2023-11-19 05:01:00
The Paraguayan pastor José Albero Insfrán Galeano surrendered before the Paraguayan Prosecutor’s Office after remaining on the run for two years. He is accused of drug trafficking, an area in which he shared documented links with Sebastián Marset, the drug trafficker who received an express passport from the Uruguayan Government and which triggered a political and institutional crisis that included the resignation of several officials. Both drug traffickers are part of a plot that highlights the complexity of the relationships between crime, justice and government decisions in the region.
Insfrán Galeano decided to turn himself in because, as he stated in an interview, he had received a “divine message.” “I am a person who serves God, I am a person who is under authority, and 15 days ago (God) told me: ‘The time has come to introduce ourselves.’ He did not tell me to introduce you, to introduce ourselves,” he declared to Radio Ñandutí. The criminal judge of guarantees of organized crime, Rosarito Montanía, ordered preventive detention for the pastor and that the authorities guarantee his safety and his life.
The relationship with Marset
In addition to being pastor of the Curuguaty Revival Center church, Insfrán was a candidate for governor of the department of Canindeyú for the ruling Colorado Party. He had an arrest warrant – for alleged money laundering crimes linked to drug trafficking – within the framework of “A Ultranza Py”, the largest anti-drug operation in the history of Paraguay, which placed Marset’s organization as one of the objectives. In another interview with the ABC Cardinal station, the pastor mentioned that through his brother Miguel Ángel Insfrán, alias “Tío Rico”, he personally met Marset at a religious camp.
“Uncle Rico” is one of Marset’s main partners. He was extradited on May 19 from Brazil and is considered by Paraguayan authorities as the alleged leader of the Insfrán Clan, a structure linked to drug trafficking. Both he and Marset, along with former Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes, are accused of organizing the murder of prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, which occurred in May 2022 on a Colombian island. Pecci led multiple anti-drug investigations, including “A ultranza Py.”
Cartes was the target of Operation “Heart of Stone,” a criminal investigation involving half a dozen U.S. federal law enforcement agencies. The operation was launched in 2010 after the DEA identified him as the head of a complex and powerful organization of drug traffickers and money launderers. This is what State Department cable ZA-09-0007/YAZ1K says, dated January 5 of that year and leaked by Wikileaks. The revelation did not prevent Cartes from being elected president of his country by popular vote in 2013. On March 17, 2017, then-senator Lacalle Pou visited and had a photograph with Cartes, then president, at the headquarters of the Paraguayan government.
According to the Uruguayan political scientist Gabriel Delacoste, the arrest of Pastor Insfrán will impact the investigation of the delivery of the passport to Marset by the government of Luis Lacalle Pou (photo from EFE, below). “There is a part of the investigation that has to do with all the obstruction of justice, the cover-up, but then there is a deeper part that is why the passport itself was delivered and in record time,” he explained to PáginaI12. “There is a not far-fetched hypothesis circulating that there are bribes and links to drug trafficking by the Uruguayan government. It seems to me that it is not plausible that the investigation does not include the legs of these criminal organizations in Paraguay, Bolivia, and wherever,” he added. he.
Nothing bad happened
Meanwhile in Uruguay, lawyer Jorge Barrera presented a brief to the Prosecutor’s Office in which he requested to archive the passport investigation. In any case, the Prosecutor’s Office plans to resolve the case after the January judicial fair, noted the Uruguayan media El Observador. Barrera is the defender of Pauline Davies, who was director of Consular Affairs at the Foreign Ministry during the process that Marset initiated to obtain the document while he was imprisoned in Dubai for carrying a false Paraguayan passport.
According to the Uruguayan newspaper El País, the lawyer explained that the time that has passed since the investigation began has been more than enough (a year and a half) and that at the moment no criminal violation was found. In fact, Barrera insisted that the delivery of the document was carried out in compliance with current legislation and that the drug trafficker had no criminal record or international arrest warrant, which is why the Foreign Ministry was obliged to give him the passport.
For his part, President Lacalle Pou spoke on Friday for the first time about the case since announcing on November 4 the resignations of several of his officials involved in the problem and the destruction of evidence. “I go everywhere. How can I not go? I already went for one case and I’m going for another,” he assured regarding the possibility of being summoned to testify to the Prosecutor’s Office, in dialogue with the local press during the inauguration of the wheat harvest in Dolores. “The only thing missing is for them to say that the President of the Republic is not going to testify,” he said ironically.
Regarding the meeting led by his former advisor Roberto Lafluf, and the former undersecretaries of the Interior, Guillermo Maciel, and of the Foreign Ministry, Carolina Ache, over the chats about Marset, the president admitted that the meeting was promoted by him because “there were different opinions Regarding what to do.” In any case, he did not explain why his officials resigned if, as he said two weeks ago, they supposedly had no legal responsibility in issuing the passport.
Nor did the members of the ruling party refer to the situation again, in continuity with the idea of ”turning the page” that they established last week as a majority in Parliament by rejecting the treatment of the scandal as a political issue. “The coalition parties for the moment maintain support for the president. They are aware that if they do not go together they have no chance of winning the next elections,” Delacoste stressed.
“To collect many bills”
However, the one who rose from the ashes like a phoenix – a few days after having resigned as Minister of the Interior – and spoke was Luis Alberto Heber, who stated at a National Party campaign event in Durazno that, despite the drug passport issue, in a few days he will return to his seat in Parliament loaded with “heavy ammunition.”
“We are not hurt by the ammunition of the adversaries, but load well because we are returning to the Senate,” Heber warned the opposition. “They hit us and they continued to hit us, and we are also going to hit us, because we have a stick to cut, and now we are going to the Senate and we are going to collect many bills there,” added the former minister, who was on leave from his position as senator while He served as head of the Interior.
In dialogue with this medium, the senator of the Frente Amplio (FA), Alejandro “Pacha” Sánchez, criticized Heber’s return. “His management as minister and his figure are highly questioned,” he said. “We must respect those who are elected by the people even if they have had a mediocre or inferior performance in matters as important as public safety, unless serious crimes are proven. We will have to wait to see what Justice resolves,” he said.
“In short, I believe that the true trial will be a year from now, in the next elections, where the Uruguayan people will judge a government with an enormous pearl necklace of corruption and without achievements in terms of political management, nor in terms neither in economic terms of growth, nor in the management of public accounts, and much less in the well-being of the population since poverty, precarious employment and the difficulties of all Uruguayans in reaching the end of their lives have increased. month,” the senator noted.
Inform: Axel Schwarzfeld
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