Columbia’s Spy-Agency Dissolved Amid Rampant Corruption

Last Monday saw the dissolution of Columbia’s spy agency, the DAS, as the culmination of a series of scandals that had racked the agency for years. Columbia’s President, Juan Manuel Santos, issued an executive order late on Monday announcing that the current employees will be transferred to other offices and that a new entity will replace the disgraced agency. The DAS had long been mired in scandals which included spying on presidential foes such as judges, human rights activists and reporters during Alvaro Uribe’s administration, who preceded Santos. The agency had also been accused of colluding with right-wing paramilitary groups that have wrought havoc on Columbian society by killing and displacing thousands of people and targeting labour activists. Uribe had prioritised the demobilisation of these paramilitaries, which were set upon in the 1980s to fight left-wing guerrillas, as one of the pillars of his security policy; however the allegations that surfaced subsequently have cast a shadow on its effectiveness.

Only last month a Columbian court sentenced a former intelligence chief, Jorge Noguera, to 25 years in prison for collaborating with right-wing paramilitaries that were involved in the assassination of a prominent academic activist. Noguera led the DAS from 2002 to 2005 which coincided with part of Uribe’s administration and was a close friend of the President. To highlight the extent of corruption with the DAS one need only look at the case of another former DAS chief, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, who has obtained political asylum in Panama with Uribe’s help to avoid charges of illegally ordering wiretaps of government opponents. The former President’s chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno has similarly been charged and jailed pending trial for allegedly ordering illegal espionage of Uribe’s foes. The scandal broke back in February 2009 and subsequently led to the imprisonment of at least 20 DAS officials.

The current DAS director Felipe Munoz said 92% of the agency’s employees would maintain their government jobs by being transferred to the chief prosecutor’s office, the Foreign Ministry and the national police. Santos further emphasised that “a lot of people in the DAS have been stigmatized, unjustly I would say. So many law-abiding people shouldn’t pay for a few sinners”.

However, the new agency, details of which Santos said would be announced soon, is still shrouded in uncertainty. Given the scale and extent of the scandals in which the DAS was mired, it is worrying that neither Santos nor Munoz explained how they would prevent previous DAS employees involved in illegal activities from simply being transferred to the new agency. As it does not seem to be merely a case of a few rogue employees engaging in illicit activities this issue is anything but marginal. Another concern regards the U.S. funding for the new agency. Previously the DAS collaborated closely with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, receiving training and equipment, as its responsibilities also included fighting Columbia’s drug traffickers. Despite the U.S. claiming that aid was closely monitored to avoid it being mishandled or funnelled into illegal channels, it remains unclear how much assistance the new agency would receive given the pervasiveness of the scandals. How these issues are tackled will largely determine whether scrapping the DAS will successfully eradicate the corruption that pervaded it or whether it is merely a superficial measure.