International NGO Reporters Without Borders called for Colombia’s President-elect Juan Manuel Santos to “break with the practices” that led government security agency DAS to conduct illegal surveillance and wiretapping of journalists, magistrates and opposition politicians.
According to the NGO’s website, which describes DAS’s wiretap scandal as an “eight-year witch-hunt that the outgoing administration waged against leading critics of President Alvaro Uribe’s ‘national security’ policies,” Santos must distance himself from the illegal activities of the security agency and “break with the practices that were encouraged and covered up by the government of which he was a senior member.”
The report calls for Colombia’s incoming government to “cooperate fully with the judicial system’s investigation of … the ‘chuzadas’ (wiretappings) and associated practices.”
In order to reinforce its call to the president-elect, Reports Without Borders on Tuesday re-released its report “ChuzaDAS: Media targeted by intelligence services,” which looks in depth at the DAS scandal and the president’s part in the agency’s illegal activity.
Investigation into the DAS is ongoing. According to the information available thus far from the trials, among the agency’s targets were sixteen journalists from ten different news sources.