Jorge Noguera, former head of Colombian intelligence, AFP
Jorge Noguera, one of those responsible for the most serious illegal espionage scandal in Colombia, known as the DAS jabs, will be released by decision of a Bogotá judge.
The then director of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), the presidential intelligence body, and one of the officials closest to former president Álvaro Uribe, had been convicted of illegal wiretapping against opposition politicians, magistrates and journalists and by the homicide of the teacher and trade unionist Alfredo Correa de Andreis.
Noguera was the head of Uribe's presidential campaign in Magdalena for the 2002 elections and later, director of the DAS until 2005, when serious denunciations emerged of the alliances of this body with paramilitary groups on the Caribbean coast.
In the midst of them, the government sent him as consul to Milan (Italy), but he had to return to the country to face charges of conspiracy to commit a crime for having handed over privileged information about the DAS to paramilitaries to commit murders.
At the time, former President Uribe defended him and described him as "a good boy."
The senior official was finally arrested in 2007 and convicted by the Supreme Court of Justice.
Since 2011 he has served two sentences, one of 25 years for the murder of the professor and another of 7 years for illegal espionage.
According to the court that granted him probation, he managed to reduce that time with work and study and now he will have to pay a bond.
He is still detained but only waiting for the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (INPEC) and the Prosecutor's Office to verify if there are other arrests in force against him.
The news of his release comes when several former paramilitary chiefs, who were extradited to the United States in 2008, finish their sentences and are returning to Colombia.
One of them is Rodrigo Tovar, alias
Jorge 40
,
head of the Northern block of the Self-Defense Forces with whom the former director of the DAS was linked.
According to the investigation, Noguera gave privileged information about the institution to this former paramilitary chief and Hernán Giraldo and put the DAS at the service of that armed group.
The strongest case was that of Professor Correa de Andreis.
The DAS falsely accused him of being a FARC ideologist, detained him for a year and when he regained his freedom he was assassinated by Jorge 40's paramilitaries.
Regarding the release order for Noguera, Deivis Flórez, lawyer for the Political Prisoners Committee, an organization that accompanied the family of the murdered professor, told EL PAÍS that they are evaluating going to international bodies and that they are awaiting the result of the search that make the Prosecutor's Office on other processes against the former director of the DAS.
“This stirs a lot of emotions in the family.
We share the complaint of Alfredo's father for whom Noguera did not reach those responsible for what happened.
We consider that behind the fact there were other people by action or omission.
It should not be ignored that Noguera's immediate boss was former Senator Uribe.
And how the former director of the liquidated DAS never made a contribution to the truth, it remains to be seen if it was only his responsibility or if he obeyed a plan designed throughout the national territory against human rights defenders, "added the lawyer.
Although the DAS was eventually dismantled and the National Intelligence Agency created, this did not end the eavesdropping.
At the beginning of 2019,
Semana
magazine
denounced a series of illegal interceptions made by the Army of journalists and opponents of the Government.
