Colombia’s deputy Prosecutor General Martha Mancera is protecting a prosecution executive who has been accused of drug trafficking, according to evidence that was made public by news media.
The documents and audio recordings were made public by news website Revista Raya and journalist Daniel Coronell.
Pacho Malo
The evidence proves that Mancera has been trying to cover up the alleged drug trafficking activities of Francisco Javier Martinez, a.k.a. “Pacho Malo,” the former director of the prosecution’s Technical Investigations Unit (CTI) in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura.
Pacho Malo’s alleged involvement in the drug trade was discovered by three undercover agents who had infiltrated his alleged drug trafficking organization.
One of the agents, Mario Fernando Herrera, formally reported this to their superior, Counternarcotics prosecutor Jaime Hernan Ocampo on March 25, 2021.
In this six-page report, which is now public, Herrera says that Pacho Malo offered one of his undercover colleagues to “contaminate” shipping containers with cocaine shipments between 40 and 300 kilograms.
Prosecution report
The regional CTI director also offered the undercover agents cocaine that had been seized by authorities.
Prosecution report
The report also contains a photograph of Pacho Malo and his girlfriend, and an organizational chart showing that the regional CTI director was the third-highest narco in the organization of “El Ingeniero.”
The day after filing the report, Herrera was assassinated by EMC guerrillas while he was undercover in the southwestern Cauca province. His two colleagues, Fabio Gonzalez and Pablo Bolaños, narrowly escaped.
The assassination
Barbosa and Mancera traveled to the city of Manizales to attend the funeral of Herrera and meet with the two surviving agents, who had become suspicious and recorded this meeting.
The chief prosecutor told Bolaños and Gonzalez that he knew about their operation and offered them his support.
The deputy chief prosecutor subsequently interrogated the agents about the details of their undercover operation.
At one point, the investigators said, they showed Mancera a photo of Pacho Malo.
“At that point she’s like she had seen the devil” and abruptly ended the meeting, the investigators told Raya.
The persecution
Two days after this meeting, on March 30, the prosecution reportedly received an anonymous tip claiming that Gonzalez and Bolaños were the ones who had been stealing seized cocaine.
This alleged tip was reportedly received by Judicial Police chief Victor Forero, the boyfriend of one of Mancera’s most loyal subordinates, Territorial Security chief Luisa Obando, who was at the meeting with the agents.
Mancera subsequently appointed notorious prosecutor Daniel Hernandez to investigate this alleged accusation, according to Raya.
Is Daniel Hernandez Colombia’s most corrupt prosecutor in history?
Mancera began to pressure subordinates to secure the removal of Pacho Malo’s name from the report submitted to Ocampo ahead of Herrera’s assassination.
In a voice message, the prosecutor that oversaw the undercover operation told Bolaños that “the [regional] director just called me, brother, that the deputy is on top of it, that she’s going to cancel” the investigation into Pacho Malo’s alleged drug trafficking organization.
Forero, who allegedly received the anonymous tip about the investigators, traveled to Manizales on April 21 and asked Bolaños and Gonzalez to delete all references to Pacho Malo’s alleged drug trafficking from the report filed by Herrera ahead of his death.
“We would like to count on your authorization to modify it, as in delete the part that has to do with this guy because this investigation has nothing to do with him and it’s no good this is going around,” said Forero while being recorded by the investigators.
In the recording, Forero instructs prosecutor Juan Camilo Lopez on how to remove references to Pacho Malo from the report.
According to Raya, the prosecution refused to receive this recording as evidence of the conspiracy to cover-up Pacho Malo’s alleged organized crime activity.
Raya also published extracts of the redacted report, which has no mention of Pacho Malo, who was transferred to the city of Pereira, the stomping ground of La Cordillera, after the investigators went public in November last year.
Mancera claimed in subsequent interviews that Bolaños and Gonzalez were being investigated because the report that was leaked to Raya didn’t exist.
The deputy chief prosecutor additionally claimed that she had no legal obligation to investigate Pacho Malo, which is also a lie.
The prosecution last week said that it had shelved the investigation into Mancera’s cover-up, falsely claiming that there was no evidence of a crime.