February 4, 2021
Efforts of Colombia’s prosecution to jail the policemen who discovered that President Ivan Duque‘s far-right party conspired with the mafia to rig the 2018 elections suffered a major setback on Wednesday.
The Bogota superior tribunal revoked a lower court’s decision to detain Major Yefferson Tocarruncho and Sergeant Wadith Velasquez, claiming the prosecution had no evidence to sustain claims the investigators were illegally wiretapping colleagues.
Controversial prosecutor Daniel Hernandez, who has allegedly covered up of some of Colombia’s biggest corruption scandals, had requested the cops’ arrest based on nothing but suppositions, according to the court.
According to Hernandez, the policemen who discovered that the Democratic Center (CD) party conspired with the drug trafficking organization of Marquitos Figueroa to rig the 2018 elections, illegally wiretapped colleagues.
February 1, 2021
Medellin‘s notoriously corrupt elite backed the city’s most powerful business giant after one of its foundations admitted it fraudulently sought a $2.8 million (COP10 billion) grant meant for poor children.
Mayor Daniel Quintero‘s attack against the so-called Antioquia Business Group (GEA) came after a failed attempt to remove the former anti-corruption advocate from power.
To make things worse for the unregistered business giant, its Clara Cristina foundation admitted to falsifying a municipal document that would grant the 60-year-old NGO a contract to provide school lunches to the city’s poor.
The reputation of the business conglomerate had already been going downhill after member businesses like Bancolombia and Cementos Argos were convicted for making a profit from Colombia’s armed conflict through land dispossession.
Colombia’s Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo has died of COVID-19 on Tuesday, President Ivan Duque confirmed.
Trujillo’s brother Jose Renan announced the death of the defense minister who tested positive to the coronavirus two weeks ago.
The 69-year-old minister became the highest-ranking government official to die from the virus that has killed almost 52,000 people in Colombia over the past year.
Trujillo was hospitalized in the Military Hospital in Bogota where he allegedly was kept in an induced coma after his health deteriorated last week.
In a video statement, President Ivan Duque said that “with profound pain and sadness I have received the news of the passing away of our defense minister.”
January 21, 2021
Colombia’s political leaders from the left to the right welcomed the arrival of US President Joe Biden to the White House on Wednesday.
Far-right former President Alvaro Uribe said he wished “all the best to the United States” and President Ivan Duque‘s American counterpart.
Leading opposition Senator Gustavo Petro praised Biden’s decision to revoke Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris Agreement to combat climate change as part of a “major agreement with American progressives.”
Former President Juan Manuel Santos, who was in office when the US president was serving as former President Barack Obama’s VP, said “the world needs him.”
January 21, 2021
Attorney Abelardo de la Espriella fanatically tries to intimidate Colombia’s journalists, but seems to panic when one tells him “I eat lawyers for breakfast.”
The humorless lawyer is ridiculed every time he fails to silence a journalist who threw one of his corrupt clients in prison or threatens to put one of his allegedly corrupt clients behind bars.
The attorney said Wednesday “I don’t give a shit” that the press freedom foundation FLIP expressed its concern De la Espriella keeps trying to censor what he called “libtard journalists who only defend the interests of the left.”
Evidence indicates the attorney does give a shit, especially when journalists expose his clients’ corruption or make him look like an idiot.