A door was opened in the legal discussion that in recent days has escalated between the Government and the Prosecutor’s Office, given the latter’s refusal to suspend the arrest warrants for 16 members of the ‘Clan del Golfo’, as requested by the House of Nariño in its perspective of starting negotiations for the submission of this group to justice. Yesterday President Petro said that it is possible that prosecutor Barbosa is right in some of his observations.
The head of state revealed that he contacted the prosecutor Francisco Barbosa and that on January 30 they will meet to discuss this matter.
“I have spoken with the attorney general, he is right on some issues, we will speak personally on January 30 to avoid institutional disagreements on the path of peace, which is the right of Colombian society,” said President Petro from Davos, Switzerland. , where today ends his participation in the World Economic Forum.
But this is not the only controversy between the Government and the Prosecutor’s Office in recent days, because precisely last Wednesday, The President of the Republic expressed his dissatisfaction because prosecutor Barbosa suspended the meeting he had scheduled with the technical panel to evaluate allegations of corruption in the SAE, a company that has assets under its custody that have been subject to asset forfeiture.
Petro said on that occasion that “I don’t know what’s wrong with the prosecutor, but this only makes the mafia happy, who, through their politicians, managed to recover the assets they obtained with cocaine and that justice had been taken away from them. The immolated judges did not matter, the wealth of the mafia returns to the mafia”.
Last Friday, the attorney general did not comply with a resolution sent to him by the Government regarding 16 members of the ‘Clan del Golfo’ and ‘Los Pachenca’, with which the Petro administration seeks to advance a negotiation for their submission to justice.
Prosecutor Barbosa’s refusal has generated a legal controversy, since the Government says that the law empowers him to request the lifting of arrest warrants for members of criminal organizations, in order for them to act as spokespersons in conversations for submission to the Justice.
Speaking to Blu Radio, Barbosa said that “I am not going to go through the history of this country as the one that validated, without legal reasons and without any kind of consideration, the release of people who, in this case, are criminal organizations and also They are the ones who have killed the social leaders and the reincorporated”.
He added that the United States Department of Justice “is tremendously concerned about the issue” and that “it is following these conversations day by day with the Attorney General’s Office and the Colombian attorney general.”
For this reason, Barbosa explained, it will be one of the topics that he will address on his trip to that country, where he will hold “a high-level meeting with the Department of Justice” and with other entities.
The prosecutor said that he had already warned the government about the impossibility of issuing arrest warrants against members of illegal armed groups who do not have political status.
“We called them to ask them how the matter was going because the cascading decrees were reaching us. We wanted to know what the government was thinking compared to what we were saying. The answer they gave us after two hours was: ‘We are with you and We are not going to send any type of decree, but rather we must take out the law of submission.’ Three days later they sent us a resolution asking for the releases,” said Barbosa Delgado.
Last Tuesday, the attorney general, Margarita Cabello, agreed with the prosecutor that “because the arrest warrants are in force, the members of the Public Force have an inescapable duty to make them effective, this is a matter of separation of powers within a democracy like ours, subject to the rule of the Constitution and the law”.
The government’s arguments
Last Friday, the Minister of the Interior, Alfonso Prada, spoke out against the refusal of the Prosecutor’s Office to suspend the 16 arrest warrants that he requested from members of the ‘Clan de Golfo’ and ‘Los Pachenca’.
Prada said that the argument presented by the Prosecutor’s Office is based on two decrees that regulated “Law 418 that we have just modified.”
He added that these decrees were issued in 2012 and 2015 and “are not designed to issue arrest warrants for armed organizations with a high impact on crime. For this reason – assumes the Prosecutor’s Office – that they cannot have political status and that this type of organization cannot be recognized at a dialogue table”.
However, the Minister explained that “that is exactly what Law 2272 of 2022 has just changed, empowering the President of the Republic to request this type of suspension of arrest warrants.”