist who reported that alleged vote-buying was coordinated by Uribe’s personal assistant, said his home was being watched.
Martinez claimed that Duque and Prosecutor General Francisco Barbosa met on Wednesday, in which the prosecutor general was “ordered” to identify the sources of the journalist.
Journalist Gonzalo Guillen
Barbosa is supposed to be investigating the election rigging conspiracy, but has been a personal friend of Duque for more than 25 years.
Other journalists, however, did follow up on the alleged election fraud and the drug trafficking ties of the president’s far-right Democratic Center party digging up even more evidence.
The Supreme Court announced another investigation against Uribe. Guillen sent the evidence of the election rigging conspiracy to Congress’s accusations committee, the body that can investigate a sitting president.
Duque admitted to knowing Jose Guillermo Hernandez last week, but denied knowing about the election fraud or the criminal investigations into the money launderer and what the prosecution called the “political chief” of the drug trafficking organization of jailed drug trafficker Marquitos Figueroa.
While evidence of election fraud has been publicly available since the elections, mafia involvement and evidence this was coordinated by an assistant of Uribe, a former Medellin Cartel associate, is new.