Reply #4: Jorge 40, very, very close to the highest offices in Colombia! [View All]

April 13, 2006
The DAS scandals
If you’ve ever traveled to Colombia, then you’ve seen the DAS, the government’s Administrative Department for Security. As soon as you get off the plane, DAS employees are there to stamp your passport and, perhaps, to ask why you’re visiting.

The DAS does much more than stamp passports, though. It is a powerful agency, a sort of “secret police” institution founded in 1960. Its principal purpose is intelligence and counterintelligence, both domestic and international. However, it is also a law enforcement body whose agents have judicial police powers – they investigate crimes and can arrest and interrogate people. The DAS also provides bodyguards and security services for high government officials and other people at risk.

To someone familiar with the U.S. government, the DAS is a strange beast. It incorporates aspects of the FBI, the CIA, and the ICE (immigration). Plus, it is not part of any cabinet ministry like Defense or Interior – it is a part of the Colombian president’s office.
(snip)

If you think this arrangement seems like a recipe for disaster, you’re right. Disaster has struck with a vengeance during Álvaro Uribe’s administration. According to recent reports in Colombia’s media and testimony from former officials, between 2002 and 2005 the DAS was essentially at the service of paramilitaries and major narcotraffickers. It drew up hitlists of union members and leftist activists, and even plotted to destabilize Venezuela.


Jorge Noguera
All of this happened under the tenure of Jorge Noguera, Uribe’s DAS director from August 2002 until he left under a major storm cloud of scandal in October 2005. According to Rafael García, the agency’s former chief of information systems who has made a series of explosive allegations, “Jorge Noguera became the Vladimiro Montesinos of Alvaro Uribe’s government. He conspired against the governments of neighboring countries, he did away with leftist leaders, he participated in narcotrafficking operations, he maintained relations with paramilitary groups, etc. etc.”
(snip)

Links with paramilitaries

~snip~
José Miguel Narváez, who as subdirector was Noguera’s second-in-command at the DAS, has told Colombian government investigators that Noguera’s relationships with paramilitaries went beyond “Jorge 40” alone. Other paramilitaries who got help from the DAS included Luis Eduardo Cifuentes (“El Águila”), the paramilitary chief in Cundinamarca (the department around Bogotá); Carlos Mario Jiménez or “Macaco” of the powerful Central Bolivar Bloc; and Miguel Arroyave, who headed the “Centauros” bloc in Bogotá and in the southern llanos (the savannahs of Meta, Casanare, Guaviare and Vichada) until his own men killed him in September 2004.

• Narváez said that Enrique Ariza, whom Noguera recruited to be the DAS chief of intelligence, ran a telephone wiretapping operation at the request of “Macaco.”
  
  
• Semana reported that DAS agents protected alias “Salomón,” the right-hand man for a Cundinamarca paramilitary leader known as “El Pájaro,” whenever “Salomón” visited Bogotá.
  
  
• Semana also charges that on two occasions (April and June 2004), senior DAS officials foiled operations against “El Águila” by giving the Cundinamarca Bloc leader advance warning that the police and DEA knew his whereabouts and planned to capture him.
  
  
• Another witness, a 15-year DAS veteran named Enrique Benitez, has said he witnessed Noguera calling off a secret DAS operation to capture Hernán Giraldo, the head of the AUC’s Tayrona Resistance Front on the Caribbean coast. Shortly afterward, the DAS agent who developed the operation was transferred to a post in far-off Arauca department.
  
  
• García said that some DAS contractors paid 10 percent kickbacks to DAS officials, who then passed most of the money on to the paramilitaries.
  
  
• García told Semana, “Once Noguera told me that he had to do a favor for the paramilitaries of the llanos,” meaning Arroyave’s “Centauros Bloc.” Indeed, according to an unnamed DAS agent who complained to Narváez along with fired agent Carlos Moreno, DAS intelligence chief Ariza “stole some intelligence documents on Miguel Arroyave” and erased the information they contained. Added García, “I know that Jimmy Nassar, who ended up being Noguera’s advisor, offered this service. I’ve known people from the Centauros Bloc, here in jail, to whom Nassar offered to erase their files in the system. He charged between 5 million and 10 million pesos (US$2,250 to US$4,500).”
  
  
• Moreno, the fired DAS agent, alleged that the DAS was performing a similar file-disappearance service for Arroyave’s principal rival in the llanos region, Héctor Buitrago alias "Martin Llanos," in exchange for millions of pesos.
  
  
• Cambio reports that the DAS even gave "Jorge 40" an armored SUV intended for President Uribe's exclusive use. “On November 17, 2004, the DAS sub-director at the time, José Miguel Narváez, called the DAS section chiefs in Atlántico and Cesar and told them that, by Noguera’s instructions, they were to place at the disposal of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, Jorge 40, in Santa Fe de Ralito – where the AUC commanders were concentrated – an armored SUV for his personal protection. That did happen, and days later the paramilitary chief was using a red Toyota Prado, license plate QGC851, with armor and a special chip to allow it to pass through the security forces’ roadblocks. The incredible part of this story is that the vehicle had been acquired by the Atlántico governor’s office and given to the DAS for the exclusive use of President Álvaro Uribe when he visits the Atlantic coast. Informed about the matter, the government ordered a search for the vehicle, which was found in Valledupar with Jorge 40 at the wheel.”
  
  More:
  http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/blog/archives/000242.htm