The former head of the Uruguayan presidential custody, Alejandro Astesianoarrested last year for being part of an organization that falsified passports, used the cameras of the Ministry of the Interior to spy on the head of the PIT-CNT union, Marcelo Abdala. Astesiano had direct access to the details of a traffic accident that Abdala suffered last year and immediately received police reports about the event, which he shared with the president’s private secretary, Nicolás Martínez. The information comes from recordings in the possession of justice that were released by The Daily, and they constitute another link in the espionage scandal that shakes the ex-custodian of Luis Lacalle Pou.
“This son of a bitch must be killed”
In a statement, the PIT-CNT repudiated a practice that “violates individual guarantees and public liberties and calls into question the democratic quality of Uruguay.” The response from the trade union center came after the local press released audio recordings in which Astesiano, the president’s former security chief, informed the president’s private secretary about a traffic accident involving Abdala.
On February 3, 2022, the rental car that the union leader was driving collided with two other vehicles that were parked on the Punta Carretas boulevard in Montevideo. After receiving from the then deputy director of the police, Héctor Ferreira, information about the crash with alcohol in his blood for which Abdala was later penalized with community work, Astesiano sent Martínez an audio with the sentence: “To this son of a bitch you have to kill him.”
The recordings and documentation published by the local media The Daily They also show that Astesiano had direct contact with the deputy chief of police, Jorge Berriel, and that he received a report on the police operation in real time, including the results of the spirometry. “Nico, 1.53 (grams of blood alcohol) is giving you spirometry. Now the police chief ordered the coordinator to go there and the zone chief. 1.53 spirometry,” Astesiano told Martínez.
The former custodian later sent Lacalle Pou’s private secretary some photos of the police operation, Abdala’s driver’s license and the result of the spirometer. “It’s in the oven”Martinez wrote. Astesiano answered him with an audio: “Now Nico’s time has come for us to kill him. Lets kill him. Let them put their batteries there, this son of a bitch must be killed.” The president’s secretary did not make any comment on that suggestion.
In total, Astesiano sent Martínez nine photos of the police procedure that was taking place in Punta Carretas. The day after the accident, he shared with the deputy chief of the Uruguayan police four video captures in JPG format and one file in MP4 format, taken from surveillance cameras, but without revealing how he got them. “The one that is walking is from early in the morning and the one with the blurred video is from four o’clock in the afternoon, what happens is that the sun screws up the camera,” Astesiano explained to Berriel in one of the audios broadcast .
Unanimous rejection of the opposition
The union center of Uruguay, the PIT-CNTexpressed this Wednesday his rejection of the “illegitimate monitoring” of which his president, Marcelo Abdala, was subjected, something that “represents a very serious event and jeopardizes the best traditions of the countrysince State resources and instruments are used for these purposes with a spurious purpose and in total contradiction with the general interest that should guide the action of government officials”. The statement was shared on Twitter by the same Rather “Given the facts of public notoriety related to illegal investigations in democracy“.
For her part, the mayor of Montevideo, Caroline Cosseassured that the new revelation constitutes “harm to democracy, to freedom, to reasonable republican coexistence, to institutions, and of course to people”, while warning: “It seems to be the moment when the entire political system takes this crisis seriously”. Along the same lines, the president of the Broad Front, Fernando Pereiradescribed Astesiano’s monitoring of the union leader as a “very serious” event.
“What was learned today about Marcelo Abdala and the monitoring on the cameras It is very serious from the point of view of institutionality, from the point of view of the freedom that social fighters have to have and that State mechanisms cannot be used to persecute senators or union leaders,” Pereira assured in dialogue with Underlined. In this sense, the former head of the PIT-CNT for six years opined that President Lacalle Pou, at this point, should request an investigation because “there are government men who participated in the monitoring of Marcelo Abdala and the intention to kill him politically.”
A long history of scandals
On September 26, Astesiano was arrested at the Suárez y Reyes presidential residence after returning with the Lacalle Pou family from their vacation in Costa Rica, before a surprised president who said he had found out about the former custodian’s record at the time. The next day, who according to local media had already reported in 2021 had more than 20 inquiries for various crimeswas accused of a continuous crime of assumption of marital status as a co-author, one of association to commit a crime in real reiteration and one of influence peddling.
Astesiano, in preventive detention since then, is being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office for his alleged participation in an organization that adulterated documents to prepare passports. Before his arrest the former presidential trustee erased all the information on your cell phonebut the scientific police managed to recover the content, including several exchanges that he had had through the WhatsApp network, which opened other lines of investigation to the extent that they were leaked by the press.
One of those lines is linked to the alleged spying on senators Mario Bergara and Charles Carrera, after it emerged that Astesiano was commissioned by a US company to put together “files” with the data of the two opposition legislators, who were the ones who filed a criminal complaint about the case. It was also learned that Astesiano used his ties with police officers to achieve personal favors, such as intelligence tasks for an ex-boyfriend of his daughter, or even to obtain confidential information about Lorena Ponce de Leónthe ex-wife of Lacalle Pou.