Former Colombian Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez has denounced to U.S. authorities that he is the victim of a plot orchestrated by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Álvaro Leyva, in collaboration with journalists, in which former President Juan Manuel Santos is also allegedly being harmed.
Martinez has sent a letter to the US ambassador in Colombia, Francisco Palmieri, and to Justice Department prosecutor Jamie Mickelson, denouncing a conspiracy «by people with a thirst for revenge» for having been investigated during his time as head of the Prosecutor’s Office.
In addition to Martínez and the aforementioned former president Santos, among those affected would be the current attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, and Eduardo Montealegre, who also led the Attorney General’s Office between 2012 and 2016.
In the letter, Martínez says that journalist Gonzalo Guillén leads a plot against him in which minister Leyva would also be participating. «If true, to the judicial persecution is now added the political persecution», he said, reports the newspaper ‘El Espectador’.
Martínez claims that several officials of the Prosecutor’s Office have been pressured to fabricate evidence against him, among them the prosecutor Daniel Hernández, in charge of the Odebrecht case in its first stage of the investigation, who will now be charged for malpractice during the process.
In the case of Hernandez, he allegedly received an offer not to serve «a single day in jail» in exchange for handing over «Humberto, Barbosa, the people who give orders to Humberto» and that if he had «something very big» against Santos or prosecutor Montealegre, he would be «free» and «with witness protection».
All this documentation has been sent to Attorney General Barbosa, said Martínez, who celebrated that the Prosecutor’s Office «can move forward quickly in the investigations that he announced» so that «the country can soon know the truth».
Martínez has been in the news again in recent months after the Truth Commission published a report in the middle of this year in which it was claimed that the guerrilla Seuxis Pausias Hernández, alias ‘Jesús Santrich’, had been the victim of a set-up by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Colombian Attorney General’s Office.
The objective was to exploit the differences that at the time maintained the now secretary general of Comunes, Rodrigo Londoño, alias ‘Timochenko’, and Luciano Marín Arango, alias ‘Iván Márquez’, on how the peace agreements reached with the government of Juan Manuel Santos in Havana were being implemented.
The theory of the «entrapment» of guerrilla leaders to get them out of the peace agreements has been defended by several members of the current government, among them President Gustavo Petro, Vice President Francia Márquez and Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva, whom Martínez now accuses of being behind this alleged plot against him.
