Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro sacked the counterintelligence chief of his intelligence agency amid persistent concerns over illegal wiretapping of the courts.
The director of the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI), Carlos Ramon Gonzalez, said that the president had ordered him to get rid of Colonel Edwin Chavarro.
Gonzalez made the announcement days after the Constitutional Court called a meeting with Prosecutor General Luz Adriana Camargo over suspicions that one of its magistrates was being wiretapped illegally.
In an interview with W Radio, Gonzalez said that the other magistrates had expressed a lack of confidence in Chavarro of the National Police.
The DNI chief also said that the Constitutional Court’s alert came after multiple warnings by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court about the possible wiretapping of magistrates.
Gonzalez stressed that investigations into the concerns of the Supreme Court allowed the DNI to rule out that his intelligence agency was involved in any intelligence operations involving wiretaps.
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The DNI chief added that the intelligence agency had already abandoned the use of fronts to conduct wiretapping operations.
Gonzalez and Chavarro should be informed about intelligence operations involving wiretaps that are conducted by, for example, the National Police and the military.
The DNI was not aware of any intelligence operations that could be targeting wiretaps, according to the agency chief.
So far, said Gonzalez, the courts have only expressed concerns based on “rumors” about illegal wiretapping and have yet to provide evidence.
The scandal caused by the Constitutional Court’s wiretapping accusations is the latest of many.
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The DNI’s predecessor, intelligence agency DAS, was dismantled in 2011 after it had been caught spying on the Supreme Court, members of Congress and people considered politically inconvenient for former President Alvaro Uribe.
The prosecution was embarrassed in 2018 after evidence emerged that its wiretap capabilities were being used for corporate spying.
Local media reported in 2020 that the former army chief had lost his job because he allegedly ordered his intelligence officers to illegally wiretap journalists, Supreme Court magistrates and politicians.