Former prosecutor Nestor Humberto Martinez accuses Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva of having sought the FARC to keep their assets

Former Attorney General Nestor Humberto Martinez has accused Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva this Wednesday of having promoted a scheme for members of the extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to keep their illicit assets after the 2016 peace agreement. The proposal could have given rise to the largest money laundering in the history of humanity, for which I rejected it outright,” Martinez stated in a letter broadcast by Caracol Radio. Leyva had demanded a few days ago that those responsible for an alleged maneuver to make former guerrilla leader Jesus Santrich commit crimes again after the agreement and thus lose the benefits of transitional justice. His request accused the former prosecutor as one of those involved.

Martinez, for his part, points out that Leyva gave him a document in 2016 that proposed that a representative of the FARC preside over a state trust company in charge of managing the guerrilla assets. The alleged project established that only 30% of the resources would be used to compensate and repair the victims of the group and that the remaining 70% would be allocated to “productive projects that contribute to the comprehensive development of the demobilized,” according to the letter. Martinez points out that the rationale that Leyva would have used was that in the “law of war” the perpetrators are entitled to a percentage of the accumulated assets. “Due to the dimension of these nonsense, it is possible to think that they were not their authorship. However, I have duly documented this episode,” says the former prosecutor.

The trigger for the accusations was a message that the chancellor published a few days ago on Twitter. In it, Leyva referred to a trap that Martinez allegedly set for Seuxis Paucias Hernandez Solarte, alias Jesus Santrich, so that he would commit crimes again after the peace agreements. “To jail the white-collar criminals enemies of peace who from the previous Prosecutor’s Office concocted the plot,” the foreign minister remarked. Last week, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) announced that it will file complaints about the actions of the prosecuting entity, without giving names or details. Leyva considers that it was not enough: “Good JEP magistrates but the names were missing. I will inform the Security Council [de las Naciones Unidas] the entrapment they denounce”.

Santrich was released in May 2019, and Martinez resigned from his position. The guerrilla leader went into hiding and in August he appeared together with another FARC leader, Ivan Marquez, in a video that denounced the betrayal of the peace agreements. In it they announced the creation of the Second Marquetalia, one of the dissidents of the FARC with which the government of Gustavo Petro is currently negotiating. Santrich died on May 17, 2021 in a confrontation.

Martinez accuses Leyva, a former FARC legal adviser, of having had “a close friendship” with the former guerrilla leader. For this reason, he asks him in this Wednesday’s letter not to get involved in the process: “I ask you to declare yourself prevented in relation to all the matters that your Ministry wants to undertake in relation to the Santrich case and with the Prosecutor’s Office and the prosecutor of that time ”.

The Foreign Ministry has preferred not to rule on this issue, after being consulted by this newspaper.