Colombia’s Prosecutor General Guillermo Mendoza Diago considers the high number of temporary liberations following the failure of prosecutors to start a trial within the legal deadline “manifestations of impunity.”
The PG admitted his concern about the decisions taken by several judges to release various defendants from prison while awaiting trial. Among those released in the past week week are seventeen soldiers implicated in the extrajudicial “false positives” killings of eleven young men from Soacha in 2008, and a politician with suspected ties to right-wing paramilitary death squads.
Mendoza Diago told Caracol Radio that “even if the judicial process continues and there is the possibility of recapturing those accused later on, one of the manifestations of impunity is that the relevant security measures in the case are not conducted.”
The PG considered that the judge who freed the seventeen soldiers could have interpreted certain arguments differently so as to avoid granting liberty to the defendants while the trial resumes.