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During the procedure, investigators from the Prosecutor’s Office took documentation related to the rules that were issued for the peace talks between the Government of Juan Manuel Santos and the ELN guerrilla. At the time, the guerrilla leader was given permission to stay in Cuba, which apparently was not supported.
Investigators from the CTI of the Prosecutor’s Office on Monday inspected the office of the High Commissioner for Peace, Miguel Ceballos. The procedure was carried out as a result of a complaint from the senior official himself, which has to do with possible irregularities by the government of Juan Manuel Santos with the authorization of Nicolás Rodríguez Bautista, alias, to stay in Cuba. Gabino, one of the top leaders of the Eln and against whom numerous arrest warrants and even Interpol red letters were weighed.
(Also read: Government asks Cuba to extradite alias “Gabino”, top leader of the ELN)
As this newspaper learned, during the diligence, documents related to the protocols and rules of the negotiation process between the Colombian state and the ELN were obtained. And the fact is that, although other guerrilla delegates remain in Cuba who arrived on the island since 2018, when the Government transferred the dialogues there, in the case of Gabino there is a special circumstance: a special permit that was extended to him in the last weeks of the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos.
Consulted by this newspaper, Commissioner Miguel Ceballos abstained from giving statements as long as the Prosecutor’s Office does not announce the progress it has made in the investigations. The case was born, the High Commissioner recalled in a statement on February 21, due to a complaint that his own office filed with the Prosecutor’s Office in August 2018, when, newly installed in the Government, they noticed that the permanence of Gabino on the island it would not be supported.
Among the documents that the Prosecutor’s Office took this Monday, according to Time, There is also a letter in which the Prosecutor’s Office of Néstor Humberto Martínez asked the Santos Government if there were any special conditions that would warrant suspending the arrest warrants against Gabino. The Executive’s response, supposedly, was “no.” In effect, the arrest warrants were never suspended and the Gabino it was more of a “safe conduct” that did not exempt him from being detained at the airport.
Permission of Gabino It expired, initially, on July 31, 2018, but was later extended until the last day of the Santos Government: August 6 of the same year. Until now, the then peace commissioner, Rodrigo Rivera, has been the only former Santos official to come out to give explanations and also in an interview with Time He pointed out that the permit, as well as the other decisions that were made in the framework of that failed peace process, are “legally protected.”
Since January 2019, after the ELn attack on the General Santander Cadet School, the Government of Iván Duque definitively suspended the peace talks with the ELN guerrillas. That same year, Cuba was asked to extradite the members of the guerrilla’s central command (coce). So far, the island has not done so and recently the Ministry of Justice sent a reiteration, in which it asks how these procedures have progressed.
