[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode…
[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Before he died, Jorge Enrique Pizano was poisoned—poisoned with hatred toward the person of the Attorney General of the Nation. And from the time when Jorge Enrique Pizano and I were close friends, I became his executioner.
[David]: Néstor Humberto Martínez, the then Attorney General of the Nation, publicly stated in his speech to Congress that he was the victim of an international conspiracy involving journalists, senators, a former government official, and even U.S. authorities. Journalist Iván Serrano didn’t understand how the Attorney General was using that information to claim there was such a conspiracy.
[Iván Serrano]: How did Mr. Martínez Neira know about the conversations between a source and their journalist, and moreover, used them wrongfully, as he used them in Congress, in an intimidating way. And one would say: How did he… how did he find out?
[David]: In the debate organized by three senators on November 27, 2018 to explain the tangled issue of Odebrecht, the then Attorney General of the Nation arrived unexpectedly to respond to the accusations against him. During his speech, he talked about a very important character in this story and in Jorge Enrique Pizano’s story.
[Néstor Humberto]: Mr. Luis Fernando Andrade, director of the ANI during the contracting of Ruta del Sol, has insisted on the theory that I am persecuting him.
[David]: Luis Fernando Andrade was the director of the National Infrastructure Agency, the ANI, the government entity that plans, contracts, and executes this type of megaprojects. Like Jorge Enrique, he had been a source for journalist María Jimena Duzán in her investigation of Odebrecht and Ruta del Sol. You’ll understand this better later, but he ended up being investigated by the Attorney General’s Office for allegedly favoring Odebrecht in a Ruta del Sol II contract.
During his speech, Martínez said that Andrade, in an effort to avoid this alleged persecution by his Attorney General’s Office, had decided to orchestrate what he called…
[Néstor Humberto]: The most shameful conspiracy process against Colombian justice in history.
[David]: And to prove it, he started by playing an audio that the Attorney General’s Office had presented at a hearing a year earlier. It was a call between Andrade and his cousin, who at that time was the president of the Inter-American Development Bank.
[Néstor Humberto]: In his dialogue with Mr. Andrade he says the following: Say what needs to be done. On one hand, whatever you need me to help you with. On the other hand, you have to fight back a bit in the media, otherwise it will be hard.
[David]: It’s not very clear, but in that call the cousin recommended that Andrade speak with the media. That’s when, according to Martínez, journalist María Jimena Duzán joined the conspiracy, in order to help Andrade publicize the alleged persecution by the Attorney General’s Office.
But that wasn’t the only thing Martínez mentioned in his speech regarding the conspiracy. He also talked about a private meeting between Andrade and Gustavo Petro, one of the senators who called for the debate. He said they met at Andrade’s house and even named the neighborhood where it was located.
[Néstor Humberto]: But I’m surprised by Senator Petro, who met with Andrade, by the way, to prepare this investigation, as people all around the Rosales neighborhood are saying. All around the Rosales neighborhood they say you met with Andrade as part of Andrade’s conspiracy, talking with Senator Petro. Ah!
[David]: Martínez also said that Andrade planned to report him to U.S. authorities.
[Néstor Humberto]: And how they’ve done it! My American lawyer friends, which are many, tell me that what has been invested in this is worth millions of dollars.
[David]: Millions of dollars that, supposedly, had been paid to a U.S. House of Representatives member and a private intelligence agency.
Andrade, whom I spoke with for this story, was watching the debate on television. This is him.
[Luis Fernando Andrade]: This Mr. Martínez went to the Senate and accused me of having created expectations for Pizano that he could get help from American justice, and that not having received help, that’s what had led him into a state of desperation that ended, well, with his death.
[David]: And Martínez went further in explaining the alleged conspiracy.
[Luis Fernando]: He also accused my wife of being a pamphleteer.
[Néstor Humberto]: Doña Teresa, the wife of this Mr. Andrade began to play a fundamental role in the halls of the United States Congress, with a pamphleteering attitude, damaging the integrity of the Attorney General of the Nation.
[David]: Andrade’s wife, Teresa Chevres, went to Law school in the United States. She remembers she was listening to the debate while driving when Martínez called her a pamphleteer. And she, who is Puerto Rican, didn’t know that word.
[Teresa Chevres]: I had never heard it. I mean, when I tried to understand it, but I don’t get what the problem is with that. What’s the problem with one defending a loved one, a family member with authorities in another country. I mean, sorry. I mean I don’t see what the problem is.
[Luis Fernando]: Well, for my wife this process has been as terrible as for me. All of this has had huge implications on our family life. And well, she has taken very seriously her role of helping me in the defense. One of the things she did was go to the U.S. Congress and seek to be heard by congresspeople who might be interested in what was happening to me, what was happening in Colombia.
[David]: And in the midst of what Martínez called a conspiracy, according to what he said in that debate in Congress, and thanks to that private intelligence agency they had hired, they had achieved something key.
[Néstor Humberto]: a meeting with the FBI this past October 16th, where Jorge Enrique delivered recordings.
[Teresa]: The fact that he knew I had been in Washington, that he knew about the FBI meetings and other… I mean, there I really felt like… I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. I felt totally defenseless.
[Luis Fernando]: What that made me feel, well, was much more anger and much more fear than I already had, because well, it was clear that the man who controlled the Attorney General’s Office in the country and who looked after the interests of powerful men, was accusing me of being a great conspirator against justice.
[Teresa]: Basically I took it, and Luis did too, as a threat, and this time as a serious threat.
[David]: Martínez was indeed very well informed about many things… And that was the doubt that journalists Iván Serrano and María Jimena Duzán had been left with after the debate: how did Néstor Humberto Martínez have so much information. But then they realized that the Attorney General’s Office had conducted an inspection of the Pizano house a week earlier and had taken several of Jorge Enrique’s belongings.
[Iván]: Later, when you know they went to Jorge Enrique’s house and took the cell phones, you know… these gentlemen have judicial police, they can intercept, they can do whatever they want…
[María Jimena Duzán]: When I realized that, I said ah, ok, the information that the Attorney General’s Office obtained for the debate was obtained from all the information and documents collected from the late Jorge Enrique Pizano and his son. But sure enough, that body of evidence hadn’t been useful to be a part of the process, because he didn’t present it.
[David]: And among the information published by the then Attorney General in the debate, as we already know, were the conversations between María Jimena and Jorge Enrique.
[María Jimena]: And we did talk a lot about Luis Fernando Andrade, because he thought that exactly what had happened to Andrade was going to happen to him: that they were going to put him in jail for 15 crimes.
[David]: From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.
I’m David Trujillo. Episode 7: The Conspirator.
Luis Fernando Andrade appeared just in the last stage of Jorge Enrique Pizano’s story, when, desperate, he was trying to find options to shield himself from possible indictment by the Attorney General’s Office. That’s why he sought him out, because Andrade’s situation was very similar to his.
So… Andrade is an industrial engineer with two citizenships, Colombian and American. He worked most of his life in the private sector until 2011, when the new government of Juan Manuel Santos hired the company he worked for to advise them on some management issues. Andrade had done some consulting in the public sector, but he hadn’t been so involved in the country’s political arena and didn’t fully understand what his acquaintances were telling him. This is Andrade again.
[Luis Fernando]: In Colombia people do tell you that politics and government are very dark, very corrupt worlds. That hadn’t been my personal experience. I had always worked with very professional, very serious people, I never saw any type of corruption. So, really, I thought it was an exaggeration.
[David]: In fact, the more he began to understand how the government worked, the more interested he became in working for the country. That’s why, when they offered him to stay there to help create and lead a new entity, the idea appealed to him… but not to his closest people.
[Luis Fernando]: And in fact everyone I trust told me not to join the government. My mother told me. My best friends told me. And unfortunately I didn’t listen. And I ended up joining the government. Yes.
[David]: His wife, Teresa, respected that decision.
[Teresa]: How our relationship works, it’s not that… he doesn’t forbid me things, I don’t forbid him things, I mean, I think we do everything as a team. I felt, I understood how he felt. And I agreed that if one did everything by the book, if one kept a record of everything, well then it was going to be fine.
[David]: The entity that Andrade led is called the National Infrastructure Agency, the ANI. The idea, as he explains, was to attract foreign private capital for infrastructure development in the country, and for that, they had to set up a very robust system with clear rules to plan, contract, and execute megaprojects without leaving room for corruption.
In that process of creating the ANI, Andrade learned about La Ruta del Sol, one of the largest infrastructure projects being built in the country at that time and which had been awarded two years earlier, in Álvaro Uribe’s government.
Andrade told me that another of the objectives in his work was to prioritize some important roads to improve them, and one of those was directly connected to Ruta del Sol. According to what he explained, in Colombia additions can be made to that type of contract of up to half the initial value, so from the ANI he began to manage the planning of that additional section in Ruta del Sol II, which is known as the Ocaña-Gamarra section. Remember that name well.
Andrade also told me that the Government asked the same consortium of Odebrecht and Grupo Aval that was already building Ruta del Sol II, to study the feasibility of that additional section. For him it made sense, because, in addition to the fact that they were the ones operating in the area and that saved costs, both were prestigious companies with abundant funds.
[Luis Fernando]: That Odebrecht-Grupo Aval structure gave me a lot of peace of mind, gave the Government a lot of peace of mind, and gave the financial sector in general a lot of peace of mind.
[David]: The planning of that section, just the planning, was done between 2012 and 2014.
In fact, among the conditions to do the project it was clear that first they had to have the approval of the most important institutions and the agencies that define the country’s fiscal policy.
Furthermore, the strategic and economic importance of the project was discussed in a CONPES, National Council of Economic and Social Policy, a meeting in which the President of the Republic, his ministers and directors of important entities review, adjust and decide key public policies for the country’s development, like this additional section of Ruta del Sol II.
And it’s worth clarifying that Néstor Humberto Martínez, who at that time was Minister of the Presidency, was at that CONPES. His name appears third in the document, right below the president and vice president. But, at that time, Martínez didn’t mention that two years earlier, in 2012, he had been hired by the Ruta del Sol II consortium to give a legal opinion on whether the Ocaña-Gamarra section could be done with an addition to the initial contract. The legal opinion was that it wasn’t necessary, because it could be understood that the section was part of the object of that contract.
Up to that point, for Andrade everything looked good, until investigations into Odebrecht’s corruption in Brazil began and then, in 2016, U.S. authorities confirmed the corrupt system they had set up on the continent.
Very quickly the investigations by Colombian authorities focused on La Ruta del Sol II, and it became known, through testimonies of captured people, that the contract was obtained through a multimillion-dollar bribe.
From that moment Andrade knew that he had to give explanations, especially about the Ocaña-Gamarra section.
[Luis Fernando]: My God, that’s a contract that’s under ANI’s custody, right? I’m the head of ANI. The first thing I did was make myself available to American justice and Colombian justice. And from then on, well, what was my, my attitude? Well, to deliver all possible information to them and make the decisions that would protect Colombia’s national patrimony.
[David]: Among those decisions that Andrade mentions, the ANI negotiated the termination of the Ruta del Sol II contract, and asked the authorities to annul it so that the contractors wouldn’t take more money than they invested. And, according to Andrade, that caused him many problems with those who were building the megaproject.
[Luis Fernando]: That, well, was going to cost Grupo Aval a lot of money, it was going to cost Odebrecht a lot of money, but those were the logical consequences of having obtained a contract by paying bribes.
[David]: Finally, two years later, an arbitration tribunal would end up agreeing with the ANI and would declare the contract null.
But before that happened, in mid-2017, Andrade received a call he didn’t expect.
[Luis Fernando]: I remember I was at the Rionegro airport, in Medellín, and I don’t know if I was getting on or off the plane. What I do remember is that I was on the tarmac, and I get a call from a journalist asking me what I think of the news. And I wonder what news. And he tells me that you’re going to be indicted.
[David]: Indicted by the Attorney General’s Office for allegedly favoring Odebrecht and giving them the Ocaña-Gamarra section contract.
[Luis Fernando]: And at that moment, the truth is, I was very confused, right? Because well, going from being a person who promoted transparency in the sector to being a person accused of corruption and I didn’t really understand why. Yes, it was very, very terrible, very confusing.
[David]: We’ll be right back.
We’re back at La Ruta del Sol.
Luis Fernando Andrade resigned from the ANI in August 2017. He didn’t think he should continue leading the entity with so many questions hanging over him and preferred to focus on dealing with his legal issues.
[Luis Fernando]: I remained reassured thinking that maybe it was going to be tough for some time, but that an explanation would come.
[David]: The news came out very quickly in the media.
[Reporter]: At about ten in the morning Luis Fernando Andrade arrived at the Paloquemao judicial complex. Amid a cloud of journalists who were waiting for him, the former ANI director stressed his interest in cooperating with justice and reaffirmed his innocence.
[Luis Fernando]: I’ve come to appear before the authorities, as I should, and I’ll make statements later. Well, my innocence is clear and that’s what I’ve come here to prove.
[Reporter]: The Attorney General’s Office will charge him with the crime of improper interest in the awarding of contracts for the construction of the Ocaña-Gamarra road, which was awarded to the multinational Odebrecht.
[David]: To sustain that indictment, the Attorney General’s Office mainly relied on two testimonies: that of a senator and that of a former ANI official, who received benefits and regained his freedom in exchange of providing information. Both witnesses received bribes from Odebrecht to influence the Government’s decision to approve the additional section. And, according to the Attorney General’s Office, they received help from Andrade.
He never denied that he had met with the witness senator.
[Luis Fernando]: Because he was a very important senator at the time. I think he’s the third with the highest vote count at that time. And he was part of the Infrastructure Committee, to which I had to report. And, in his first statement before the Supreme Court, he said that he did fulfill his obligations to the Brazilians by organizing meetings showing the benefits of the project, etc., but he never talked about bribes or anything improper inside the ANI.
[David]: The Attorney General’s Office showed some text messages as evidence of that relationship between Andrade and the witnesses.
[Luis Fernando]: The Attorney General’s Office showed many text messages, but those texts weren’t with me, those texts were among them and, what they showed was how they were trying to obtain some kind of information from the ANI or say they could get meetings with me to then talk with the Brazilians and charge them for handling things.
[David]: In one of those chats between those involved in the bribes, they referred to a person with the initials LFA who was charging for management. But in that conversation nothing else was clarified, neither what they meant by that management nor who they’re really talking about.
From the very beginning the Attorney General’s Office was requesting Andrade’s arrest. The peace of mind he initially had was fading, he was very afraid of ending up in prison.
[Luis Fernando]: The problem is once you’re in a prison detention center, then the Attorney General’s Office really has influence and the dark hands that were behind this, have the capacity to pressure you. In prison one is very defenseless. Very much at the mercy of what other prisoners or some corrupt authorities want to do to harm you.
[David]: Teresa, his wife, felt something similar.
[Teresa]: I was very afraid that he would end up in prison. I was very afraid, because I think Luis is very, very strong, but I think a prison can destroy anyone, no matter how good the prison is. I really thought that could destroy him.
[David]: Teresa remembers there were close people who suggested a plan to avoid prison: accept a charge, some small responsibility, even if it wasn’t true. The idea was to reach an agreement with justice to reduce the possible sentence. But Teresa knew they couldn’t do that.
[Teresa]: Under no circumstances. That goes against his moral fiber, his person. This is until the end, but no, I’m not going to ask him to admit doing things he didn’t do. One should never do that. That’s like a very, very basic mistake.
[David]: And that’s why, from the first moment, Teresa, who had studied law although she didn’t practice, decided to help him in his defense. Not as an official lawyer, but collecting information, investigating, talking to people.
[Teresa]: I think it was automatic. I mean, I don’t know if it was rational or what, but it was like automatic. I love him. We’re together. We’re a team. I think I studied law because I really, I hate injustices. So I like, I mean, as a hobby, as a pastime, I like doing research. So well, they also found a retired lawyer who loves research. This was served to me on a silver platter.
[David]: According to Andrade, the first argument of his defense was that this crime of improper contract interest didn’t make sense because it was the Government itself – the president and his cabinet assembled – that confirmed the importance of that additional section. Furthermore, a businessman involved in Odebrecht’s corruption said that Andrade didn’t receive money for that and the Attorney General’s Office also couldn’t confirm that other bribes had entered the ANI, besides the one received by that former official who gave the testimony.
[Luis Fernando]: But to the extent that, well, it was becoming evident that this matter had no basis, then they kept pinning more and more crimes on me, right? There they accused me of having tampered with information we sent to the Attorney General’s Office. They accused me saying that the contract couldn’t legally be signed, that this type of addition was illegal, so it’s another type of crime. Anyway and there they kept adding crimes. With a sentence, well I mean… if they convict me I’ll be in prison until I die. I see that as the frustration of not finding a way to get me, basically, and throwing in more and more crimes to see which one they can convict me with, right?
[David]: Andrade felt they were bringing the full weight down on him.
[Luis Fernando]: My perception at the time and it continues to be the perception today, is that the Attorney General’s Office made a decision that they had to convict me as a scapegoat and I think largely to avoid investigating the people who should have been investigated.
[David]: At the arraignment hearing, Andrade pleaded not guilty to the crimes of improper interest in contract award, concealment of evidence, and perjury. This is what he said at that hearing.
[Luis Fernando]: I am not the Odebrecht man that the Attorney General’s Office has tried to portray here. Quite the contrary: as president of the ANI and working with the organization’s instances we signed the Ocaña-Gamarra addendum to save the nation resources in doing a project that is extremely important for the country and we prevented any money from claims from being paid to the firm Ruta del Sol SAS whose main shareholder is Odebrecht.
[David]: Teresa and Andrade also decided to tell U.S. authorities what was happening. Not only because he was a citizen in that country, but because the investigations there had opened the Odebrecht case internationally.
[Teresa]: We wanted the different authorities in the United States: the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI, to know the things Luis had done and those he hadn’t done and what his intentions had been. And the same with some people in the House and Senate. It was like having them informed, just in case. Like a non-specific form, but in general of protection.
[David]: And following his cousin’s recommendation to take the case to the media, Luis Fernando contacted María Jimena Duzán to investigate what was happening. That’s how, initially, she came to this topic of Odebrecht, Grupo Aval and Ruta del Sol.
For María Jimena it was very unjust that the heads who managed the bribes weren’t being investigated…
[María Jimena]: And yes, they moved way forward to accuse only one person, who was Luis Fernando Andrade, who neither received nor ordered any bribes. His case is dramatically unjust. I mean, without any proportion at all. It has nothing to do with justice and has to do with justice’s decision to choose the person in the chain who was apparently the weakest to pile all the crimes on him, all the crimes, of which none can be proven, to somehow show that justice had worked.
[David]: Around that same time, in mid-2017, they arrested the head of the Anti-Corruption Unit of the Attorney General’s Office. It was very paradoxical that the person the Attorney General put in charge of leading the investigations of the biggest corruption cases in the country ended up convicted of receiving bribes to manipulate legal processes of very powerful figures. Shortly after, he was extradited to the United States for receiving a bribe in that country.
[David]: His name is Luis Gustavo Moreno. He already served a sentence of just over four years, so I got in touch with him. At first he was very willing to talk, but when I gave him the details of the investigation I was doing, he stopped responding and blocked me.
But he did give María Jimena an interview in 2021, when he had just been deported from the United States but was still serving his sentence in a prison in Colombia. There he told her some things about the Odebrecht case, one of many that he was in charge of.
[María Jimena]: And as Gustavo Moreno himself told me in an interview, already from prison: that he had been placed there to protect those who needed to be protected in the Odebrecht scandal, not to do justice.
[David]: This is a part of that interview that María Jimena published on her YouTube channel.
[María Jimena]: You told me they appointed you to do favors.
[Luis Gustavo Moreno]: To run errands, yes.
[María Jimena]: But what kind of errands?
[Luis Gustavo]: Judicial hit man. And to be a bulletproof vest for some and to screw others. And that wasn’t behind Néstor Humberto’s back, María Jimena. This was in line with Néstor Humberto, of course.
[David]: And for that judicial hit man job, as Moreno calls it, he said that, among other things, he himself had chosen the prosecutor who led the investigations in the Odebrecht case, whose name is Amparo Cerón, to follow orders, to protect those who had paid the bribes. This is another part of the interview María Jimena did with the former anti-corruption prosecutor.
[Luis Gustavo]: Even if they say that, that, that no, that the prosecutor has been there for a longtime and has a long career, I appointed the prosecutor, the resolution, even if they issued subsequent resolutions, it is Gustavo Moreno who creates the transnational corruption group and designates prosecutors who had that profile.
[David]: Among those prosecutors who worked in prosecutor Cerón’s group in the Odebrecht case was Daniel Hernández. Some time later Hernández would be put on trial for allegedly stopping three arrest warrants that he himself requested against the heads of Odebrecht in Colombia and for threatening one of the key witnesses in the case. At the close of this publication that trial continues.
But in mid-2025, Hernández gave a statement to Andrade’s lawyers for his process. They recorded that statement and this is the first time it’s being published.
[Investigator]: Can you tell me your full name?
[Daniel Hernández]: Daniel Ricardo Hernández Martínez.
[David]: Hernández said that in the meetings the team had to show progress in the investigations. They talked about Andrade. And that when he asked prosecutor Cerón why they should indict him if it seemed there was nothing incriminating against him, she didn’t like it.
[Daniel]: She would get upset, that is not good, not good, that, I was meddling in her OACS, that why would I know then if he had it or didn’t have it, that I had no reason to know what she… sorry. Always apologizing: prosecutor Cerón, excuse me.
[Lawyer]: But, regarding the indictment, Mr. Daniel, did you know what was the reason or fundamental reasons why the Attorney General’s Office, and in this case led by the prosecutor, well, charged Dr. Luis Fernando Andrade with crimes for these facts related to Odebrecht?
[Daniel]: If you ask me about the legal reasons I don’t know them. I never knew them, I never knew of their existence… From what I investigated, I never saw material evidence that, at least, within reasonable inference, generated any kind of indication of responsibility for Dr. Luis Fernando Andrade.
[David]: According to Hernández, he himself spoke with some of the witnesses the Attorney General’s Office had against Andrade and they never implicated him in acts of corruption. Not even three of the heads of Odebrecht in Colombia, whom Hernández also interviewed in Brazil for the investigation of the entire case, spoke badly of Andrade.
[Daniel]: I can assure you I asked those three about Mr. Andrade and all three stated in unison that this had nothing to do with Mr. Andrade, that nothing corrupt, nothing irregular.
I’ve never met r. Luis Fernando Andrade. I don’t know him, right? All I’ve heard about that man are wonderful things. But yes, he became a target for a woman who couldn’t get him out of her head, I don’t understand why. I don’t know why.
[David]: Prosecutor Amparo Cerón was removed from the Odebrecht case in 2020 for not moving forward with the investigations and ended up resigning from the Attorney General’s Office. I also tried to contact her but she didn’t respond. She has barely spoken publicly about this topic, except for a couple of interviews she gave to Semana magazine in which she said she did deliver results in that investigation.
[Amparo Cerón]: I heard many journalists saying “but that prosecutor hasn’t done anything, she didn’t do anything. So look: seven sentences in the Odebrecht case, Four principles of prosecutorial discretion, one plea agreement and around… I may be wrong on the number, five arraignment hearings and imposition of requested pretrial measures (FADE).
[David]: María Jimena insists that the intention wasn’t to solve the case.
[María Jimena]: I mean, it was a biased investigation, directed to find a scapegoat who was the one they had chosen to demonstrate that justice did work, who was Luis Fernando Andrade. But those same prosecutors led by her were incapable of catching and capturing any of the executives, the high executives of Odebrecht who stayed here for months without any trouble and who were able to leave from El Dorado airport easily. She let them leave. But not only her, but by order, well, of her higher-ups.
[David]: But as things keep on happening in this story, prosecutor Cerón had a very serious accident in Chile in October 2018, two years before retiring.
[Reporter]: The accident occurred when the official was traveling in a vehicle with her family during her vacation period. The high official is in a medical center in Santiago, Chile where she remains in intensive care.
[David]: She survived and woke up from a coma ten days later, but lost vision in her left eye. Although Chilean authorities left it as a car accident and didn’t investigate further, Cerón has maintained that it could have been an attack as retaliation for her investigations around the Odebrecht case, but hasn’t given details about this. She only said in the Semana interview that she would talk about the subject before Colombian justice when an investigation is opened about it.
[Amparo Cerón]: An investigation was initiated there. I understand they filed it. But if they open it here in Colombia, well they’ll call me and I would prefer to discuss the situation in that sort of context.
[David]: A pause and we’ll be back…
We’re back at La Ruta del Sol.
December 2017. It had been four months since the process against Luis Fernando Andrade had started and the judiciary had already made a decision.
[Reporter]: A judge with the function of overseeing procedural guarantees ordered house arrest for the former president of the National Infrastructure Agency Luis Fernando Andrade for his alleged participation in the distribution of Odebrecht bribes, and charges him with perjury and improper contract interest.
[David]: Teresa, Luis Fernando’s wife, already knew this process was going to be more difficult than they had thought at first, but it never ceased to surprise her.
[Teresa]: Well, I arrived home first when they… When they decreed house arrest for him. And then someone brought him at night and we looked at each other, and really, we… I mean we couldn’t believe what was happening. I mean, I really couldn’t believe it.
[David]: Andrade still wasn’t convicted, the process was going to continue, but now he couldn’t move from his house.
[Luis Fernando]: I could only go out to go to judicial hearings and, with prior permission, to any medical appointment I had. Now, that’s when a series of strange things also began to happen.
[David]: By that time, Andrade already suspected his phone was tapped and they were recording his conversations, like that one he had with his cousin.
[Luis Fernando]: And from there we learned another irregularity of how they obtained permission to record me. It turns out that the DEA issued a request to a judge to intercept some phone numbers related to this Odebrecht case topic. My phone number wasn’t among those numbers , but Mrs. Amparo Cerón tampered with one of the numbers so that my number would be intercepted. So she basically, well, committed fraud by altering a DEA document and taking it before a judge and that way being able to have recordings of my conversations.
[David]: I also contacted former prosecutor Cerón to clarify this interception issue for me, but, as I already said, she didn’t respond.
Andrade remembers that from the beginning of his house arrest, he noticed they weren’t only recording his calls.
[Luis Fernando]: We began to realize that there were things we talked about privately, my wife and I, in the apartment, and that then somehow became public knowledge, right? So the question is: How are they recording us?
[David]: He even remembers a visit that seemed very strange to him. It was the director of the prison he was assigned to, and he went to his house to tell him to cancel a phone interview with American journalists he was going to have the next day. Andrade didn’t accept, the judge in his case said there was no restriction for that. But the question was how the prison director had found out about that interview.
Teresa also began to notice something that seemed very strange to her in an apartment that was right across from theirs.
[Teresa]: In fact, I, I, I recorded it. I filmed it because I mean there was like, no one lived there, no one, but there were like colored lights, like if it were a nightclub and those colored lights were there all night. And I would lean out, take out binoculars but like I didn’t see people, I didn’t see a party.
[David]: Private investigators they hired to find out what was happening confirmed to them, without them having told them, that signals from devices to record conversations at a distance were coming from that building across. They also told them that only the State had that type of equipment and national security entities used them.
[Luis Fernando]: And a couple of times we found drones recording at the apartment windows, right? So, obviously there was a very big interest in knowing exactly what I was doing. But there were many situations that made it clear that someone very important high up in the State wanted to intimidate and silence me.
[David]: So they started taking precautions to avoid being recorded. They thought they had the capacity to know everything they were doing and it was better to prevent it. They even preferred not to talk to each other.
[Teresa]: We did a lot of writing things, like with a notepad, writing things. And we even made like a little fire and burned the papers, because I mean because of my age I remember the Watergate era, that they checked the trash too and well, I was paranoid. So yes, burning too. It was like a feeling of a lot of uncertainty, because the truth is we couldn’t… I mean, yes we could verify some things. Others were like the feeling.
[David]: But even so, Andrade continued with his plan to talk about his case with the media, even international ones.
[Luis Fernando]: One can’t let these things pass, you understand? Out of fear. Not that I wasn’t afraid, I was very afraid. But if one lets these things pass, then they get away with it, right? That’s why, every time they committed an irregular or criminal act, I talked about it not only with the media but also with the judge of the case.
[David]: In early 2018, when Andrade had been detained in his house for a couple of months and going to judicial hearings, he found out that someone was looking for him.
[Luis Fernando]: Through a mutual friend I learn that Mr. Jorge Enrique Pizano wants me to obtain some statements he made in the Ruta del Sol arbitration tribunal. So, basically he sends me word that he knows I have nothing to do with this matter and that if I look into those statements, I will understand better what’s going on.”
[David]: Andrade didn’t know Jorge Enrique, but it caught his attention. When he inquired about those statements and documents, he realized that in the tribunal they were trying to find out how involved Grupo Aval was in the Ruta del Sol II corruption. For that, they had already summoned Jorge Enrique for having been controller of the project and he had given them the information on the irregular contracts he had collected over the years, including the recordings. At that time, remember, there were about eight months left before the scandal broke. When Andrade saw what he was referring to in what was in the tribunal, he was surprised.
[Luis Fernando]: There it became clear to me that the involvement in all this entanglement wasn’t unique to Odebrecht, but Grupo Aval or some Grupo Aval officials also participated. Until that moment I believed the version that they were also victims in this process. Of course, with Mr. Néstor Humberto Martínez being Grupo Aval’s trusted lawyer, and him being the one accusing me, and him being the head of the Attorney General’s Office, things begin to become clearer and clearer, right?
At that moment I was already quite scared, and then I find out, well, about everything Jorge Enrique Pizano told me, because I already knew I was considered an enemy, right? In the highest positions of the Attorney General’s Office and Grupo Aval.
[David]: Andrade didn’t physically meet with Jorge Enrique. It could be risky considering the possibility that they were both being watched. So, they decided it was better for Teresa to meet with him in another neutral place. It couldn’t be at either of their houses.
[Teresa]: At that moment, the curious thing was I still didn’t know if he really was a victim or if he had been sent to get information. I mean, it wasn’t clear, it wasn’t clear who he was.
[David]: But they realized that Jorge Enrique served as a witness for Andrade’s defense. His case was very similar, the same thing could happen to him. Teresa saw how bad off he was.
[Teresa]: He was very worried that they were following him and that something might happen to him. Something with his safety, I mean, something physical.
[Luis Fernando]: She did tell me that he was… that he feared for his life. He feared they would kill him. He was very worried about that. But he was someone very motivated to move forward.
[Teresa]: He wanted justice to be done. He wanted to be able to clear his name. As I understood it, it wasn’t only clearing his name to leave his reputation clean, but it was well in a society as small as Bogotá’s, so that his daughters and son wouldn’t have to live with, I don’t know, with “my dad was a criminal”. It was for the repercussions that could have for them in the future. I mean, for him that kind of thing was very important.
[Luis Fernando]: He was someone very committed to his family. He was in a very difficult situation, but he was fighting.
[David]: And because he wanted to fight, Jorge Enrique had also sought out Andrade, because he had access to U.S. authorities.
[Luis Fernando]: And so he asked me to help him because he was very afraid. And obviously he couldn’t have any confidence in Colombian justice, well, because the Attorney General’s Office was controlled by the person who was persecuting him, right? And I helped him get in touch with U.S. authorities.
[David]: In the next episode…
[Juanita Pizano]: His eyes welled up with tears. Then I started crying too from being nervous, because I no longer understood. I mean, the situation was already very tense and I said to him like: Where do we have to go now? Do we have to hide? What do we have to do? And he told me I don’t know anymore, we have to stay still.
[Carlos Barragán]: And he says that given the news with the Odebrecht case, they request special attention to the security and physical integrity of both Mr. Andrade and his family members, who inhabit the place of confinement.
[David]: Juanita, Jorge Enrique’s youngest daughter, found a crumpled card in her dad’s jacket pocket. That card was from an FBI agent.
Credits:
La Ruta del Sol is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network from IHeart Radio.
The reporting and production of this episode were done by me, David Trujillo. The lead editor is Camila Segura, with additional editing by Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas and Eliezer Budasoff. Eliezer is the project manager. Fact-checking is by Bruno Scelza and Sergio Sebastián Retavisca. Camilo Vallejo did the legal review. Sound design and mixing are by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. The graphics and art direction for the series are by Diego Corzo.
Product development for La Ruta del Sol was led by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production was done by Nelson Rauda and Óscar Luna, with support from Lina Rincón and Samantha Proaño, from the Radio Ambulante Studios audience team.
La Ruta del Sol was recorded at Fiona Records.
At iHeart the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.
We want to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their advice on security matters.
Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.
You can follow us on social media as central podcast RA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.
I’m David Trujillo. Thank you for listening.