2023-11-05 05:01:00
The president of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, arrived this Saturday in Montevideo from the United States and went directly to the presidential residence to meet with the partners of his government coalition to face the political storm in which he is trapped by the express concession of a passport to the drug trafficker who was imprisoned in Dubai. At the end of the meeting, he announced that he accepted the resignations of the Minister of the Interior, Luis Alberto Heber; that of his undersecretary, Guillermo Maciel; and that of the President’s advisor, Roberto Lafluf, who had requested that the Undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry – Mariana Ache – eliminate messages related to the drug trafficker.
In his opening monologue at the conference, Lacalle Pou tried to appear very relaxed and began by saying that he has the “intimate conviction that Guillermo Bustillo and Carolina Ache – already resigned in advance – have no legal responsibility” regarding the accusation of benefiting drug traffickers. He twice clarified that he was very tired and defended himself against possible inaccuracies in the information.
Then he reconstructed from memory some of his dialogues with Ache – he had rescued them from his cell phone – and said that at the end of October, he had asked his image advisor Lafluf – whom he especially exempted from any responsibility because he was not a civil servant – to meet will join with Ache and the Undersecretary of the Interior, Heber. In said meeting, Ache had stated that the documents she was demanding had to be presented to the Court. According to Lacalle Pou, his instruction had been “that everything be presented.”
The most unique argument expressed by the president was about his participation in said meeting, where the repercussion and legal claim of the express passport process would have been discussed: “yes, I was at the meeting, for two minutes, I said hello.” He clarified that he usually does these things because the office is close to him: “I asked for a meeting. “I was there, but I didn’t participate.”
Regarding the previous resignation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Francisco Bustillo, he said that it was accepted because the suspect “wanted to release the government.” And specifically, he said that now “a case is opened, they will know how to defend his honor.”
The uncomfortable questions
At the press conference, a journalist asked if there was an institutional crisis, to which Lacalle Pou responded that it was more of a political problem “that has a political solution.” For him, a political crisis would be something else, as the resignation of a vice president was in the past. Although he said that the comparisons were odious and that it was all a matter of semantics, without much importance. He also clarified that his government never hid information about the case and that the “big problem was the lack of communication between ministries.”
Regarding the specific fact of the issuance of the controversial passport, Lacalle Pou was emphatic: it “should have been given yes or yes, according to the law.” And it is at this point where the contradictions come to light because in the questioning that the Frente Amplio made in parliament, government officials had declared that they did not know who the drug trafficker Marset was.
Bustillo himself said that he did not know who Marset was. When asked by a journalist about whether the president was aware that information was hidden in parliament, he responded that “knowing who he (Marset) was, we had to give it away. I never said that information was hidden. That is what the Frente Amplio says and what Justice will say.”
The last question of the press conference once again insisted on the issue that if Bustillo, Ache and Maciel do not have any responsibility, then who would. Well, the president resorted to his circular argument: “there was no other chance, whether it was drug trafficking or something else, according to the regulations”, the passport had to be granted. And he ended his presentation by highlighting that in Uruguay there is an institutional framework and an active justice system with an open process and “shortly there will be a decision; “I have the peace of mind that they will act within the framework of the law, even if I don’t like that Marset has a passport.”
The senator’s criticism
The senator of the Frente Amplio, Alejandro Pacha Sánchez, harshly criticized the president’s speech: “Lacalle Pou reported that he accepted four resignations from senior public officials where it is said that they did not commit anything illegal, nor any lack of management. There is a huge inconsistency in accepting the resignations and saying ‘nothing happened here’. Lacalle Pou missed the opportunity to be honest with the Uruguayan people, we expected a thorough investigation to get to the core, not just resignations; It is proven that there were meetings to hide evidence, to lie to parliament, that there were communications between them where it is clearly demonstrated that there was knowledge that Marset was a heavy and dangerous drug trafficker. True to his folksy style, he spoke of secondary facts, but did not refer to the underlying issues, such as the fact that he himself entrusted holding a meeting to his advisor Lafluf – who would have no power, but could summon two undersecretaries to a meeting in the Executive Tower–, where the president only stopped by to say hello. Ache said that in that meeting they were requesting that the evidence (the chats) be deleted. And the president says nothing about Lafluf obtaining the Foreign Ministry file and eliminating the delivery of those chats that Ache had already made. And he, too, did not express an opinion on the conduct of those officials who met to lie to parliament, who organized to make a cell phone disappear (“make it lost,” they told Ache). He also said that any Uruguayan in the world can apply for a passport, even if they are a drug trafficker. But he does not say why it was express and they were in such a hurry to make it and deliver it.”
The opinion of the deputy
In dialogue with Página/12, the deputy for the Frente Amplio, Cristina Lustemberg, declared that “we are in an extremely complex situation, an atypical situation for our country. It is a scenario of profound political crisis that should put us all on alert; it requires immediate action from the Government in coordination with the opposition, effective and radical. If we do not reach a situation of institutional crisis, it is due to the strength of the institutions and the democratic quality of our country, and because the opposition has behaved extremely responsibly to preserve the institutions and governability. However, the information known in recent days where ministers, undersecretaries, police officers and advisors made the decision to lie to parliament regarding the information they had about the drug trafficker Marset, is very serious. To this must also be added the recommendations of a minister to his undersecretary so that he lose a cell phone that contained information that showed that parliament had been lied to. That is to say, there was a decision to deceive parliament and lie to the citizens. The president is going to have to clarify before the citizens his responsibility, not only for choosing his advisors, ministers, undersecretaries and other political positions, but for allowing behavior that today is clearly systematic disorder of corruption and mismanagement of things. public.”
Asked about the president’s curious statement about the meeting – “I was there but I did not participate” – Lustemberg said: “we have no reason not to believe what the president says, but it is worrying that if he asked (as he said) for the meeting to be convened, meeting, after it did not receive information on the topics and issues that were discussed there.”
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