The Attorney General, Francisco Barbosa, warned yesterday that it is not true that the Prosecutor’s Office will negotiate with drug traffickers who take advantage of the law of submission to justice, which the Government filed in Congress within the framework of its peace policy.
In this way, Barbosa Delgado corrected the statements made by the Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco, in dialogue with CM&, where on Tuesday he assured that the Government would carry out a series of negotiations with drug traffickers, but yesterday he clarified that these actions will be carried out by prosecutors and not the executive.
In conversation with Blu Radio, the head of the portfolio explained that there are two different processes, the first being negotiations with the guerrillas and the second submission to criminal gangs, including those related to the crime of drug trafficking. .
“They are two completely different policies. Negotiating with the guerrillas, submitting to criminal gangs that, evidently within their multicrime, extort, generate violence, murder and are in the drug-trafficking business, submission is offered to those people and the one who negotiates with them is a prosecutor.” Velasco maintained.
Likewise, the Minister of the Interior added that the Government is not negotiating with these people “because it has not sat down to make the law with the drug traffickers, but rather it is building a public policy called the submission law and that it hopes that the prosecutors , in whom we trust, and the judges can use it to negotiate with these criminals”.
However, yesterday, the Attorney General of the Nation maintained that “this is false. Here the only one that has expressed interest in negotiating with drug traffickers is the government. The Prosecutor’s Office and prosecutors exclusively apply the law. The terms of that law will be defined by Congress and not by drug traffickers or government negotiators.”
Prosecutor Barbosa also said that the national government, with its statement, “again disrespects justice.”
It should be remembered that, in recent days, prosecutor Francisco Barbosa stated that: “you cannot negotiate with drug traffickers, first, do not negotiate in this way and let us not confuse peace with drug trafficking. The criticisms that have been made to me have been criticisms that necessarily have to do with the fact that drug trafficking is basically being brought into ‘total peace’. I ask the Colombians to divide that for me at once and to place the discussions where they have to be ”.