Habla José Antonio Salazar, el hombre que otorgó la licitación de pasaportes

0:00 In the WU the Report Colonel Daniel, Monday report with passports and, above all, with the new revelation that was known thanks to Jorge Lesmes, of the relationship of the scandal with the National Intelligence Directorate. Welcome, Daniel. That' s Julio, good morning. This is today' s Colonel report. President Gustavo Petro has called him a traitor. Social networks are full of unsubstantiated messages that assume as certain that he made his multimillion dollar decision as a product of a José Antonio Salazar sobor, until a few days ago, Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, in practice, of the official closest to the suspended Chancellor, to Varoleib Durán, was who, in a lightning operation, revoked decisions of his boss and friend for thirty years to grant the tender of passports to the temporary union of that made for Thomas Grecansons, the company of the Baptist brothers, who has been making that document in Colombia for eighteen years. Salazar did so with three morning resolutions, based on the fact that the foreign minister in charge, Luis Gilberto Murillo, returned to him the direction of the revolving fund of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is the undersigned entity of the passport contract. Salazar is a seventy- five- year- old lawyer, Air Force Reserve Colonel, former governor in charge of

1:30 putumayo, former congressman. According to some reports, close to the Conservative Chief of Caldas, Omar Jepes and brother of the former Supreme Court Justice, Ariel Salazar, who in turn is attributed closeness to the prosecutor Margarita Cabello, the same one that suspended the chancellorÁlvaro Leiva. He is the man who is in the eye of the hurricane and here at this hour we greet. Good morning, Dr Salazar. Thank you very much, very good morning, Dr Salazar. Let' s start with the toughest question first. You were offered money. You received a bribe for making your decision. Absolutely not that I have explained many times in the performance of duty. There must be no other aspiration to serve the homeland. But you, some arrival or family member of yours, were contacted by individuals to speak or offer something in exchange for the granting of that visitation. I don' t talk to people who came to me about the family even a long time ago, because duty, the colect to duty, takes a long time and I' ve practically given up.

2:46 Made my family nothing to be attending to the daily caceres of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as I was forced to have accepted a position. You' ve been a friend butÁlvaro' s staff was going on for over thirty years. What he had said after his decision to award that tender. That friendship is true. I have never denied it and I have explained several times that after having made the decisions, I called him he told me Joseph, being you the secretary that I took us to the Ministry. Why didn' t you tell me that before. Of course he didn' t tell me why he didn' t ask me to consent, but why he didn' t tell me then I explained it, DoctorÁlvaro, because you, then, are suspended. And secondly, I did not consider it necessary. And first of all, because I had the ability to solve that many problems that were in the mystery. That was imitated by the talk that day when I asked for the admission acts. It' s been, like, two or three days now. I don' t have any voluntas. We talked about it again because I thought he was upset with me. I hadn' t called him back. I thought three was angry with me and in the fruit he did not make any demonstration or claim about it. Since September last year it has been said that you offered the Minister to award him the tender for

4:21 passports and then declared him insubstantial. How was that conversation. No, I didn' t offer anyone, because that' s not a matter of offers. A tendering process that was advanced with all the guarantees, with total and absolute adherence to the laws of contracting culminated after many difficulties, after much study, after many avendas, in the month of September, when it owed to juicafe, which is the way they normally build litatory processors. When it reached that stage, I informed the Chancellor that I was going to proceed to locate the contract. Then he disagreed. I told you, DoctorÁlvaro, I have to listen to a contract, because that is the strict application of the contact law, which is what we are doing this listatory process. Then he upset told me. He asked me what the alternative was, I told him DoctorÁlvaro. The landlady is that you take on this whole process because you could do it, and I explained myself to the people who attended to the legal issue and that yesterday the way you could take on the responsibilities that I had. The Chancellor summed them up and proceeded in full exercise of the law as Minister, having summed up powers to dismiss the decision decatory of some of

5:51 the dissipation and then to arrange for the urgent contrast. That' s the procedure that hides in that case For all the time that happened within September and the last time that I took the powers and can always act, my polon was modifiable in the sense that that process had been carried out with all the legal formalities, with such transparency and that it should have been awarded. Yes, but when the Minister decided to resume the management of the revolving fund of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he did so and said that he was going to declare the tender to be certain for reasons of public interest. I mean, what he was saying was that his decisions, Dr Salazar, were against the public interest. It didn' t happen to you that you had to leave the chancellery at the time. No, that' s a point of view that he had and I didn' t leave because I had the faculties, they had taken them the locker Then there was no impediment to me, no difficulty, and I wanted to continue to collaborate, to continue helping public administration in what is within my reach, because for that I was appointed.

7:15 Then I don' t see any reason to have pulled me, because if the problem is over, I didn' t have it now. Mr Meso argued for a reason the public interest in the fundamental rights reasons of irremobilisation, a motivation which, in his opinion, as a man dedicated to the study of constitutional issues, was his point of view. My point of view was completely different in the sense that it should give full and strict application to the recruitment rules in the Colombian system. I was very struck by the fact that one of the first things that you said when you decided to grant this bid was that that bid was without legal floor. The suspension of the Foreign Minister was ordered by the Office of the Procurator and that he could return to his post. He weighed in his decision the wish that he would return to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Well, first of all, there are several expressions that don' t correspond, that he offered that I gave him his faculty.

8:26 That' s not true. The contractual process is a process that is advanced starting with a structuring comique that I do not take part in. But I am not going to leave the answer, Mr Chancellor, what was the question. Excuse me, the question is simple. You make the decision and, when you speak for the first time after making that decision, you say that the reasons why the Attorney General' s Office had suspended disappear.Álvaro Leiva pesofecto, that condition, that condition at the time of making the decision, that is, you wanted to benefitÁlvaro I was going with your decision at all. And those reasons had disappeared since Minister Murillo transferred new powers to the General Secretariat. For that is logical for any lawyer who disappears the causes of the prosecutor' s office to suspend Chancellor Leiva. Nor is it logical why, because you, Dr Salazar, in any case, as Secretary- General, were still a subordinate to Dr Leiva and to that extent he could influence the tendering process. Yes, but the moment Chancellor Murillo gives me the full powers as Secretary General again, which I had never done, the leiva doctor throughout that process, from the moment when the powers that are no longer in the head office of the Minister are transferred. It' s those causes.

10:01 I did nothing but make an assessment, which is legal, but the suspension determines it, determines it, suspends it or concludes it by the Office of the Attorney General of Ración and that event did not occur. I just made an appreciation to answer a question. Okay doctor salt the administrative acts that you issued. They say because you also wrote it, so they must be sub- published in SECOP, something that didn' t happen because you had closed access at the times you had to. They also say that, since they have not been officially communicated, the principle of advertising loses its validity because they do not comply with the principle of advertising. Look but before you say what you' re handling, they say they go into rigor with your expedition as effectively, in the nature of those acts you' re sitting in pons are. What followed was its publication in the SECO came, although I had not ordered it because SECOP is the means of publication that the State has.

11:11 But these acts have already entered into force. Dr Paula, advisor to Chancellor Murillo, orders me what opens the covid The system is blocked. Such communication is not necessary for the validity of the acts because they were already in force. When that happens, I make the media like the communication and information system of administrative acts, which is one of them, and that exactly what happened then. The publication of the CC, which is a medium, a simple means of communication of the contractual issues that the State has, was blocked and the publication was suffered by other means in the face of such a situation that there was what this is not, of course in the media that at the same time that the administrative acts come into force. I was practically expelled in the secretariat by a person who does not currently see the Ministry' s official, but they said contact and fulfill that and you are a lawyer. This establishes a certain order, which states that they must be communicated, not communicated by the open media, but through the formality of publishing them in the SECOP, which is the State' s means of communication. Yes, indeed, the provisions say communiqué and fulfill because all the update of communication, as I

12:41 say to them, because they came into force with their expation. As the rules of administrative law say. What the Community followed are for that communication It was possible to do because the officials who are in charge of that, the georg banks are publication mechanisms that handle people who depend on my secretariat, were completely blocked and interrupted. The persons who in this activity were forced to suspend the publication process that they are doing. But the fact that you say in the administrative acts publish and comply does not take away any validity. It is a simple system of communication and publicity that established by the rules after its validity in this specific case Oktor, Dr Salazar, the chancellor in charge, Luis Alberto Murillo, says that you awarded without a certificate of budgetary availability and that is why your refusal is illegal and null and void. What do you say?

13:52 I have heard this on several occasions, starting with the Minister. That of an engineer of me, but well, that is not enough to explain it, because it turns out that in the fourth article of the actor says uncle that I have issued the administrative direction, with the support of this secretariat, to enter all the necessary procedures and procedures to request, constitute and or re- establish the proposed reservations, inspired validitys, future validitys that are required for the contract awarded. That provision in article 4 of my administrative acts.

14:35 As part of the award, the proposed reservations existed at the time of being here. I think they still exist. Where in the release of the appeals for the early termination of the contact that was made of urgency by the disposition of chancellor Leiva and mainly in the lisi this new a process that are planning to do a chancellery for the term of three years. There are the resources that were immediately released with my performance. That is the existing budgetary provision.

15:16 Shortly after my performance, the Minister of Finance indicated that the proposed resources were there and someone was hiding them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within a few hours. I think 12 o' clock. Mr Lliso from the Treasury changed his mind, but what he said initially is completely recorded there. Now let ' s look at the subject of budget reserve. What is required by law is that budgetary resources and primary resources exist at the time of experience of acts that existed and must already be in existence because of the explanations given in article 23. I believe from the law eight hundred and fifty the two thousand seven that budgetable regions are a requirement for the execution of contracts. This is very clear, and what is normal or what is important is to have the budgetary resources. And with the provision I made in the fourth article, which was totally my control, the contract was completely well awarded. That' s the term. What is not that this torpedoed excuses by criminal maneuvers, hear well Mr Journalist, through criminal maneuvers through the Crimes Commission in the Personal Ministry,

16:51 let loose complied with orders and began torpedoing compliance with the provisions that were in force. What these maneuvers consisted of was that a person who was not at that time a staff member came to my office and then proceeded with the orders to be blocked in the dry as I was and not to make the respective publications. Similarly, he ordered that the budgetary procedures they are doing, which are about to be completed in less than half an hour, should be suspended and the certificate could not be issued. Not that the sections existed, because they existed and they are existing, but that a tifcado being was dismissed, that is, that it was said whether there was budgetary availability such activities, as it ratified, was prevented by superior illegal orders. I' m guessing it' s Dr Paula you' re the ones with these crimes, Dr Salazar. Yes, indeed, with his own name, he was already the person who came to my office without being a fulsorary of the Ministry at that time and began to handle the subject and bear, for I withdrew to have coffee in the fan bardés and at once it happened to me in my mind

18:22 to call a medium. I didn' t do it first and the administrative acts had enough julgation. Fortunately and for good, my defense of public heritage now with everything you' re doing? When that tooth that I freed the State from a patriotic destrement that was of a certain seventeen billion pesos, because the Tribunal immediately considered the validity of my administrative acts and terminated the process and transmitted the claim. But now, with everything they' re doing, they ' re taking them to the state, they' re still endangering public property for a lawsuit that comes close to six hundred billion pesos. Thank God, I am not in that irreel situation and I am relieved of those responsibilities, because there would not be, I would not have hesitated for a second to assume them and fulfill them as mandated by the contactual law Doctor Salazar. There is a November document of two thousand twenty- two called the Report of the Technical Specifications of the Colombian Electronic Passport Project. It is a document of the same Chancellery that obeys recommendations of the OAS International Civil Aviation Organization for the operation of the electronic passport in all jurisdictions. According to that document, the tender

19:53 should not request copies in the tender, as it is not a common practice. I am reading textually to request copies from suppliers at the time of submission of proposals, as they are not grounds for examination, because no supplier, except the current one, could give final specimens. Therefore, only the current supplier would be favoured. Some people say that you had been warned of this at meetings and that, however, that remained one of the conditions of the bidding. What do you answer before that With pleasure, you are talking to me about the month of November and this judge bid nailed true in September, and that is that in the month of November I had no competition for these issues. That report that Dr Salazares is making true references, November of two thousand twenty- two. Sixteenth of November, two thousand twenty- two, that is, of the year long before. With pleasure, then I refer to the concrete answer in the process, because I did not intervene in it.

21:02 My activity now explains it. A consultancy from that international agency was hired there. In that consultancy, he said, he did indeed recommend not to ask for the samples. A consultancy is precisely for that to implement, to collaborate in the development of the contract. The contract' s technical structuring committee finally considered that it was absolutely impossible to conclude a contract without having the samples, because of experiences in other countries that have contracted without such samples and the contracts have subsequently had difficulty. I also insisted or insisted on some occasion I told the Committee to structure that it was entrusted with that subject. Finally, the subpractor committee of the contract considered that it could not make a procurement without the samples. I don' t even want to swallow one thing. I don' t intervene in contact structuring. My activity was limited to appointing a structured committee composed of professionals from different disciplines. In its total, there were six public accountants, economists, engineers, the systems, business administrators, graphologists and forensic documentologists, these people you trust are worth doing. I don'

22:37 t have a deal and even if they put them in front of me, I' m not able to distinguish them by one with the name. They structured the contract according to or taking into account the base document, which is a consulting document and in the end considered that it was absolutely important not to require samples. But on this has been enormous falsehoods in the sense that they are asking for samples made by the companies that ended up, which ended up favored. That' s completely false. You have read yourself and we have spent these weekends the definitive set of conditions and there it says that you show samples similar to those of the Colombian passport. We could not expose the entity to finding, after a contract, a company that did not have the technical skills to do a job. That it is delicate is that we are talking about an issue that carries reasons about the national route of security to Colombia, Colombians have suppressed visas in many parts of the world just for that reason, because their passport is one of the best passports in the world other than security.

23:56 Then I couldn' t. We could not be so irresponsible to make a hiring without a requirement that I made them a structuralist considered absolutely necessary. Then I' ll show you again the OSI report. It is a consultancy that was taken care to hire and also take into account to do things in the best way possible. The consultancies do not force absolutely anyone and in the fact that they asked for the samples, what was done was to do things the best way and the samples had similar characteristics to the astor the passport that we Colombians have, and that similarity was in the spirit of maintaining the assurances of an instrument that has given us many advantages or the global one. Well, but maintaining that security is for some it meant making a statement that could only win one bidder, because, for example, the production of passports was required to be ready four months after the award, and that requirement, according to other stakeholders, could not meet it, but the current operator. You.

25:18 What answers to that, he replies that you got out of the subject because we are not talking to him that the samples that were asked were not impossible to make are samples that any company in the market and the business that wants to participate and has the technical ability and but it is not talking about the samples at this time. Please, why, because I got the thing out ok were samples that any company you' re in a position to hire, could do. And so you so that the day of presentation of ours came preferably with black bags and pure ones or on the desk saying that there were contained and finally it went like trying to make a bufla to the process.

26:08 Well, I' m not talking to you at this point about the samples, but about the deadline for delivering passports effectively, after the award, which was four months. Other interested parties say that it was impossible for someone other than the current supplier to have that production within four months. That term carried the dice of the tender. According to some you respond to it gladly. That question is made about a budget that is totally false. It is completely false why two months and six months were set for the plant implementation process at the start of the contract. Then any company could participate because it could begin to discuss the contract and even by making some notebooks abroad, according to the terms of the priego of conditions and take the time of six months for the implementation of the plant in Colombian territory. Whatever it was was the offer of a plant, not that it had them. This was what I was talking about. There is a fallacy and deception to public opinion in the sense of saying things that are not written in the solicitation documents. This process has been sufficiently monitored by the monitoring bodies. I had not to say the pressure,

27:38 but in the preventions of the general contraloría, of the general attempt, strictly following the process, they knew that it was a legal process and that it was not as Bustly trying to say it now and addressed and I insist the chilenco careful the definitive statement of conditions that governed the process, says that a term of two months is given for the execution of the contract and there is more for the process of implementation of the plant in national territory. That is the part they are saying that it did not correspond and how a country will have developing passports outside its national context. If in Colombia there is the foreign exchange currency, if in Colombia it is where citizens come to take out their passports mostly, then that has been distorting it in form and that is with very dark interests. The issue of the plant also gave scores for offering in North America, not only in the United States and, if not, also Mexico and Canada in Europe and, naturally, in higher scores in the national territory. That was a completely logical thing. Well, Dr Salazar, I want to ask you one last question. What do you know about the

29:11 alleged extortion of Foreign Minister Alvaro Leiva Dura? That is other questions, but I want to ask myself are answered your previous concerns, because about those concerns will arise others, such as how. It' s normal. But it is clear to the people that there was a higher score to have the plant established in Colombia and that this higher score, that difference in score, favored the current passport operator. It seems to me that, on the one hand, it is logical that this should be the case, but on the other hand, because it creates an advantage for one of the interested parties, you do not create, perfect doctor, when the advantages are not given by the contracting entity, but they are considered tartistas. What the irregularity. I' m not to blame for the contracting entity. It is not your fault that there are some competitors who have greater advantages, because if you are going to buy some cars, it is impossible to set a deadline for establishing an assembly plant or, as others wanted, within this process that we put in the budgets also the silver and bisque to assemble or implement the plants that to such absurdity. A sane person who defends the interests of the State cannot arrive.

30:33 Now I' m going to answer your question. There is the extract that has to be started by indicating that there has been an initial imprecision, very large in the sense of talking about a station, because the criminal type of the situation says that it is the one that costs another to do one thing for the purpose of obtaining a profit and I do not see the situation. Rather, the criminal offence is that of the fraud established in article nine hundred and forty- seven. The penal code, which says that it is that it obtains an illicit profit for it has been by a third party with deceptive maneuvers, as it is subject to a penalty. There I saw in my judgment, if a criminal conduct is a criminal type of scam and not what they have talked about all the time, the media and the scam, because the scam is the Colombian State, because, according to the demonstrations I have heard, the money the resource came out of the public treasury, because you call certain expenses reserved. Now I' m going to tell you that I know all that absolutely nothing other than what I' m going to tell you the doctor was going after he put the subject of the prosecution' s knowledge,

32:06 made me the full comment and past, which is the same one that came out in the week magazine about the scam, to keep using the same term. And he told me that when he was in that situation, when they started asking him for the money via telephone, with the details that are already known, he went to the Presidency of the Republic and there they instructed a deputy intelligence officer to give the money. Well, I don' t know anything anymore. I know how you were instructed. Who gave him the instruction. It was given by the President of the recursica or in the Presidency of the Republic. I don' t know who would give it to him or whether it was in the same National Intelligence Directorate, but it was the demonstration he made to me, that he proceeded in full conformity with what he considered to be, and that' s why he went to those instances.

33:08 Then he puts it at random. Excuse me, excuse me. I pause on this because it is very important what you just said, the order to pay the money to the alleged extortionist or scammer, as you want to rate it. He now came from the Presidency of the Republic. I am fully explaining that the information I have is that the doctor read in front of the problem. When I see, I don' t know what I was doing. I know absolutely nothing about that, but what he told me was that he went to the Presidency or went far away. I don' t play yes physically or by phone or by any. I do not know how, because there are no three details and that is the Presidency. He was managed with the National Intelligence Directorate that was there by the director or that was finally handed over by the director of the National Intelligence Assistant Director. That' s what I know up there. I don' t know anything anymore. I must add that thing when you come to this scandal. I am still a secretary and it has been the greatest sadness I have ever received in my life.

34:22 When a picket arrives so that we bring the correct term of ten out of ten people from the police, of immediate reaction of the controloría, and this produced me almost I want to cry in the chancellery, to see the entity. So I sat down to ask myself what they were going to see where the money came from. I replied that in the Ministry at all, not a single weight and that they are wasting their time in that distance, because I was absolutely certain that no physical or financial resources had come out of the Ministry to learn about those issues. And then they picked up my exclamation because they were going to take an initial version and I said well, and I was very sad. That' s all I know about this is about this. Well, doctor, salt. Thank you very much. Beyond sadness, I was going to like it well to do it. No, Mr Le, I want to thank you for this conversation and I said that, beyond your sadness, this has a serious connotation. The fact that the order came from the Presidency of the Republic or that at least this was said by the suspended Foreign MinisterÁlvaro Le Iba, regarding the extortion of the Prosecutor' s Office, who, through two confidential sources, told me that it is

35:53 not true that he had proved payment to the extortionist, asÁlvaro Le Iba said, confirmed this information in writing to journalist Jorge Espinosa of six am from Caracol. According to the prosecutor' s office, the alleged payment was made on February 2. On the 5th, Minister Leiva went to the Public Prosecutor ' s Office, but did not report this, and only on the 7th of February he filed that formal complaint. This is how Jorge Espinosa was informed of six of half Caracol, who asked him through a petition right to pay those moneys. Some say that there are thirty million and others that twenty- eight were made by depositing the possible extortionist or scammer into a Ban Colombia account and was made with money from the National Intelligence Directorate of NIS and without approval from a prosecutor. This is especially sensitive. You just heard Dr Salazar because DNA depends directly on President Gustavo Petro in DNA and successor to the sadly remembered Das. There is the thesis that the payment could be made and that it will be healed with the subsequent control, which corresponds only to the deputy counterlord for security and defense. Others think that, without prior approval from a prosecutor, it is an illegal payment. Whatever President Gustavo Petro' s decision to relieve the DNA director and Manuel Alberto Casanova goes through this controversial payment. Journalist

37:28 Jorge Lesmes revealed in the Alternativa magazine that, on account of the payment of the alleged obstructionÁlvaro Leiva, the director of Intelligence and counter- intelligence, the deputy director of operations and the private secretary of Casanova, also came out. This was today' s Colonel report. Thank you very much, Daniel, for the report leaves a gigantic squid and a gigantic contradiction. I don ' t know if you agree to the National Intelligence Directorate' s payment order. Dr Salazar just told you that he came from Nariño' s house. Wine. Yes, he told you, at least the Chancellor was going to him. If that is so, because then there is the relay in the National Intelligence Directorate, as this is particular. I' ve had some record conversations with people from the National Intelligence Directorate who say the following. Dr Casanova, director of DNA, has been acting naively, which is just a mortal sin for someone who exercises intelligence. Juicy report Colonel headlines the order of payment of the expenses reserved by the alleged extortioner who then said here at the WU

39:04 that it was the other way around that he was sought and he did not seek wine from Nariño' s house. Mighty report Colonel of today until soon Daniel a hug a thousand thanks, Julio