Pretelt De La Vega told Caracol Radio he had to give up his vacation to be able to be questioned by the prosecutor, showed his face and answered all the prosecution’s questions and said his lawyers will handle the case from now on.The former Interior Minister is accused of having offered bribes to Medina to change her mind about a constitutional change needed to allow Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to run for office for the second time in 2006.The former congresswoman already is convicted for having accepted the bribe. She told the court she changed her vote, after people from the Uribe administration offered her political favors.Meanwhile, Colombia’s current Interior Minister, Fabio Valencia Cosio, is continuing to prepare the congressional vote needed to call for a referendum that will try to ratify the President’s current term by the Colombian people.The legitimacy of the last election is currently under investigation by Colombia’s Constitutional Court, because of the alleged bribery to make the re-election possible. The Supreme Court wants to know if the elections were legitimate if it took a crime to make the re-election of the current president possible.The popular Uribe is trying to avoid a possible annulling of the elections, by taking the vote from the Constitutional Court to the Colombian people. A recent Survey showed uribe would receive 72 percent of the country’s votes if there were presidential elections now.The opposition accused Uribe of becoming a “populist dictator” and is trying to divert attention from “the fact” his re-election was born from a crime.Uribe and any of the accused (former) members of his administration deny having bribed Medina, saying she “self-incriminated” herself, but the actual bribe was never proven.
