Military intelligence reports provided to Colombia’s Supreme Court by ex-President Alvaro Uribe allege that the senator who oversaw the debate on Uribe’s ties to paramilitaries himself received checks from drug cartels, according to Semana magazine.
The name of Senator Jimmy Chamorro, who belongs to President Juan Manuel Santos’ U Party, appears several times in a report dating from 2000 by the special command of the army which fought drug trafficking in Cali, a city in southwestern Colombia.
The report was prepared to request a special agent be assigned to oversee the criminal process against a known accountant of narco-traffickers. It appears to have been sent to the then-Investigator General Jaime Bernal Cuellar, who claims while he doesn’t remember it, if it had been received by his office, it would have been investigated. He found it curious that the document had no stamp to indicate it had been received or approved.
Semana said that several of the people named in the report were contacted and confirmed the veracity of the information it contained.
The initial accusations date back to mid-September when Chamorro acted as president of the Second Commission of the the Senate. He oversaw the debate, initiated by leftist-Senator Ivan Cepeda, over Uribe’s alleged ties to paramilitaries and narco-traffickers. In Uribe’s response on the senate floor, he largely avoided responding to the accusations, and instead slung mud at a several of his political opponents.
One of those opponents was Chamorro, who had attempted to join Uribe’s party before switching to President Santos’ coalition.
Chamorro, for his part, denies every receiving checks from narco-traffickers. From his Twitter account, he claimed: “I have never known a narco-trafficker in my life, nor I have ever received any benefit from them.”
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Chamorro recently went to the Latin American Institute of Polygraphs to respond to questions about his alleged illegal actions. The test “did not present indication of deceit,” according to the website Vanguardia.
The lawmaker challenged Uribe to also submit himself to a polygraph, a challenge the former head of state has yet to accept.
Hitting back at Uribe, Chamorro has filed official complaints with the Supreme Court over these allegations, claiming they are libel.