Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office received evidence suggesting that US officials are involved in a conspiracy to falsely link an alleged victim of former President Alvaro Uribe to drug trafficking.
Senator Ivan Cepeda, an alleged victim of Uribe, said on June 25 that he and defense attorney Miguel Angel del Rio provided evidence of a plot to falsely link them to drug trafficking organizations in June.
Through various sources of information, we are aware that a criminal operation is being plotted against us that seeks to attack our reputation and integrity. The authors of this operation intend, through serious slander and false testimonies, to link us to drug trafficking organizations.
Ivan Cepeda and Miguel Angel del Rio
On Monday, W Radio published evidence suggesting that Uribe’s former fixer, Diego Cadena, was conspiring with a low-level drug trafficker and federal agents to incriminate Del Rio and Cepeda.
The senator and the attorney have been key in prosecution attempts to jail Uribe and his former fixer for their alleged attempts to bribe witnesses in order to obstruct investigations into the Uribe family’s ties to organized crime.
The evidence published by journalist Daniel Coronell suggests that Cadena sought to recruit a driver of the Drug Trafficking Junta, Manuel Castañeda, to testify against Cepeda and and Del Rio.
Castañeda was released on bail last year after agreeing to testify on the ties between the junta and Colombian security officials.
The journalist also published images suggesting that Cadena was talking with five US law enforcement officials in Bogota and Tampa while conspiring to smear Uribe’s opponents in court.
In the screenshot reportedly sent to Castañeda ahead of a meeting in the JW Marriot hotel in Bogota, one of the alleged conspirators told Cadena: “tell him that I am obtaining all the authorizations so he can be cool and we do things right.”
In this meeting, Castañeda subsequently told Cadena, one of the foreign agents “explained to me how they worked… about the legal protection… not with the prosecution but with a magistrate and that we worked with a local prosecutor, a in from here and obviously from there, from New York or something like that.”
“Yeah, a prosecutor from New York and the agent, a guy from the FBI in New York,” responded Cadena.
After Cepeda and Del Rio made public that they had found out about the conspiracy, Uribe’s fixer alerted a person identified as “Gilberto Lopez, FBI Bogota” on the phone of the self-named “gangstattorney.”
Cadena and the alleged embassy official subsequently agreed to switch from WhatsApp to Signal after which Uribe’s fixer called Castañeda to do the same.
The evidence made public by Coronell is in the hands of the prosecution, according to the journalist.
