Phone-tapping scandal hits Colombia

Phone-tapping scandal hits Colombia

A phone-tapping scandal has turned Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s last months in office into a nightmare. His government is being accused of spying on journalists, political opponents and the supreme court.

Members of the secret police, commonly known as the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), appeared in Contravia, a local TV show that revealed that Juan Manuel Santos, a former minister of defence and presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections, knew what was going on and was shown a “mega project” to infiltrate and investigate South America’s “left”.

One of the agents that appeared in the show had his face covered and says he feared for his life. Shortly after the director of the DAS denied the claims made by the agent.

A key victim in the scandal that broke out last year is journalist Claudia Julieta Duque. She says it all started when she received phone calls telling her that her 10-year-old daughter would be cut into pieces.

Rape threats

"They called saying they would leave her fingers all over my house, that they would rape her. Sometimes I received 70 threats in one day," she told me.

She was considered a threat because she was investigating the murder of a renowned Colombian journalist. She later found out that the threats came from the DAS. Now she is suspicious of anyone coming close to her.

"The President had a speech against those opposing him," she says.

"Those speeches were simultaneous with the actions of the secret police against us. There is a clear relation between a speech that accuses and a secret police that attacks."

Evidence was found by the prosecutor's office in the DAS building which included documents that were labelled “political war” against Duque and another journalist, Hollman Morris, as well as political opponents and even members of the supreme court.

Among those documents is one that details threats against Duque. The document describes how the phone calls shouldn't last longer than 49 seconds, and gives instructions on how Duque's daughter was supposed to be threatened.

Uribe denials

The documents have led to the arrest of five former secret police officials.

Uribe has said he did not know the wiretapping and threats. He blamed drug-trafficking organisations for infiltrating the DAS.

"If the government ordered the spying those who ordered it should go to jail; even the President. I have been straight all my life. I do not need to do anything shady," he said.

But the latest investigations have shown links between the activities of DAS and Casa Narino, as the presidential palace in Colombia is known.

“A carpet has been lifted and it's not that we don’t like the carpet but that below it there are things that are not right," Fidel Cano, the director of El Espectador newspaper, told me.

"We have to see how far the prosecutors office can go and whether they can prove President Uribe knew what was going on."

Ramiro Bejarano is the lawyer of the former President of the Supreme Court who was also being monitored.

'Corrupted' state

"There is a systematic attack from a State that is corrupted and that believes that its way of surviving is spying, threatening opponents, the critics, even our families," he said.

"We would like this case to make it to the International Criminal Court."

The investigations continue and will seek to establish whether there is enough proof about how much Uribe really knew.

He still enjoys enormous popularity, but the scandal has affected his candidate in the upcoming presidential elections.

People here enjoy the new found security that came with Uribe's presidency, but they fear that the way in which it may have been achieved has damaged Colombia's democracy.