Photos Taken from: El Espectador and Momento24
For at least 14 years, judicial proceedings against Juan Carlos Abadía, former governor of the Valley, have been pending in the Prosecutor’s Office. This one, for which he was arrested last Tuesday, February 6, is for irregularities in a contract of 1,072 million pesos with which they sought to provide forty educational establishments in 10 municipalities of that department. The process had not been developed because, as the Prosecutor’s Office accused him, Abadía would have given nearly 400 million pesos to the former anti-corruption prosecutor Luis Gustavo Moreno to file his case. More words, less words, it apparently belonged to the scandal that became known as “The Toga Cartel.”
Abadía was away at home at the time of his capture. Now they must prove whether this is true or not. Abadía is the son of Carlos Herney Abadía, former senator, sentenced by process 8000 to 50 months in prison for having received money from the Cali Cartel and who created monsters of regional politics such as Juan Carlos Martínez and his own son Juan Carlos. . Carlos Herney was an expert match creator. The PIN, for example, was his work. He went from being an ex-convict to a “Puppeteer” as Daniel Coronell called him at the time in a column. He loves to command someone else’s body.
In 2010, the National Integration Party, the PIN, which supported Juan Carlos Abadía, then governor of Valle, had almost a million votes. In those elections he brought eight senators and twelve Representatives to the House. This party was made of the remnants of the movements that in the 2002 and 2006 elections made the country tremble with the scandal of parapolitics. The PIN had the skin of Colombia Viva, a political group created in 2003 and whose president was Dieb Maloof, a doctor from Barranquilla who obtained support from Jorge 40 to reach congress. In 2007 he was sentenced to seven years for the crimes of conspiracy to commit aggravated crimes, organizing illegal armed groups, electoral fraud and constraining voters. Here was also the Democratic Colombia party, which had as one of its most visible leaders Mario Uribe Escobar, convicted in 2011 for the support he received from the paramilitaries to reach Congress. Another of the scraps with which the PIN had been woven was Apertura Liberal.
The PIN had emerged after its first skin, the National Democratic Alliance, had fallen apart when it lost legal status due to having within it figures such as Vicente Blel and Habib Merheg and Juan Carlos Martínez congressmen convicted of alliances with paramilitaries. It didn’t matter that at the time of the elections the ADN could not participate in politics, out of nowhere the PIN emerged and all the streets of Cali were wallpapered with its candidates. Where had the resources come from for such a spontaneous advertising campaign? El Pin had Senate candidates like Juan Carlos Martínez, born in Timbiquí and whose ties to the Calima Block of the AUC gave him votes in Buenaventura. He was convicted for this act.
There were rumors about the then governor of Valle’s participation in politics. He never paid for this crime. Nothing could ever be proven to him even though the country knew.
In 2010, the analyst León Valencia stated about Juan Carlos Abadía: “parapolitics has been evolving for ten years. They are no longer the same politicians without further training or charisma, there are people like Juan Carlos Abadía who is an intelligent, charismatic young man, with academic training. , very politically bold, with speech and the ability to produce advertising.”
Juan Carlos Abadía did not hide his relationship with “Negro” Martínez who was close to Olmes Durán Ibarguen, the Lord of the Port, a drug trafficker extradited to the United States. The then senator Rodrigo Lara said about him: “the government of the Valley personifies, perhaps, the clearest penetration of drug trafficking in politics and of a mafia group in all the coastal municipalities of the Pacific, in their autonomous corporations.” The director of El País de Calí until 2022, Diego Martínez Lloreda, tried to verify his alleged links with the mafia but was never able to. In a profile that appears in the magazine Don Juan he said about this: “proving irregularities to Abadía is very difficult because he is very well advised, it is the first time that in the Valle government the legal head, Raymundo Tello, is not administrative but criminal. And legally it is impeccable.”
At that time Abadía was 32 years old and his image appeared everywhere in Cali and the Valley. He had 81% percent approval but, in part, he owed it to his desire to be in the media. She said things that were deeply applauded, such as “My dad is a great dad, every child has a mother.” Since Carlos Herney Abadía was arrested, he decided not to appear in public. In an article published in La Silla Vacía in 2010, they recount all the foreign bodies in which he was involved in politics “In 1998 he appointed his wife, Esperanza Muñoz, to replace him in the Senate seat. In 2000 he consolidated the United Popular Movement, MPU. His wife, Dilian Franciscaamilia Toro, was a candidate for governor of Valle, but finally decided to support German Villegas, who won that election. In 2000 he elected his blood son, Juan Carlos Abadía, and his political son, Juan Carlos Martínez, as deputies of the Valley Assembly. ”
The MPU was the unfortunate party that promoted the candidacy of Eleonora Pineda, one of the bastions of parapolitics. Added to these violations is the one she carried out in 2009 when her family received 800 million pesos from the Agro Ingreso Seguro program. According to the Silla Vacía portal, these resources financed part of her campaign for the governorship.
Having been arrested for a contract worth 1,000 million pesos during his governorship is just the tip of the iceberg. Will they dare to discover it?