[David Trujillo]: Previously on La Ruta del Sol…
[Carolina Pizano]: And there I started screaming: How can people believe in God? I mean, I couldn’t believe that my dad had died three days ago and my brother was dying now.
[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Hehehe yes, yes yes.
[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: Idiots.
[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes, son of a bitch.
[Néstor Humberto]: This is a bribe, man.
[María Jimena Duzán]: And so I said: no, this is definitely the smoking gun, this is the smoking gun showing that those contracts are irregular, they did exist, despite the fact that all the authorities at Grupo Aval told Jorge Enrique himself that that wasn’t true, that it wasn’t real, that that was an invention of his.
[Jorge Enrique]: I became a nuisance for many people, among them those that today are…they were convicted over irregular contracts in Ruta del Sol.
[Juanita Pizano]: He told us that he was very sorry, that he knew he could have done more for my dad and he cried and all.
But right after saying that, he told us: but I need you to release a statement because people are going crazy. So I need you to release a statement to say that you support the Attorney General’s Office investigation.
[Carolina]: And in the middle of all that he was saying things like if there’s an investigation, it’s going to come out that Jorge Enrique was guilty of Alejandro’s death. So, of course, if they tell you that, you, in deep pain, say no, well no, better not, because we don’t want them to say now that Jorge Enrique was guilty.
[Carlos Valdés]: I told my deputy director: find out from the laboratory what that stain was. And then she gives me an answer about an hour later: the result is that that stain is saliva. I said: oh, I made a mistake.
[Jorge Robledo]: What changed in this story? What’s new? We all know: Jorge Enrique Pizano is what’s new in this story.
[Angélica Lozano]: Mr. Attorney General: resign. If you do the crime, you do the time. And you must pay.
[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.
[Luis Fernando Andrade]: 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.
[Juanita]: But my dad’s complaint was definitely, at least the basis for the Americans to find much more. I mean, what my dad found was like the tip of the iceberg.
[Protests]: Take to the streets to bring down the corrupt Attorney General.
[Nestor Humberto Martínez]: I’ve already told you that Jorge Enrique and I built a very beautiful friendship.
Unfortunately, today that friendship is even disavowed, despite the fact that I helped him so many times in his professional life.
The case of the profoundly painful death of Alejandro Pizano Ponce de León is hereby closed.
[David]: In late March 2024, a little more than five years after the deaths of Jorge Enrique and Alejandro, I met Juanita Pizano in Bogotá. It was the first time we met in person, though we had already done a virtual interview a few months earlier.
She had been living in the United States for over a year, working at a law firm. The plan was to spend a few months with her family and then return to the U.S. to sort some things out.
We met at her mother’s house to talk about the family tragedy that remains so confusing, about what had happened in the past few years, and about her return.
I wanted to ask you precisely that, how does it feel to be back?
[Juanita]: I feel very weird. Very anxious. Very strange. Coming back here did cause me a lot of anxiety, and there’s this fear of running into people I knew from that time, because it’s like suddenly going back in time. Sometimes I run into someone I haven’t seen in years and I feel like I’ve gone back in time and everything is going wrong again. But I think that, over time, that starts to heal. Days go by and I start feeling more in 2024 instead of in those dramatic days.
[David]: We also discussed the country house, the place where the deaths occurred. She told me it was still very important to the family and that they didn’t want to stop going there.
[Juanita]: We’ve gone there many times since everything happened, and it’s also been a therapeutic process—not to replace, but to add new memories to that place, to change the energy a little.
[David]: But the grief continues…
[Juanita]: Grief plays these tricks on you. For some reason, I feel like my dad is going to be there waiting for me, but he isn’t. It’s like I walk into that house and look for him in every room, and he’s not there.
[David]: Her sister Carolina had been living in that house for a year. I had also spoken with her a little over a month earlier, and Juanita had already gone to visit her.
[Juanita]: When I got there, I realized that everything had changed a lot while I was gone. Not destroyed, but very different. The whole house had been rearranged.
[David]: That wasn’t the only thing that had changed over those years. Several things had also happened with the case. Let’s remember that in 2019, the Attorney General at the time, Néstor Humberto Martínez, publicly announced that the investigation into Alejandro’s death was being closed. The argument was that Jorge Enrique’s death had been of natural causes, and his son’s death a tragic accident caused by his father—who was no longer alive to be investigated.
But the story didn’t end there. When a case has reached a certain stage, a judge must accept the Attorney General’s Office’s arguments in a hearing in order to close it. And whatever that decision is, it can be appealed. So from the moment Néstor Humberto Martínez made that announcement, an endless legal tug-of-war began between the Attorney General’s Office insisting on closing the case, and the justice system demanding further investigation. Although the family initially authorized the case to be filed, some time later, working with their lawyer and in order to convince the judge that there were sufficient reasons to continue investigating, they spent more than a year meticulously reviewing what the Attorney General’s Office had done at the time of the deaths. In that process, they found gaps that, to them, were obvious.
The question was whether that review would be enough to convince the judge not to close the case.
From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.
I’m David Trujillo.
Today, our final episode. Episode 10: The Puzzle.
[David]: Juanita was never convinced that her father’s death had been of natural causes. From the moment her mother called to tell her what had happened, she thought it was strange.
[Juanita]: My dad’s death didn’t sound normal to me. Literally from the second he died.
[David]: And that feeling didn’t fade with time. In fact, it was reinforced by comments she saw online. In those days, as the media and social media talked about Jorge Enrique’s work and his death, she came across something that didn’t surprise her.
[Juanita]: Someone posted a comment like… haha, they killed him. And I was like, yeah, that really resonates. Like, I’m not the only one who finds this strange.
[David]: At the time, she didn’t get a chance to talk about it with anyone else—not even with Alejandro, who knew more about what was going on with their father. But there wasn’t time for anything, because just three days later, her brother had also died. Nothing was clear anymore.
And as we know, everything started to become confusing very quickly. The same night Alejandro died, after a first, very quick inspection of the house by an official from the Attorney General’s Office’s Investigation Unit, the family did not stay there. They returned to Bogotá. But suddenly, they received a call from the person who worked at the house, telling them that several black vehicles were asking to be let in.
[Juanita]: It was a bunch of SUVs from the Attorney General’s Office trying to get in at 11 p.m. on November 11. And we told them no. I mean, what were they going to do? They said they were going to do a search, some kind of photographic documentation. And they insisted—apparently for hours.
[David]: They didn’t understand why the Attorney General’s Office was so insistent on entering the house—especially without them being there. Or why there were so many vehicles.
[Juanita]: And we told the person working there, please don’t open the door, don’t open the door for those people because we don’t know who they are. I think we called Néstor Humberto himself—I don’t remember exactly—but we called someone high up to say, hey, get these people off the property. We don’t know who they are. This is not the moment to do any kind of photographic documentation. Just leave us alone for a second. Alejandro just died.
[David]: That’s why they agreed that the Attorney General’s Office’s Investigation Unit would inspect the house almost a week later, when they would be present. During that inspection, in a recess when the family was outside the house, investigators found the cyanide container in one of the bathrooms. They also found a towel with brown stains that turned out not to be blood, and they seized hard drives, security cameras, and cell phones.
[David]: A few days later, the results of the forensic analyses began to come in. And amid all the doubts surrounding the investigation, there was something that Juanita found even stranger: the bottle. One reason was that on the day her father died, she had gone to the house to pick up some documents. She had even looked for them in his desk.
[Juanita]: That’s where I always say, and repeat, that there was no bottle on my dad’s desk. Because my boyfriend at the time and I lifted it—it’s one of those school-desk-style tables where you can lift a cover and have a little compartment inside. But the bottle wasn’t there. And then, a few days later, my ex told me, “Hey, I don’t want to scare you, but I didn’t see the bottle when I was there with you, picking up the papers.” And I was like, yeah, you’re right. I had thought the same thing, but I didn’t want to create unnecessary drama at that moment. But yes.
[David]: Juanita also found it very strange how quickly the Attorney General’s Office put together the hypothesis we already know: a failed suicide attempt, Jorge Enrique’s death of natural causes, Alejandro’s accident. None of it convinced her, and she couldn’t understand why other lines of investigation were never considered.
[Juanita]: They ruled out the criminal element with arguments that were so, so absurd—absurd in how basic they were. For example, that my dad’s death was of natural causes because he had cancer, when everyone knew, and we had all said over and over again, even to exhaustion, that my dad did not have cancer when he died. Or the idea that no one decides to kill themselves and then immediately go take a shower. Or that he had, I don’t know, a couple of appointments scheduled for the rest of that week and that weekend. Also, the fact that they didn’t really look carefully at the symptoms that Alejandro and my dad each had at the time of death, and didn’t properly compare them—that was also terrible.
[David]: Juanita felt that everything that was happening was much bigger and more confusing than she had thought. A truth that was almost impossible to grasp. Because of all this, and because of the overwhelm caused by the avalanche of media coverage, she chose not to talk about it with her family at that moment. Maybe it was better to leave things as they were, not to dig any deeper.
[David]: Her sister Carolina was feeling something similar. I also met with her, also at their mother’s house, almost a month before speaking with Juanita. At that time, she told me that although she had doubts about the deaths very early, she didn’t dare bring them up either.
[Carolina]: I think there are two things here. One, fear. If you know this happened because of the complaints, because of speaking out, you say something like, hey, no. Let’s leave it at that. And also because there was so much pain.
[David]: In 2022, when there was a new hearing to decide whether the investigation into Alejandro’s death would be closed, the sisters and their mother were summoned as victims. When it began, the judge asked them about their lawyer. But they didn’t have one. They didn’t have the money to pay for one.
Carolina remembers that the prosecutor who was there began to pressure the judge to continue without a lawyer.
[Carolina]: He more or less said something like: can we go on? We need to close this, this has to be done quickly. And the judge was like, no, there has to be a victims’ representative. So that’s when we left, started reaching out, and ended up with Miguel Ángel del Río.
[David]: Miguel Ángel del Río is a very well-known criminal lawyer in the country. He has handled very high-profile cases. Like for most people in Colombia, the Pizano family’s story had had a strong impact on him.
[Miguel Ángel del Río]: Even from the very beginning, from the very beginning, I suspected that something strange was going on, but as a distant observer.
[David]: And as a distant observer, as he says, his suspicions continued as the few details of the case became known. It seemed very strange to him that even though not all doubts had been resolved, it was closed in just two months.
[Miguel Ángel]: I have always wondered what was the rush the Attorney General’s Office had to close a process. Here, investigations stay open for 20 years and nothing happens. Why not keep investigating? Why… why do they want to rush it?
[David]: When he found out that the Attorney General’s Office once again wanted to close the investigation and that the family needed a lawyer, a journalist friend put him in contact with Carolina.
[Miguel Ángel]: And I told her that I would like to take on that representation of victims, because in reality we are not—we are not defendants, but representatives of victims.
[Carolina]: So, obviously, I told him that we didn’t have the means. I mean, we were in debt here, because when my dad died he also left a lot of debt, a lot. So he said no, that he would do it pro bono. So it was like, no—wonderful, perfect. Then I met with Miguel Ángel and he tells me, I tell him—we kind of established contact like that and started working with him.
[David]: That was at the beginning of 2023. And working with him meant digging deeper, looking for arguments so that the judge would not archive the investigation. It was going to be very painful, but Carolina, Juanita, and their mother agreed. They felt it was time to reopen what had been closed.
[Carolina]: Once we were able to handle the grief, to be a bit calmer, to some extent, you start to realize that for our grieving process it’s also necessary to have the intention of clarifying things. It’s very easy to say: I’m just going to think about the nice things that happened and that’s it. About the good things. Yes, about the family we had, about the love, about the relationship. Yes. But that’s not seeing the elephant in the room. It’s looking for the reason for the death. It’s opening Pandora’s box.
[David]: Despite that, there were people around them who advised them not to insist. They told them that what had happened could not be changed, that they should leave hatred and anger aside.
[Juanita]: I don’t like that comment from that third party about why we’re so angry, that historical comment of telling a woman to calm down. No, I’m not angry, not hysterical. I just want to know what happened. The three of us—my mom, my sister, and I—we would like the Attorney General’s Office to carry out all of its functions properly, in the best legal way, because it didn’t do that at the time.
[Carolina]: Yes, that’s exactly it. They haven’t done their job. They didn’t do the work of investigating. Journalists have done more than they have. We’re not doing this because we’re full of hatred or resentment, or because we think our pain is going to go away by finding the truth. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with a moral and just intention, and it’s purely personal.
[David]: Wanting to know what happened
A pause, and we’ll be back.
We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.
From the moment the Pizano sisters and their mother got in touch with the lawyer Miguel Ángel del Río, he set out to understand Jorge Enrique’s personality and his intentions in the months before his death. The family gave him boxes and boxes filled with all kinds of documents, which allowed Miguel Ángel to get closer to how methodical and organized Jorge Enrique was.
[Miguel Ángel]: And I ended up feeling very connected, because I work that way. So I felt, okay, this is a distressed man, this is a man being judicially persecuted, who has had all the doors closed on him, who is gradually being left without support from anyone, only with his family. But I also saw a man who wanted to prove his truth. To me, Jorge Enrique Pizano is a hero, someone who, by his own conviction, believed that people needed to know the truth about a dark chapter of recent judicial history. And I said: we have to find the truth here.
[David]: He reviewed the investigation carried out by the Attorney General’s Office—which lasted only two months, from November 2018 to January 2019—and also the arguments used to close it.
[Miguel Ángel]: There was interest in the investigation, yes, but with a purpose aimed at closing the investigation at any cost, at considering that Jorge Enrique Pizano had died of a heart attack. The normal course of a judicial process is supposed to be to investigate everything: the good, the bad, the small, the big—especially an investigation of this level. And from that moment on, I realized that nothing had been done.
[David]: For him, it was absurd that in one of the most important investigations the Attorney General’s Office was handling at the time, with almost the entire country watching, they had ignored such basic things.
On the one hand, it was not clear to Miguel Ángel why the Attorney General’s Office had clung to a single hypothesis for Jorge Enrique’s death: that of a failed suicide attempt due to financial problems. As he explains, the Attorney General’s Office ’s arguments do not include key information, such as the fact that Jorge Enrique had appointments scheduled for just days after his death. There was one with the journalist María Jimena Duzán and another with a Bloomberg journalist, and Jorge Enrique himself had confirmed he’d be there. They also did not take into account where he had worked, the relationships he had with other employees, and even less the irregularities he had uncovered. The Attorney General’s Office did not even take into account his fear for his safety, a fear that he had directly expressed to them himself.
[Miguel Ángel]: And the Attorney General’s Office didn’t do that. We did. In fact, we found documents written by him a month and a half before his death where he tells the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation: Gentlemen of the Attorney General’s Office, please protect my life, because I fear for my personal safety and that of my family. Why didn’t the Attorney General’s Office investigate and interview, for example, Iván Serrano? Not so that he would give journalistic information, but to establish what the criteria were.
[David]: The criteria—that is, Jorge Enrique’s reasons for requesting protection. We already know that when he gave the interview to Iván and handed over the recordings, he told him that he was afraid. It is true that Jorge Enrique did not accept the protection program offered by the Attorney General’s Office because, according to what he wrote in a document, it did not fit his conditions. But it is also true that he asked them to urgently transfer his case to the National Protection Unit, which is independent from the Attorney General’s Office and is exclusively in charge of managing protection for people in situations of risk.
In addition, Miguel Ángel learned something key in all of this:
[Miguel Ángel]: In fact, he had an interview with a protection official from the Attorney General’s Office, and that was never disclosed. What did he talk about with that official? What did the official tell him? We still don’t know to this day.
[David]: It’s also not very clear why, on the bottle—as we already mentioned—they only found Jorge Enrique’s DNA and not Alejandro’s.
[Miguel Ángel]: That’s what makes you say: but let’s see—if Alejandro was the one who drank from the bottle and died from ingesting cyanide, how is it that the only DNA found on the mouth of the bottle is from Jorge Enrique, his father, who supposedly died of a heart attack?
[David]: Another piece of evidence presented by the Attorney General’s Office was that video of Jorge Enrique buying several similar bottles of water at a supermarket. But for Miguel Ángel and the family, the only thing the video proves is exactly that: him buying the water he liked. Nothing more. It’s not even known whether it was the same bottle that contained the poison.
[Miguel Ángel]: Because we were able to find out that those bottles have bar codes, and those bar codes correspond to the bottle throughout the entire country. What did that mean? That if I bought a bottle of water in Santander that year or bought it in Bogotá, it had the same serial number. Obviously, the bottle that appears has the same serial as all the bottles in the country in 2018, because that’s what the brand itself told us.
[David]: There is also no concrete evidence that he bought the cyanide. There are no videos, no receipts, no purchase records. Nothing. But according to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, there was DNA from Jorge Enrique on the cyanide container and on the bags that wrapped it. That is another of the bases of the Attorney General’s Office’s hypothesis that he put the poison in the bottle.
But that doesn’t convince Miguel Ángel either.
[Miguel Ángel]: Because, among other things, what brings down the suicide theory, for example, is that he was shaving when they find him. No one with full awareness drinks cyanide and then starts shaving.
[David]: But, according to Miguel Ángel, that doesn’t mean that Jorge Enrique had not ingested the poison.
[Miguel Ángel]: The Attorney General’s Office didn’t even investigate that ingesting cyanide in his body can cause respiratory arrest. So even the Forensic Medicine report on his death doesn’t make sense, doesn’t have support. I do believe he had cyanide in his body, but through accidental ingestion—accidental on his part, deliberate by third parties.
[David]: Miguel Ángel believes that that third party could have been someone who worked at the country house where Jorge Enrique was living.
[Miguel Ángel]: The Attorney General’s Office says that he had absolute trust in all those people who worked with him and that they could never have killed him. And we were able to prove that two of the people who worked there had just met with Enrique Pizarro a month earlier, and that Jorge Enrique himself had reservations about one of them.
[David]: Carolina remembers that her father complained about the couple who took care of the place—a man and a woman. He said they had stolen some things from the house and that he no longer felt comfortable with them. She also remembers that her father was planning to fire them very soon, and that the day he died he was working on their severance payments. Shortly after the deaths, they stopped working at the house.
[Miguel Ángel]: And notice that all those people disappeared. The Attorney General’s Office lost track of them. Today they are unfindable. It would be good to really bring them back in, to have them say the things that could have happened.
[David]: Miguel Ángel also maintains that the testimony given about Jorge Enrique by the housemaid who lived in that house is also unclear.
[Miguel Ángel]: At first, she stated that no, that she had never seen any suicidal intent or any desire to harm himself.
[David]: But later she said that she had seen him take a bottle of water and a spoon from the kitchen. When the then Attorney General announced the closing of the investigation, he added that, according to that testimony, Jorge Enrique had locked himself in with the bottle and the spoon in the same bathroom where the cyanide container was found.
On the other hand, according to the statement of the other housemaid who came on weekends, on November 8, after Jorge Enrique was taken to the hospital and while she was organizing his room, she did find the bottle on the desk. She noticed that two or three sips of the liquid had been drunk and that it had the cap on, but it was not closed. She left it there. She also said that at that moment she found on the floor a note written by Jorge Enrique.
[Miguel Ángel]: A letter as if it were some kind of farewell will. And later it was discovered that the document that had been found was a document called Things to Do, like when you write in a planner what you’re going to do that day. It was found on Jorge Enrique’s desk and it said things like: we have to pay the employees, we have to withdraw some severance payments from such-and-such bank, we have to go talk to so-and-so. The natural plans of a human being. If a person is going to end their life, they don’t leave a technical letter, they leave a human letter. With a powerful emotional charge, too. And that didn’t happen.
[David]: The housemaid who found Jorge Enrique’s note and the bottle added that right afterward she spoke with the live-in housemaid, and that the latter told her the following—this is a direct quote: “She told me: I have a feeling that Don Jorge drank something, because he went down early to the kitchen, had a coffee, and took a bottle of water from the pantry and left drinking it, because he never drinks water that early.” End quote.
It is also possible, according to Miguel Ángel, that someone from outside entered the house and placed the bottle there. It was not unthinkable, as the Attorney General’s Office suggested.
[Miguel Ángel]: And we were also able to establish how easy it was for any citizen to enter. That is, there was no kind of rigor, no alarms, no—there was nothing at all.
[David]: What there were, were security cameras. According to Miguel Ángel, Jorge Enrique had installed them a month before his death.
[Miguel Ángel]: And then you ask yourself, fine—and what’s on the security cameras? We will never know, because the Attorney General’s Office took them and said, no, we weren’t able to legalize this information.
[David]: Remember that they kept the evidence longer than they should have and did not legalize it before a judge.
[Miguel Ángel]: That’s one of the most unbelievable things. They knew that if they arrived late, that evidence would be rejected, and they would be left with the theory of a heart attack and that Alejandro drank that cyanide by accident, which is the only reality. The only reality of the case is that Alejandro did drink from that bottle by accident.
[David]: A pause, and we’ll be back.
We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.
[Miguel Ángel]: Thank you, Your Honor. This representation of victims, which precisely represents the interests of María Carolina Pizano, of Juanita Pizano—
[David]: At the end of 2023, the lawyer Miguel Ángel del Río presented the family’s arguments before a judge so that the case of Alejandro Pizano would not be closed.
[Miguel Ángel]: They have been waiting five years for justice.
[David]: Miguel Ángel and his team had been gathering information since the beginning of that year and had clearly identified the gaps in the Attorney General’s Office’s investigation of this case.
[Miguel Ángel]: In such a way that, from this moment on, this representation of victims must oppose the request for preclusion. Because the real question here, Your Honor, is the existence or not of possible investigative lines that the Attorney General’s Office has not addressed.
[David]: Miguel Ángel’s intervention lasted around eight hours, with a break in the middle to rest and eat something. During that entire time, the lawyer presented the doubts we have already mentioned and added documents, statements from the Pizano family and other witnesses, analyses of expert reports, and everything necessary to make it clear that the Attorney General’s Office’s argument—that Jorge Enrique prepared everything for a suicide and that just minutes before had died a natural death—made no sense. For him, it was impossible to reach a conclusion about what happened with an investigation that had only lasted two months.
[David]: Toward the end of his intervention, Miguel Ángel made a list of what the Attorney General’s Office did not do.
[Miguel Ángel]: The Attorney General’s Office never identified security problems involving Jorge Enrique Pizano. It never interviewed the people who could have been reported by Jorge Enrique Pizano. It never interviewed the protection official who spoke with Jorge Enrique Pizano, and to this day, Your Honor, we do not know exactly what was said or discussed. The files within the Attorney General’s Office, the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce, and the Arbitration Tribunal—where Jorge Enrique Pizano gave statements in 2018 and in 2017—were never inspected. It was never established with certainty, Your Honor, what the diagnosis of death was, or it was overlooked that the heart attack could have consequences—not in the evaluative and speculative aspects made at the time by pathologist Morales, but rather, Your Honor, in the possibility that it was related, precisely, to the ingestion of cyanide. The backgrounds of the people who worked with Jorge Enrique Pizano were not established. It was established that he did not trust them. It is not known where they are today. Complaints were not filed. The Attorney General’s Office did not even request testimony from Prosecutor 80, Amparo Zerón, to establish what the investigative line was and what contribution Jorge Enrique Pizano had made to that investigation.
[David]: The Pizano sisters were listening to Miguel Ángel’s intervention. They knew what he was going to say, but it was still surprising. Up to that point, they had not had someone represent them in the way they truly wanted.
[Carolina]: And there I felt very happy with how well he presented it. It’s all there—he told everything, all the information is there. It’s like tying loose ends together. Or it’s like when you start cleaning a glass, right? At first it looks kind of cloudy, but each time it looks clearer.
[Juanita]: I had never seen anyone explain so clearly and concisely, and legally, everything that happened to us. And he did it in a truly masterful way. I mean, he was able to explain point by point all the causes of our insomnia. He’s been one of the few people who has taken the time and the energy to investigate who Jorge Enrique Pizano was.
[David]: At the end of his intervention, Miguel Ángel asked the judge to allow the victims to know what happened.
[Miguel Ángel]: In that sense, Your Honor, thanking you for your patience with each of the parties, this representative of victims concludes his intervention by making the request, I repeat, not to grant the preclusion requested by the Attorney General’s Office and that this investigation continue its necessary inquiry. Thank you very much.
[David]: But the judge’s decision was not immediate. They had to wait more than three months and another long hearing—almost five hours—to learn it. The day I met with Juanita, I also asked her about that.
How did the March 8 hearing go?
[Juanita]: Well, I wasn’t mentally prepared and I wasn’t expecting anything. I thought that, honestly, I was sure the judge was going to say that the investigation was over.
[David]: But that day, March 8, 2024, the judge announced something very important:
[Judge]: There is doubt regarding death by natural causes of Jorge Enrique Pizano Callejas, in addition to a series of inconsistencies in the collection and handling of evidence of vital importance in the present case.
[David]: He ordered the Attorney General’s Office, once again, that the case could not be closed. And he added that other possible causes of the Pizanos’ deaths should not be ruled out.
[Judge]: To conclude, it was sufficiently clear that the hypothesis chosen by the Attorney General’s Office is only one possibility within the wide range of probabilities that are equally valid for the investigation of the person responsible for the death of Alejandro, and that this entity did not dispel.
[Juanita]: The three of us were very surprised—in a good way. It was very gratifying to hear the judge literally give the Attorney General’s Office a lesson on how a case, an investigation, is precluded, and let’s say all the shortcomings the Attorney General’s Office had had, not only in its actions but also in its argumentation afterward in the hearings, which was quite serious.
[David]: The news came out that same day.
[Catalina Vargas]: A judge in Funza ruled that the investigation into the death of Jorge Enrique Pizano, former controller of Ruta del Sol and a key witness in the Odebrecht case, and his son Alejandro cannot be precluded. And he ordered the Attorney General’s Office to continue the investigation to establish whether the death of both was a homicide.
[David]: For Miguel Ángel, it was a small victory amid so much horror.
[Miguel Ángel]: They have suffered two tragedies … actually three, which are the death of the father, the death of the brother, and the justice system’s failure to respond. The Office of the Attorney General of the Nation has revictimized them and slapped them in the sense that the only thing they believed in was institutional legitimacy. They believed in the officials who participated in the investigations, they voluntarily handed over material evidence, and all of that was lost. So now we are going to set the investigation on the right path, as it should be done—that the Attorney General’s Office investigate the good, the bad, the ugly, everything.
[David]: Among what Miguel Ángel mentions that the Attorney General’s Office must investigate, there is a specific event that occurred in 2018, shortly after Alejandro’s death.
The daughters and their mother were at an uncle’s house in Bogotá when the then Attorney General, Néstor Humberto Martínez, paid them a visit that was arranged by his son. We had already talked about that visit in other episodes. It was when Jorge Enrique’s daughters tell that Martínez arrived very shaken. Not only by the loss, but also because, after the revelations of the audio published by Noticias Uno, he was being criticized in the media and on social media. Carolina was there.
[Carolina]: So then… my mom feels compassion for everyone. Yes, she has an overly, overly kind heart. And of course, if someone tells you that, well, you think about how to help them. So at that moment my mom offers him the iPad. Like, sure, here are some recordings that might be useful to you.
[David]: Jorge Enrique’s iPad, with which he had secretly recorded Martínez and other high-ranking officials from Grupo Aval.
[Juanita]: It was like a sign that we trusted him and that we had nothing else against him. Yes, like, look, everything you could find against you is right here.
[Carolina]: My mom handed it directly to him. And he took it. Yes, he took it that same day. And they returned it in the afternoon.
[David]: His bodyguards returned it.
[David]: When they told Miguel Ángel about this, he was shocked.
[Miguel Ángel]: With Néstor Humberto Martínez being the custodian of evidence in Colombia as head of the Judicial Police of the Attorney General’s Office, how is it possible that he would take a piece of physical evidence without the natural rigor of a legal process?
[David]: That iPad should have been transported under a chain of custody, as required by law. But according to Miguel Ángel’s investigation, it was not even registered as evidence in the investigation into the deaths.
[Juanita]: The mere fact that he received the iPad outside of any legal procedure is absurd. And if a woman as kind, as… I don’t know, like my mom, offers it to you, you say no. I mean, if you are a decent person—which we already know he is not—but you tell her no, that you can’t, that within your legal powers it is not permitted to have that iPad.
[David]: Miguel Ángel adds that Martínez not only took the iPad and later returned it.
[Miguel Ángel]: We have been able to determine that this iPad was manipulated.
[David]: In order to be able to state this, Miguel Ángel and his team analyzed the iPad and the information it contained. According to him, they found most of the files —emails, photos, videos, recordings—but the information from the years 2016 to 2018 was missing.
[Miguel Ángel]: In other words, here we are also facing the commission of other crimes that must be investigated with rigor.
[David]: At the beginning of this year, 2025, the family and Miguel Ángel filed a complaint against Néstor Humberto Martínez before the Investigation and Accusation Committee of the House of Representatives, the body that investigates attorneys general, both current and former, for possible crimes committed during their time in office. The complaint against Martínez was for concealment, alteration, or destruction of physical evidence. It is a long, bureaucratic, and political process, but if the Committee finds sufficient grounds, it could bring charges against him. In that case, since he is no longer Attorney General, the Supreme Court of Justice would take over the case to try him. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to between four and twelve years in prison.
Martínez has not denied that he received the iPad, but he insists that he did not manipulate it. When we interviewed him in September 2025, we asked him about this issue. He told us that he had also filed a complaint against Miguel Ángel for allegedly fabricating evidence to accuse him, and that Miguel Ángel had already been summoned by the Attorney General’s Office to give sworn testimony. This is Martínez.
[Néstor Humberto]: In that criminal complaint they have asked the lawyer to hand over the iPad. For what? To carry out the forensic work and determine, as it should be determined, whether in fact someone tampered with the operating system of that iPad. Hearings before one judge. Hearings before another judge. A summons for delivery. The iPad never arrives. It does not appear. They do not want to hand it over.
[David]: Miguel Ángel assured me that this is false, that he has always been at the disposal of the Attorney General’s Office not only in relation to this complaint, but also with all the others that have been filed against him from many sectors and that, according to him, have a political background.
Martínez added something about the people who analyzed the iPad. He told us that his lawyer took statements from them and that one of them said that, during the extraction of the information, deleted elements appeared, but that he could not confirm that this had actually happened. Nor could he know who manipulated it or when.
But Miguel Ángel says that the people Martínez is referring to were not the ones who carried out the expert forensic report on the iPad, but rather that, based on that report, they issued conclusions about the findings, among them the deletion of certain information. The person who, according to Miguel Ángel, did examine the device was never questioned. And he maintains that the evidence shows that the only person who had access to the iPad was Martínez.
Even so, Martínez insisted to us that he did not manipulate the iPad, that he did not delete any information.
[Néstor Humberto]: No, I did not do something that vile. For God’s sake. But they cannot drag me to the cemetery of Colombia’s moral life by making this thing up about me. I refuse to believe that the family agrees with raising such a calumny against me based on reports from people who say they did not say that. That is why I have filed a criminal complaint against this man.
[David]: And we asked him how he felt about being reported by Jorge Enrique’s family.
[Néstor Humberto]: The family cannot forget how much I helped Jorge Enrique. I remember when my son would arrive distressed, telling me oh poor Jorge Enrique, that he was going through difficulties, and I helped him. For God’s sake! I helped him. He was always my great friend. And look what happens in the end: that there is an investigation. And that they come up with this story about the iPads. What barbarity! What barbarity! The lawyer… the family cannot condone that. I believe they cannot condone it because it cannot come from their hearts. That the family ends up being the driving force behind an accusation against me. That I erased Jorge Enrique Pizano’s iPad to hide evidence. Listen to this monstrosity!
[David]: So let’s recap everything up to this point: the family and their lawyer filed a complaint against Néstor Humberto Martínez over the iPad. Then Martínez filed a complaint against attorney del Río. According to Martínez, the evidence used to accuse him of having manipulated the iPad was false. That is where things stand on that front.
And as for the case of Alejandro’s death, the Attorney General’s Office appealed the decision not to close it. Now, what Miguel Ángel and the family are seeking is for the investigation into Jorge Enrique’s case to be reopened. They are convinced of how important it is to reexamine everything that can still be reviewed. But they are also realistic: the evidence collected by the Attorney General’s Office is no longer legally valid, and so many years have passed that they no longer even know where it is.
[Juanita]: Like the bottle. We don’t know what happened. The towel, the fingerprints in the house, the security camera recordings. We don’t know what happened to any of that. So I think the big question is: with what are they going to investigate? I have no idea.
[David]: They are even clear that it is very likely they will never fully put together the puzzle of everything that happened. But the more pieces they have, the better.
[Juanita]: There are so many unanswered whys. So I think that more than trying to answer them, it’s about accepting that those whys will always exist and learning how to live with them, and sometimes answering them a little bit, but understanding that I will never answer them completely.
[David]: But for Miguel Ángel there are still things that can be revisited. He has already said it: all the evidence of the irregularities that Jorge Enrique gathered over so many years. But they would also have to locate the workers from the country house, interview them again, and corroborate their testimonies. They also have to review all the times Jorge Enrique made it clear that he feared for his safety and that of his family, and this time truly take into account that, officially, he requested protection from the Attorney General’s Office… in short… to carry out an investigation—this time a truly exhaustive one—in the hope of being able to determine, with certainty, that Jorge Enrique’s death was of natural causes.
[Juanita]: The three of us—my mom, my sister, and I—are seeking the truth, justice, and reparation that are owed to us as victims within the framework of these two criminal proceedings. But that does not mean that I am here saying, like, you killed my family, like you, Luis Carlos Sarmiento, you, Néstor Humberto, killed my father and my brother. I am not saying that. What I am saying is that they behaved very inappropriately— professionally and personally.
[David]: And this last part has been very painful. Feeling that their father was so ignored, so manipulated, so threatened, just for doing his job properly… But Carolina understands that this was her father’s personality…
[Carolina]: My dad always tried to work for the good of the country, in the public sector, of making the country better. And I think that’s what he did by denouncing corruption. Yes, by denouncing what was done wrong. What I think is… I don’t even think my dad imagined the impact that all of this has had at this point. I think he would be proud of himself.
[David]: And are you?
[Carolina]: Yes, of course. Of course. I just didn’t like the consequence.
[David]: The way the Lava Jato case investigation was handled, which uncovered the Odebrecht corruption scandal—the largest on the continent—has drawn a great deal of criticism in recent years. Some convictions and agreements were annulled or renegotiated. There were also allegations that the investigation process was carried out using illegal practices.
For cooperating with the justice system, Marcelo Odebrecht reduced his sentence from nineteen years to ten, and in 2017 he was granted house arrest. In 2024, Brazil’s Supreme Court annulled the rulings against him on the grounds that due process had been violated, and he regained his freedom.
Odebrecht changed its name and since 2020 has been called Novonor.
In Colombia, from Grupo Aval, only one person was convicted: in 2019, the president of Corficolombiana, José Elías Melo, for having arranged the bribe for the Ruta del Sol II contract. He was sentenced to nearly twelve years in prison, but in 2024, after having served three-fifths of his sentence, he regained his freedom. One year later, although he did not have to return to prison, the Supreme Court upheld that conviction and confirmed that Melo did indeed arrange the bribe.
Colombia’s Superintendence of Industry and Commerce opened an investigation in 2018 into several individuals and companies for Odebrecht-related corruption. Among those investigated was Luis Carlos Sarmiento Gutiérrez, the son of Sarmiento Angulo and president of Grupo Aval at the time. It was not for bribes, but for conflicts of interest. And although the Superintendence also asked the Attorney General’s Office to investigate him for possible crimes, neither of the two proceedings moved forward and both were ultimately shelved.
On the other hand, several things have happened in relation to the Ruta del Sol.
After the Ruta del Sol II scandal, in 2018 the government handed the unfinished project over to a public entity that, due to lack of funds, was unable to make much progress on its construction. Three years later, it was transferred to two private Colombian construction companies so they could complete it. In 2023 they announced that the road was already passable, but the full project is expected to be completed in 2028, almost twenty years after the contract was awarded.
Both presidential campaigns of 2014 were investigated for receiving money from Odebrecht. But in 2024 only one of the candidates, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, and his son, the campaign manager, were formally charged. What most incriminated the candidate from uribismo was a recording in which he discussed the matter with one of those implicated in the corruption network of the Brazilian multinational. The trial has not yet concluded.
Roberto Prieto, the manager of both presidential campaigns of Juan Manuel Santos, was sentenced in 2019 to five years in prison. But not for what happened in Ruta del Sol II, rather for campaign posters that Odebrecht paid for during Santos’s 2010 campaign, and for having received a bribe, personally, in the third stretch of the highway, known as Ruta del Sol III.
That third stretch also remains unfinished and with plans to be completed in 2028. Although Odebrecht and Grupo Aval were not involved, it has suffered delays, multimillion-dollar debts, bankruptcies, and corruption scandals.
As for the Deferred Prosecution Agreement between Corficolombiana, part of Grupo Aval, and the United States Department of Justice, on December 3, 2025, the Colombian government asked the U.S. Attorney’s Office to reveal the identity of the mysterious Colombian Official Number 3, described verbatim in the document as “a high-ranking official of the executive branch of the Colombian government approximately between 2010 and 2018.” One week later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office refused to provide the name.
Now, regarding the investigations by Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office: in 2023 the agency announced that it would formally charge another fifty-five people in the Odebrecht case. Among those individuals there was no one from Grupo Aval, but there were executives from the Brazilian multinational, who remain in their country without facing Colombian justice. In addition, charges were brought against officials from the National Infrastructure Agency, the ANI, including another charge against Luis Fernando Andrade, who was the director of that agency.
Andrade is awaiting a judicial decision in the case related to Ruta del Sol II, and says it could be known in early 2026. Even if he is declared innocent, the Attorney General’s Office continues to investigate him in other cases, such as corruption in Ruta del Sol III. Although he has been formally charged three times for that, all three times a judge has rejected the charges.
At this moment, a bill known as the Jorge Enrique Pizano Law is moving forward in Congress. Its goal is to protect those who report acts of corruption.
Credits:
[David]: La Ruta del Sol is a podcast by Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network of iHeartRadio.
Reporting and production for 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 was done by Bruno Scelza and Sergio Sebastián Retavisca. Camilo Vallejo conducted the legal review. Sound design and mixing were done by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. The graphic design and art direction of the series were done 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 would like to thank FLIP for its valuable support in the legal review of this production and for its 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 and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.
I’m David Trujillo. And this was La Ruta del Sol. Thank you for listening.
