Wiretap scandal grows in Colombia

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe faced a new scandal on May 15 over alleged wiretapping of political opponents and journalists. In a news conference that day, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos disclosed that the administration had uncovered a broad and systematic practice by the national police of wiretapping prominent public figures, including members of Uribe's government. The 12 top generals in the national police were dismissed or forced into retirement on May 14 over the scandal, including Colombia's police chief, Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro, and the head of police intelligence, Gen. Guillermo Chavez. Santos insisted that neither he nor Uribe was aware of the wiretaps. As defense minister, Santos is responsible for the Colombian armed forces, including the 130,000-member national police. He said the wiretaps had been going on for as long as three years. The Uribe government said it became aware of the alleged illegal wiretapping on May 13, when it began investigating how transcripts of wiretapped conversations appeared in Semana, a newsweekly based in Bogotá, the capital. The article embarrassed Uribe with its portrayal of jailed paramilitary leaders running criminal enterprises from their cell phones. Human rights organizations and opposition groups have long suspected that they were the objects of surveillance and eavesdropping, said Jorge Rojas Rodriguez, president of a leading Bogotá -based Colombian human rights organization known by its Spanish initials, CODHES. "The government has a lot to explain from a democratic point of view, how it uses military intelligence to find out what the opposition says," Rojas said. "It only shows this is a police state that puts a premium on arbitrariness over the rule of law."