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[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode we talked about an important character in this story: Luis Fernando Andrade. Let’s remember that Andrade directed the National Infrastructure Agency,  ANI, the government entity that plans, hires, and executes megaprojects in the country. It was in that process of creating the ANI that Andrade learned about the Ruta del Sol II project, and later, because of an additional section of that highway, they took him to trial for allegedly benefiting Odebrecht and put him under house arrest.

At the beginning of 2018, while Andrade was in house arrest, Jorge Enrique Pizano, decided to reach out to him. This is Andrade.

[Luis Fernando Andrade]: I imagine he saw in me someone who was in a situation very similar to his. And so he asked me to help him because he was very scared.

[David]: Andrade’s wife, Teresa Chevres, was the one who met with Jorge Enrique.

[Teresa Chevres]: He was very worried that he was being followed and that something might happen to him.

[Luis Fernando]: And obviously he couldn’t trust at all the Colombian justice system, 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 the United States authorities.

[David]: The day Jorge Enrique died, Juanita, his youngest daughter, went to the house where it all happened to pick up some documents. In her father’s room, Juanita found the clothes he had picked to wear that day.

[Juanita Pizano]: And there was his jacket. So I put on that jacket. I searched his pockets and he had, like, yes, papers, receipts, and I found the FBI agent’s card.

[David]: The card from someone at the FBI. It was very worn, as if it had been in that pocket for a while. A few days before, Jorge Enrique had told Juanita that he had already sent the evidence of the irregularities in Ruta del Sol II to the American authorities. Although he had been discreet, Juanita knew that Jorge Enrique had been talking with them for a few months, and that card most likely was from one of those contacts.

Despite the card’s condition, everything could be read clearly. It had the FBI logo, a phone number, a fax number, an address and an email. The card was from a special agent of the International Corruption Unit, the area dedicated to investigating violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The agent’s name was also clearly visible: Jared Randall. His name was mentioned a lot in different media in 2015 because he was the one who led the investigation of another major international corruption scandal: the FIFA or «FIFA Gate,» as the press called it.

Juanita didn’t know if it was to this particular agent, but she did know that her father had given them very important information.

[Juanita]: Obviously the Americans have many more tools to find information. But definitely my dad’s complaint was at least the basis for the Americans to find much more. I mean, what my dad found was like the tip of the iceberg. I mean, it had to be very serious, I don’t know. It had to be much more than what my dad could have imagined.

[David]: From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 8: The Contact

The first meeting Teresa had with Jorge Enrique was around four or five months before his death. Since they knew they were being watched, they took precautions: the first was to meet in a neutral place, not at their homes.

[Teresa]: Since I knew how things were with cell phones, etc., I went there without a cell phone. He was… he had a hat and also had, like, sun  glasses so he wouldn’t be recognized.

[David]: Jorge Enrique told her of the irregularities he knew about and the evidence he had been collecting for years, including recordings of high-ranking officials from Grupo Aval.

[Teresa]: I mean, he had made these recordings because he understood that something strange was going on and decided to record it to protect himself. So, he gave me the CDs and other photocopied documents. We listened to them, I translated them into English.

[David]: While she was making those translations, Teresa realized that what was there was important.

[Teresa]: The information he brought  showed that… well, that Odebrecht hadn’t said everything it had done in Colombia.

[David]: Teresa and Andrade knew that this would likely interest the American authorities, so they organized a meeting between Jorge Enrique and their FBI contact, with whom they had already been talking before. I asked them if it was Jared Randall, the same agent from the card that Jorge Enrique’s daughter found in his jacket,, but they couldn’t give me more details. Everything in this investigation was –and still is– handled with great secrecy.

What we do know is that, after meeting two or three times with Teresa, Jorge Enrique agreed to meet with the FBI at the American embassy in Colombia. Teresa would accompany him and would be in charge of translating the conversation.

[Teresa]: If the FBI wanted to continue afterward, well, they would have an official translator and I wouldn’t be part of that.

[David]: Although Teresa couldn’t confirm the details of what was  discussed there either, she told me that Jorge Enrique gave the FBI agent the same documents he had given her. She assured me that she didn’t accompany Jorge Enrique anymore, but she told me that the FBI agent was interested enough in the information to meet with him again. Andrade told me that Jorge Enrique didn’t get a formal offer of protection as a witness, because everything happened very quickly, but that he does believe they were in the process of considering it.

Jorge Enrique didn’t give Juanita, his youngest daughter, much detail about what he was discussing with the United States authorities. But she does remember that there was a moment when he started asking her to translate documents and emails that they sent him. She says that through one of those emails she found out that the FBI people were taking him seriously.

[Juanita]: The FBI agents told him that his safety was compromised and that they were going to do everything within their reach to take us all to the United States so that we would be protected under a Witness Protection Program.

[David]: The witness protection program. Although we asked the entity in charge of  this program about this case, they said they couldn’t answer specific questions. But Juanita does remember seeing it in her father’s emails.

[Juanita]: According to the documents I saw, he was applying for that, and with that they were going to take him to the United States. I assume the rest of us too, well Carolina was already in Spain, Alejandro was already in Spain, but then my mom and I. So I didn’t have a suitcase ready, but in my head I already had sort of figured out what I was going to take in case we had to leave Colombia kind of quickly. Because the idea was to get him out of Colombia as soon as possible. And that’s what the messages from the American authorities said. But there wasn’t a specific date. Everything depended on how… on the visa process.

[David]: Juanita already had a visa. But Jorge Enrique and his wife had to get a tourist one through the conventional process because, according to Juanita, his contacts in the United States told him that the complaint was a secret matter. Nobody, not even at the embassy, could find out what was going on. That’s how they did it. They followed the recommendations, but in the end they were denied the visas. A State Department spokesperson told us that he couldn’t talk about specific cases either, so we can’t know the reasons for that decision, but Juanita suspects that the investigation against her father by the Attorney General’s Office had something to do with it.

[Juanita]: That was in September 2018, and it was a really hard blow for my dad. He became very depressed after that. And the FBI agent told us this doesn’t end the process; it just delays it a bit because they needed to figure out how to bring him.

[David]: Jorge Enrique agreed to move forward, but before signing and sending the formal complaint, he asked Juanita to read the whole document with her law-student eyes.

[Juanita]: Well, it was a very long document. I was 18 at the time when he asked me to read it, and I feel like I was really young, and I mean, I was in my third semester of law school — I didn’t know much yet. I mean, I know English, so I could read it, but there were many things that confused me. I really had to look everything up, and it caused me a lot of fear. I was literally crying, begging him not to put his name on it, to send it anonymously, because reading all this made me realize how serious the situation was. It’s not like I didn’t know it was serious, but it was a lot. And seeing the transcriptions of the recordings with Néstor Humberto, where he listed all the crimes— I don’t know why, but in English they sounded even worse.

[David]: Everything was overwhelming for her, but she helped her father in any way she could.

A few days before he died, Jorge Enrique told Juanita that he had already officially sent the complaint. He told her he had done it anonymously, and he also told her that Grupo Aval would not only know about the complaint, but also about the evidence supporting it.

 [Juanita]: And my dad’s voice is in the evidence, because the recordings are there.  Who else could it be? And all the emails, everything… even if they cross checked his name, I mean, they just look him up on a computer for one second and my dad’s name comes up. So it was very clear that he was the complainant, even if his actual name wasn’t written there, and that’s what made him most nervous.

[David]: Juanita remembers that moment with her father clearly.

[Juanita]: His eyes welled up. So I started crying too, out of nerves, because I didn’t understand anymore. I mean, the situation was already very tense, and I said to him: “Where do we have to go now? Do we need to hide? What are we supposed to do?” And he told me, “I don’t know anymore, we just have to stay still…”

[David]: And wait to see what would happen.

We’ll be right back.

We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

[David]: When Teresa heard from her husband that Jorge Enrique had died, she couldn’t stop crying.

[Teresa]: I mean, I had known him only briefly, but I had grown very fond of him. Because I truly thought he was a very good person, very decent, very thorough, who was suffering a lot. I mean, he reminded me a lot of Luis in that he was someone who had never let himself be pressured, and never would.

[David]: But that sadness turned into fear when, three days later, they learned of Alejandro’s tragic death.

[Teresa]: I mean, it wasn’t just being worried about the Pizanos — it was being worried about all of us. Because honestly, this was way too much for me. I never imagined I would be afraid that someone might kill me, or that I’d be talking to someone who was afraid that they were going to be killed and then actually died. I mean, I stepped into this surreal dimension — it was like living inside a Netflix series. It was… I prefer to watch things like this on TV, to read about them in books.

[David]: In the middle of all the confusion, Teresa called the FBI contact — the same one who had been speaking with Jorge Enrique — and told him everything that was going on. She wanted to let him know about the potential risk her husband and the rest of her family were facing. Almost two weeks after Alejandro’s death, the media published a letter that the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia had sent to the agency in charge of the prisons. Remember that Andrade was a U.S. citizen.

[Carlos Barragán]: It says that, given the recent news related to the Odebrecht case, they request special attention to the safety and physical integrity of Mr. Andrade and his relatives who live in the place of detention.

[David]: But one of the moments when Andrade and Teresa felt most nervous about their safety was when they watched the debate in Congress — the one we talked about in previous episodes. In that debate, the then Attorney General mentioned them by name and accused them of staging what he called “the most shameful conspiracy case against Colombian justice in history.”

[Luis Fernando]: If the Attorney General came out to declare that you, for example, were the biggest conspirator against Colombian justice in the country’s history, wouldn’t you feel afraid? Wouldn’t you feel like you were being threatened?

[Teresa]: I took that — and so did Luis — as a threat. And this time, a very real threat.

[David]: And they reached a conclusion.

[Teresa]: Yes, we decided we had to leave Colombia.

[David]: But before they could leave, they had to wait for the court’s decision regarding Andrade’s release. A full year of pretrial detention had already passed, and now they were going to decide whether to extend it or allow him to face trial in freedom. One week after that debate in Congress, the court ruled that the measure was no longer— and I quote — “adequate, necessary, or proportional.” And Andrade regained his freedom.

Even though it was good news for him and his family, the situation kept getting more and more tense. A few days after his release, the judge in his case reported that he was being harassed. This is what he said during a hearing:

[Judge]: I report harassment by aggressive motorcyclists. They stop in front of the vehicle I commute in — which is my personal vehicle — and I had never seen anything like this before.

[David]: Around that time, it also became known that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened a formal investigation into Grupo Aval and Corficolombiana for possible corruption in Ruta del Sol II.

Amid all that avalanche of events, the uproar caused by the forensic analyses in the investigation of the Pizano deaths, and taking advantage of the fact that he no longer had any travel restrictions, Andrade put into motion the decision to leave with his family for the United States. They were going to travel on a private plane. But at the airport, right before takeoff, something happened.

[Luis Fernando]: A security vehicle came — I think it was from Colombian Immigration. They took me off the plane, the bodyguard who had come from the United States accompanied me, and basically what they wanted was to detain me at the airport.

Hours and hours went by, and nothing happened. The person who had to authorize the plane’s departure wasn’t answering the phone, so Teresa started making calls.

[Teresa]: So I got in touch with the people in the United States, who in turn contacted the key people in Colombia — the ones whose call the airport official did have to take  — and then he finally gave the authorization for the plane to take off, and it took off.

[David]: Andrade and Teresa arrived in the United States, where they were able to feel much safer. A welcome ceremony was even held for him at the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and he received a medal. But remember, the trial wasn’t over, and over time new charges were added and new proceedings were opened in other institutions. Andrade was a U.S. citizen, but he still had to follow the proceedings from there, attend virtual hearings, and respond to everything Colombian authorities requested.

We already know that one of his key witnesses in the case, Jorge Enrique, was gone — but there was someone else who was also very important. This was Rafael Merchán, who had served as Secretary of Transparency under the Santos administration, precisely when Andrade was director of the ANI. At that time, according to Andrade, the two of them had raised alarms to prevent Odebrecht from creating a cartel in the road contract bids, and they planned a mechanism to report any irregularities.

[Luis Fernando]: Rafael Merchán was always trying to do things by the book, with transparency. And his participation was very important to me because, since I’m accused of favoring Odebrecht, I wanted him to testify about the efforts he and I made to ensure that Odebrecht couldn’t control other participants in the bidding process.

[David]: But in late December 2018, a little more than a month after the Pizanos’ deaths…

[Jorge Alfredo Vargas]: Another witness in the Odebrecht case was found dead today.

[María Lucía Fernández]: It is Rafael Merchán, who served as Presidential Secretary of Transparency during the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos.

[Journalist]: The causes of death have not yet been clarified by the Institute of Forensic Medicine, which is still conducting studies on the body of the former official.

[Journalist]: Official sources indicated that his family had not heard from him since the past weekend, before Christmas. Merchán was scheduled to testify in favor of Luis Fernando Andrade in the case related to the bribery scandal involving the Brazilian multinational Odebrecht in Colombia.

[David]: Another one of Andrade’s witnesses had died.

[Luis Fernando]: I mean, it was a deep sadness and a horrible tragedy. And honestly, well, there’s the question of what really happened in that case, right? Because they investigated it very quickly, closed the investigation, and declared it was a suicide — and that was that.

[David]: Suicide… and also with cyanide. According to the Attorney General’s’s Office, Rafael Merchán committed suicide by consuming the same poison that killed Alejandro Pizano. But in this case, his family said it had nothing to do with his work as a public official. The Attorney General’s Office closed the investigation based on evidence that Merchán had purchased the poison.

A short break, and we’ll be back.

We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

So, one month after the Pizanos’ deaths, it became known that the U.S. Department of Justice had begun an investigation against Grupo Aval and its subsidiary Corficolombiana for irregularities in the construction of Ruta del Sol II. The company said from the very beginning that it would cooperate with the investigation.

And nothing more was known about it until August 2023, almost five years later, when the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission — the SEC — sanctioned Grupo Aval and Corficolombiana for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

To begin with, we need to be clear: yes, the investigation revealed that Corficolombiana facilitated the payment of more than 23 million dollars in bribes between roughly 2012 and 2015, and that the company — in order to avoid being prosecuted by the Department of Justice — accepted an agreement called a Deferred Prosecution Agreement. Remember that well: Deferred Prosecution Agreement.

But let’s go step by step. I know this is a complex, tangled legal process that needs to be examined carefully. So, to understand it better — and to understand the role Jorge Enrique Pizano might have played in all of this — I spoke with U.S. journalist Stan Alcorn.

[Stan Alcorn]: I’m an investigative journalist. And back in the United States, before coming to Colombia, I did a lot of investigative reporting, including on criminal cases in which the FBI was involved.

[David]: Stan has been investigating this story for months.

But to begin to understand what this Deferred Prosecution Agreement actually means, why would the United States be interested in a Colombian case?

[Stan]: Yes, so the short answer is that even though it’s a Colombian company, there is a connection to the United States.

[David]: Remember that Grupo Aval entered the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, and part of the bribe money moved through U.S. banks. In fact, the only concrete example in the agreement of one payment that went through those banks appears to be the same one Jorge Enrique mentioned in his interview with Noticias Uno: the 2.7-million-dollar payment.

[Stan]: But there’s also a longer answer that basically responds to the question: Why does a U.S. law against bribing public officials in other countries even exist? And that’s another story.

[David]: That story began in the 1970s, after the Richard Nixon administration and the major scandal known as Watergate, which ended in the president’s resignation. During the hearings about the case, it came out that several large companies had given suitcases full of cash to Nixon’s campaign, and that set off alarms for the authorities, who began investigating whether companies were making similar payments… in other words, bribes — and not just in the United States.

[Stan]: And it turned out that many large companies were routinely making big cash payments abroad to government officials — from prime ministers to police officials, for example. And at that time, in the ’70s, none of this was illegal. In fact, companies could deduct those bribes from their taxes.

[David]: So they decided to put a stop to it, and that’s how the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — the FCPA — was created.

[Stan]: It is really, or is considered to be, the first law that made it illegal to pay bribes in foreign countries.
 

[David]: By 2018, when Jorge Enrique Pizano began talking to U.S. authorities, several things were happening: many international companies had entered U.S. stock exchanges — meaning there were more companies to investigate. Also, countries across the continent had created laws to fight international corruption and to cooperate with the U.S. authorities. And, of course, the Odebrecht case had exploded.

The FBI—particularly its International Corruption Unit—had a lot of work to do. Remember that this was the unit that appeared on the business card Juanita, Jorge Enrique’s younger daughter, found in the pocket of his jacket.

[Stan]: I spoke with Darryl Wegner, who was the head of the International Corruption Unit between 2015 and early 2018.

[Darryl Wegner]: “Really it was—we identified it as a need, as an investigative need, that came out of demand.”

[Stan]: And overall he told me that they were responding to the demand from the Department of Justice and the SEC, and that’s when the FBI began focusing more on this kind of case during those years.

[Wegner]: “It wasn’t a situation where we thought, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of corruption. We need to go meet that market.’ The market came to us.”

[David]: Wegner says it wasn’t a situation where they thought, “Hey, there’s a lot of corruption; we need to go looking for that market.” No. The market came to them. He also told Stan that in 2018 there were FBI agents in several countries, including Colombia, and that they had been invited by those governments. Although neither the FBI nor the Department of Justice nor the SEC answered our questions—and everything related to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement investigation is very secret— Wegner explained to Stan that these agents can conduct an initial interview with someone who approaches the Embassy to report something. Here’s Wegner again:

[Derryl]: “An agent who’s assigned to the embassy anywhere in the world can take a matter in as a first instance, as a whistleblower; someone can facilitate that.”

[Stan]: It’s very common for people who want to report something to go to a U.S. embassy and want to speak with someone—for example, with the FBI. But afterward, if there is interest, an agent with more specific expertise would be needed.

[Wegner]: “Every investigation has its own nuances and skill sets; someone who works child porn is very different from someone who works a corporate fraud.”

[David]: Translation: “Each investigation has its own nuances. Someone who works on child pornography is very different from someone who works on corporate fraud.” And that’s why, if it’s a case involving corruption, it must be handled by an agent from one of those units.

[David]: And do you think—or well, can we know—what role the agent on the card found by Pizano’s daughter might have had?

[Stan]: Well, yes. The card says Jared Randall, International Corruption Unit. And based on his LinkedIn, it seems that there is indeed a Jared Randall who was part of that unit during those years. We tried to contact him. He didn’t respond, but it makes sense that someone like him would handle interviews in a potential case related to the FCPA.

[David]: Now, about the offer to protect Jorge Enrique and get him out of the country, Stan was able to find out from his sources that, in general, yes, it is possible for the FBI to offer that kind of help in certain circumstances. Wegner confirmed it.

[Wegner]: “And the answer is yes, that is possible, right. But it all depends, and obviously I wouldn’t want to go into all that stuff. But certainly, like a core tenet—and I’m sure for your line of work as well—is you need folks to be comfortable bringing information to you. That if they do bring a concern, it does not lead to their destruction.”

[Stan]: According to Wegner, “it’s necessary for people to feel comfortable providing information to the FBI.” They need to make sure that doing so “won’t lead to their downfall.” But Wegner and also another FBI agent I spoke with told me that, in corruption cases, there are usually easier ways to protect someone than sending them out of the country. Because corruption isn’t like a murder—where if the only witness testifies in court, they’re putting their life in danger. Corruption doesn’t work like that. To carry out millions of dollars in bribes, there are documents, lawyers, bank accounts—there’s a lot of evidence. And investigators just need someone to tell them where to look.

[David]: And yes, although Jorge Enrique was the first to internally flag the irregularities, we can’t confirm exactly what role he played in the FBI’s investigation.

Do you think we can get closer—or try to understand—how important Jorge Enrique Pizano was in this investigation?

[Stan]: Well, to know know? No. Because none of the people and entities involved answered that question. But it’s obvious that Pizano was super important in the whole story, right? Reporting the contracts internally, talking to Colombian authorities, handing documents to the media. But regarding the U.S. investigation, the only thing I could say is that the Department of Justice formally opened its investigation one day after Alejandro Pizano’s death. So I can’t say for sure that one thing caused the other, but, well, the dates speak. It happened immediately after.

[David]: And now, going back to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement. What does it say? What does this document say?

[Stan]: Well, first of all, we have to say there were two agreements announced at the same time: one with the SEC.

[David]: The SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission… That document—which is not criminal but civil, as the SEC itself explains—states that Corficolombiana paid bribes through fake contracts, and that Grupo Aval included them in the accounting books it regularly submitted to that agency. For that reason, the SEC ordered Grupo Aval to never again violate the law, but also to pay 40 million dollars, which is the money the company obtained from those bribes plus interest, according to the document.

The other document, which is from the Department of Justice, is the actual Deferred Prosecution Agreement.

[Stan]: Which is more complicated, but also more interesting. That agreement includes a criminal charge against Corficolombiana for violating the FCPA.

[David]: For violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

[Stan]: In fact, it’s the same offense for which Odebrecht pleaded guilty in 2016. But the small yet important difference between the two cases is that here, Corficolombiana did not plead guilty. For now.

[David]: Exactly, for now, because the agreement is in effect until August 2026. And understanding that is very important because what the Department of Justice did was tell Corficolombiana that it would not take the next step—prosecuting them—as long as they complied with a long list of requirements.

Stan used a metaphor to explain it:

[Stan]: This is more or less like having a loaded gun: if Corficolombiana complies with the agreement, they won’t pull the trigger and take them to trial.

[David]: There are many requirements in the agreement, but according to the document, among them is paying another fine of 40 million dollars—which would be cut in half if Corficolombiana pays more than 20 million to a Colombian authority, the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce, for a similar sanction. In other words, they have to pay fines totaling more than 80 million dollars: 60 to U.S. authorities and more than 20 to the Colombian one.

[Stan]: Another requirement is a whole series of internal measures and mechanisms to prevent something like this from happening again. And the company also has to acknowledge its responsibility—that is, it cannot deny that the bribes really took place and that they, Corficolombiana, do bear responsibility for those bribes. And if they comply with all these conditions, then after three years—that is, at the end of 2026—the Department of Justice commits to withdrawing the criminal charges against the company.

[David]: So, going back to Stan’s metaphor: if all of this is fulfilled, the U.S. authorities commit to putting down the gun they have pointed at the company. And it would be a decision made solely by the Department of Justice, one that couldn’t even be appealed.

[Stan]: If the Department of Justice decides that the company has not complied with the agreement, then they can easily prosecute Corficolombiana using all the information that has been provided to them. And given that the company has already admitted responsibility, a conviction would be practically guaranteed.

[David]: And how did the company communicate all of this at the time? Were there several statements? What did they say?

[Stan]: In general, the press releases emphasized heavily the fact that the investigation had been closed. Right? That’s the headline of the first press release: “After five years, the investigations by the U.S. government come to an end.”

[David]: Which is true, and some media outlets ran almost the same headline. But they didn’t focus on the sanction Corficolombiana accepted in order to avoid a harsher conviction.

So, to make it really clear: this agreement did not demonstrate the innocence of Corficolombiana, or of Grupo Aval, or of the people who worked there… not even of its owners, the Sarmiento family. In fact, the agreement specifies that it offers no protection whatsoever against the prosecution of any individual, regardless of their relationship with the company or any of its affiliates or subsidiaries. But the truth is that there was a lot of confusion.

[Stan]: There were many people—journalists, politicians, influential people—who at that moment said things like: “Oh, this guy is innocent,” or “this company is innocent.” And I think that is, well, to put it mildly, a very poor way of understanding this kind of agreement.

[David]: In the more than 50 pages of the document, they describe how the bribes were managed, the amount of money that moved, how the payments were made… They also mention people who offered and received those bribes. And there are some people in there who facilitated the bribes, but whose names are not given. Do you know why that happens?

[Stan]: Basically, this is an agreement with the company. They are accusing the company of having committed a crime; they are not legally accusing any individual person. And the Department of Justice’s policy says that, to protect the privacy and reputation of uncharged individuals, they do it this way—using generic descriptors like “Corficolombiana Executive” or “Colombian Official Number 2.”

[David]: One of those unidentified figures that drew the most attention from journalists and people following the case was the one referred to as “Colombian Official Number 3”—described literally as “a high-ranking official in the executive branch of the Colombian government approximately between 2010 and 2018,” who received bribes totaling 3.4 million dollars. To this day, it’s not known for certain who that senior official was.

At the time we finished this story, there was still one year left before the deadline given to Corficolombiana by the Department of Justice to comply with the agreement. We contacted them through their Director of Communications and Marketing, sent several questions, and she responded verbatim that “regarding this particular matter, Corfi refrains from issuing any explicit statement.”

In February 2025, President Donald Trump suspended the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for 180 days. The argument was that they were going to review ongoing investigations and already resolved cases because, for Trump, it is a law that sounds good on paper but often ends up preventing other countries from wanting to do business with U.S. companies. Although the reality is that nearly all the most significant sanctions have been imposed on foreign companies, not U.S. ones, this is what the president said the day he signed the executive order suspending the law:

[Donald Trump]: It means that if an American goes over to a foreign country and starts doing business over there legally, legitimately or otherwise, it’s almost a guaranteed investigation indictment. And nobody wants to do business with the Americans.

[David]: In June, the Department of Justice published a new guide on how to apply this law in accordance with President Trump’s instructions to—quote—“limit undue burdens on U.S. companies operating abroad and direct enforcement actions against conduct that directly undermines the national interests of the United States.”

It also became known that the Department of Justice reduced the number of attorneys working on matters related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But then…

Does this mean that these processes that are already underway around the world, like the one against Corficolombiana and Grupo Aval, will be closed or come to an end?

[Stan]: Well, during the pause that Trump ordered, there was indeed a review of cases, and some investigations and some agreements were closed before their expiration date. And it is also true that there is a lot of fear that perhaps we will see fewer of these kinds of investigations in the future. But so far, there is no sign that they plan to close or stop monitoring the Deferred Prosecution Agreement with Corficolombiana.

[David]: In the next episode…

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: And I have kept a precise and methodical silence. But of course, I’ve been gathering a lot of information, right? I have acquired a lot of information. There’s nothing here that’s opinion.

[David]: Former prosecutor Néstor Humberto Martínez answers several questions.

Credits

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 from iHeart Radio.

Reporting and production for this episode were done by me, David Trujillo, and Stan Alcorn. 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 handled legal review. Sound design and mixing are by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. The graphic design 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.

Many thanks to Ruti Smithline, Mark Pieth, and Mike Koehler for contributing their expertise to this investigation.

At iHeart, the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.

We want to thank FLIP for its valuable support in the legal review of this production and for its security advice.

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 newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.

 I’m David Trujillo. Thank you for listening.

[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.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode, we heard how one of the unions from the Institute of Forensic Medicine denounced alleged irregularities surrounding the analysis of the evidence in the Pizano case. In the end, it turned out that the Institute’s director had, indeed, made at least one mistake: the brown stains on the towel were not blood.

But beyond the reliability of those analyses being questioned, a judge confirmed that the evidence collected by the Attorney General’s Office during the inspection of the Pizano home was not admissible in the investigation of the deaths—because the chain of custody hadn’t been respected, and they had kept the evidence longer than allowed by law.

It had been less than a month since the deaths of the Pizanos, and the sisters and their mother wanted no further involvement in the scandal it had all become. It was the top story in every newscast, and they preferred to leave things as they were—not to dig deeper. As we already know, because of all this, they agreed to let the thenAttorney General close the investigation.

[Juanita Pizano]: But it was also about keeping the peace with everyone, not causing more trouble. And… I think there was also a bit of fear. Fear of opening up a Pandora’s box—like, well, we don’t really know what happened in that investigation, and maybe we don’t want to know, because it could hurt us deeply.

[David]: They’d already been presented with the hypothesis of Jorge Enrique’s attempted suicide and Alejandro’s accidental death. It was too painful to even consider. So two weeks after the deaths, they boarded a plane to leave the country for a while.

[Juanita]: We left on November 27, and I remember being on the plane thinking, “Wow, something’s happening. Thank goodness we’re leaving.”

[David]: They chose not to pay much attention. After all, they were leaving the country. But at that same moment, on social media, people began talking about what was happening in Colombia’s Congress—where their father’s name was being mentioned.

[Jorge Enrique Robledo]: What changed in this story? What’s new? We all know: Jorge Enrique Pizano is what’s new in this story.

[David]: Three senators had organized a televised debate to explain to the country the complicated issue of Odebrecht.

[Gustavo Petro]: Today we know, thanks to Pizano and to the statement by Luis Bueno, a senior executive at Odebrecht, that Grupo Aval knew, from the very beginning, about the five acts and the five moments of bribery that I’ve described here.

[Angélica Lozano]: It’s been proven—at least by Mr. Pizano’s recordings—that  attorney Néstor Humberto had full knowledge of the illicit actions being committed by members of this consortium—his client, his friends.

[David]: Néstor Humberto Martínez, the then Attorney General, was under no obligation to attend that debate. It carried no judicial implications. And though no one expected him that evening…

[Ernesto Macías]: I ask the plenary session if it wishes to declare itself in permanent session.

[Senator]: Yes, Mr. President.

[Ernesto]: You have the floor, Dr. Néstor Humberto Martínez, Attorney General of the Nation.

[David]: Martínez arrived at that debate to explain the accusations against him: his conflicts of interest, his closeness to Grupo Aval and Odebrecht, his possible omission of corruption he already knew about, and his relationship with Jorge Enrique Pizano. He was ready to put up a fight.

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 6: The Debate.

[David]: The debate in Congress took place on November 27, 2018, at 3 p.m. It was broadcast live on national television during prime time.

[Jorge Robledo]: Hello, hello. My warmest greetings to the Minister of the Interior, to the President of Congress, and to everyone gathered here… (FADE)

[David]: The first to speak was Senator Jorge Enrique Robledo, at the time a member of the opposition party Polo Democrático Alternativo. Only three months earlier, the new government of Iván Duque,of the right-wing Centro Democrático party,had taken office, and along with other pro-government parties, they held a majority in Congress. The then Attorney General was known to be close to some sectors of that ruling coalition.

When Robledo stood to deliver his speech, he was wearing a yellow tie —the color of his party— and in front of him, on the podium, he placed a poster with the hashtag #RenuncieFiscal (“Resign, Attorney General”).

[Jorge Robledo]: And this will probably be the first of these debates in which we finally have all the pieces of the puzzle. Let’s say that’s what’s truly new this time, because there’s new evidence—new evidence that formally links Grupo Aval and Corficolombiana to this corruption. (FADE)

[David]: Robledo was one of the first congressmen to denounce this case in Colombia. At first, he didn’t fully understand what had happened, but he dove head-first into investigating after a statement made by the then Attorney General, Néstor Humberto Martínez, in January 2017—more than a year before the Pizano deaths.

Just two weeks earlier, the Odebrecht scandal had erupted with the publication of an investigation in the United States and Attorney General Martínez had already announced publicly that there was nothing illegal about one of the business deals the Brazilian conglomerate had  in Colombia —other than  Ruta del Sol II.

I spoke with former Senator Robledo for this story. This is him:

[Jorge Robledo]: What got me involved in the debate was Néstor Humberto’s behavior. Because this guy—if supposedly nothing was known yet—took very limited information, did what he did, and absolved everyone. So he closed every door. And I said, “Wait, what?” I told my staff, “Heads up, everyone dig into this.” I had a very good team at the office, you know? And we said, “No, no, there’s something shady here” as we say in Colombia. Because on what grounds does he go out there absolving everyone?

[David]: During his investigation, Robledo and his team learned that Grupo Aval was also involved in that business deal, and that the law firm of which Néstor Humberto Martínez had been a partner—and whose director was his own son—had legally advised the companies. Robledo told me he already knew who Martínez was: that he’d been active in politics for over 20 years, that he’d served as Minister of the Presidency under Juan Manuel Santos, that he was close to the vice president of that administration, and that he was a well-known commercial lawyer.

[Jorge Robledo]: He had a very successful career and ended up becoming a very important man to Luis Carlos Sarmiento. That opened the door for him to all kinds of businesses—always very controversial. He always stirred up debate and stuff because of the way he was.

[David]: Robledo also confirmed in his investigation that Martínez had been hired as a consulting attorney for Ruta del Sol II.

[Jorge Robledo]: That really caught my attention. I thought, wait,this guy handles deals worth astronomical sums, and he resigns to become Attorney General? I’m just speculating here, but one has to wonder if they’re putting in a “pocket Attorney General” for Luis Carlos Sarmiento. It’s obvious that the people in that business, Odebrecht on one side and Sarmiento on the other,were deeply concerned about how things would unfold, especially with the Americans involved, saying, “Someone’s head has to roll.”

[David]: For Robledo, it was crystal clear that Attorney General Martínez could not be investigating the business dealings of his former boss—deals he had participated in as a lawyer.

That’s why, from the very moment he began debating the corruption of Odebrecht and Grupo Aval at the Senate, he also criticized what Martínez was doing—or, rather, not doing—from the General Attorney’s  Office. And he always demanded the same thing: that Martínez resign. For Robledo, it wasn’t enough for him to merely recuse himself from the specific case.

After speaking about it in the media for over a year and after two Senate debates, came the deaths of the Pizanos and Noticias Uno’s revelation of the recording that implicated the Attorney General. The scandal, as we know, became huge. Robledo was shocked.

[Jorge Robledo]: Of course—totally shocked, like every Colombian. What Pizano did is what made the whole thing blow up, because suddenly things became much more serious. The things Néstor Humberto said in those recordings were deeply incriminating.

[David]: That’s why, along with two other senators, he decided to call for  this November 27 debate to explain to the country what was happening. It wouldn’t be easy—the odds were against them. As we said, the ruling coalition held the majority, and Attorney General Martínez was close to some of those factions. 

Even so, the opposition saw this moment as the right one to capture public attention—especially because, as Robledo said, there was a new ingredient in the scandal: everything Jorge Enrique Pizano had exposed.

[Jorge Robledo]: The corruption in Ruta del Sol wasn’t exposed by Néstor Humberto—it was exposed by Pizano. Despite Néstor Humberto and all of Grupo Aval standing in his way—and Odebrecht standing in his way. The Attorney General’s Office barely managed, based on those investigations, to say, “Well, other than  theft, there were also bribes.” But that isn’t really thanks to Attorney General Martínez. He covered up everything about Ruta del Sol—that’s clear. There’s more than enough proof of it.

[David]: And in the end, after speaking for nearly an hour, Robledo once again demanded the same thing of Martínez: that he resign, and that a new shortlist be sent to the Supreme Court of Justice to appoint a new Attorney General.

[Jorge Robledo]: And let’s hope that this next Attorney General won’t have the tricks, the connections, or the cunning of Martínez Neira. It’ll be up to all of us, Colombians united. If we mobilize as we should, we can start to defeat the corruption that has taken hold of Colombia. Thank you very much.

[David]: The next speaker was Gustavo Petro —Colombia’s current president— who at the time was a senator for the Colombia Humana party.

[Gustavo Petro]: I’ll begin the debate with this chart, which I hope can be shown on the television screen.

[David]: It was hard to grasp at first glance, but it was essentially made up of color-coded tables with notes on what was known up to that point about the Odebrecht case in Colombia. There were figures on the bribes, and names of people and companies involved. It was an attempt to visually explain the whole web of the case.

[Gustavo Petro]: And from here you can see the entire picture, let’s say, of what’s known up to now about the Odebrecht/Sarmiento issue and its connections with the State.

[David]: But although he explained it in detail during his one-hour speech,  Petro clarified that that picture was incomplete. Not even with Jorge Enrique Pizano and the irregular contracts he found which were the newest link in this chain of events, did we have the full picture.

[Gustavo Petro]: And the one who might  know everything that happened—Odebrecht—won’t say it, won’t confess it. That’s why this chart represents, for now, all that we have.

[David]: At the end of his speech, Petro—unlike Robledo—didn’t demand that Attorney General Martínez resign. Instead, he asked the Supreme Court to appoint what is known as an ad hoc prosecutor. It was a legal strategy to select someone who would be exclusively dedicated to investigating a case in which the Attorney General clearly had conflicts of interest—like this one, the Odebrecht corruption case.

[Gustavo Petro]: So that we no longer have just political oversight like this, but a serious judicial investigation that would lead to the individuals responsible for receiving the bribes, since we do know who paid for them in Colombia. Thank you, Mr. President. Very kind.

[David]: At that moment, the television broadcast of the debate was interrupted for a national address by President Duque to speak about the first 111 days of his administration. The senators agreed to pause the debate until the live broadcast could resume.

[David]: About twenty minutes later, the  national broadcast returned to the congressional debate.

[Ernesto Macías]: Senators, thank you for keeping quiet…

[David]: Then it was Senator Angélica Lozano’s turn, from the Alianza Verde party.

[Ernesto]: Senator Angélica Lozano has the floor.

[Angélica Lozano]: Thank you, Mr. President. My speech, on behalf of the Alianza Verde party, is titled: Who does the crime, does the time in Colombia? 

[David]: Lozano said that all over this Odebrecht case there was what she called a very complex institutional labyrinth that made it difficult to reach justice, to reach the truth, and to ensure public money wasn’t lost.

[Angélica Lozano]: The justice system is upside down because there’s a hot potato being tossed from side to side, and nothing gets clarified.

[David]: According to Lozano, one of the strongest obstacles in that institutional labyrinth was the Attorney General. The conflicts of interest that have been mentioned so many times.

[Angélica Lozano]: Néstor Humberto knew what he was going to the Attorney General’s Office to do: to cover up, to block, to protect, to guarantee impunity for the richest man in Colombia, his boss or his friend, a very close relationship, in addition to his political entourage.

[David]: And in an unexpected moment, nearly three hours into the debate, the chamber began to stir.

[Angélica Lozano]: The bell, Mr. President.

[David]: Lozano had to pause her address

[Ernesto]: Silence, please.

[David]: Lozano took a sip of water and greeted the newcomer who sat right in front of her.

[Angélica Lozano]: Welcome, Mr. Attorney General.

[David]: Martínez had arrived, unexpectedly, at the Senate plenary. No one was expecting him. Not even Senator Robledo, who had so many times told him to come.

[Jorge Robledo]: I had invited him to all the debates—he always dodged them. And this time he showed up. So I thought, well, it’s great that he came. I was actually very pleased, because debates in Colombia follow a certain format: those who called the debate get to close it.

[David]: Martínez would only speak once. Robledo and his colleagues would listen to everything he said and then be able to respond to him right there.

A break, and we’ll be right back.

We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

With Néstor Humberto Martínez now seated before her, Senator Lozano continued, saying that in other countries the institutional labyrinth had been overcome and justice had reached the highest levels of power. And to achieve the same in Colombia, she proposed that the government allow a special international mission to resolve the Odebrecht case.

[Angélica Lozano]: A special UN mission, directly from the United Nations,with its head appointed by the UN Secretary-General. Special in nature. It’s temporary. A temporary measure. Two years. that could be extended for another two. What is its role? And pay attention to the verbs: to support, to support, and to collaborate in the technical and scientific investigation of the Odebrecht case.

[David]: At the end of her speech, Lozano addressed Martínez directly.

[Angélica Lozano]: Mr. Attorney General: resign. If you do the crime, you do the time. And you must pay.

[David]: After an intervention by the then Minister of the Interior, Martínez stood up from his seat and walked to the podium. He carefully arranged the pages of the speech he was about to read and switched glasses.

[Ernesto]: You have the floor, Dr. Néstor Humberto Martínez, Attorney General of the Nation.

[Néstor Humberto]: Thank you very much, Mr. President. Honorable senators, honorable senators who have called the debate.  

[David]: He said that, from the outset, he wanted to make something clear: as we’ve mentioned, it was very unusual for an Attorney General to appear there. The law didn’t require it. But he had decided to attend as a citizen.

[Néstor Humberto]: And that’s why I have to come: for my honor, for the defense of my moral integrity, out of respect for the thousands of Colombians who have expressed their solidarity during these two infamous weeks… (FADE)

[David]: Martínez began defending himself from the attacks the senators had launched during their speeches—especially what Robledo had said.

[Néstor Humberto]: Because Senator Robledo now acts as inquisitor and strips any citizen of his morals, driven by the political motives that inspire him.

[David]: And he was prepared to talk about the recordings that so deeply incriminated him.

[Néstor Humberto]: Because some recordings were made public. Recordings made by my lifelong friend, Jorge Enrique Pizano, whom I welcomed into the intimate friendship of my home and his entire family.

[David]: The Pizano family didn’t watch the debate. As we said, they were on a flight leaving the country at that very moment. But Martínez’s claim of the friendship between them was something they would later have to hear  many times.

[Carolina]: What made me the angriest was hearing Néstor Humberto say he was our friend, that he was a friend. He wasn’t. For me, he was the father of one of Alejandro’s friends. But to say he was my dad’s close friend? No. I remember well, I think it was my dad’s fiftieth birthday, yes 50, —he threw a huge party  at home, his true  friends were there, and I never saw Néstor Humberto in those celebrations, not even at my brother’s wedding. A friend is someone who’s there. A friend is someone who, in those five years, would’ve sent a direct message. Everything was always through his son.

[David]: Yet Martínez kept insisting on that supposed closeness with Jorge Enrique.

[Néstor Humberto]: And he came to my law firm as a personal friend, asking me to help ensure his information reached the president of the organization, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo. A task that I fulfilled.

[Juanita]: That conversation my dad recorded—maybe Néstor Humberto thought it took place within the bounds of friendship. But when you listen to it now, it’s clear they’re not friends, and it’s clear Néstor Humberto doesn’t care about my dad’s well-being.

[David]: On the contrary, Martínez seemed to believe that he had been so important to Jorge Enrique Pizano that Pizano was still watching over his wellbeing, even after death. He invoked him during his speech.

[Néstor Humberto]: Tonight, Jorge Enrique comes to the Senate chamber to take a stand—against slander, against insult, against lies, against falsehood.

[David]: He returned to the same argument he’d made in his interview with Caracol News: that when Jorge Enrique recorded their conversations, he hadn’t yet realized that what he’d uncovered amounted to bribery. Martínez read aloud a transcript of Pizano’s statement to an authority, in which Pizano said precisely that—he knew the contracts were odd, but he wasn’t sure they involved crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: And I was supposed to know, back in 2015? Because I am the clairvoyant of the Colombian people? No. He insisted he didn’t know they were crimes.

[David]: After repeating in his speech that he had known of no crimes, Martínez moved on to defend how the Prosecutor’s Office handled the evidence collected during the inspection of the Pizano house.

[Néstor Humberto]: They say we went after the computers and hard drives. Where do they get such lies? It was the family—it was the family who handed over those pieces of evidence so we could investigate matters of interest from the victims’ standpoint.

[David]: But remember, according to  Jorge Enrique’s daughters, during that inspection they had clearly said this: 

[Carolina]: I remember he said:  they’re not going to take anything that isn’t related to the death. He was clearly referring to not taking documents. But they did take the hard drives and they took the security-camera recordings.

[David]: In his speech, Martínez went on talking about the family.

[Néstor Humberto]: Even though the family has stated twice, “We fully trust the Office of the Attorney General.” Oh, how it pains them to read that. How it bothers them that the family trusts the Office of the Attorney General.

[David]: But, as we’ve told before, for the daughters, in hindsight ,those statements supporting the Prosecutor’s Office resulted from being manipulated during the hardest moment of their lives.

[Carolina]: Of course, we fell completely for that manipulation. It was like yes, do what you have to do. Yes, do what you have to do. We couldn’t think straight. And it’s something that people don’t understand, and it’s how difficult it is to try to think with clarity in those moments. 

[David]: Martínez had been speaking for over an hour. Robledo listened from his seat, seemingly uncomfortable.

[Jorge Enrique Robledo]: He defended himself in his typical style, which is to deny reality and present you as the liar, right?. So I’d hit him with A, B, C, and he’d respond with X, Y, Z. Throwing in some underhanded and dirty jabs. That cynicism, right? And the whole Congress—most of it—was on his side, applauding him, even. Liberals, conservatives, everyone. Because he’s part of the pinnacle of the Colombian establishment, friends with all those congressmen.

[Néstor Humberto]: Go to the Attorney General’s Office, sir! File a petition…Mister.

[David]: At one point, Senator Robledo even shouted at Martínez, calling him a fraud.

[Ernesto Macías]: I ask you, please…

[Néstor Humberto]: While you…

[Ernesto Macías]: Senator Robledo, please allow the debate to continue…

[Néstor Humberto]: For God’s sake.

[David]: But Martínez went on with his speech. And after nearly an hour and a half of speaking, he reached the most striking part of his address. That was when he shifted from defending himself to attacking his opponents—laying out what he called a conspiracy. Not just any conspiracy.

[Néstor Humberto]: The most shameful conspiracy process against Colombian justice in history began.

[David]: A conspiracy of which he said he was a direct victim. He pointed fingers at senators, journalists, other state officials, and servants of international organizations—even U.S. authorities. A conspiracy that, according to him, achieved one specific thing.

[Néstor Humberto]: 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]: A break, and we’ll be right back. 

We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

[David]: In Congress, Martínez continued explaining the alleged conspiracy. According to him, one of the people involved was journalist María Jimena Duzán—whom we’ve already heard in other episodes. As we know, María Jimena had been publishing about corruption in Ruta del Sol for some time and had revealed, after the Pizanos’ deaths, that Jorge Enrique had been her source.

[David]: Martínez mentioned her by name in his speech.

[María Jimena Duzán]: According to Néstor Humberto, I was the key piece—the great mastermind of a plot to destroy justice. An international plot to bring down justice in Colombia.

[David]: And, according to Martínez, to destroy justice in Colombia María Jimena had help from another person. His name is  Luis Fernando Andrade. Andrade had been the head of the National Infrastructure Agency—the ANI—the state entity that plans, hires , and executes that type of major infrastructure projects. He was also one of María Jimena’s sources in her investigation.

Later we’ll talk more about Andrade and the role he played in all this. or now I mention him because Martínez also referred to him in his speech—saying something that startled María Jimena, who was watching live on TV.

[María Jimena]: We realized, from Néstor Humberto’s  speech, that he had privileged information—information only Jorge Enrique Pizano could have had through the chats he exchanged with me. And those chats came up there, mentioned by the Attorney General himself, Néstor Humberto Martínez.

[Néstor Humberto]: The journalist conveyed to Jorge Enrique Pizano a message from Andrade: You have to react in time, –says Andrade–. Don’t let them have the upper hand, because otherwise the Prosecutor will do to you what he did to me—persecute you. Persecute you! In other words, she incited him to strike at the Attorney General.

[David]: María Jimena couldn’t believe that the Attorney General was sharing transcripts of her private conversations on live television. She said she didn’t know how those private chats—between a journalist and her source—had been used, but she knew exactly how it made her feel.

[María Jimena]: Of course I felt fear. I thought, who knows how they’re using the chats I had with Jorge Enrique?

[David]: But she wasn’t the only journalist Martínez mentioned that day.

[Iván Serrano]: He mentioned me too.

[David]: Iván Serrano—the Noticias Uno journalist to whom Jorge Enrique gave the interview that was published two weeks earlier, right after his death. 

Martínez also accused Iván of being part of that conspiracy.

[Iván]: He said there was a collusion to poison Jorge Enrique, and other nonsense. Martínez Neira was very well informed about what the journalists and Jorge Enrique were doing.

[David]: Martínez said that Iván Serrano and the director of the newscast had betrayed Jorge Enrique—apparently he had wanted the piece to air before he died.

[Néstor Humberto]: It has come to light that Mr. Iván Serrano, journalist of Noticias Uno, had agreed to air the recorded interview with Jorge Enrique on the holiday of Monday, November 5, three days before his death. That means the  story had been made to run three days earlier, not afterward as a testament.

[David]: But according to Martínez, the director of the newscast had chosen to air another story that day, and the Pizano piece came out a week later.

[Néstor Humberto]: After knocking on many journalists’ doors, many, he chose to go through Noticias Uno, and they didn’t run the story they’d promised. He died in despair. They had sold him the idea that Néstor Humberto would crush him judicially. And it didn’t work out because they offered him the alternatives ofAmerican justice and a TV news outlet,and he fell into total depression. Used and manipulated by the conspirators.

[David]: Martínez was implying that Iván and the news outlet had deepened Jorge Enrique’s depression, which would ultimately lead to his death.

[Iván]: I felt truly intimidated when Martínez Neira went to Congress and implied he had knowledge—taken out of context and in bad faith—of conversations I’d had with him.

[David]: Conversations he’d had with Jorge Enrique. Conversation, again, between a journalist and his source.

[Iván]: And they were used maliciously, as he used them in Congress, in an intimidating way. And I wondered: how did he even know?

[David]: Iván had to publish those chats to clarify the issue and show that in that conversation they hadn’t spoken about the recordings, but about his frustration with the then Inspector General  for having lied publicly when he said that Jorge Enrique was a direct employee of Odebrecht.

[Iván]: In that message exchange there’s no mention of the news director, as you can see on screen, nor any reference to the interview or to the recordings that had been sealed since August at Pizano’s request. The suggestion by Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez that this newsroom bore any blame for the engineer’s death is, at the very least, irresponsible.

[Iván]: I felt intimidated. At that time, I even noticed odd things happening around my home, because with Martínez Neira we discovered just how powerful the Attorney General’s Office is. In Colombia, no one can say anything to the Attorney General. They can do whatever they want, and they’re judged only by the House’s Accusations Commission.

[David]: A commission made up not of judges but of congressmen that is also charged with investigating and accusing presidents—and that almost always ends up acquitting those it investigates.

[Néstor Humberto]: I have come to the Congress of the Republic, to the Senate of Colombians.

[David]: After speaking for almost two hours, insisting that he wouldn’t yield to those who supposedly wanted to set Colombian justice on fire, Martínez concluded.

[Néstor Humberto]: Today, the whole story is known—not the manipulated version of the conspirators. Thank you, Colombia. Thank you, honorable Senate of the Republic.

[David]: Amid the applause of Martínez’s supporters, Senators Robledo, Petro, and Lozano were ready to confront everything he’d said, his accusations, and to deliver their conclusions. Those were the rules.

Robledo was satisfied.

[Jorge Robledo]: I thought I might bring him down, but also,  you know they don’t fall overnight, right? Still, I think, up to the point we reached, the country was shaken. And there are facts there, glaring facts that no one can deny in any way. And the political impact was huge. In that sense, I’m satisfied with everything we did.

[David]: But the Senate president began giving the floor to senators from the Centro Democrático, his party, the ruling party, which additionally , as we explained, was politically aligned with the then Attorney General.

[Jorge Robledo]: And then something happened that no one had counted on. Paloma Valencia, a senator from Centro Democrático, cunningly, yes cunningly, because it was irrelevant to the topic. Breaking all normal procedures in the Senate, she played that now-famous video, the one with the bag…

[David]: It was a secretly recorded video from 2005. You couldn’t really hear what was being said, but you could see Gustavo Petro—one of the senators who had organized the debate and, at the time, the strongest opposition candidate for the next election—with a former aide of his, in a very confusing situation involving cash and a well-known architect.

[Jorge Robledo]: And on top, it was a black plastic bag, ominous, stuffed with money and all. 

[David]: Although the video never proved any illegal act—and Petro himself had warned beforehand that it would be released—it was extremely controversial and ended up diverting all attention away from the debate.

[Jorge Robledo]: It exploded like an atomic bomb, and the debate couldn’t go on, they ended up adjourning it.

[David]: Without him or the other two senators having a chance to respond to Martínez.

[Jorge Robledo]: So Néstor Humberto ended up closing the debate. Completely calculated. That’s not how it’s done. It was clearly orchestrated to protect this guy. Because that same accusation could’ve been made the next day if she was really so interested in doing it. 

[David]: With that abrupt end to the debate, many explanations from then Attorney General Martínez were left pending, about the supposed international conspiracy, but also about how he had gained access to all those conversations of Jorge Enrique’s, and how he had come to know even  about private meetings and phone calls.

In the next episode…

[Luis Fernando Andrade]: My perception at the time,and it remains my perception today, is that the Prosecutor’s Office made a decision that I had to be convicted as the scapegoat. I believe that was, in large part, to avoid investigating the people who truly should have been investigated.

[Teresa Chevres]: We did a lot of writing things down,like on a pad of paper, writing things,and we even went so far as to make a little fire and burn the papers. Because, well, given my age, I remember the Watergate era, when they even checked people’s trash. And yes, I was paranoid. So yes, burn everything too.

[David]: The then–Attorney General Martínez pointed to a very important figure in this story—and in that of Jorge Enrique Pizano—as the great conspirator against Colombian justice.

Credits

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 series’ graphics and art direction 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 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 advisory 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. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode…

Carlos Valdés, the then director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, Colombia’s forensic entity, announced in different press conferences the results of analyses of four pieces of evidence in the Pizano case.

First, he spoke about Jorge Enrique’s body tissues that had been preserved in formaldehyde after the autopsy.

[Carlos Valdés]: No cyanide was found in any of the tissues or in the solution that contained the tissues.

[David]: Then, he made reference to the cyanide container wrapped in plastic bags that the Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office found in the house where Jorge Enrique and Alejandro died.

[Carlos]: What can be said is that he touched the external bag, he touched the internal bag, and touched the container’s body and lid.

[David]: He also spoke about the flavored water bottle from which Alejandro drank the cyanide.

[Carlos]: And the result is that within the diverse genetic material that was found, Mr. Jorge Pizano’s DNA was present. That is the result: Mr. Jorge Pizano’s DNA was there. 

[David]: And lastly, about the towel that was in the bathroom where his wife found him dying and that had brown stains.

[Carlos]: The results are as follows: first, it’s human blood. Second, the DNA recovered from there corresponds to that of Mr. Jorge Pizano. Third, the stain does not contain cyanide.

[David]: The conclusion then, according to all these results, was that Jorge Enrique touched the cyanide container, touched the flavored water bottle, but did not die from poisoning.

Rumors that something strange was happening around this case started very early. Within days of the deaths of Jorge Enrique and Alejandro Pizano, Javier Oviedo, the president of one of the unions at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, began receiving complaints from his fellow expert colleagues. They said, mainly, that they were being pressured to accept the version that the acting director was sharing in the media. This is Javier.

[Javier Oviedo]: There were some experts who called us and said: we were called first thing in the morning to sign a statement. That is, the director gathered them to sign a joint statement saying that everything had been done and that everyone… and they wouldn’t sign it, they didn’t want to. But none of them wanted to speak out for fear of… well, of what was coming and it was a complicated case. And what it entailed with Odebrecht and all these things. Well, that, let’s say, is intimidating, right? For anyone.

[David]: Intimidated as they were, Javier’s colleagues insisted they couldn’t support the acting director’s version. They didn’t agree with giving credibility to the results of the analyses of Jorge Enrique’s tissue samples. It was always known they were submerged in formaldehyde, a substance that can eliminate cyanide and make its detection more difficult. Although the samples were unsuitable for that procedure, they did it and validated those results. But according to Javier, nothing could be ruled out or confirmed based on that. It could be a false positive.

[Javier]: In other words, the test wasn’t reliable. There’s no absolute truth there… I mean, the truth isn’t there. As far as we know, the grounds to argue a death of natural causes weren’t  that solid. It seems more like they made it look that way. It was already something very serious, what he was doing, because he’s saying things that his experts aren’t saying and he’s doing things outside the established procedures and functioning.

[David]: With these complaints that the union was receiving, what Javier and his colleagues suspected was that something was being planned from above.  

[Javier]: We had the feeling they were covering something up, because what was the need to go out and lie. That encouraged us  even more to say no, something has to be done here. So that’s when we decided to take the risk. And we decided to take this to the media.

[Journalist]: A doctor from the Institute of Forensic Medicine and union director denounced that they couldn’t even look for cyanide in Jorge Enrique Pizano’s tissues because of the formaldehyde they had been  delivered in, and he’s asking director Carlos Valdés to explain his statements.

[Javier]: To explain how it is possible to detect in formaldehyde and in tissues with formaldehyde –to try to do a cyanide test if it’s not validated at the Institute, to explain that to the public.

[Journalist]: Oviedo went further. He refuted Valdés’s statements about a bloodstained towel.

[Javier]: We want to ask the director general how he can say that the bloodstain was Jorge Pizano’s if there’s no reference sample because the body was cremated?

[David]: That complaint came out in the media on December 9, one month after the deaths. The Institute of Forensic Medicine, led by  Carlos Valdés, rejected all the complaints. It published a statement saying that Javier was a general practitioner and didn’t have the knowledge in pathology, toxicology, or genetics to refute the results of the analyses. They insisted they had specialized and validated techniques to find cyanide.

The following week, the newscast Noticias Uno published a virtual meeting in which Valdés summoned all the employees of the entity in the country.

[Journalist]: Last Monday, the director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, Carlos Valdés, had called a press conference to explain his version in the case of the death of Jorge Enrique Pizano and his son Alejandro after the doctor and president of the Institute’s union, Javier Oviedo, questioned the results of the studies. But he canceled it unexpectedly and instead convened a video conference  with all the staff of  the Institute of Forensic Medicine in the country.

[David]: Someone, from a room where the meeting was being projected, recorded a video secretly. On a white wall you can see the image of a video call where Valdés starts by greeting his subordinates.

[Carlos]: I’m glad to have you there. Greetings to all of you.

[David]: The audio isn’t the best, because it was surely recorded with a cell phone, but you can understand that Valdés spoke to them about what was happening, about the complaints that questioned the reliability of the analyses of the evidence. And he asked something from them…

[Carlos]: I ask the entire community of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at this time that if I coerced you, please report me.

[David]: Little by little he became agitated and started gesticulating. 

[Carlos]: Stand up and say something. If I have coerced you at any time. It can’t be possible that 104 years of work go down the drain because a union leader dares to smear the Institute.

[David]: Then he calmed down a bit, but he seemed discouraged. He rubbed his head, at one point his voice broke, and at the end he yelled what he expected from all of them.

[Carlos]: I don’t expect anything more from any of you, colleagues of the Institute, than your loyalty to the institution.

[David]: Finally, he promised something.

[Carlos]: This director continues. No one is going to intimidate me.

[David]: «This director continues,» meaning, he wasn’t going to resign. And he ends by saying that no one is going to intimidate him.

The Office of the Inspector General  opened a process to investigate Valdés for possible disciplinary failures. But in addition to that investigation, Javier recalls that right after holding a press conference to publicize the complaints, he and the vice president of the union received an email from the Attorney General.

[Javier]: From Néstor Humberto Martínez himself, the Attorney General at that time. Where it said we have received your complaint, we’re assigning you a prosecutor and this is a criminal notice number. That was very strange, because when does a prosecutor go through the trouble to write to you saying we have received your complaint. It’s like saying I know who you are and what you did.

[David]: And for them it was even stranger when they looked up that criminal notice number on the Attorney General’s Office website, that is, the case registration number, and it didn’t seem to be their complaint.

[Javier]: When we later verified that criminal notice, it corresponds to something else, anything but what it is.

[David]: There it says that the crime they investigated was that of non-compliant contract. It doesn’t seem to be related to what the Institute of Forensic Medicine union reported. And it also says the investigation was filed in November 2021.

[Javier]: In other words, that was never done. And, actually, the Attorney General’s Office never called us to testify. Never.

[David]: From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

In today’s episode we’re going to review in detail the evidence in this case that was analyzed at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the reasons why it remains so controversial.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 5: The Autopsy.

[David]: Let’s start by remembering something: the autopsy of Jorge Enrique’s body was done one day after the death, on November 9, in a hospital with an independent contractor. Having no indication that it was a violent death, the Institute of Forensic Medicine didn’t do it, so the ruling on the cause of death wasn’t theirs.

Javier adds an additional piece of information.

[Javier]: And the person who does the clinical autopsy is a former expert from the Institute, but he’s not just any former expert, he’s the former deputy director of Forensic Services. An experienced pathologist.

[David]: That expert is called Pedro Emilio Morales. I contacted him for an interview, but he told me he couldn’t talk about the subject because at this time the case is under confidentiality, but in 2019, he did give some statements to the Inspector General’s Office for the disciplinary process against Carlos Valdés.

According to what Pedro Morales explained in those statements, when he began doing the autopsy of Jorge Enrique’s body, there was no information in the medical record that would lead him to suspect cyanide poisoning. And he didn’t see the obvious signs that this poison usually leaves on the body: no flushed spots on the skin, no unusually fluid and redder blood, no cherry-colored gastric mucosa, no smell of bitter almonds. Since there was none of that, he didn’t even consider the possibility of cyanide poisoning.

Let’s remember that Jorge Enrique had been receiving cancer treatment for about a year, but Morales also said he didn’t find the cancerous lymphoma, which means the treatment had worked. But he did discover some conditions in the liver, lungs, a kidney, and the heart. With that, and based on a history of heart disease, he concluded he had died from what’s called «cardiac arrhythmia due to left ventricular hypertrophy,» that is, a failure that can be caused by physical stress from unusual exercises or psychological stress due to overwhelming emotions, such as panic or fear. But also from lack of oxygen.

As we already said in past episodes, Morales kept some tissue samples of vitreous humor, the gelatinous substance found in the eyes. But he didn’t take blood samples, which is where the most reliable toxicological tests can be done, because, according to what he said and I quote here: «If I take blood it means I must do toxicology studies and I turn  the autopsy into a medico-legal one.» That means he would have opened the door to the hypothesis of an unnatural death and he had no indication that led him to think that.

So, let’s focus on those tissue samples. We already know these were the only option to analyze possible cyanide poisoning because the body had been cremated. We also know they arrived submerged in formaldehyde at a toxicology laboratory of the Institute of Forensic Medicine. And let’s remember that formaldehyde could eliminate cyanide and make its detection more difficult.

Javier, the union president, says those samples were no longer suitable for doing that type of analysis. 

[Javier]: The problem there was that the… first, the test wasn’t standardized at the Institute, meaning, it wasn’t usually done. And in other laboratories, well, it’s very complicated. I mean, there wasn’t the… The procedure to do that wasn’t there, but he does it in the end, Valdés orders it to be done.

[David]: Carlos Valdés, the director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at that time, assured me that wasn’t true. That those accusations came from a political discussion. This is Carlos.

[Carlos]: The death of Jorge Enrique Pizano was being presented as a political event and there was one political group accusing another political group that was defending itself. In the middle of that was the director of Forensic Medicine and the institution was there and many questions were being raised, right?

[David]: He also said he didn’t pressure anyone to analyze the tissue samples submerged in formaldehyde, because he never intervened in the work of the experts because of the pyramidal structure that the Institute has always had.

[Carlos]: The director didn’t speak with the staff. The director gives directives through his deputy director and the regional directors.

The toxicologist who did that analysis of the samples told the Inspector General’s Office later that when he received them, the label on the container didn’t clarify that they were in formaldehyde, as is usual. When he realized, he consulted with his boss, the toxicology coordinator, so she could determine whether the analysis could be done or not, and she authorized it. The toxicologist followed the instructions, but left a record that those samples weren’t the best. Another expert report from the same case that was done later also says the same thing: samples in formaldehyde are not the most suitable for conducting the search for cyanide. It is more appropriate to perform this type of analysis on blood samples or gastric contents.

So the toxicologist opened the portion of liver he received and from the center extracted a blood sample that apparently hadn’t been reached by the formaldehyde. The result of that analysis, as we already know, was negative for cyanide, but in the statement to the Inspector General’s Office, when they asked the toxicologist what was the probability of finding cyanide in those samples, he said something that, to be thorough, I’m going to quote verbatim: «If the cyanide is there, the likelihood is absolute in this type of sample that I analyzed. But since we don’t have certainty that the formaldehyde had attacked the entire sample, we can’t assert that we were dealing with cyanide. Today I’m not sure that the formaldehyde had attacked the entire sample. That’s why the center was analyzed, which seems not yet to be in formaldehyde.» End of quote.

The toxicologist also said he informed the prosecutor in charge of the case about all of that, including that the samples weren’t the most suitable for that analysis. In the end, it’s the prosecutor who decides if the evidence is valid. And that’s what he did: he accepted it.

But then if the tissue samples weren’t the best, could the result not be reliable? Although Carlos said in a press conference that they hadn’t found cyanide, because the law allowed him to share results of this type of investigation, Javier, the union president, insists that with those samples kept in formaldehyde you couldn’t know with certainty whether Jorge Enrique really consumed the poison or not.

[Javier]: Well, with what was there, it couldn’t be confirmed. Scientifically, neither one thing nor the other is proven.

[David]: Carlos says that indeed there’s no 100% reliability, because no science, including forensics, produces absolute truths.

[Carlos]: What do I want to tell you with this? Any scientific result given by any laboratory in the world is a non-absolute truth. It’s a relative truth.

[David]: And he adds that of course mistakes can be made, but that the Institute’s quality procedures can detect them in time.

[Carlos]: With this I want to tell you that yes, the result that cyanide doesn’t exist in the sample can be questioned, of course, and scientifically it can be questioned. It can’t be questioned by hearsay, by witnesses, by belief, because I imagine, no. Scientific results must be questioned scientifically.

[David]: In other words, he says the negative result can be refuted with another scientific analysis, but since there are no other samples not contaminated with formaldehyde, it’s impossible to do it.

But there’s something more in the statements of Pedro Morales, the expert who did Jorge Enrique’s autopsy, that’s worth highlighting.

After Alejandro’s death, when the authorities sought him out to corroborate the information, he didn’t completely rule out the possibility that Jorge Enrique had died from consuming cyanide. But he said he didn’t see or smell anything suspicious, although he did clarify that the flushed skin spots left by the substance can vary and that even detecting the smell of bitter almonds depends on the investigator’s sensitivity and many people don’t even recognize it. He added that, and here I quote, «cyanide poisoning can be demonstrated with the body or with the scene.» That’s why he asked   the investigators to look for the cyanide container in the house and even find out if Jorge Enrique had searched on the Internet for how to commit suicide that way.

Morales also told the authorities they hadn’t taken into account that the cyanide in the bottle was dissolved in flavored water, which has citric acid. He explained the following to them—this is also a verbatim quote—: «if the water has citric acid when you mix it with cyanide, hydrogen cyanide is produced, which is a very volatile gas and when you inhale it you can die without the cause of death being identified afterward.» End quote.

He said it was a possible hypothesis and added that if that was the case, and again I quote, «in the toxicology tests nothing is seen, they won’t find cyanide in the blood.»

So I presented that hypothesis to Carlos Valdés: that the gas produced by mixing cyanide with water killed Jorge Enrique and that’s why the poison couldn’t be found in the tissue samples.

[Carlos]: Yes, that possibility exists. Now, that term in science is nothing, because there’s a possibility that yes, or a possibility that no – in science, in science that’s nothing. For me, as a doctor practicing science, I never speculate. I don’t speculate. I say what science gives me so far. It may be that as the years go by, science advances and, as I tell you, the truth that today is relative, can be modified as it advances… But so far that’s the truth.

[David]: After the break, the bottle and the towel.

We’ll be right back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

It’s clear that Alejandro Pizano drank the liquid from a plastic bottle of flavored water with a green cap. It was small, personal size. It was almost full when he found it on his father’s desk.

Later, while he was reacting to the effects of the poison, his sisters claim to have grabbed that bottle several times. First Juanita, who brought it close to her lips to try to identify what that liquid was. Then Carolina, when they left for the hospital and in the car she gave it to her sister again. And finally Juanita passed it to someone in the ambulance and saw that some nurses  had it. She didn’t know what happened after.

But it turns out that bottle was analyzed at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and they confirmed it contained cyanide. But they also found other things, like this one that Javier, the union president, mentions.

[Javier]: Samples were taken from the mouth of the bottle and there they found DNA that belonged to a relative of his.

[David]: DNA from a relative of Alejandro. The expert report is very clear, and I quote here: «In the swab from the mouth of the plastic bottle, a genetic profile of an unknown male individual was found.» The same report also clarifies that it’s the DNA of, and here I quote again, «a relative of Alejandro Pizano Ponce de León from his same paternal lineage.»

[Javier]: Let’s say they shared genetic information as if it were from father and son.

[David]: In addition, the expert report adds that that DNA was the same that was found on the plastic bags that wrapped the cyanide container they found in one of the bathrooms. The conclusion was logical. Carlos Valdés confirms it.

[Carlos]: The bottle had cyanide and DNA from Jorge Enrique Pizano. That is, he had touched the bottle.

[David]: But it’s not that he had only touched the body of the bottle with his hands, as Carlos said in a press conference. The DNA, according to the expert report, was found on the mouth of the bottle. Now, whether he drank from there before or after it had cyanide… we can’t know that.

The expert report also gives another piece of information that seems absurd. I quote verbatim: «Alejandro Pizano Ponce de León is excluded as the origin of the genetic profile obtained from the swab of the mouth of the plastic bottle.» I asked Carlos about it.

[David]: Does that mean there’s no DNA from Alejandro?

[Carlos]: No. That means there wasn’t… and it’s understandable because of this, look: To detect the DNA molecule there has to be a minimum of cells. Very surely the little contact there was between Alejandro Pizano’s lips and the edge of the bottle wasn’t enough to leave the minimum cells for DNA to be detected. Do you understand what I mean?

[David]: Understood. But the thing is that although they analyzed the entire bottle, not just the mouth, they also didn’t find DNA from the many other people who touched it.

[Carlos]: Oh, well I don’t know how many hands, but only Jorge Enrique’s was found on the edge of the bottle. I don’t know how many hands might have touched it. Or I don’t know how it was manipulated, yes, … that I wouldn’t know.

[David]: And then I asked him if it was possible that in the rush to reach a result that would support the initial ruling of death of natural causes, the other analyses of the evidence had been forced or even information that could contradict it had been ignored.

[Carlos]: No, that’s not possible, because as I tell you, the entire Institute, its laboratories, everything, all the Institute’s dependencies act with quality control systems. So, for someone to think that a procedure was altered to reach a previously agreed result, that’s totally impossible when an institution is internationally and nationally accredited.

[David]: But even so, as he indeed said: mistakes can be made.

Ok. So let’s see about the towel.

It was white, full-body size. It was in the bathroom where Jorge Enrique’s wife found him dying on the floor. According to what the family said, it was the towel he was wrapped in at that moment. And it had something important: some brown stains that appeared to be blood.

The Inspector General’s Office investigation concluded that due to the time elapsed during the process of  packaging and preservation of the towel, that evidence wasn’t suitable either for analysis to detect cyanide. They still performed it. And on November 27, Carlos Valdés announced in another press conference the results of the analyses of those brown stains.

[Carlos]: The results are as follows: first, it is human blood. Second, the DNA recovered from there corresponds to that of Mr. Jorge Pizano. Third, the stain does not contain cyanide.

[David]: And that ruling stood until about a month later, when on December 20 La W Radio revealed the expert report on the towel with a surprising conclusion: the stains were not blood.

[Journalist]: Valdés assured that only until midday today did he learn of the text of the forensic report that was sent by the Institute of Forensic Medicine to the Attorney General’s Office and in which it’s ensures that it wasn’t blood, which, according to him, doesn’t change the primary result where it was reported that Jorge Pizano died from natural causes.

[David]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

The expert report on the towel made it clear that the stains were not blood, as Carlos Valdés had said publicly. For Javier Oviedo, the union president, that fact undermined the entire narrative that the Institute of Forensic Medicine had been telling for about a month about the Pizano case.

[Javier]: Indeed, there’s a test that looks for cyanide in blood. But it wasn’t blood, so since it’s not a bloodstain, well, the whole lie falls apart. Remember that he was a doctor, and if you read there it says it’s not blood. If someone from outside can read it and say the conclusion is that there’s no blood, why can’t a doctor interpret it? I mean, it doesn’t make sense, right? So it can be two things: either he wanted to cover something up or he definitely didn’t know what he was doing.

[David]: Carlos assured me he found out about the expert report on the towel that same day through the media. As he’s said before, he didn’t intervene in the work of his subordinates. What he did, according to him, was replicate the information they gave him. So when he found out about the news, he immediately called his deputy director to find out what had happened.

[Carlos]: 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 was wrong.

Colombians listening to me know that in Colombia there’s a saying that one should not “give papaya”. That is, the opportunities to make mistakes are many, but one must be very careful not to make mistakes. I know I felt great disappointment at having made a mistake. I had lost because I should have asked. I myself felt disappointed because I hadn’t been thorough.  And look at me, I could have said no, the guilty ones were the chemist who didn’t notify, who having heard me tell the media that it was blood, didn’t warn me. That the lab chief didn’t do it either, that the coordinator didn’t do it, that the sectional director didn’t do it, that the regional director didn’t do it, that the deputy director didn’t do it. And I could have blamed any of them and could have fired them from the institution because it was a serious fault. But I went to the Attorney General and told him: Attorney General, I am the only one to blame. I resign, effective immediately. 

[Journalist]: Attention, the director of the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, Carlos Valdés, resigned from his position. The official accepted that he made a communication error by revealing rulings of the tests in the Pizano case.

[David]: Carlos announced his resignation at a press conference.

[Carlos]: I have submitted my resignation today, because my work of eight years at the head of the Institute shouldn’t be smeared. I am the only one responsible, my mistake was due to the fact that, because of the initial characteristics of the stain, I assumed it was a bloodstain. That from that moment I made the mistake of never asking the laboratories about its origin and only focused  on the forensic results of whether it corresponded or not to Mr. Pizano and whether there was or wasn’t cyanide there.

[David]: At that same press conference, he also claimed that the Institute of Forensic Medicine had done its work well and that the rest of the analysis results remained intact.

[Carlos]: The results obtained in the laboratory and that you learned about do not alter its integrity in any way. That result is truthful. It has no modification.

[David]: But I had a question about the towel. The result of the analysis was that the stains were not blood, they were saliva… But brown saliva?

[Carlos]: Very surely, because also in the accounts that those from the Technical Investigation Unit had, it seems he had previously drunk coffee. But no, otherwise I wouldn’t know why it was brown. Or it may have happened that the denomination of the color brown was wrong, right? Because sometimes one perceives a color as brown and sometimes it’s not brown. There are shades.

[David]: It was saliva, ok. Its analysis confirmed there was no cyanide… also ok. But then…

[David]: Is it likely that that saliva had been there before he, let’s suppose, had consumed cyanide?

[Carlos]: There, once again, I tell you I don’t know. And as a doctor who practices science, I don’t speculate. So I don’t know, I don’t know. The probability that yes, the probability that no, I don’t know.

[David]: Carlos left the direction of the Institute of Forensic Medicine on December 31, 2018, but continued working at the Attorney General’s Office. According to what he told me, it was the then Attorney General, Néstor Humberto Martínez, who offered him to be an advisor in the creation of a database with DNA of criminals, and Carlos accepted because he told me he needed to work one more year to have a better pension.

From that moment until today, -he is currently a university professor- he has always said that in the Pizano case he never manipulated information or lied, but that he made a mistake. 

[Carlos]: And if you look at a Spanish dictionary, when you lie it’s when you know the truth and change it. That’s called lying. But if you, without knowing a result, say something else believing that to be true, that’s called in Spanish language a mistake.

[David]: And, according to that, when there’s a mistake, the implications are different. In 2023 the Inspector General’s Office ended up agreeing with him in that regard and cleared him of any disciplinary liability in the first instance. 

Javier Oviedo, the union president, says that despite being he and his colleagues who reported the possible irregularities and who provided the evidence for investigation, they were never notified of that decision.

[Javier]: After so much asking, they tell us that a decision was made on the case, that the case is already closed. So we request a copy of the entire process and decided to appeal it, because in the process there were many inconsistencies. And the Inspector General’s Office at that time tells us no, you don’t have the right, you can’t appeal and they don’t let us appeal.

Around the same time as Carlos Valdés’s resignation, at the end of December 2018, a second instance judge ruled on the inspection that the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office did at the Pizano house. An inspection that, remember, from the start was based on a hypothesis of suicide due to financial problems.

What that judge did was ratify that the evidence that the Attorney General’s Office collected in that inspection was not valid. The law says that evidence must be legalized before a court within the following 36 hours, but in this case, the Attorney General’s Office kept the objects for five days. They didn’t respect the chain of custody.

That meant something crucial: since the Attorney General’s Office didn’t follow what was established by law regarding time, the evidence they took that day, like the cyanide container wrapped in plastic bags or the towel with the brown stains, was not valid in a legal process. They also couldn’t use what was on Jorge Enrique’s cell phones or on his computers’ hard drives, like the conversations with journalists, with the United States authorities and the other evidence that was there about corruption in La Ruta del Sol II. That didn’t mean that the information there wasn’t valuable, only that it couldn’t be used for the legal process.

In the next episode…

[Jorge Robledo]: And this is probably going to be the first, the first of these debates, in which we’re going to complete the pieces of the puzzle.

[Angéliza Lozano]: Néstor Humberto knew what the Attorney General’s Office was up to: cover up, block, protect, guarantee the impunity of Colombia’s richest man, his boss or his friend, a very close relationship.

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Well, Jorge Enrique comes this evening to the Senate chamber to take a stand against the falsehood, against the injury, against the lie, against the fallacy.

[David]: The Attorney General would accept an invitation he wasn’t obligated to attend. But he was ready to fight.

Credits

La Ruta del Sol is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of My Cultura’s podcast network from iHeart Radio.

The reporting and production of this series were done by me, David Trujillo. The main 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. Sound design and mixing are by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser and Óscar Luna. The graphics and art direction of 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 audiences team at Radio Ambulante Studios.

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 in their advice on security matters.

Carolina Guerrero is the executive producer of Central and 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. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode…

[Mábel Lara]: Engineer Jorge Enrique Pizano, key witness in the Odebrecht bribery scandal in Colombia and who passed away last Thursday, left the evidence of his complaints in the hands of Noticias Uno since last August.

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: I presented the reports to the person who appointed me as controller, right? Not only the final report, but everything… the evidence of those emails exists. And here, it’s clear and concrete evidence. It’s not that I heard, that I said, no. It’s what’s in the documents and it is the documents that speak.

[David]: Noticias Uno also revealed the audio that Jorge Enrique had recorded with the then Attorney General of the Nation, Néstor Humberto Martínez, who at the time of that recording was a lawyer for Grupo Aval.

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Look, we’re doing one hell of an investigation. I mean, you… because I see you in a state of anxiety. Of course.

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Okay. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Well. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about  something…

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course.

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the way, because, damn, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, that you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[David]: That and the tragic death of Alejandro Pizano made the scandal break. Now the key question was: why was there cyanide in the bottle? Had Jorge Enrique also taken the poison? The then director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine had opened a possibility during a press conference…

[Carlos Valdés]: However, the person who performed the clinical autopsy left samples of different tissues for histopathology studies. The investigation that the Attorney General’s Office has currently undertaken will most surely order the analysis of those samples.

[David]: So… this episode begins with a visit. 

It was a few days after Alejandro Pizano’s death and shortly after they had announced the result of the autopsy.  Burdened by confusion, anguish and the pressure from the media, the Pizano Ponce de León sisters and their mother received the then Attorney General of the Nation, Néstor Humberto Martínez, for a private conversation. As we had mentioned, he knew Jorge Enrique from before he was Attorney General and their sons had been best friends since school, so he was not a stranger to them. And, in fact, it was Martínez’s son who arranged this visit.

The daughters remember that the Attorney General arrived visibly moved. He wanted to give them his condolences.

[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. 

[Carolina Pizano]: So, like playing the grieved one, the hurt one. No, and now my position, right? Like, everyone is doubting me. He cried, but the kind of  tears that… like when a child misbehaves, cries and convinces the parents that it wasn’t their fault. And as soon as the parents forgive them they’re perfectly fine again…it’s like, but yes…like…emotional manipulation. Manipulation when we were the most vulnerable we had ever been in our lives.

[David]: He told them that he would personally take on the investigation of  what had happened, he talked about all the technology that the Attorney General’s Office had to find the truth.

[Juanita]: But immediately 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]: Of course, we fell completely for that manipulation. It was like yes, do what you have to do. Yes, do what you have to do. We couldn’t think straight. And it’s something that people don’t understand, and it’s how difficult it is to try to think with clarity in those moments. 

[David]: And so, following what they understood as a request from Martínez, on November 16, 2018, two days after the interview they had given to Caracol Noticias, the Pizano Ponce de León family published the statement in the media. In it they said they would not give statements on judicial matters because Jorge Enrique had already given everything to the authorities. They also asked that their painful situation not be used in political arenas. Regarding the deaths, they said they were waiting for the results of the investigations by the Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Attorney General’s Office.

But that didn’t make the scandal wane.  That same day, the newspaper El Espectador revealed a new audio recorded by Jorge Enrique. In this one, which was also recorded secretly, you can hear Martínez reading a list that a criminal lawyer had given them of the possible crimes that had been committed based on Jorge Enrique’s findings. Listen carefully: Martínez mentions, literally, the word crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: Look at all the crimes that have been committed.

[David]: He says: look at all the crimes that have been committed. Crimes…not irregularities, as he said in the Caracol interview. And he makes a list:

[Néstor Humberto]: Bribes, money laundering, falsification of private documents, disloyal administration, breach of trust, fraud, aggravated theft by trust, embezzlement by appropriation.

[David]: I repeat: bribes, money laundering, falsification of private documents, disloyal administration, breach of trust, fraud, aggravated theft by trust, embezzlement by appropriation.

That same day part of the results of the investigation into the deaths were also released. Remember that Jorge Enrique’s body was cremated because, according to the autopsy, he died of natural causes, from cardiac arrhythmia. But there was an alternative to find out if he had also taken cyanide: to analyze the tissue samples we already mentioned, those that were kept after the autopsy. Carlos Valdés, the then director of the Institute of Forensic  Medicine, held a press conference to announce the results publicly. The ruling was conclusive.

[Carlos Valdés]: No cyanide was found in any of the tissues or in the solution that contained the tissues.

[David]: With that result, the initial ruling that Jorge Enrique had died of natural causes remained standing.

But that didn’t really clarify anything. Alejandro’s death had not been of natural causes and the most important question around the Pizano case was how the cyanide had gotten into that bottle. There were other doubts, yes, and more could come up, but if that fact came to be known, the case would stop being a mystery to become a tragedy for which someone was responsible.

That’s why, that weekend, six days after Alejandro’s death, the CTI, the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, went to the house where both had died to do a more detailed inspection. The evidence had to be there.

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 4: The Evidence.

[David]: The last time the Pizano Ponce de León family had entered the house where it all  happened was during the first visit of an investigator from the CTI, the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, when Alejandro had just died. It was a very quick examination and that day nothing was taken.

But on Saturday, November 17, almost a week later, they were summoned again, early, to begin the detailed inspection. And something important must be made clear: according to what journalist María Jimena Duzán published, from the begining, the order to do this inspection was based on the hypothesis that what had happened, at least in Jorge Enrique’s case, was a possible suicide due to economic problems. There is no mention that they were considering  other options. And nothing related to his work on Ruta del Sol II or the revelations from Noticias Uno.

The first thing the investigators did was take statements, separately, from the two people who took care of the place, a man and a woman, who were a couple. They also interviewed the housemaid and another worker. And the family, of course: the two sisters and their mother.

In that interrogation Juanita felt that the conversation was being directed toward the topic of suicide.

[Juanita]: So the lady literally asked me like: And do you think your dad wanted to commit suicide and why? And…but was he depressed? On a scale of one to ten, how depressed was he? How many times did you see him cry? And like that, very repetitive.

[David]: Even after that formal interview, another investigator approached Juanita to try to continue talking about the subject.

[Juanita]: She acted nice and asked me how I was, etc. And I was like no, well normal. I mean, surviving. And she asked me: Do you really think your dad didn’t want to commit suicide? Like that. Who was going to hurt him? Who was going to want to hurt him anyway? And I told her like: my dad had been threatened for many years and I think there were several people who wanted to hurt him, honestly.

[David]: After taking the statements, they talked to them about how they would do the inspection of the house. The plan was to examine each space in great detail, first the upper floor and then the lower one. Carolina was there when one of those officials made something clear to her.

[Carolina]: Yes, he was very diligent and told me: we’re going to do this and that, we’re not going to enter any room in your absence. We’re not going to open anything without your authorization or we’re not going to do anything without you being there.

[David]: She even remembers signing a document to authorize the inspection. Then they made them put on the same white suits, gloves and face masks worn by the investigators, who were at least ten.

[Carolina]: So we started with my parents’ room. But we spent many hours in that room. At least three hours.

[Juanita]: I sensed that  they had instructions to look for something with details not so… like broader. So they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but they were desperately looking for something and like they couldn’t find it and couldn’t find it.

[Carolina]: But they seemed… I don’t know, it’s like…Imagine like zombies, right? who are desperately looking for something  to bite, something  to eat.

[David]: In the middle of that search they found a suitcase full of Jorge Enrique’s documents. At that moment, the official who had explained the procedure to Carolina stopped them.

[Carolina]: And I remember he said: they’re not going to take anything that isn’t related to the death. But they did take the hard drives and they took the security camera recordings.

[David]: The security cameras of the house…And also Jorge Enrique’s cell phones. 

Then, in that bedroom’s bathroom, where his wife had found him dying, there was a towel…that towel was also noticed by the first investigator who went to the house when Alejandro had just died, but he had left it in the same place.

[Carolina]: I really didn’t understand the towel thing. At that moment it really didn’t seem that relevant.

[Juanita]: That was the towel my dad was wrapped in when he died. But there was something kind of red or brown on the towel.

[David]: Some stains… very visible. They looked like blood.

[Carolina]: They took it. But I…at that moment I said well a towel with blood, like it has nothing to do with my dad’s death, right, because it’s blood from where. I mean, he shaved and cut himself, was what I thought.

[David]: But that towel would be very important later. 

A lot of time had already passed in the inspection. It had gotten dark and they still hadn’t started examining the first floor. At one point, they decided to stop and resume a few minutes later. The family left the house.

Juanita went to the car with her mother. But since her cell phone battery  was dying, she went back into the house, without the white suit or the face mask or the gloves, to plug it in the living room. There, she noticed  there was commotion among the investigators.

[Juanita]: I said: I’m going to see what they’re doing, because well I’m already here. And at that moment I went up and on that kind of  mezzanine all these people were gathered there.

[David]: They were next to a bathroom that everyone had used during the long day of inspection. Many people had been going in and out all day.

[Juanita]: And the man there said: We just found something. And I said: You just found what? And he shows me a container.

[David]: A plastic container that was wrapped in -also plastic- bags. It was white, flattened, cylindrical, medium-sized. They had found it in that bathroom, in the drawer under the sink and behind a speaker from a sound system. It had a red screw-on lid and a label that said potassium cyanide, and just below the quantity: 1 kilo.

They called Carolina, who had also stepped out of the house.

[Carolina]: And that’s when they told me they found a container with cyanide and so then I went in. But then I asked myself: But how, if I had to be present, how did they continue searching? If they told me we were going to take a break. What happens next? I remember they take a photo there.

[David]: Two photos: one of the container wrapped in the bags and another of the drawer under the sink, where they found it. Both photos were uploaded the next day on the Attorney General’s Office X account.

[Carolina]: And so one says: to what extent is this private? Yes, I mean, did we authorize them to publish a photo of evidence? Well no. So, how does the Attorney General’s Office share information that way. When there’s an investigation, the evidence isn’t supposed to be shown, right? 

[David]: With the publication on social media, the media began to replicate the news.

[Journalist]: The substance was found yesterday in the house where Jorge Enrique and Alejandro Pizano died, when agents from the Attorney General’s Office were looking for elements and evidence. Two judicial prosecutors and members of the Pizano Ponce de León family were summoned there.

[Journalist]: The Attorney General’s Office has said that biological traces and fingerprints were already collected and delivered to the director of Forensic Medicine so it can be established who brought this kilo of cyanide into the Pizanos’ house.

[Carlos]: When they found it, I said here’s what we’ll do, we’ll test if Jorge Enrique Pizano touched those plastics and the container, right?, because to know if, if he had manipulated the cyanide.

[David]: He is Carlos Valdés, the director of Forensic Medicine at that time.

[Carlos]: I am a surgeon doctor specialized in forensic anthropology. I have practiced forensic medicine for 37 years. 

[David]: At that time, he had been directing the Institute for seven years. He was appointed, like all directors, by the Attorney General’s Office. And Carlos arrived with a characteristic that his predecessors didn’t have: his constant appearance in the media. For Carlos it was always very important to speak publicly about the progress of the investigations that Forensic Medicine carried out.

[Carlos]: Look, for me it wasn’t a problem. Because science wouldn’t make any sense if that scientific knowledge is not given to society, right? So, as I was entitled to do by Colombian law and international law, well I periodically announced those scientific results to the media. Right?

[David]: And this Pizano case, which was so mediatic, was not the exception.

Carlos remembers that his media appearances began two days after Alejandro’s death, that is, on November 13, when he announced, along with the Attorney General’s Office, the cyanide poisoning. In that same press conference he also mentioned the samples  from Jorge Enrique’s tissue.

[Carlos]: Those samples arrive at the Institute and arrive at the Institute in formaldehyde..

[David]: Submerged in formaldehyde to preserve them. That is a very important fact because that substance can eliminate cyanide and make its detection more difficult. But Carlos insists that they were prepared for that type of situation.

[Carlos]: The samples that always arrive at the Institute of Forensic Medicine are difficult samples. They are not the same samples that can arrive at a private laboratory or at a university laboratory. I mean that they are samples that are generally contaminated, they are samples of chemical substances that are not pure.

[David]: And for that very reason, according to Carlos, the Institute has protocols, quality criteria and specific technology to analyze those difficult samples, as he calls them.

When they received Jorge Enrique’s tissues they couldn’t examine them in the Bogotá laboratory, because the equipment to do the analyses wasn’t working at that time, so they had to send them to another city.

[Carlos]: The analysis is performed by a toxicologist chemist, with a doctorate in toxicology and was done on a large liver fragment of 11 by 12 centimeters, which, according to the toxicologist chemist’s description, when making the cross cut, in the center there was blood, the formaldehyde present in the periphery of the fragments hadn’t reached the center. And he affirms that from there he took the sample and that sample was valid for the toxicological chemical study and that the result was that it had no cyanide.

[David]: We already said Carlos announced those results,  at another press conference on November 16, five days after Alejandro’s death, and the cardiac arrhythmia remained the official cause of death. But the fact that there was no cyanide in that sample from Jorge Enrique’s liver didn’t mean the case was solved. The same question remained unresolved: how did the cyanide get into the bottle?

Let’s go back then to the house inspection that the Technical Investigation Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, the CTI, did one week after the deaths. Remember that during the process they found the cyanide container  that Carlos asked for, so that Forensic Medicine could establish if Jorge Enrique had touched it. On November 20, three days after the house inspection, Carlos announced the results at a new press conference.

[Carlos]: The conclusion that the Institute of Forensic Medicine has reached is that the DNA samples recovered from both the external bag, the internal bag and the container, on its lid and on the body, the cyanide container, belong to Mr. Jorge Pizano, with high scientific certainty. What can be said is that he touched the external bag, he touched the internal bag and he touched the container’s body and lid.

[David]: The Attorney General’s Office found the store in which that kilo of cyanide was bought, but they couldn’t establish who bought it, because they only had registered half of the buyers’ names and none of those was Jorge Enrique’s. According to the daughters, the Attorney General’s Office told them they were going to check the security cameras in the area, but then they realized they weren’t working. 

So, let’s recap: according to Forensic  Medicine, Jorge Enrique touched the cyanide container and the bags it was wrapped in. There was the possibility of suicide because of the very difficult situation he was going  through. But they didn’t find the poison in the tissue sample. So there was one last option to confirm the cause of death: to analyze the towel that was in the bathroom and the possible biological traces that were there.

A break and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back at La Ruta del Sol.

Carlos Valdés, the then director of Forensic Medicine, received the information about the towel from the Attorney General’s Office. They told him that Jorge Enrique’s family had said that was the towel he had when they found him collapsed in the bathroom. Also that it had some brown stains.

[Carlos]: And I assumed that stain was… since it was brown, I said that’s blood, possibly it’s blood. And I assumed it was blood, because when you bleed and the blood stays on a fabric, it oxidizes and gives that brown color. My response was: bring the towel, bring it, give it to Forensic Medicine and we’ll do the test. And I told my deputy director, I said: arrange for them to do both toxicological chemistry exams, to see if that stain has cyanide and if that stain is from Jorge Enrique Pizano. And I told her please, inform me when the results come in. 

[David]: They came out on November 27, 10 days after the Attorney General’s Office CTI inspection in which they found the towel.

[Carlos]: So, as I always used to give the scientific results, I went to the media and told them:

[Archive]

[Carlos]: The results are the following: first, it’s human blood. Second, the DNA recovered from there corresponds to Mr. Jorge Pizano’s. Third, the stain does not contain cyanide.

[David]: With those results, the delegated prosecutor for Citizen Security of the Attorney General’s Office, who accompanied Carlos at that press conference, spoke about what the investigation was pointing to up to that moment.

[Luis González]: Up to that moment this is the conclusion: Jorge Enrique Pizano’s death is of natural causes and is the product of a cardiac arrest. That is, there are no criminal hands in Jorge Enrique’s death. Up to the moment the investigation shows us those conclusions.

[David]: Death by natural causes, no criminal hands…But they had already said it was clear that Jorge Enrique had touched the cyanide container… and we already know that, indeed, there was cyanide in the flavored water bottle.

As if  there wasn’t enough confusion, at that same press conference Carlos also announced the results of the analyses of that bottle.

[Carlos]: And the result is that within the diverse genetic material that was found, Mr. Jorge Pizano’s DNA appeared. That’s the result: Mr. Jorge Pizano’s DNA was there.

[David]: And he confirmed, right after a journalist’s question, that that DNA was on the body of the bottle.

So. A summary of where evidence stands  at this point. According to Forensic Medicine, yes there was Jorge Enrique’s DNA on the cyanide container and on the bags that wrapped it. Also on the towel and on the water bottle. But no traces of cyanide were found in the tissue samples or in the brown stains on the towel.

So, everything indicated that Jorge Enrique handled all the objects that had cyanide, but he didn’t consume it…and he had still died. By that time, the Attorney General’s Office already had an idea of what had happened, based on the analysis results.

[Juanita]: The Attorney General’s Office’s theory is that my dad dies from a heart attack. They rely mainly on the medical history of the cancer.

[David]: And on the fact that they didn’t find cyanide in the tissue analyses.

Also that Jorge Enrique had intentions of committing suicide and that, in fact, he planned it. He put the cyanide in the flavored water bottle, only to die before drinking it.

For Juanita and her family the suicide wasn’t unimaginable.

[Juanita]: I know that in his head the possibility of suicide could exist, because they made him lose all his dignity, his work, which was what he lived for. He was left in debt, without friends, everyone turned their backs on him. My dad felt very lonely.

[David]: But let’s remember that the hypothesis of the CTI inspection of the Attorney General’s Office was based on economic problems. They didn’t take into account everything he had discovered about the irregularities of Ruta del Sol II, nor the Attorney General’s Office investigation against him.

For the family, if there was a suicide attempt, it was induced by the pressure they subjected him to and it was absurd that the Attorney General’s Office reduced it to only economic problems. They had seen him in very bad shape for a long time and even Juanita remembers once when he spoke to them about this possibility.

[Juanita]: And I know he said like I want to die. I mean, what is this? One time, when the Attorney General’s Office was pressuring him,  at a lunch he told us like, I want to be clear, and with tears in his eyes he told us, but if they put me in jail, I’ll kill myself and that’s it, because I’m not going to put you through this. Because I’m innocent and I, I couldn’t bear it.

[David]: Around those days, Néstor Humberto Martínez, the then Attorney General, returned to visit Jorge Enrique’s wife. Juanita remembers having listened in on that conversation and assures that Martínez said something more shocking than the idea of suicide: that if the investigation continued, some congressmen opposed to the acting government would say that Alejandro had died because of Jorge Enrique. That that was the cause of his death: homicide.

[Juanita]: And the active subject of the crime, which would be, according to them, my dad, for the alleged crime of manslaughter by negligence, is dead. So the theory is that my dad put the bottle there and culpably, I mean, like unintentionally and intentionally, so to speak, killed my brother.

[David]: So, a failed suicide attempt and then a tragic accident.

[Juanita]: And in this conversation, Néstor Humberto tells my mom: it’s better to close the investigation, for us it’s better, well, if you agree.

[Carolina]: It’ll be what you say, it’ll be what you want, but see let’s do this. And in the middle of all those things 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.

[Juanita]: Also, at that moment we only wanted to be left alone. So what are they going to investigate? I mean, the bottle, the fingerprints, the towel… I mean, that’s it. That’s when well, let’s say we give our consent for them to file the investigation or close it, I don’t know.

[Carolina]: But if you realize, that’s pure manipulation at the moment.

[Juanita]: We didn’t have a choice.  I mean, what else do you do if you have the Attorney General of the Nation in front of you telling you these things? Especially to my mom, who well first has no legal knowledge no matter how intelligent she is, and second, being as emotionally vulnerable as one is after losing one’s husband and son.

[David]: They didn’t want to suffer anymore. It wasn’t worth insisting on an investigation that was going nowhere. At the end of November, the family left the country to get away from the media circus they had been put in.

But for them, even from there and with the Attorney General’s Office hypothesis, everything that had happened to them seemed almost surreal. Beyond the pain they felt that everything that had to do with the case was very confusing.

[Juanita]: We didn’t understand that difficulty to establish. Because there was no clarity of literally anything, of what procedures were being carried out, of when they were carrying them out. If someone entered the house without us knowing, who had the bottle in their hands, who put the bottle there.

[David]: And they weren’t the only ones asking these questions.

A pause and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back at La Ruta del Sol.

Around the already messy and confusing case of the Pizano deaths, in the corridors of Forensic Medicine rumors began to spread that something strange was happening.

[Javier Oviedo]: Well, my name is Javier Oviedo Gutiérrez.

[David]: Javier has been at Forensic Medicine for more than 20 years.

[Javier]: I am an expert in the area of anthropology, and I also serve as president of the National Union of Workers of the Institute of Forensic  Medicine.

[David]: And since he got involved with the union he has also been working for the rights of his colleagues and against possible abuses of power.

Regarding Carlos Valdés, the director of the Institute at that time, Javier remembers how mediatic he was in that position and the way he spoke publicly about cases that were being investigated. But that, according to Javier, was not the director’s responsibility, he shouldn’t communicate those procedures.

[Javier]: Our role as an Institute is technical and scientific support to the administration of justice. But that is part of the confidentiality of a process. That is, we are not, let’s say, enabled, so to speak, by the regulations to go out and do that, because we are violating confidentiality. The one who owns the information is the prosecutor.

[David]: The prosecutor who carries the case. And it’s that prosecutor who should, according to Javier, talk about the evidence during the oral trial, not the director of Forensic Medicine before the media.

That’s why the union had been following up on those announcements and collecting evidence of possible irregularities in other cases. But none of that had been made public until the Pizano case arrived.

[Javier]: Which was, let’s say…the final straw. I mean, we can’t let this pass. That already goes against the institution itself, it’s playing with the Institute’s credibility.

[David]: On December 9, 2018, a month after the deaths, Javier made public the complaints that something weird was happening.

[Journalist]: And the president of the Forensic Medicine union, Javier Oviedo, denounced alleged irregularities in the autopsy and genetic studies that were performed on engineer Jorge Enrique Pizano.

[Journalist]: Supposedly, the techniques that were used to determine what were the causes of death of the Odebrecht case witness are not validated at the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

[David]: The results of the analyses were beginning to be questioned. And that meant that the questions were coming back.

In the next episode…

[Javier]: We had the feeling that they were covering something up, because what was the need to go out and lie. That empowered us more to say no, something has to be done here. So that’s when we decided to take a risk. And we decided to take that out to the media.

[Journalist]: Oviedo went further. He refuted Valdés’ statements about a towel stained with blood.

[Javier]: Do we want to ask the general director how he can say that the blood stain was Jorge Pizano’s if there’s no reference sample because the body was cremated?

[Carlos]: Ah, well I don’t know how many hands, but only Jorge Enrique’s was found on the bottle. I don’t know how many hands might have touched it. Or I don’t know how it was manipulated, yes, that I wouldn’t know.

[David]: There were three pieces of evidence that caused controversy: the autopsy, the bottle and the towel. The results of their analyses didn’t seem to convince everyone.

Credits:

[David]: La ruta del sol is a podcast from Central, Radio Ambulante Studios’ series channel, 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, with production support from Desirée Yépez. 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 by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales 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’d like to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their guidance 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 centralpodcastRA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode we heard how Jorge Enrique Pizano had shared with some journalists the irregularities he found in the construction of Ruta del Sol II.

[Iván Serrano]: So the question was: Who did you tell this to over there? Well, I told Néstor Humberto Martínez. And do you have proof that Néstor Humberto knew? Yes, I have the recording. And he lets me listen to a part  of it.

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Because I see you in a state of anxiety. What do I do?

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Ok. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Well. Because the thing is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing.

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about something…

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course.

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the way, because, damn, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, when you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[María Jimena Duzán]: And I said: this can’t be. Did this really happen? Is this Néstor Humberto Martínez’s voice? The Attorney General  who had said he was supposedly going to end all acts of corruption and expose  those responsible for Odebrecht. And I said no, this is a bomb. And then I thought and said: wow, if this gets published, well, Néstor Humberto Martínez would have to resign.

[David]: Today we begin in mid-2018. Jorge Enrique, as had been usual since the beginning of that year, stopped by journalist María Jimena Duzán’s house again. That day he arrived in his car.

[María Jimena]: Full! The car was full of documents, but full of documents!, and he left them with me.

[David]: They were all related to his work, during eight years, as controller of Ruta del Sol II, the unfinished project that Odebrecht and a company from Grupo Aval, one of the largest and most powerful conglomerates in the country, had begun to build. María Jimena already knew some of those documents, with them, she had been publishing her articles about corruption in the project.

Since Jorge Enrique had managed  to sell his apartment and was moving to a house a little over an hour from Bogotá, before leaving, he preferred that María Jimena keep the documents. Perhaps she could find new information to publish there.

[María Jimena]: And so, a month looking at those documents. And there I discovered, by luck, because well I had people who were helping me, a settlement agreement.

[David]: A settlement agreement is basically an agreement between two or more parties to put an end to a legal conflict and prevent new disputes. The confidential document that María Jimena found, dated March 2016, nine months before the Odebrecht corruption scandal broke in Colombia, was very clear to her:

[María Jimena]: This is a settlement agreement between Odebrecht and Grupo Aval. It was an acknowledgment of the existence of those irregular contracts that they had denied to Jorge Enrique himself so many times. Everyone there, at Grupo Aval, denied it to him. But in this contract they did acknowledge them. And they said: look, those contracts that add up to  32 billion and that were paid, Odebrecht owes them to Grupo Aval. And that, well, we’re going to work it out between the two of us to help each other out. You won’t sue me, I won’t  sue you. That’s what the contract said.

[David]: According to that, Odebrecht had to return those 32 billion pesos to the construction consortium, which was more than 10 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time, although María Jimena couldn’t confirm that that payment had actually been made. Furthermore, if one of the parties breached the contract, it had to give the other an additional payment of more than a million and a half dollars at the exchange rate of the time. And if either one broke confidentiality, the penalty was double: more than 3 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

[María Jimena]: 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, you know? So of course, there was already evidence that Odebrecht and Grupo Aval knew about these contracts and that they wanted, somehow, to cover it up or whitewash it so it would look like it was a transaction that had been resolved with the idea of helping each other out and that they were moving forward in their partnership.

[David]: In other words, that they had decided not to make claims against each other and leave things as they were.

Jorge Enrique insisted to María Jimena that he didn’t know about that contract between Odebrecht and Grupo Aval. He said he was just as surprised as she was, and even more so to learn that, as the document stated, the agreement had resulted from some meetings that both parties had between September and November 2015. That is, right after he recorded the company’s senior officials, including the then-lawyer Néstor Humberto Martínez, and it became very clear that he gave them proof of his findings.

But this contract that María Jimena had discovered left her feeling that Jorge Enrique had alerted the company about  the irregularities, but, instead of protecting him and putting an end to what appeared to be corruption, they rushed to cover everything up. María Jimena wanted to know how they had reached that decision. So she traveled to Brazil to speak with direct sources from Odebrecht.

[María Jimena]: And, indeed, they confirmed that the other members of Grupo Aval went all the way there to make this contract, to sign it. The one who proposed it and promoted it was Néstor Humberto Martínez, who at that time was the lawyer for Grupo Aval and who later became the Attorney General of the Nation in charge of investigating Odebrecht and the Grupo Aval scandal, please.

[David]: María Jimena published this settlement agreement in Semana magazine in July 2018. In the text she launched several questions, some directly to the Attorney General, so he would clarify what had happened. With one of those questions, which was what this document seemed to be, she titled the article: A code  of silence?

[María Jimena]: When I broke that whole story…that  really was another very complicated point and which also unleashed rage against Jorge Enrique Pizano. The threat he had was that they were going to put him in jail. And that was like a sword of Damocles for him. And he knew they were going to make him pay for the fact that he had discovered something. When that happened, Jorge Enrique himself  said you know what? It’s  time. We have to release the recordings.

[David]: The audio recordings in which it became clear that the then Attorney General of the Nation, Néstor Humberto Martínez, knew about the irregularities in one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country before being Attorney General, and that he still didn’t report them to the authorities.

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 3: The interview.

[David]: After the publication of that settlement agreement, Jorge Enrique thought it was better to release  the recordings on a television newscast, Noticias Uno. María Jimena agreed. So he contacted Iván Serrano, the other journalist to whom he had been giving information for a few months, including the audios. He told him it was time to reveal everything. By then, he was trying to shield himself from a possible charge from the Attorney General’s Office for allegedly having received a bribe when he was manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct. Additionally, he had already given the authorities proof of the irregularities he had found in Ruta del Sol II, including names of senior officials from Grupo Aval and businessmen involved. A year before he had given to the Attorney General’s Office  the reports he made when he was controller of the megaproject, and now they had contacted him again to testify against the only Grupo Aval official who was being investigated. Jorge Enrique asked for protection to be able to give that testimony.

So, much of the information that the authorities had was already coming out in the media, but now, with Iván Serrano, it would be the first time that his direct source was going to show his face and speak on national television. They agreed to meet in August 2018 to record an interview that they would publish later. This is Iván.

[Iván]: It’s in his apartment. I think on a day when he knows his daughters or his wife aren’t going to be there. And we do the interview.

[David]: In the video you only see Jorge Enrique in a medium shot, sitting next to a desk. He has a blue shirt and a black vest with a lapel microphone. Iván, off camera, asks him questions. This is how the interview begins…

[Iván]: I want to ask you a little about the decision you made to give us this interview. Why have you made that decision?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, I believe that the facts and the truths are coming to light and we see how there really is a plot, if you can call it that, against integrity, in this case, against my integrity as a person and that my rights are being violated.

[David]: A plot, he says, because he felt they were cornering him. The reason, according to him, was having done  his job well for almost a decade, even when some of the people involved didn’t expect him to do so.

[Jorge Enrique]: I became inconvenient for many people, among them those who today are… were convicted for the irregular contracts of Ruta del Sol.

[David]: He said explicitly that he had all the proof of those irregularities.

[Jorge Enrique]: I don’t speculate. I always make my statements because I have proof of each one of my actions, which I did in accordance with what the law ordered.

[David]: Now, we must remember that Grupo Aval had been on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014 and that meant that if there had been any  irregular  money transactions in the United States, that country’s authorities could investigate and, if necessary, sanction the company.

So, at that moment, Iván asked him a key question:

[Iván]: Were there transfers abroad? Were there transfers to the United States?

[Jorge Enrique]: Of contracts identified, not by me, but by the contractual manager designated by Episol and the construction consortium, yes, payments of transfers abroad were detected.

[Iván]: Do you know the amount?

[Jorge Enrique]: 2 million 700 thousand dollars, if I’m not wrong.

[Iván]: With what destination as t source?

[Jorge Enrique]: To Constructores Unidos.

[David]: Iván, who had known Jorge Enrique for a decade and had taken him as a source on other topics, knew how rigorous he was. That interview and everything he said there was supported with very solid foundations.

[Iván]: He was obsessive about information and he had proof of everything he said. Jorge Enrique would say A and show the paper for A. He’d say B, he had the paper for B.

[David]: During the interview, Jorge Enrique added something even more compromising: he had handed all this well-organized information to his bosses and he had warned them that something strange was happening long before the Odebrecht international corruption scandal broke.

[Jorge Enrique]: I presented the reports to the person who appointed me  as controller, right? Not only the final report, but everything… there is evidence in those emails. And here it’s clear and concrete evidence. It’s not that I heard, that I said, no. It’s what’s in the documents and it is the documents that speak.

[David]: In the interview Iván asked Jorge Enrique about two particular characters: about the president of Grupo Aval.

[Iván]: Did Mr. Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo also have knowledge?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, yes, of course.

[David]: And also, of course, about the Attorney General of the Nation.

[Iván]: Did you inform Mr. Néstor Humberto Martínez of these facts?

[Jorge Enrique]: Néstor Humberto Martínez, well, he was the lawyer for… for Grupo Aval.

[Iván]: But did he know? Did you personally inform him about the matter?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, of course.

[David]: And he had the recordings that proved it.

[Jorge Enrique]: All the meetings are perfectly documented both with documents and with audios, because I can record my meetings for follow-up.

[David]: In that interview, Jorge Enrique also mentioned that the witness who accused him before the Attorney General’s Office  of allegedly receiving a bribe when he was manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct knew about the recordings. He doesn’t clarify how this person got that information, but he did say he was extorting him with that.

[Jorge Enrique]: That’s why he sends me a text message telling me that, that…

[Iván]: And you have that?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, I have the text. In other words, extorting me for…

[Iván]: What did he tell you in the chat?

[Jorge Enrique]: No, no, that I had to give him that information. If not, he would speak badly of me.

[David]: Although Jorge Enrique seems very sure and convinced in that interview, Iván insists that he was actually cautious.

[Iván]: I thought he was going to be much more… much more direct, like he usually was.

[David]: And yes, he said compromising things like that one of Colombia’s richest men and the Attorney General knew about those irregularities from before, or that it was possible that the money that came out of there had gone through the United States, but still, Jorge Enrique was sparing.

[Iván]: Evidently, he had some fears. It was absolutely real and as I tell you, he spoke in a low voice in his apartment. In other words, it wasn’t a thing… it wasn’t a thing from the movies. I mean, here we’ve been understanding that many of those fears were absolutely real.

[David]: This  fear led Jorge Enrique to ask Iván not to publish that interview yet… nor the audios that proved he had shown proof of those irregular contracts to the now Attorney General. Jorge Enrique had one condition:

[Iván]: Which was when he was safe in the United States or if something happened to him. Unfortunately it was the latter.

[David]: The latter: three months later, he died.

A break and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

[David]: Jorge Enrique asked the Attorney General’s Office for protection for all the sensitive information he had given them. He asked for security for himself and for his family, and even wrote a letter directly to Néstor Humberto Martínez, but they never gave him that protection.

To the economic crisis, unemployment  and the lymphatic cancer that he was still treating, was added the fear of what could happen to his family. He asked his daughters, Juanita and Carolina, to take many precautions.

[Juanita Pizano]: My dad would tell me: don’t take the same route to catch the bus at the university. He’d tell me: change routes, change paths. Not to talk on the phone about where we are and try not to send messages either about where we are or who we’re with.

[Carolina Pizano]: My dad is worried about his health, about his physical integrity, you know? And about ours. So it was like racing against time without knowing what was going to happen. It was like you’re trapped in a problem. You’re trapped there and there’s nothing you can do to get out of that problem. You can’t say okay, let’s forget about this. How can you live like that?

[David]: Both knew, without many details, about the mess their dad was in. And they also knew he had been talking to journalists, but not everything was clear to them. 

[Carolina]: Beyond the content, I didn’t know that my dad had… had said to keep certain information until he died. I didn’t know my dad was so afraid as to do that. Everything was very bad. Everything seemed… It’s like a pressure cooker, that you don’t know when it’s going to explode.

[David]: Juanita remembers very well Tuesday, November 6, 2018. Unlike her parents, she had stayed living in Bogotá, at her grandmother’s, because it was easier for her to go to the university from there. That day her dad went to the city and met her at a café to tell her something very important.

For a few months, Jorge Enrique had been talking with American authorities to offer them the information he had in exchange for asylum and protection. Remember: Grupo Aval had been on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014, it was the responsibility of that country’s authorities to investigate the suspicious money movements the company had made. An investigation that, furthermore, connected with that of another bigger case: the Odebrecht corruption.

That day, Jorge Enrique told Juanita that he had already sent the proof he had.

[Juanita]: We had a coffee and he told me that  the complaint in the United States had already been made. They’re going to notify Grupo Aval or they already notified them, and he told me with a… I mean, he was about to cry. And I said: What do we do? Where do we hide? And he said: I don’t know. And silence. I mean, silence, silence. There was nothing more to say. Only for me it was very valuable to be in that moment with my dad and make him feel that I was supporting him. And that’s it, at the end we said goodbye, but yes, I remember thinking when is this going to end, how is this going to end? Because this has to end at some point, I mean, this… Something is going to happen, like it’s going to be the end point, but what’s it going to be because I feel it’s deadly.

[David]: Jorge Enrique spoke with journalist María Jimena Duzán the next day, Wednesday, November 7.

[María Jimena]: And he called me and said: Hey, how’s it going? I’m not well, the thing is… telling me that he was very sad about the cancer, he was tired, that he didn’t know what to do with his family, he was kind of  depressed. He would always get depressed, but he had many things to be depressed about. I honestly tell you that his life wasn’t easy because they made his life unlivable. And that was the last time I spoke with him.

[David]: Because the next day, Thursday, November 8, a day before his birthday, Jorge Enrique died.

The mother of the Pizano sisters, who didn’t want to speak in this story, gave the news to her two daughters by phone. Juanita was in class at the university. Carolina, who had left two months ago to study in Spain, was walking on the street.

[Carolina]: When my mom called me to tell me that my dad… She told me: Carito, Carito, your dad died. I had a panic attack in the middle of the street. No, I went into a sort of  shock… like not understanding, you know? What had happened. I still don’t understand very well.

[Juanita]: She just said poor thing, I found him lying on the floor. And she told me: poor thing, poor thing. Immediately I asked her: Who killed my dad? Who was it? Who was there? And my mom told me: nobody killed your dad. He had a heart attack.

[David]: And although the mother could barely speak from how distressed she was, she tried to explain to them what had happened early that morning. She told them they were getting ready to leave.

[Carolina]: My mom goes down to have breakfast and when she comes back up well my dad should have been getting ready, but my dad wasn’t opening the bathroom door.

[Juanita]: She knocked on the door and he didn’t answer. Nothing. She opened the door.

[Carolina]: And she finds my dad lying on the floor, but my dad was still… still alive.

[Juanita]: It seemed like he couldn’t breathe well. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t speak. He was breathing very hard and had his eyes open and was looking at her.

[Carolina]: My mom puts his underwear on him because my dad was in a towel. She puts him in the SUV to take him to the health center, but there my dad, well, dies.

[Juanita]: And once they declare my dad dead, the first thing my mom does, the first thing my mom does is two things: one, tell Néstor Humberto Martínez through a message.

[Carolina]: Your friend just died. Something like that. And with Luis Carlos Sarmiento, my mom called the secretary and told her: tell your boss that Jorge Enrique Pizano just died. And I think that her having done that, in that moment, says a lot.

[David]: The news of Jorge Enrique Pizano’s death came out immediately in the media. It also started to spread among those who knew him and his case. Journalist Iván Serrano was called by his boss, the deputy director of the newscast, to tell him. He told him that now they did have to publish the interview that had been pending for three months.

[Iván]: I was in shock and was frozen because it was a person with whom I constantly met and went to his house and talked to. It was agreed  that he would let us know: ok, now we can. That would have been ideal. That he, alive, safe, would have said: ok, let’s proceed. Not like this.

[David]: That same day, María Jimena remembers that she received a text message from Jorge Enrique. In it he complained about the same situation and said that his lawyer had told him that they had summoned him to an interrogation at the Attorney General’s Office for the investigation against him. María Jimena and he agreed to meet the following Saturday.

But three hours later, a mutual acquaintance called her.

[María Jimena]: And told me: Did you hear the news? What happened? Jorge Enrique died. What do you mean Jorge Enrique died? He was normal, as always, complaining, but he was fine.

[David]: The first thing María Jimena did was call Alejandro, Jorge Enrique’s oldest son, who lived in another country but who was going to travel to Colombia immediately. She already knew him because Jorge Enrique had gone with him to her house to have her listen to the recordings. Alejandro was aware of everything his dad was going through, including the publication that was coming, and agreed to meet with María Jimena that weekend, after Jorge Enrique’s funeral.

[María Jimena]: And then it happened that… Alejandro died.

[David]: The tragic scene at the beginning of this series: Alejandro drank the liquid from a bottle of flavored water that was on his dad’s desk and collapsed minutes later. As we already know, he died in the ambulance before reaching the hospital, but they still had to take his body there to do the autopsy and determine the cause of death. The hospital reported the case to the authorities.

[David]: Without yet knowing what had happened, Carolina and Juanita remember that in the midst of the confusion at the hospital, an official from the CTI, the Technical Investigation Unit, the area of the Attorney General’s Office that supports investigations, of collecting evidence, approached them.

[Juanita]: He immediately puts my sister and me in a little room. The man asks us what happened.

[Carolina]: He started asking a lot of questions, and he’d tell me but at what time was it? And it’s like no, I didn’t, I had no notion of time.

[Juanita]: I felt that the man didn’t want to let me speak. I’d tell him, the thing is I’m over 18 years old, I’m 19, I know what happened, but I felt like the man didn’t want me to say anything, I don’t know why. I mean, it frustrated me a lot.

[David]: After the questions, the CTI investigator asked them to go to the house where everything had happened.

[Juanita]: And he starts touching doors, drawers, everything with his hands, without gloves, without any kind of precaution.

[Carolina]: He takes a bottle out of the trash and says what is this? And I said: do you want me to tell you it’s a bottle? I mean… And that’s it. He asked some questions, like with that air of superiority but with zero tact. I mean, my dad and my brother just died… Why are you asking me things this way?

[David]: The sisters don’t remember exactly how long that first informal visit lasted, but it was quick and the CTI official didn’t take anything. When it ended, the family decided not to stay there that night. They closed the house and went to Bogotá.

The next day, Monday, November 12, the shock was no longer just for the family, but also for many people who had seen  Jorge Enrique’s interview on Noticias Uno.

[Archive]

[Mábel Lara]: Pizano was convinced that he was a victim of judicial and economic power, especially of General Attorney  Néstor Humberto Martínez, and our journalist Iván Serrano was with him and received from his hands proof that he was a whistleblower and not the accused.

[David]: They also published the recording, as they had agreed…

[Archive]

[Mábel Lara]: He gave us audio recordings that prove that he told Néstor Humberto Martínez, with documents in view, all the Odebrecht irregularities in Colombia since mid-2015. Neither Martínez nor Corficolombiana, the Brazilian company’s partner in the construction of Ruta del Sol II, paid attention to him. On the contrary, he was fired two years later.

[David]: During the same broadcast of the newscast, they talked about what was known at that time about Alejandro’s death.

[Archive]

[Journalist]: Yesterday, when the family was just beginning to recover from Pizano’s demise, tragedy brought mourning to them again. Alejandro, who had arrived from Barcelona to attend his father’s burial, also died. The cause of death is still unknown.

[David]: That was confirmed the next day, Tuesday, November 13. When the little information available started to leak and the story got much more complicated, the Deputy Attorney General of the Nation and the director of the Forensic Medicine Institute, the forensic entity, held a press conference.

[Archive]

[María Paulina Riveros]: Good afternoon. Well, today I’m accompanied by Dr. Carlos Valdés, with whom we inform the country that on Sunday, November 11 in the afternoon hours, the Attorney General’s Office received the news of the death of Alejandro Pizano Ponce de León.

[David]: She said that after two days of an initial investigation, of reconstructing the facts around Alejandro’s death and analyzing the results of the autopsy…

[María Paulina]: The cause of death was poisoning by cyanide ingestion.

[David]: And that, additionally,  the investigators had in their possession the bottle where the liquid was.

[María Paulina]: To which the corresponding analyses are being performed. As a result of the previous facts, the Attorney General’s Office has also initiated a criminal investigation to determine the reasons why this substance was found in the house of the victim’s parents.

[David]: That was the big question: Why was there cyanide there? Well, that and also the cause of Jorge Enrique’s death. Could it be known if he also drank from that bottle?

[María Paulina]: We understand that Dr. Pizano’s body was cremated at the time because in the autopsy, apparently, the cause of death was established as a heart attack.

[David]: In other words, since it was supposed to have been a death from natural causes, it wasn’t necessary to preserve his remains intact and now, of course, they couldn’t do this type of analysis on the ashes.

But there seemed to be an alternative.

[María Paulina]: Dr. Valdés, I don’t know if you can explain that part of the autopsy, but I repeat, that is being investigated at this moment.

[David]: The director of the Forensic  Medicine Institute confirmed that the result of that autopsy revealed cardiac failure.

[Carlos Valdés]: However, the person who performed the clinical autopsy left samples of different tissues for histopathology studies.

[David]: Meaning that, that person decided to keep parts of tissue from Jorge Enrique’s body in the hospital to analyze them. That meant that in those samples they could look for traces of cyanide. That’s what  the director of Forensic Medicine suggested. 

[Carlos]: The investigation that at this moment the Attorney General’s Office has undertaken will very surely order the analysis of those samples.

[David]: A break and we’ll be back

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

The Pizanos’ story was very juicy and very particular even in the violent context of Colombia, a country in which there have been and continue to be many witnesses of crimes who end up dead. But this case, first of all, had to do with an enormous web of international corruption. Furthermore, the witness died after trying unsuccessfully to ask for protection for everything he had discovered, and with the additional tragedy of his son’s death under very strange circumstances. And, as if that weren’t enough, there was also the audio of the Attorney General of the Nation with a phrase that became famous.

[Néstor Humberto]: Hehehehe

[Jorge Enrique]: Do you understand me?

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots…

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes. This is a bribe, dude.

[David]: On social media they wouldn’t stop talking about what was happening. Even Alejandro’s last tweet that he published on the morning of the same day of his death went viral. In it he speaks to a very well-known radio journalist who publicly accused Jorge Enrique of having given a contract to Odebrecht in exchange for a bribe when he was manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct. Alejandro’s tweet says the following: «To you who didn’t speak the truth about my dad’s situation when you could, who judged him through your microphones, life will have to teach you to be responsible.»

In response to that tweet, people started commenting things like these:

[Tweet 1]

Strength for your whole family in such a terrible situation but it will be the truth that cleans Mr. Jorge.

[Tweet 2]

Rest in peace father and son and may justice be done and what happened be clarified. Everything that happened is too strange, this country is in the hands of a mafia. This is now undeniable.

[Tweet 3]

People who call themselves journalists but act without scruples or professionalism. All with individual interests. They cover up for some and denigrate others.

[Tweet 4]

Forensic  Medicine must determine the causes of the deaths of father and son, gruesome events.

[Tweet 5]

A supportive hug for you and your family. For that journalist, total contempt for his mediocre work.

[Tweet 6]

The corrupt people of this country, because of their greed for money and power, destroy lives and families. They will fall, sooner or later they will fall… in memory of those fallen because of corruption, double standards and violence in Colombia!

[David]: It became the most important news in the media.

[Archive]

[Journalist]: Attorney General’s Office initiated an investigation to determine the causes of Alejandro Pizano’s death.

[Journalist]: The Attorney General’s Office is investigating the strange death of Alejandro Pizano, son of Jorge Enrique Pizano, one of the main witnesses in the Odebrecht case.

[Journalist]: The question today is, who put the cyanide in that bottle. The Attorney General’s Office is investigating the strange death of Alejandro Pizano, son of Jorge Enrique Pizano, one of the main witnesses in the Odebrecht case, who arrived in Bogotá, as we’ve told you, to attend his father’s burial.

[David]: The news even reached international media…

[Archive]

[Journalist]: Colombia is investigating the death of a key witness in the Odebrecht case, after his son died poisoned with cyanide. Now it’s being investigated whether the engineer, key witness in the scandal of the Brazilian construction company that has shaken all of South America, was murdered.

[Journalist]: Those close to the former auditor dismiss that he intended to commit suicide with cyanide. The engineer left a recorded interview in case he died or obtained protection in another country. His statement implicates the Attorney General, Néstor Humberto Martínez, and raises doubts about the investigation of the plot in Colombia.

[David]: Every day they published more and more information about the scandal this story had become. If before very few people in Colombia had heard of Odebrecht, now the Pizanos’ case had turned attention to this international corruption machine.

But the family was saturated. They couldn’t stand the media chasing them to know more details.

[Carolina]: They contacted us without the slightest tact. Without the slightest empathy. So I’d tell them they were not professional at all. And obviously, you’re in  pain,they start harassing you, well what you do is shut yourself in, isolate yourself, say,  don’t talk to me about the subject. It’s like I don’t want to talk about this. And like that to everyone. But a ton of journalists, a ton of journalists.

[David]: But there was someone who did have to talk about the subject publicly:

[Archive]

[Juan Roberto Vargas]: Mr. Attorney General, thank you very much for attending Noticias Caracol.

[Néstor Humberto]: Well, thank you very much for your invitation. It seems very timely and very important to me.

[David]: This interview with Néstor Humberto Martínez came out on the night of November 14, 2018, three days after Alejandro’s death. It was on national television with journalist Juan Roberto Vargas.

[Juan Roberto]: How do you feel today, Attorney General?

[Néstor Humberto]: Well look, this position of highest responsibility has all these uncertainties and difficulties and you have to handle the situation always with composure, with poise and with a lot of serenity. That’s why, I hadn’t spoken out until today. 

[David]: Martínez started by saying that this whole debate that was being generated was political, not legal, and that’s why it was full of lies. The first thing he tried to clarify was that that meeting that Jorge Enrique recorded in 2015, three years before dying, and that Noticias Uno revealed, was personal, between two friends, not work-related.

[Néstor Humberto]: He invited me to that meeting, he asked me a favor to take some papers to Dr. Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo. I acted in that meeting as a personal friend of Jorge Enrique.

[Juan Roberto]: Of course, you act as his friend and he tells you a series of things that later become the heart of the worst corruption scandal that Colombia has had. The big question that Colombia asks today, and this isn’t political or legal, Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect, is, how did you at that moment not report that to the competent authorities?

[Néstor Humberto]: The answer is in the recordings that all Colombians learned about over the weekend.

[Juan Roberto]: What’s the answer?

[Néstor Humberto]: I ask Jorge Enrique, Jorge Enrique, tell me, are these bribes, are they kickbacks? Yes or no?

[David]: He was referring to this part of the recording that Noticias Uno revealed:

[Recording]

[Néstor Humberto]: Are these bribes? Yes or no? Tell me. How is it true? Yes or no? What?

[Interview]

[Néstor Humberto]: And he tells me man, well I don’t have certainty.

[Recording]

[Jorge Enrique]: No, man, well I don’t have certainties.

[Interview]

[Néstor Humberto]: He didn’t have certainty that that was a corruption crime. So one can’t go before the authorities to say look, investigate this that seems to be, that it could be or maybe not, no. When you go to the authorities you say this is like this.

[David]: I repeat Martínez’s argument: since Jorge Enrique, at that point in the conversation, told him that he didn’t have certainty that they were crimes, then, he had no way to report it.

[Juan Roberto]: But in other parts of the same conversations that Noticias Uno reveals, you even say: look, what  you’re showing me is very serious. It even seems like there are bribes for people in the Colombian government. Wasn’t that enough?

[David]: Juan Roberto, the journalist, refers to this part of the recording in which Martínez, as the company’s lawyer, does seem to sense that there were crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: You know what I think? That it’s for the paras, that it’s internal corruption, that it’s to pay bribes outside, that it’s to pay bribes inside. All of the above.

[David]: He says: that it’s for the paras (that is, paramilitaries), that it’s internal corruption, that it’s to pay bribes outside, that it’s to pay bribes inside. All of the above.

But there’s also this other part of the recording, which Martínez also didn’t mention in the interview, in which he seems to be sure that they were bribes.

[Recording]

[Néstor Humberto]: That one, for example, Inversiones Profesionales, it’s clear that it’s a huge bribe. 

[David]: Nor did he mention this other part of the recording, the famous phrase.

[Néstor Humberto]: Jorge Enrique: Do you understand me?

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots…

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes. This is a bribe, dude.

[David]: But going back to the interview… Martínez did confirm that Jorge Enrique discovered suspicious contracts, but insisted that they were only known to be crimes when the Attorney General’s Office, his Attorney General’s Office, investigated two years later. That’s when they realized that Jorge Enrique was indeed right.

He also assured that Jorge Enrique had been key in the investigations.

[Néstor Humberto]: For God’s sake, that can’t be forgotten. He was very important. But additionally, he gave statements here in the Odebrecht case and everything he said about the contracts we incorporated in May 2018 into the Attorney General’s Office investigations.

[David]: 2018… eight years after Jorge Enrique began reporting the irregularities to his bosses.

And, as we’ve already heard, the heads of Odebrecht never testified in Colombia. Neither did those of Grupo Aval. And the way the journalists learned about the workings of that corruption in the country was, in large part, through what the authorities in Peru and Brazil investigated.

Martínez also failed to  mention in the interview that Jorge Enrique didn’t feel safe, that he had asked the Attorney General’s Office for protection for having given such compromising information and that they never gave it to him.

Juan Roberto, the journalist, asked him next  why he didn’t report  those irregularities when they appointed him Attorney General, in August 2016.

[Juan Roberto]: Didn’t it occur to you? And forgive me, please excuse me. It’s with the greatest respect, Attorney General, didn’t it occur to you to say hey, a man told me two years ago that there were some big irregularities there?

[Néstor Humberto]: No, look. I can’t make references to conversations that have to do with my professional practice.

[David]: But remember that a few minutes before he had said it was a meeting of friends, not a professional meeting.

[Juan Roberto]: But you were friends…

[Néstor Humberto]: Just like you, journalist.

[Juan Roberto]: No, because you tell me you were friends, you weren’t a lawyer.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, but later I made a contract… No, no, no.

[Juan Roberto]: That is…

[Néstor Humberto]: Don’t create misunderstandings. Of course, the friend asks me to take some papers…

[Juan Roberto]: As a friend, not as a lawyer.

[Néstor Humberto]: … and after they reach an agreement, as a lawyer they ask me to execute a contract, which is when I learn about the irregular contracts.

[David]: Martínez was referring to the settlement agreement we mentioned at the beginning of this episode and that journalist María Jimena Duzán published.

With that, Martínez changed his argument: according to what he said in the interview, he learned about the irregular contracts as a lawyer when he made that settlement agreement and since he had a professional privilege, he didn’t report it to the authorities.

But that didn’t change the most important point…

[Juan Roberto]: That is, you acknowledge that when you arrived at the Attorney General’s Office you knew about those irregularities.

[David]: And Martínez insisted…

[Néstor Humberto]: I knew about no crime.

[David]: Even when Juan Roberto clarified it again…

[Juan Roberto]: Those aren’t irregularities. Those are crimes.

[Néstor Humberto]: When it’s known where the money ended up. Nobody knew where the money had ended up. Jorge Enrique would tell me I don’t know where that money went.

[David]: Martínez also said that in May 2018, he had decided to step away from the Odebrecht investigation because of his conflict of interest.

[Néstor Humberto]: So in this we have acted with total rigor. But the most important thing is that the investigations are carried out, by independent and autonomous prosecutors, whose defense I assume absolutely for their moral integrity. They’re irreproachable people.

[David]: But Juan Roberto questioned him for precisely having that position of power.

[Juan Roberto]: But the thing is the prosecutors who are investigating are your subordinates.

[Néstor Humberto]: Excuse me, in fact… that’s false.

[Juan Roberto]: No. Pardon me, the prosecutors who are carrying the case are… the office is next to your office, Attorney General.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, excuse me. Completely false.

[Juan Roberto]: Why?

[Néstor Humberto]: In Colombia, by mandate of the Constitution and jurisprudence, prosecutors are autonomous and independent.

[Juan Roberto]: Oh no, that’s another thing. But what I’m talking about is the bad taste that’s left with people.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, the thing is public opinion can’t be confused. No, I can’t give an order to a prosecutor in a case.

[David]: But the Constitution itself gives a lot of power and autonomy to the Attorney General of the Nation to manage the State’s investigation and prosecution machine.

After more than 40 minutes of going around the same theme, that he knew about irregularities, not crimes, and not going into the subject of Jorge Enrique and Alejandro’s deaths, the interview ended.

[Juan Roberto]: Well, Mr. Attorney General, thank you very much for having attended Noticias Caracol at this difficult time.

[Néstor Humberto]: Well I thank you and above all the severity of your questions, because it allows me to show the integrity with which my prosecutors have been acting and I assume their defense because they’re men who fulfill their duty to society and the Constitution.

[Juan Roberto]: Thank you very much, Mr. Attorney General..

[David]: Two days after that interview, on November 16, several important things happened. Among them, the revelation of a new audio.

In the next episode…

[Juanita]: But he immediately said that, he told us: but I need you to put out a statement because well people are going crazy. So I need you to put out a statement to say that you support the Attorney General’s Office investigation.

[Carolina]: They were looking, but it seemed… I don’t know, it’s like… Imagine some people like zombies, right? who are desperately looking for what to bite, what to eat.

[Juanita]: We didn’t understand that difficulty in establishing… Because there was no clarity about literally anything, about what procedures were being carried out, about when they were being carried out. If someone entered the house without us knowing, who had the bottle in their hands, who put the bottle.

[David]: To know what had happened, they had to investigate the evidence that surely remained in the house where Jorge Enrique and Alejandro died.

Credits

[David]: 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, with production support from Desirée Yépez. 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 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 of the series are by Diego Corzo.

Product development for La Ruta del Sol was handled by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production was done by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales and Samantha Proaño, from the Radio Ambulante Studios audiences team.

Many thanks to Laura Isabel Niño, Daniel Patiño, Andrea García, Jacobo Patiño, Juanita Camacho and Esteban Patiño for lending us their voices for this episode.

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 in 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. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: This story begins on a very sad Sunday for the Pizano Ponce de León family. It was November 11, 2018, the peak of a family tragedy that had been going on for several years. The family had gathered at their house in Subachoque, a town in Colombia about an hour from Bogotá, to mourn the father, who had died in that same house three days earlier. Juanita Pizano, one of the daughters, was there. At the time, she was 19 years old.

[Juanita Pizano]: We were having a family moment, really beautiful, actually: remembering my dad and sharing stories and laughing and crying a little.

[David]: Juanita’s father, Jorge Enrique Pizano, was 57 years old and had a diagnosis of lymphatic cancer that they had managed to treat, but one day before his birthday,  according to the official report, an unexpected heart failure ended up killing him.

That November 11th, Juanita was with her mother, who lived with Jorge Enrique in that house and who found him collapsed on the bathroom floor on Thursday morning. Her older siblings, Carolina and Alejandro were also there: as soon as they received the news, they had traveled from Spain, where they lived. And Alejandro’s wife, who was pregnant at the time.

With the travels, the funeral, the cremation in Bogotá, and meetings with friends and other family members, they hadn’t been able to have an intimate moment to talk. In fact, this was the first time they all went  to the house. Finally, they had a moment to feel calmer… or at least to share their grief in peace.

[Carolina Pizano]: We arrived there. So we started looking at all of my dad’s things. And, yes, I was the first one to go upstairs.

[David]: She is Carolina Pizano, Juanita’s older sister. She’s 7 years older than her. Carolina remembers that that day, while her brother’s wife stayed in the kitchen preparing lunch, the rest of them started walking around the house.

[Carolina]: So we took my dad’s watches and other things, yes, we were each like, taking  things, or we saw them and left them there.

[David]: Then, the three children and their mother went to the main bedroom, where Jorge Enrique used to sleep.

[Juanita Pizano]: Alejandro starts saying, I should dress the way my dad tells me. And he put on some sneakers, the sneakers we gave my dad for his last Father’s Day that we gave him sneakers…

[David]: Then Alejandro approached Jorge Enrique’s desk, which was in the same room.  There were still some papers, like a to-do list. Alejandro started to take a look at  what was there.

[Carolina]: So that’s when Alejandro calls me and says Caro, look.

[David]: He showed her a photo of her that their dad had put in a picture frame.

[Carolina]: And for me it was a… it’s a very important photo because it’s like the moment where I overcame all my traumas, yes, like all my depression. That my dad had that photo there was super significant to me. And next to it was a bottle.

[David]: A small flavored-water plastic bottle with a green cap — a personal-sized one.

[Juanita]: And my mom said, ‘oh, your dad’s waters,’ because my dad was always so thirsty. She said it was because he had had cancer, but I don’t really know. He was extremely thirsty all the time, so there were always those green-caped bottles around.

[Carolina]: From what I remember –I have no idea if I’m right or wrong– it was quite full. Yes, I mean, obviously it wasn’t new, but it was at least… at least three quarters full. And my brother grabs the bottle, tastes it and says, «What is this disgusting thing?” But I thought well it tasted bad to him and that’s it. Yes, like it must be spoiled.

[David]: But the taste had to be more than bad, because Alejandro’s reaction was not exactly one of disgust. It seemed more like terror. He left the bottle on the desk and ran to the bathroom, desperate.

[Juanita]: But he was screaming. He was terrified, completely panicked. And he started trying to spit in the bathroom.

[David]: It didn’t work. Alejandro came out staggering and started going down the stairs as best he could. At that moment, Juanita grabbed the bottle. She brought it close to her mouth.

[Juanita]: I wasn’t going to be so stupid as to do exactly the same thing, to  take a sip, but I did want to at least perceive what was there. And I didn’t even have to completely turn the bottle over. Just putting my mouth there I felt the most disgusting and bitter taste I’ve ever felt in my life. I mean, I can only describe it as death.

[David]: When Alejandro reached the kitchen, he fell to the floor and started convulsing. His mother, not understanding what was happening, tried to lift him up and help him somehow.

[Carolina]: “My mom tried to make him vomit by sticking her finger in his mouth, but she used her thumb. And I said No! I pulled her back and used my index finger to make him throw up , but my brother was already rigid — so he bit me and I still have a scar here.”

[David]: They quickly got him in the car to take him to the nearest health post. Before leaving, Carolina ran upstairs and grabbed the bottle.

[Carolina]: I’ve watched many medical shows. If they know what he took, they know how he can be saved. So I went and grabbed the bottle and got in the back of the car, in… in the trunk. With that door open and everything. And the door closed with the bump of going downhill at full speed. I think that’s when I passed the bottle to my sister.

[David]: After a few minutes they got to the health post. Alejandro was unconscious. The entrance to the place was empty, there was no one to receive him. They started screaming for help until someone came out and put him on a stretcher. Alejandro was losing his vital signs. Respiratory arrest was imminent and that place wasn’t equipped to save him. He had to be taken immediately to a larger hospital, which was more than 40 minutes away.

[Juanita]: They put him in an ambulance and there I handed the bottle to someone in the ambulance and told them: this is what he drank. And then my mom got in the ambulance and the rest of us were in the car behind the ambulance and we were going to the Facatativá hospital, but he lost vital signs.

[David]: They weren’t going to make it. The ambulance stopped in the middle of the road, in front of another smaller hospital, and the paramedics started trying to resuscitate him: 30 chest compressions, two mouth-to-mouth breaths… And so on, several times. From outside, the others watched how the ambulance moved up and down in dozens of resuscitation attempts. Like that for half an hour.

[Juanita]: And a crowd of people started gathering around us, and we just cried. And we screamed at Alejandro to stay with us.

[Carolina]: 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. I felt such hatred for God. I said he can’t exist if this happens.

[David]: But there was nothing else to do. He had died. Alejandro was 31 years old.

[Carolina]: And then, everything collapsed. My mom was screaming. They had to sedate her. Life breaks in two and I think it breaks into a thousand pieces. That’s why for me, death isn’t the death of the person, it’s the death of… of everyone who was around the person, because you stop being who you were. Many parts of yourself change.

[Juanita]: And I couldn’t believe it. The worst moment of our lives, what does this mean? I mean, my mom was just screaming, obviously like a madwoman. They had to give her tranquilizers. Everything was absolute and total chaos.

[David]: But in the midst of the chaos and shock they were all in, Juanita remembers seeing the bottle.

[Juanita]:They took it out of the ambulance and some nurses had it. But I don’t know. I mean, I only saw it passing by, but I don’t… I don’t know. That was the last time I saw the bottle.

[David]: Two days later the autopsy results came out: cyanide poisoning.

From Central series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

Alejandro Pizano’s death left many questions. In the days that followed, the case became increasingly tangled until it ended up turning the attention of an entire country toward a very large corrupt machinery that operated not only in Colombia, but in several countries in the region.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 1: The Bottle.

[David]: Whether a substance is toxic depends on many factors, but the amount to which the body is exposed is the most important. The famous phrase «the dose makes the poison» is true. So much so, that it’s surprising to know that, for example, consuming cyanide, the most famous poison in crime stories, is more common than you’d think. It’s found in apple and pear seeds. Also in the fleshy interior of peach, cherry, plum, and apricot pits. Spinach, almonds, soy and even yuca contain this substance. It doesn’t kill us, of course, but only because the doses are very, very low.

But you shouldn’t be too confident either. Low doses of cyanide can be lethal. Just taking orally between 150 and 200 milligrams, less than a pinch –what you can grab between two fingers–, or even breathing the gas it exudes, can cause effects to start appearing immediately: headache, nausea, tachycardia, chest pain, difficulty breathing. At that point, the substance is already leaving cells without the oxygen necessary to produce energy and that starts to cause a very rapid cascade of deadly effects.

It starts with central nervous system dysfunction, which is reflected in loss of consciousness and convulsions. Then the body goes into a coma, there’s cardiovascular failure, respiratory arrest and brain damage. All of that lasts between 10 minutes and an hour, when the person dies. After that, some signs that experts can detect in the body remain: like reddish spots on the skin, cherry-colored gastric mucosa and sometimes a smell of bitter almonds. 

In Alejandro Pizano’s case, his family had seen the immediate reaction to drinking from the bottle. That’s why his sister Carolina had grabbed it, to take it and have its contents examined. Even before the autopsy results came out, it was clear that that’s what had killed him. But, for his other sister, Juanita, that confirmation, had created new doubts rather than giving them that one certainty.

[Juanita]:The fact is that my dad’s death was no longer of natural causes. I mean, at least the question existed of what happened to dad? It couldn’t be natural causes, because who put that in there? I mean, everything started to become a bit dark.

[David]: And even more so knowing that for almost a decade, their dad had been dedicated to collecting very sensitive information.

[Juanita]: My dad knew many things that no one else knew.

[Carolina]: Yes, my dad was a very curious person and with that curiosity which was so… so positive, right? Like I want to know how this works so I go and ask.

[Juanita]: He had a great capacity to store information in his brain that we… never understood.

[David]: Juanita and Carolina’s father, as we already said, was named Jorge Enrique Pizano. He was a civil engineer recognized in his field who had worked in private companies and in Colombia’s public sector. He got along with people. Juanita describes him as someone very extroverted.

[Juanita]: My dad’s personality was totally captivating, I mean, extremely charismatic. Running an errand in Bogotá, going to the  mall or something was also… It caused me a lot of anxiety because my dad would run into 50 people per square meter and had to greet each and every one.

[David]:Very different from Juanita herself, who since childhood has always been more shy and reserved with everyone, even with Jorge Enrique.

[Juanita]: But as I was growing up my dad always sought to have a close relationship with me, even if, let’s say, I didn’t want to and not because I didn’t love him deeply, but because sometimes it was very hard for me to tell him or in general, express how I felt.

[David]: But he always found a way to show her his love without pressuring her, with small but very significant acts. Sometimes he would leave books or notes in her room.

[Juanita]: Pretty concise notes, but I think very heartfelt, that maybe only he and I understood perfectly what was behind them.

[David]: With his other daughter, Carolina, he also had a good relationship. What she remembers most about him was his sense of humor.

[Carolina]:My dad had… had a very fine humor, right? And very… he was, he was too funny. So he was always making jokes about everything.

[David]: Although sometimes they argued, especially because Jorge Enrique was very strict and pressured her to do things the way he thought was best.

[Carolina]:My dad always worked very hard, he was very methodical, very organized. It was very, very much his personality, and the thing is… My dad always said: “things should be done well or not done at all”.

[David]: And with that idea of doing things right he accepted a public position in 2008. They named him manager of Bogotá’s Aqueduct. There he would have to follow the goals of the new mayor’s office, which consisted, among other things, of expanding water service to some areas of the city and decontaminating the Bogotá river.

At that time, Carolina and Juanita didn’t understand very well what their dad did. They imagined it had something to do with pipes, water and building construction, but what became very clear to them very quickly was that it wasn’t an easy job.

[Carolina]: Because he had the whole issue of unions. Many people came to ask him for contracts. The issue of bidding. And so many people came to request positions.

[Juanita]: There, I guess I could understand that my dad’s work wasn’t so much pipes and buildings, but more management. 

[David]: And political, especially political…

That job ended up being torture for Jorge Enrique, and it didn’t take long for him to start complaining.

[Carolina]: My dad was dying of boredom, he didn’t want to be there anymore, he wanted to run away from there.

[David]: Because the situation reached the point of becoming dangerous.

[Juanita]: I remember him saying that he wanted to resign and that he wanted to resign and once I saw him tell my mom that he wanted to leave the Aqueduct because he was being threatened.

[David]: Juanita, who was between nine and ten years old, doesn’t remember very well if it was her mother or who it was, but at that age she was given a very clear order: she couldn’t answer the phone.

[Juanita]: I saw my dad quite tense and I knew there were people who had been making threatening calls to my dad. I felt panic, but well I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t do anything, especially because I wasn’t supposed to know what was happening and I wasn’t supposed to understand because I was very young, even if I did know. 

[David]: Around that time, Jorge Enrique got an opportunity to work in the private sector that really motivated him. It was with the civil engineer and banker Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, one of the richest men in Colombia and owner of Grupo Aval, one of the largest business conglomerates in the country… and in Latin America. He owns several banks. Not only in Colombia, but also in other countries in the region: Banco de Bogotá, Banco de Occidente, Banco Popular, and AV Villas, among others. He also has investments in agro-industrial and mining businesses, and owns pension funds, brokerage firms, ATM networks, energy infrastructure companies, luxury hotels, and several media outlets, including El Tiempo, one of the most important newspapers in Colombia. His conglomerate covers practically every strategic sector of the Colombian and regional economy.

Among  all the activities of Grupo Aval, there’s also investment in construction projects of different sizes, public and private, like housing complexes, bridges, highways. Some of those constructions, like a cancer research center and a building at the National University, have been donated by Sarmiento Angulo himself through his foundation. Jorge Enrique had already met him at some point while he was at the Aqueduct.

[Carolina]:For my dad he was like a great man, he was someone he deeply admired. So Sarmiento told my dad one day that he would like my dad to work with him. Yes, like he was welcome whenever he wanted. The next day my dad went with his best outfit, with his résumé and told him: Look, here is my résumé. Of course, Luis Carlos received the résumé and passed it along and said something like find a position for him. 

[David]: Within the entire conglomerate there was an open position at Corficolombiana, the company in charge of financing and investing in all kinds of businesses, including construction ones. Not long before, the consortium formed by a Corficolombiana company called Episol and two other partners had won a very important public-private contract: the construction of the second section of the so-called Ruta del Sol, a highway of more than 1,000 kilometers that would connect the center of the country with the Atlantic coast. That second section, known as Ruta del Sol II, would cover more than 500 kilometers and, according to the original contract, would cost over one billion dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

The position available for Jorge Enrique was that of controller, which is basically an auditor.

[Juanita]:Being a controller means ensuring that payments are compliant with the law in terms of contracts and in terms of money laundering.

[David]: In other words, review the consortium’s accounts and verify that payments met international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism standards. This means he would have to ensure the project’s transparency. It wasn’t the job he dreamed of– he actually wanted to be closer to Sarmiento Angulo– but it was the best option at that moment.

[Carolina]: And he accepted the position because he said ok, well, you have to start somewhere, right? This is like getting closer to that person I admire.

[David]: Jorge Enrique started his new job in August 2010. Despite everything, he was enthusiastic. His personality fit perfectly with the job he had been hired to do, and that’s why he came to review everything in great detail. Very quickly he noticed suspicious things in the documents.

[Carolina]:My dad starts to notice that there are inconsistencies, that there are things that don’t add up, that there are payments that… where does this come from.

[David]: After two weeks of being in his job, Jorge Enrique wrote a report that the media outlet Cuestión Pública later revealed. In it he warns that the consortium was making payments without signature control from whoever ordered them. Those payments were made from Corficolombiana by an executive from the other partner company in the project without authorization to sign them.

[Carolina]: But of course, my dad was initially very naive. Yes, he was very naive because he thought it’s an error, there are errors, yes, they have to be fixed.

[David]: But so many errors couldn’t be normal. Each time he found more incriminating things.

[Carolina]: Fake companies, fake signatures. Corruption, pure and simple corruption.

[David]: We’ll be right back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

So… Jorge Enrique Pizano was so methodical and obsessed with order, that during his work as controller he dedicated himself to saving every document he reviewed, every report he made and every email he sent. According to Cuestión Pública’s investigation, one of those emails had the subject «Higher payments» and he sent it in November 2013 to two consortium executives. There he denounced payments of invoices for, and I quote here, «higher and different values than those contracted without having the corresponding support.» They were big alerts, but he didn’t receive any response.

At home, Jorge Enrique didn’t talk about the details of his work, but Juanita remembers that he constantly complained about his bosses’ lack of diligence, their lack of communication.

[Juanita]: He talked a lot about how they were ignoring him. He said: I tried to talk to this person or I had this conversation with this person about these payments and… and damn they don’t do anything.

[Carolina]: He would get home visibly upset sometimes and would say that they hadn’t told him no… that yes, like they hadn’t given him the information, but initially it was like that typical annoyance of the man who, who… or the woman who arrives home loaded from work. Over time it became much more complex because my dad started to realize that this was serious and that many people already knew.

[David]: In 2014 the initial contract for the highway was modified to include a new 80-kilometer section, with an additional cost of more than 500 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time, and that construction was assigned to the same consortium. Jorge Enrique later realized, among other things, that more than 5 million dollars had been paid, at the exchange rate of the time, for land management related to that project—to a company that, just a year earlier, had been dedicated to textile manufacturing.

By 2015, alerts about irregular contracts flooded the project, but when Jorge Enrique demanded information to write his reports, they denied it to him.

[Juanita]: So he had to start going directly to the treasury to ask for the payments that had gone out from Corficolombiana. He had to start begging for this information, even searching almost in the trash cans. So he talked about all this quest for information, because they were no longer giving it to him. And that terrible angst of no longer having anything to do day to day, because they weren’t letting him do his job.

[David]: In June of that year, as Cuestión Pública also revealed, he sent an executive summary to his bosses. In it he asked them to apply internal anti-money laundering regulations urgently. He told them that they were paying invoices without, and I quote here, «respective reports or support of deliverables.» But nobody responded.

[Juanita]:Obviously he looked quite stressed. He suffered a lot from stomach aches from literal stress gastritis. I mean, the stress was getting worse and I think it was also a generalized stress for everyone, a tension that grew and grew. None of us could handle the stress. I even stopped eating. No, I mean, my mom looked sick. My mom couldn’t sleep, I think she couldn’t eat either. And that also caused me anxiety and fears.

[Carolina]: I, on the other hand, have always been quite avoidant, so I prefer to look the other way while things get settled. I never imagined that things were so serious. I lived in this privileged girl bubble, absolutely pathetic. So I said no, but my dad… obviously nothing is going to happen. Yes, like… Yes, nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to happen. That’s what I thought.

[David]: But Jorge Enrique didn’t think the same. He wasn’t going to sit and wait. He tried one last option. He then sought out people from the closest circle of Sarmiento Angulo, the owner of Grupo Aval. He wanted to tell them about all the irregularities and have them alert him directly about what was happening. Among those people he sought was the company’s legal advisor: Néstor Humberto Martínez, an economist and commercial lawyer who had been working with the multimillionaire for several years in different important businesses, like this one of Ruta del Sol II.

[Juanita]: The Sarmientos really trusted Néstor Humberto and it was already the last way my dad could say well, I did everything to give this information to these guys and now they’ll see what they do with it.

[David]: Besides being a recognized lawyer, Néstor Humberto Martínez was a quite experienced politician. At that moment when Jorge Enrique sought him out, Martínez had just left a very important political position two months earlier: Minister of the Presidency. For a year, Martínez had functioned as a liaison between the president and other ministries and other state powers… a position so powerful that some called him super minister.

Jorge Enrique sought out Martínez because of the position he had in Sarmiento Angulo’s conglomerate, yes, but also because he trusted him… he knew him from before: his son Alejandro had been best friends with Martinez’s son since they were very young in school.

Jorge Enrique met with him in August 2015. There, he told him in detail what he had already told his bosses and handed over written evidence of what he had found in those five years: copies of the documents, fake contracts, unsupported expenses, and the reports he had written.

[Juanita]: My dad gave these printed reports directly to Néstor Humberto Martínez, and Néstor Humberto Martínez personally told us that he gave that report to the Board of Directors.

[David]: After that, Jorge Enrique learnt about some meetings held by the project partners to clarify the situation, but he said he hadn’t taken part in them. What the majority partner company did was hire another firm to conduct a confidential analysis, among other things, of the public bidding process for Ruta del Sol II. The report from that analysis, dated October 2015, concluded that, based on the information provided by the company, there had been transparency and legality in those processes.

A month later, an investigative commission —also from the majority partner— wrote another report on the findings from Corficolombiana, where Jorge Enrique worked as a controller. The conclusion they reached, according to the document, was that after a detailed verification, and I quote, “no significant irregularities were found.”

And nothing was reported to state authorities. There was nothing more Jorge Enrique could do.

[Juanita]: Like he no longer had anything to complain about, and nothing happened: he would go to the concessionaire, be there for two seconds because he no longer had anything to work on, come back home, have lunch, go back to the concessionaire to see what he could do. Because little by little they were leaving him without work to do and they were, I think, waiting for him to resign, but he said I’m not going to resign. He said, well let them fire me because I’m going to keep trying to work with the little I have, at least, but I’m not going to stop working or lose my job because of this.

[David]: The option of resigning wasn’t even a topic of conversation with the family.

[Juanita]: There were many things that simply left no room for discussion and I think his work was one of them.

[Carolina]: I was also angry at my dad. Why, if he could have had a quiet life, why did he choose this?

[Juanita]: I think we knew there were things we could say to my dad and things we couldn’t, because he simply did what he thought was right and that’s it.

[David]: And for him, the right thing to do was to keep insisting: to report the irregularities he had found until the company’s top executives activated the mechanisms to stop it. But it was also a form of protection for himself.

[Carolina]: For my dad it was already too important to denounce, because if he didn’t denounce, having known that, well he ended up being an accomplice. So he couldn’t just detach himself like that.

I never imagined it was so serious. Yes, I thought work problems, well… I didn’t imagine it was everything he discovered and what it all ended up being.

[David]: Because it’s not like he talked about all the details with his family… except with one of his children.

[Juanita]: With Alejandro they had very serious conversations. Alejandro clearly knew everything that was happening, but I felt that my dad trusted Alejandro like few people.

[David]: But it wasn’t just a feeling. Indeed, Jorge Enrique confided many things to his son, and both knew these weren’t just work problems. They weren’t even just Colombia’s problems. This was much bigger. It involved very powerful people.

We’ll be right back

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

The information Jorge Enrique had wasn’t just about one project, or even about one country. Remember this—it’s very important: the consortium in charge of Ruta del Sol II was made up of three partners. Two Colombians, both minority partners. One of those was the company Episol, which belonged to Corficolombiana and was part of Grupo Aval. And the third, the majority partner, was foreign, and at that time, the largest infrastructure company on the continent. A company with megaprojects in several countries in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Except for a few politicians and businesspeople, almost no one in Colombia had heard its name. But that started to change in June 2015, when the head of that company, Marcelo Odebrecht, was arrested in Brazil.

[Journalist]: According to official sources, 59 people were arrested in the operation, including businessmen Marcelo Odebrecht and Otávio Azevedo, who preside over the companies Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez.

[Journalist]: Marcelo Odebrecht represents the third generation of the family business, the largest engineering company in Latin America, also linked to infrastructure construction for the 2016 Olympic Games.

[Journalist]: Everything pointed to  the accused having known  about the movements the companies had done to have works granted to the state company. 

[David]: And the year before, Brazil’s police had raided a car wash in Curitiba where, according to investigators’ suspicions, they were laundering money.

[Periodista]: A Polícia Federal desmantelou hoje um esquema de lavagem de dinheiro em seis estados e no Distrito Federal.

[Journalist]: The Federal Police dismantled today a money laundering scheme in six states and the Federal District.

[Periodista]: Pelo menos 24 pessoas estavam envolvidas na Operação Lava Jato.

[Journalist]: At least 24 people were involved in Operation Car Wash.

[David]: That operation, which later became known as Lava Jato, ended up discovering that this was the tip of the iceberg of a huge corruption network in which Petrobras, the state oil company, managed bribes between companies and politicians at all levels and parties to secure multimillion-dollar contracts. One of the companies involved was Odebrecht.

[Journalist]: This Friday, the presidents of the construction companies were arrested after being accused of fraud in bidding and bribes to Petrobras officials.

[Journalist]: Brazil’s largest construction company, Odebrecht, expressed its indignation at the arrest order for five of its executives for allegedly being linked to the Petrobras corruption scandal.

[David]: Although at that moment they were just beginning to learn what was happening in Brazil, not the regional scandal that came later, Jorge Enrique had shared with his son the evidence that this corruption had penetrated Colombia’s largest infrastructure project.

And among many of the pieces of evidence he had, there were some audio recordings that compromised very powerful people.

In the upcoming episodes of La Ruta del Sol

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: So now we don’t know how…what we’re getting into. We don’t know if they’re giving money to paramilitaries. If, if, if there’s corruption, those sons of bitches thieves are stealing it.

[David]: We’re going to hear how Jorge Enrique made sure the evidence of the irregularities he found was thoroughly documented.

[Iván Serrano]: He called the recordings «the Christmas carols.» I have enough messages from him saying: soon you’ll be able to play the Christmas carols, but not yet. Hey, be very careful, my life and my family’s depend on this. I have huge security problems.

[María Jimena Duzán]: Everyone said there were bribes, but, but it couldn’t be proven. And the first time I saw it clearly was with these documents that Jorge Enrique Pizano gave me. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had a way to break open the scandal.

[David]: We’ll also talk about the controversy generated by the investigation into the deaths of father and son.

[Carolina]: They took it away. But I… at that moment I said well, a towel with blood, since it has nothing to do with my dad’s death, right, because it’s blood from where. I mean, he shaved and cut himself, that’s what I thought.

[Journalist]: Oviedo went further. He refuted Valdés’s statements about a blood-stained towel.

[Javier Oviedo Serrano]: Do we want to ask the director general how he can say that the bloodstain belonged to Jorge Pizano if there’s no reference sample because the body was cremated?

[David]: We’ll hear about the political scandal that this family tragedy sparked.

[Jorge Robledo]: What changed this story? What’s new? We all know: Jorge Enrique Pizano is what’s new in this story. Jorge Enrique Pizano was a controller, an auditor for the Ruta del Sol. In other words, a person who had access to the company’s internal information, the one who could know what was going on there, and he revealed so many truths that things got complicated and began to change.

[David]: And we’ll talk with some very important characters in this story who, until now, had preferred not to give many details about the case.

[Carlos Valdés]: The death of Jorge Enrique Pizano was being framed as a political event and there was one political group accusing another political group that was defending itself. In the middle of it all were the director of the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and the institution itself.

[Néstor Humberto]: A long time ago, I’d made the decision not to talk about these topics anymore, because it seems to me better to let history and justice run their course. But this seemed like a good opportunity: a different media outlet, one that knows how to make a different kind of radio and isn’t tainted by the political conflicts we’re living through in Colombia today, —they’re such a mess.

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, with production support from Desirée Yépez. 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. Legal review by Camilo Vallejo. Sound design and mixing by Martín Cruz, with original music by Andrés Nusser. Series artwork and art direction by Diego Corzo.

Product development for La Ruta del Sol was led by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales 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’d like to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their guidance 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 centralpodcastRA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast.audio

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

[David Trujillo]: In the previous episode…

[Carolina Pizano]: And there, everything collapsed. My mom was screaming. They had to sedate her. Life breaks in two and I think it breaks into a thousand pieces.

[Juanita Pizano]: And I couldn’t believe it. The worst moment of our lives, what does this mean? I mean, my mom was just screaming, obviously like a madwoman. They had to give her tranquilizers. Everything was absolute and total chaos.

[David]: Alejandro Pizano died after drinking liquid from a bottle he found on his father’s desk. The autopsy revealed he was poisoned with cyanide.

But even stranger was the fact that his father, Jorge Enrique Pizano, had died three days earlier in that same house from an alleged heart failure.

[Juanita]: The fact is that my dad’s death was no longer of natural causes. I mean, at least the question existed of what happened to dad? It couldn’t be natural causes, because who put that in there? I mean, everything started to become a bit dark.

[David]: Especially because, for several years, Jorge Enrique had been gathering evidence of the irregularities that plagued the second section of the Ruta del Sol, one of Colombia’s largest infrastructure projects… a mega-project in which the Brazilian multinational Odebrecht was involved.

This episode begins with a scene that takes place three years before those two tragic deaths. It’s a day in August 2015. We’re in an office in Bogotá. Two characters are there. We can imagine they’re sitting, that there’s a desk, that they’re facing each other. One is Jorge Enrique and the other is Néstor Humberto Martínez, the legal advisor of Grupo Aval, the business conglomerate they both work for.

Jorge Enrique has arrived at this office with many papers, documents, important evidence he needs to show Martínez. They already know each other from before: their children studied at the same school and have been best friends since childhood. Jorge Enrique wants to speak with Martínez to show him the irregularities he’s been keeping a record of for several years and for him to deliver that information to the owner of the conglomerate, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, one of Colombia’s richest men.

Martínez senses why they’re there.

The dialogue they’re about to have, the phrases they’re going to say… those you don’t have to imagine. Jorge Enrique, accustomed to dismissive attitudes from his bosses, from other high-ranking company officials, has decided this time to secretly record the conversation with his iPad to have backup of that meeting.

So, the conversation begins like this: Martínez tells Jorge Enrique that they already know something suspicious is happening, that they’ve already made decisions and right off the bat gives him an instruction. This is Martínez:

[Néstor Humberto Martínez]: Look, we’re doing one hell of an investigation. I mean, you… because I see you in a state of anxiety, what do I do?

[Jorge Enrique Pizano]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Ok. Because the thing is… 

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing. 

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about something… 

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the channel…

[Jorge Enrique]: Ah, okay. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Because, damn it, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, that you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[David]: In other words, according to Martínez, Sarmiento – the owner of Grupo Aval – already knows about the irregularities, they’re investigating and basically Jorge Enrique shouldn’t do anything else. Martínez tells him that, from now on, he should deliver all information directly to him, because he knows very well that his bosses have been ignoring him for years. Martínez assures him he won’t minimize those concerns, especially because the situation had changed recently.

Indeed,  two months earlier they had captured Marcelo Odebrecht in Brazil. Although at that moment it wasn’t the international scandal it later became, Martínez confessed to Jorge Enrique that they’re already suspecting that Odebrecht’s corruption had reached Colombia… through La Ruta del Sol II, the infrastructure mega-project they were building.

This is what he says:

[Néstor Humberto]: So now we have a problem: we don’t know how… what we’re mixed up in. We don’t know if they’re giving money to paramilitaries.

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, that too.

[Néstor Humberto]: If there is, if there’s corruption, those sons of bitches are stealing it, they’re thieves. We don’t… Let me tell you all the hypotheses we’re working on: we don’t know if these sons of bitches are paying bribes from here to foreign governments and we don’t know if they’re paying bribes here to the Colombian government.

[David]: Bribes, that is, kickbacks.

Jorge Enrique continues making a comparison.

[Jorge Enrique]: Excuse me for saying it’s… Excuse the analogy, it’s like a mille-feuille.

[David]: A mille-feuille from which he’s discovering new layers. Each more shocking than the previous.

He starts, then, with a first example: a contract made with suspicious documents, with forged signatures, plus a legal representative who was investigated for having ties with paramilitaries. With that, the consortium that was building Ruta del Sol II gave more than 300 thousand dollars at the exchange rate of the time to what appears to be a shell company. 

Martínez, who doesn’t seem to know about this finding, is taken by surprise.

[Néstor Humberto]: These guys are crooks, man.

[Jorge Enrique]: So… But that’s down there. I’m talking to you… We’re talking about the mille-feuille.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, look. Everything. This company’s screwed. This company’s  screwed, brother.

[David]: Jorge Enrique tells him he’s going to give him those documents and Martínez responds that he’ll show them to his boss in the next few hours.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, that at 11 then…

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course, so…

[Néstor Humberto]: … Sarmiento will be looking at them.

[David]: But the meeting doesn’t end there. Jorge Enrique has much more and shows him several papers.

[Jorge Enrique]: Here I brought you the collection I have: August 4… of all the contracts, right?

[David]: It’s a compilation of suspicious contracts he’s been collecting that add up to an extremely high sum of money.

[Jorge Enrique]: …and all the groupings that add up to 24 billion pesos.

[David]: About 8 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time… Martínez sounds baffled. He tries to confirm what he just heard.

[Néstor Humberto]: But what is this?

[Jorge Enrique]: Those are the bogus contracts.

[Néstor Humberto]: Strange ones?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, the strange ones. Right?

[David]: And, as if that weren’t enough, Jorge Enrique tells him he knows about another set  of strange contracts that add up to about 12 million dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

[Néstor Humberto]: Ah, but Sarmiento doesn’t have this, buddy!

[Jorge Enrique]: No, that’s what I was telling you.

[David]: And pay attention to this moment in the scene:

From that pile of documents, Jorge Enrique shows him a specific  contract that he had already reported two years earlier… and which, additionally, involves a public entity. In it, according to Jorge Enrique’s explanation, it appears that they gave money to a fake company to do lobbying and modify the original contract for Ruta del Sol II, in order to benefit the consortium of Grupo Aval and Odebrecht. 

Martínez is taken by surprise again. He wants to see that document with his own eyes.

[Néstor Humberto]: Where does it say that shit, man?

[Jorge Enrique]: Let’s see…

[David]: Jorge Enrique reads what the contract literally says, the service they paid for:

[Jorge Enrique]: Look: complementary activities required for the modification of the concession contract is summarized…

[Néstor Humberto]: Which was the one they modified… I mean.

[David]: In other words, they paid to adjust the contract. 

Martínez seems to understand. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Hehehe yes, yes yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes, son of a bitch.

[David]: And Martínez explicitly says what that contract means.

[Néstor Humberto]: This is a bribe, man. How much is this worth?

[David]: Jorge Enrique mentions the figure: almost 448 thousand dollars at the exchange rate of the time.

So, to be clear: at that moment it would seem that the two of them sense, based on  the documents that are there, that the consortium building Ruta del Sol II paid a possible bribe so that the State would approve an additional section of the road and assign that work to them.

And then, they  both say they’ve known for years the people involved in that bribe. Martínez names them.

[Néstor Humberto]: And this is Villegas?

[Jorge Enrique]: That’s Villegas.

[Néstor Humberto]: Ah, no, he’s a thief, he’s a thief.

[Jorge Enrique]: The other one I saw…

[Néstor Humberto]: He’s a thief.

[Jorge Enrique]: …that I’ve known for 20 years, is Federico Gaviria.

[Néstor Humberto]: That’s another thief.

[Jorge Enrique]: And he was there.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, maestro. These guys fell into the hands of the lumpen. Instead, I’ve been around for this long, I’m a professional.

[Jorge Enrique]: No, it’s that I became…

[Néstor Humberto]: I know all these people.

[David]: «I know all these people,» says Martínez. 

And then he asks Jorge Enrique if anyone else knows about this:

[Néstor Humberto]: And who did you give this shit to?

[Jorge Enrique]: Nobody.

[Néstor Humberto]: And so what did you do with this?

[David]: Jorge Enrique explains again that nobody in the company has paid attention to him, that they even treat him like crazy when he arrives, just like at that moment, with the big pile of corrupt contracts. Martínez laughs.

[Néstor Humberto]: There’s… there’s a crazy guy there.

[Jorge Enrique]: There’s a guy there…

[Néstor Humberto]: A crazy son of a bitch. He’s crazy!

[Jorge Enrique]: You know what I mean?

[Néstor Humberto]: A crazy guy who walks around with a folder under his arm.

[Jorge Enrique]: So, they told me ah, ah, ah don’t come here with gossip. But what gossip? Look. Ah, ah, ah.

[David]: Jorge Enrique insists there are more things, many more… But he confesses to Martínez that he feels his bosses might retaliate for all that information he’s sharing.

[Jorge Enrique]: I don’t want… excuse me. I don’t want them to hate me at Corfi now or whatever, and I end up without a job.

[David]: «That they hate me and I end up without a job,» he says. Martínez tells him to calm down.

[Néstor Humberto]: No, no, man. But we’re doing this…

[David]: And he adds something to give him more security.

[Néstor Humberto]: Wait, I’m going to call Sarmiento and tell him he has to be in the 11 o’clock meeting. Look, call Mr. Sarmiento. Urgent. Urgent.

[David]: For the second time, he tells him Sarmiento will receive all that information that same day.

At the end of the scene, after Martínez acknowledges Jorge Enrique’s rigorous work and after both agree on having a methodology to know what to do, Jorge Enrique asks for instructions:

[Jorge Enrique]: What do I do?

[Néstor Humberto]: Let me know if anything comes up, ok? And, don’t worry because between the two of us, there’s total discretion.

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, yes, me too.

[Néstor Humberto]: But don’t worry.

[David]: They both say goodbye and Jorge Enrique leaves the office. The scene ends. 

The audio you just heard has many names, contracts, figures, the quality isn’t that good and it can even sound confusing at times. What does seem clear is that Jorge Enrique handed over to Martínez the documents of the irregularities he had found.

But it would take years to come to light…

From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is La Ruta del Sol.

I’m David Trujillo. Episode 2: The Recording.

[David]: Let’s go now to early 2018, a little over two years after that meeting we just heard. Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán had been investigating the Ruta del Sol for some time.

[María Jimena Duzán]: That was like the crown jewel of all the big tenders for mega-projects the country had at that moment. And with great, great excitement in the world, Colombia, everyone, all businessmen embraced that new tender because supposedly it was going to change not only the image, but it was going to be the cornerstone of a new dimension for companies because they would have very easy access to the Caribbean.

[David]: One day María Jimena received a message from Jorge Enrique Pizano. He had read her articles on the subject and wanted to give her very confidential information.

[María Jimena]: I didn’t really know him. According to what he explained to me, it was Grupo Aval’s prerogative to appoint the controller, which was him. He showed me from the beginning: look, I’m an employee of Grupo Aval. I worked there until then because there was a very complicated situation. So I said to him: what was it?

[David]: In that two-year span several things had happened. U.S. justice proved, largely through confessions from Odebrecht’s top executives, that for decades they had paid almost 800 million dollars in bribes in Latin American and African countries. In Colombia’s case, one of the projects related to that corruption was Ruta del Sol II, and by that time the State had already terminated the construction contract. After eight years, the work was incomplete and had absurd cost overruns.

According to U.S. justice, the bribes in Colombia were just over 11 million dollars, one of the lowest figures on the list. But that wasn’t the only oddity of what was related to that case in the country.

[María Jimena]: I had already written several articles about how absurd what was happening in Colombia was because the people and companies that were involved, linked to paying bribes, weren’t being mentioned because only Odebrecht was mentioned and not its partner, which was Grupo Aval.

[David]: In fact, Grupo Aval, for whom Jorge Enrique worked, rejected from the very beginning any illegal activity and declared itself a victim of Odebrecht. They also insisted that they would cooperate with the investigation transparently.

But that didn’t entirely convince María Jimena and some of her colleagues.

[María Jimena]: That situation had gotten  many journalists like me, well, looking a bit to see what was happening, because this seemed like, like non-justice.

[David]: And, as we already know, Jorge Enrique had possible evidence that there had been strange money movements in Ruta del Sol II for years and no one had reported it to the authorities. María Jimena paraphrased what Jorge Enrique told her when they spoke that first time.

[María Jimena]: Well it turns out that in recent months I started seeing that there were contracts that didn’t match to anything and I started looking, and looking and I ended up understanding they were paper contracts. Why? Well because the money did go out and the contracts were paid, but they didn’t end up going to the things they were supposed to go to, as the initial contracts said and, instead, they ended up in shell companies that were intermediaries.

[David]: María Jimena was interested in what he was telling her, but she wanted to see first what all this was about, so she arranged to meet him at her house.

[María Jimena]: I was surprised that when he arrived, I received him, he told me: Oh, it’s the first time a journalist has agreed to meet. I’ve gone to all the media outlets saying and telling everything I know and none of them listened. And I told him: well, show me what you have. He gave me an immense portfolio of evidence and I started analyzing it.

[David]: The documents were very strong. They seemed to show what up until that moment was an open secret.

[María Jimena]: Everyone said there were bribes, but, but it couldn’t be proven. And the first time I saw it clearly was with these documents that Jorge Enrique Pizano gave me. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to break the scandal. What happened was that from that highway they took the money to pay bribes with the purpose of helping political campaigns, not only the 2014 presidential campaign, but also for the 2015 gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns.

[David]: From different political parties and in various regions of the country.

Jorge Enrique told her that he was certain that because of that information he had, he had become inconvenient for the company and recently, at the end of 2017, they had terminated his contract without paying him what he considered fair. Since then he had not been able to get another job. In addition to the difficult economic situation he was going through, he had also recently been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and was just starting his treatment.

The question that remained for María Jimena was why it seemed like the Attorney Genral’s Office wasn’t using that information for their investigations. According to what Jorge Enrique told her, they had already had it for at least a year when, at the beginning of 2017, the authorities took away the computers from the consortium’s offices of Ruta del Sol II because of the Odebrecht case, along with the documents and reports he had sent.

[María Jimena]: So I got into that story that was Kafkaesque.

[David]: For her, the most absurd thing was that for almost a year, the position of Attorney General of the Nation, that person who holds the reins of the State’s investigative power, including for this huge international corruption case involving Odebrecht, had been given to Néstor Humberto Martínez, the same person whom Jorge Enrique had recorded in 2015. Martínez had not only been Minister of the Presidency and promoted by the government to head the Attorney General’sOffice…

[María Jimena]: He had also been Grupo Aval’s lawyer. I mean, there was a conflict of interest from all sides but he was still elected  Attorney General.

[David]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

In mid-2016, the Supreme Court elected Néstor Humberto Martínez as Attorney General of the Nation and he arrived at a new powerful position like the ones he was used  to. One of the goals he set from the beginning was the fight against corruption. This is what he said in his inauguration speech:

[Néstor Humberto]: The fight against corruption needs those responsible for this opprobrious crime to be subject to prison sentences.

[David]: That the corrupt have to go to jail without benefits. That the law be enforced.

[Néstor Humberto]: When that happens, without privileges or contemplations, we will see again that the pockets of public servants are like crystal.

[David]: That is, that State finances be transparent. That last phrase would be the name of his flagship program, Crystal Pockets, perhaps the most emblematic of his period as Attorney General.

Later in this series we’re going to hear Martínez talk about his role in this entire story, but all you need to know for now is that he didn’t report to the authorities what Jorge Enrique showed him. Not at that moment, in 2015, nor when he arrived at the Attorney General’s Office a year later. And although he said in an interview in December 2017 that the investigation of the Odebrecht case was going to end in less than a month, that’s not what happened. 

But let’s go back to the meeting between Jorge Enrique and journalist María Jimena Duzán. She remembers that the same day they met, he told her that the Attorney General’s Office was investigating him. But not exactly for what he had discovered in Ruta del Sol II, but rather for allegedly having received a bribe, also from Odebrecht, when he was manager of Bogotá’s Aqueduct  ten years ago. María Jimena asked him directly about that matter.

[María Jimena]: And you didn’t receive any money from Odebrecht? And he tells me, do you think that if I had received money from Odebrecht, well I would have money. I don’t have money. And really he didn’t have money and he could prove to me that he, when he entered, his predecessor had already signed that contract. And indeed he was right.

[David]: Furthermore, the person who accused him of receiving that bribe later told the Supreme Court that in that Aqueduct  case he had confessed to crimes he didn’t commit because the Attorney General’s Office had pressured him to reach an agreement. In other words, he had lied so they would give him benefits in his legal process and his lawyer recommended that he accept the condition. 

But the investigation against Jorge Enrique continued and María Jimena could see he was in bad shape. 

[María Jimena]: They set up a process to harass and intimidate him, and the  Attorney General’s Office set it up. All to prevent him from being called as a witness and to discredit him as a witness in the few processes that Néstor Humberto Martínez’s Attorney General’s Office was pursuing. They wanted to trap him and catch him and silence him and almost put a gag in his mouth so he wouldn’t keep talking. They had to destroy his honor and his mental state. And that was deeply tormenting him. So, besides not having money, besides not having a job, the problem of feeling they were going to arrest him had him feeling very upset.

[David]: Jorge Enrique’s youngest daughter, Juanita, didn’t find out what was happening because her father told her. She found out through a news story she came across on the Internet.

[Juanita]: And literally a news story came up, El Tiempo. Obviously Sarmiento’s media had to be the ones saying it, that they were going to charge my dad that week and that’s when I called my dad and told him look, I’m not a little girl and I need to know what’s happening and I’m not going to find out through these things, through social media, because it’s absurd. And I said, what’s happening? I mean, I need you to tell me.

[David]: Jorge Enrique explained to her the situation with the Attorney  General’s Office, the investigation they were conducting. He told her someone had testified against him, but that he hadn’t done anything illegal. And he also told her that they couldn’t build a case against him because there was no evidence of anything.

[Juanita]: However, the Attorney General’s Office never stopped investigating my dad and all it did was pressure him more. And it intercepted all our communications and I know because it was noticeable when we made a call, there was very clear interference and they violated my dad’s fundamental and constitutional rights and ours too. Mine also, because I was a minor and my communications were intercepted.

[David]: From then on only strange things kept happening.

Alejandro decided to go to Spain in early 2018. He was newly married and since the situation was too tense, he wanted to distance himself although always keeping close contact with his family. Juanita and Carolina, who did stay, remember their father became increasingly insistent about taking certain precautions.

[Juanita]: And I liked having the curtains open and he told me to close the curtains and I felt he was kind of paranoid.

[Carolina]: I remember I’ve always posted on Instagram and my dad kept telling me: don’t post things, don’t show our faces, don’t show anything. Like don’t use the same route, go other ways.

[Juanita]: And at night you could see like lasers, like pointing at the house. And my dad talked about the lasers, but I was like, that sounds a bit paranoid, I don’t know. And I connected all these dots literally last year because I was telling all this to my ex-boyfriend, who was a super security engineer, and he told me that’s super advanced technology to listen to conversations.

[David]: Jorge Enrique saw no other way to explain what was happening:

[Juanita]: This is persecution, he said, against people who have nothing to do with these crimes. And where are the people who committed them? Where are the executives of Corficolombiana? Where are the executives of Grupo Aval? At their homes, relaxed, in even better paid positions.

[David]: Only one person was arrested from Grupo Aval: the president of Corficolombiana, the conglomerate’s company where Jorge Enrique worked, for having ordered the payment of a bribe. Grupo Aval didn’t defend him. On the contrary, they insisted that everything had been planned by him, as president of the company, and his partner, Odebrecht.

But the heads of Odebrecht in Colombia didn’t answer to the authorities either, because they left the country even when there were arrest warrants for them and without at least having testified before the Attorney General’s Office. Shortly after, the president of the multinational in Colombia said, from Brazil, that in 2014 they had given millions of dollars to the presidential campaigns of the two main candidates, including that of President Santos’s reelection. But since these weren’t just electoral crimes, but also violations of campaign rules, a different entity than the Attorney General’s Office had to be in charge of another investigation and decide on other possible sanctions.

Jorge Enrique, on the other hand, stayed in Colombia targeted by public opinion. Even the Attorney General publicly pointed his finger at him and said he had been an Odebrecht employee for years when these corrupt money movements took place. But in reality Jorge Enrique was an employee of Grupo Aval, a company that, for him, had done nothing to at least respect his presumption of innocence. Instead, they terminated his contract. Carolina remembers her father’s disappointment with that job.

[Carolina]: Super disillusioned. And besides, Néstor Humberto Martínez was there and Sarmiento was there, two people who he thought were close, whom he admired and whom he cared about at some point. But super disappointed and scared. I mean, the emotion that started to prevail in my dad was fear… of them putting him in jail while being innocent.

[David]: And, on top of the distress of persecution, and  the emotional wear, came  the economic crisis. Nobody was going to give him a job with such a stigma following him.

[Juanita]: I think it’s one of the saddest moments of my life, because seeing a person like my dad, who was so dedicated to his work, defeated. I mean, he was totally defeated.

[Carolina]: My dad looked and looked for work, he asked for my help, so I talked to my friends who work in human resources and I sent his resume, and my dad told me, well Carito, they interview me, and everyone tells me that my experience is much broader than what’s required for the position, that I don’t fit the profile. Desperate. My dad didn’t know what to do to get work. Everyone turned their backs on him. The first ones who turned their backs on him, long before, were my maternal uncles. Then, my dad’s friends, they all disappeared.

[María Jimena]: He was in very bad shape, and since I first met him he was like that.  And on top of that,  he had cancer. He had come out, let’s say, more or less well from a recent treatment, but since things had become more critical in general, he felt very bad health-wise.

[David]: Although he felt cornered, for Jorge Enrique it was very important that what he had discovered be known because it was a strategy to clean his name… and to protect himself. So for months, he and María Jimena began organizing what they had and connecting the dots.

[María Jimena]: Throughout those months, we started meeting every week, because each time he brought me more information. And I started building a much deeper investigation and we realized it was much more money, and that there were many more contracts that led to about 55 billion pesos just in contracts.

[David]: According to María Jimena, more than 19 million dollars, at the exchange rate of the time, that would have come from  one of the country’s most important infrastructure projects in recent years.  More than what Odebrecht’s heads had confessed before U.S. justice, which was 11 million. For her, the picture was becoming increasingly clear.

[María Jimena]: Grupo Aval’s participation was really  very important and had been very key, and what was happening in Néstor Humberto’s  Attorney  General’s Office, well, was very strange.  

[David]: María Jimena published her investigation in several articles in Semana magazine, always concealing her source’s identity.

Distressed, Jorge Enrique decided to look for another journalist who would also end up playing a key role in this whole story.

We’ll be right back.

[David]: We’re back on La Ruta del Sol.

Iván Serrano was a journalist for Noticias Uno at that time. Jorge Enrique had known him for a decade and had been his source for other topics. He also gave him the evidence of corruption in Ruta del Sol II, asked him to publish the information without mentioning him and in one of their meetings explained that, since Grupo Aval had been on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014, U.S. justice could investigate and sanction the company. Jorge Enrique, off the record, mentioned to Iván the gravity of the matter. This is Iván.

[Iván Serrano]: I clearly remember that Jorge Enrique spoke in a low voice in his apartment, and he told me: because of this they can extradite Sarmiento.

[David]: Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, the president of Grupo Aval.

[Iván]: Well because money from money laundering had entered the American banking system. I mean that was the size of it.  So evidently Jorge Enrique was terrified because his findings didn’t only involve the most powerful man in this country, but they showed that Marcelo Odebrecht himself lied to U.S. justice, because there he talked about, I think, 11 million dollars. And it’s obvious that the bribes they paid here exceeded 11 million dollars, they exceeded them. So what Jorge Enrique found was very important.

[David]: And he had found out about it though it was very difficult to get information.

[Iván]: The problem is they put the wrong guy because Jorge Enrique did do the work despite them not giving him information, despite him having to look through trash cans, ask around the sides, personally go to addresses to verify if a company was located at that address. I mean his work was impressive. His alone, because he was alone. He didn’t have other people, he was alone. And basically he discovers, well, the most terrible corruption network in the country’s recent history.

[David]: And he discovered that network, as Iván calls it, before the Lava Jato case broke, before they captured Marcelo Odebrecht, before US justice made the figures public, before Néstor Humberto Martínez was elected Attorney General of the Nation.

[Iván]: So the question was: Who did you tell this over there? Well, I told Néstor Humberto Martínez.

And do you have proof that Néstor Humberto knew? Yes, I have the recording. And he lets me listen to a part of it. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Because I see you in a state of anxiety. What do I do?

[Jorge Enrique]: No, no

[Néstor Humberto]: So Sarmiento sends word to me: nothing.

[Jorge Enrique]: Well. Because the thing is… 

[Néstor Humberto]: Nothing. 

[Néstor Humberto]: But if you know about something… 

[Jorge Enrique]: Of course. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Sound the alarms. And this is the channel…

[Jorge Enrique]: Ah, okay. 

[Néstor Humberto]: Because, damn it, over there they’re pissed about what happened three years ago, that you sounded the goddamn alarms, and nobody paid attention to you.

[David]: Despite the fear Jorge Enrique felt, he decided to give the recordings to Iván on a thumbdrive with a password he didn’t give him. He thought the content would be in good hands, but he wasn’t yet sure enough for him to publish it.

[Iván]: He called the recordings «the Christmas carols.» I have enough messages from him saying: soon you’ll be able to play the Christmas carols, but not yet. Hey, be very careful, my life and my family’s depend on this. I have major security problems.

[David]: Iván only heard one of the recordings, the one we already heard at the beginning. But there were three others: one, also with Néstor Humberto Martínez and that was made a few days after that first meeting in 2015. And two more, which were conversations with two high-ranking Grupo Aval officials. I listened to all of them and in all of them it’s very clear that Jorge Enrique told them what he had found. It’s also clear that the people he recorded committed to doing something to sound the alarms.

María Jimena knew about those recordings from the beginning. Jorge Enrique told her.

[María Jimena]: He says he knocked on all doors at Grupo Aval and no one listened, that they treated him like a crazy guy and that that’s when the theory began that something was going to happen to him and that he had to record them because he realized along the way that with so much denying of what he had discovered, that he was onto something, he didn’t know what it was, but that because of that, all sorts of things would happen to him and so he started recording them.

[David]: But he only let María Jimena listen to those recordings some time after they started talking. One day Jorge Enrique and his son, Alejandro, arrived at her house with the iPad with which he recorded everything. They wanted her to publish them.

[María Jimena]: They sat down and showed me Néstor Humberto Martínez’s audio, which seemed to me the most compromising of all.

[Néstor Humberto]: Hehehe

[Jorge Enrique]: You know what I mean??

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes yes.

[Jorge Enrique]: Idiots.

[Néstor Humberto]: Yes, yes, yes, son of a bitch.

[Néstor Humberto]: This is a bribe, man. How much is this worth?

[María Jimena]: And I said: this can’t be. Did this really happen? Is this Néstor Humberto Martínez’s voice? The Attorney General who had said he was supposedly going to end all acts of corruption and discover those responsible for Odebrecht. And I said no, this is a bomb. And then I thought and said: wow, if this is published, well Néstor Humberto Martínez would have to resign.

[David]: Jorge Enrique told María Jimena that those audios were his definitive insurance, the last card he had left to protect himself. But if he published them, he was afraid that something could go wrong, that his situation could get worse. That’s why he asked María Jimena to wait this time. He wanted to feel safe.

[María Jimena]: He knew that the day he released the audio they were going to kill him. He told me that: the day I release the audio, my life is in danger. The truth is, I keep  thinking it was the opposite. I think that since he delayed releasing those audios, that was a mistake. I think he should have released those audios quickly and not delay for eight months, which is how long he took after I had heard them. 

[David]: In the next episode…

[Iván]: I want to ask you a bit about the decision you made to give us this interview. Why have you made that decision?

[Jorge Enrique]: Yes, I believe the facts and truths are coming to light and we see how there really is a plot, if you can call it that, against integrity, in this case my integrity as a person and that my rights are being violated.

[Iván]: Evidently, he had fears. It was absolutely real and as I tell you, he spoke in a low voice in his apartment. I mean, it wasn’t a thing from the movies. I mean, here we’ve come to understand that many of those fears were absolutely real.

[Juanita]: All I said was: poor thing, I found him on the floor. And he told me: poor thing, poor thing. I immediately asked him: Who killed my dad? Who was it? Who was there?

[David]: Jorge Enrique tried to protect himself in every way he could. In the end, he agreed to publish the recordings, but only with one condition.

Credits

[David]: La ruta del sol is a podcast from Central, Radio Ambulante Studios’ series channel, 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, with production support from Desirée Yépez. 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 by Nelson Rauda, with support from Melisa Rabanales 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’d like to thank FLIP for their valuable support in the legal review of this production and their guidance 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 centralpodcastRA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio

I’m David Trujillo. Thanks for listening.

This is El Péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

During this series we have taken you to North Carolina –

Pastor Daniel Sostaita: I mean, I see that we build walls and not bridges.

To Pennsylvania –

Daniel Jorge: And we believe that we are going to vote for this president because he is going to lower the price of gasoline. Is that all you are looking for in a president?

We went to Nevada…

Marta Fabiola Vazquez: People are afraid to spend now. They don’t spend like they used to, they don’t go out like they used to. Prices are very high for food, for everything.

To Arizona…

Adrian Fontes: Here in Arizona, not only in the summer – it is very hot. [laughter]

And to Florida –

Julio: And now that we are in an election year, is there anything that worries you? Anything that particularly calls your attention?

Zairenna Barbosa: That the differences have been taken as a point not to solve the problems, but to create them.

Always with the same goal, to listen to you, the Latinos from different countries, who live and work and who are part of this immense, diverse country. We wanted to understand how you planned to vote… And why. Your concerns, your complaints, your dreams.

We said it in the first episode: our idea is never to give predictions, but to report on what we found, in the streets, in the markets, in the churches, in the neighborhoods. And well, now, Wednesday afternoon while we are recording, we have something that we thought we would not have so soon… A result. A winner.

Donald Trump.

Trump: This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to Make America Great again. [applause fade out]

However you look at it, his victory is historic… The last time a president won a second non-consecutive term in the United States was more than a century ago, in 1892.

So, the man who was rejected by the American people four years ago, who was found guilty of 34 criminal charges, and responsible for sexual abuse and who continues to face other charges… today is once again at the gates of the White House.

And this time, he has a clear mandate. Unlike his victory in 2016, this time he also won the popular vote. If that were not enough, his party has also won control of the Senate. Control of the House of Representatives was still undefined at the time of closing this episode.

Let’s say that a little more than half of the country is happy with these results, and the other half, or a little less, is distressed, or even in shock.

So, to understand everything that has happened, and what it may mean for Latinos and for the country, we have two guests… Sabrina Rodriguez, national reporter for the Washington Post, and Paola Ramos, my colleague from Noticias Telemundo and author of the book “Defectors.”

This is El Péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast from Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Today… The red tide. The return of Trump and the future of Latinos.

JULIO: Hey, Sabrina and Paola. Thank you very much for being here.

PAOLA: Thank you very much.

SABRINA: Yes, thank you for the invitation.

JULIO: Well, first of all, the polls told us that this was going to be a very close presidential campaign, that the two candidates were neck and neck with a count that could last even days without us knowing who was going to be the winner. But here we are. With Trump winning the electoral vote and also for the first time, the popular vote. What do you think happened? Sabrina, we start with you.

SABRINA: I think it’s a question that we’re going to be asking ourselves for days and weeks. Honestly, I think that for example, now we’re starting to see the exit polls and seeing. Okay. What group? I mean. What are the groups that helped Trump win the presidency? So what we’re seeing now in just the hours after the election was over is that everyone —I mean, if we’re talking about various groups of Americans: I mean Latinos, African Americans, white women— helped Trump win the presidency and I think that shows us the limits of the polls really and we focus so much in the days before the election on seeing, «ah! look at 50% in this state or look at 49% in this one». But at the end of the day it all depends on who goes out to vote.

JULIO: Mhm. You, Paola. How are you explaining it?

PAOLA: Look, I think Sabrina is absolutely right. I think that now we kind of don’t know what the whole story is, what the whole picture is. But what we do know is that we underestimated the power that Donald Trump had. I think that in the last two months we thought maybe that in the face of what Donald Trump was saying, this country was a country of immigrants that in the face of these abortion bans this country was perhaps going to choose not to be pro-abortion anymore. But I think that what we are understanding right now goes far beyond Donald Trump, it goes far beyond Kamala Harris, it has everything to do with the voters, and the voters had two very clear, very different options. Two fundamentally different stories. And they clearly chose a candidate who is promising a very different vision for this country. And that’s what we have to process. What are they telling us? Maybe it’s an electorate that does care about democracy, but in a very different way than we thought.

JULIO: Mhmm. Now, the idea that we had working on this series and seeing the numbers and listening to different reports before the vote, we have the image of a country divided within different Latino communities, even where you are in Pennsylvania and Arizona. How have the Latinos you’ve spoken to reacted? What have you heard off the top of your head, Sabrina?

SABRINA: I think that. I mean, it does show how divided we remain. I mean, it’s not something that’s going to change because Trump won. I think that the divisions that exist are only going to be reinforced. And I think that coming up to the vote in Pennsylvania, I’ve been in the Philadelphia area. A lot of the focus has been on the Puerto Rican vote and for the Democrats there was a hope that they were going to win with a lot of Puerto Ricans because of the comment that was made at one of Trump’s rallies in New York, when a comedian said that Puerto Rico was an island of garbage and in the last days before the elections that was it. I mean, they used it as a moment to really mobilize voters and there was a hope among the Democrats that it was going to help them. But then, talking to voters, I met several Puerto Ricans who voted for Trump, who were saying that yes, he offended them, I mean, they were offended by what had been said, but that at the end of the day they were more concerned about the future of the country, that they were really more concerned about the economy if it offended them, that sometimes they thought that things that Trump said were ridiculous and they didn’t like them, but that they thought that the future was safer with him. And I think that we are going to have this conversation again for weeks and months: that people see a very different vision of who could help us in the future. But I think that in Philadelphia it became clear that many Puerto Ricans did go out to vote. Yes, they were interested in the election, but they had different visions of who would be the person who would help their families.

JULIO: Yeah. What have you heard in Arizona, Paola?

PAOLA: Well, something similar, right? Look, I spent the night with many families of mixed immigration status. I think that at the beginning of the night, before understanding the results, before seeing that Trump had won, I think that the hope of many of these immigrant families —the hope was that at the end of the day the Latinos would support them, right? That Latinos, faced with the comments that Donald Trump had made, faced with those comments that were heard in New York about the island of garbage and the promise of mass deportations —I think that the hope that they had was that at the end of the day what happened in 2020, in 2016 and in other previous years would happen. And that is that the Latino community would come out in very large numbers in favor of the Democrats. But I think that just like what Sabrina says, we are seeing that two stories can exist at the same time, although there are Latinos who were afraid of those threats of mass deportations and who chose Kamala Harris, but even so there were many more Latinos than expected who were not insulted by Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant comments. And that was seen here in Arizona. No, it did not affect them much, they did not feel included in those insults. I think the interesting thing that’s happening here in Arizona is that even an immigration proposal that was on the ballot, which is Proposition 1314, which is a proposition that gives, that will give more power to local police here so that they begin to act as immigration agents. That proposal here in Arizona, in a state where there are many Latinos, won. So we’re back to the same thing. We’re facing an election where many stories can exist at once.

We’ll be back.

[MIDROLL]

We’re back at El péndulo. I’m Julio Vaqueiro.

Today we spoke with my colleague Paola Ramos, from Noticias Telemundo, and Sabrina Rodríguez, national reporter for the Washington Post.

JULIO: Well, one of the big stories is the margin between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Right? Latino voters supported Trump much more in this election, 25 percentage points more than four years ago. It’s a historic change. No other Republican had reached this percentage and you have reported a lot about these communities. How do you explain it? Paola, for example, you wrote the book Defectors —just about how Latinos have turned to the right. Did you expect this figure? 45% of Latinos voting for Trump?

PAOLA: Yes, I expected it because I think we’ve been seeing some of these signs for four years. Back in 2020 we started to see that Donald Trump, after four years in the White House, already began to increase those margins with the Latino community, increasing between eight and ten points in 2020 compared to 2016. I think that in the last four years we have begun to see signs, signs of a Latino community that did not care so much about those threats of mass deportation, signs of a Latino community that felt comfortable with some of the anti-trans comments that Donald Trump’s campaign was making. We have seen a Latino community that little by little also feels much more comfortable with the evangelical movement. We have seen a Latino community, even Afro-Latino, for example, in a state like New York, that also feels more and more comfortable with some of the anti-African American comments. I think that’s what it tells us, that there are many more divisions between us than we want to see, than we want to acknowledge. So I’ve been seeing these signs for a long time.

JULIO: And Sabrina, we saw something that you posted on social network X on Tuesday, on election day, you wrote. And I’m going to translate it here. Let’s not start with that of blaming Latino voters again. Let’s see, explain to us. What do you mean?

SABRINA: Ah, Julio [laughter] The interesting thing has been the response to that post, really.

Julio: Let’s see?

SABRINA: But I think that for me. I mean, looking at the exit polls, looking at the states that Trump has won, this goes beyond Latino voters and that’s the part that frustrates me already and is going to frustrate me with the narrative. It’s that in the next few weeks it’s going to focus a lot on the US. Why is it that Latino voters gave the presidency to Trump and it’s going to be as if Latinos were the only ones who went to vote for Trump. Or it’s going to be a focus on, that is, the 45% who voted for Donald Trump instead of the 55% who voted for Kamala Harris. And I think that’s the part that many times the debate and the conversation around voters and Latino voters in particular, lacks that level of complication of talking about the differences, the divisions, that in one area it can be different than in another. I mean, we talk and we’re probably going to talk more, but about the division between women and men. I mean, there are so many, there are so many pieces of this conversation and I think it’s irresponsible, I mean, to put all the blame on one group for what happened in this election because Trump won.

JULIO: Also, it’s interesting the approach of blaming someone for voting, no, for what they wanted.

SABRINA: Absolutely. And I think that —and look, I think that seeing what I’m seeing in X, there are many people. I mean, they voted for Kamala Harris, who are blaming Latinos. I see it in the comments on that particular post. People saying, “Well, Latinos deserve to be deported. Oh, look, they deserve what’s going to happen now, because look how they went out to vote for Trump.” And I think that because of comments like that, because of responses like that, we are in this moment of so much division. I think that also, I mean, Democrats have to take a moment now after this and well, more than a moment to really process why this has happened and what they have to do differently. Because Pablo and I have talked about it many times, but after 2020 there are many Democrats who came out saying that the exit polls were wrong, that there weren’t that many, many Latinos who went to vote Republican or they blamed themselves, I mean, the Mexicans in South Texas, in the Grand Valley River or the Cubans in Miami. But always. But it was not possible that Trump was doing better with Latinos around the country. It had to be a group here, a group there. But it is not. I mean, it is not something that is happening in the rest of the country and I think that in having that reaction. They have been very late in responding to this problem that they clearly have when we are talking about a group of people that for decades were expected to be voters, that the Democrats could depend on.

JULIO: Do you agree with this vision, Paola?

PAOLA: Totally. And look, there is also something very interesting. I mean, all the comments right now are going to be focused on the Latino community. What happened? But that is the reality. The reality remains that regardless of the fact that Kamala Harris won the Latino vote, she also won the African-American vote. And the reality also remains that white women who were supposedly going to be the Democrats’ salvation at this moment, white women continued to vote for Donald Trump. So this idea of ​​blaming groups really starts with that reality that white women continued to support Donald Trump. Despite all this narrative and despite the threat of abortion bans, I also think that what Sabrina says is very important. One of the things that is very clear here in a state like Arizona and it is what activists would tell you, what many Latinos would tell you is that here the Democratic Party failed them. They did not give them the resources they needed, they did not give them the infrastructure they needed. And I think that more than anything many Latinos on the left would tell you that they did not give them the message they needed to mobilize, to inspire a coalition that right now needed to be inspired, they did not need to have a message that would lead them to that final goal.

And what do I mean? I mean this idea that if we think about 2020, one of the reasons why Joe Biden wins in a state like Arizona is because he distanced himself in a very, very clear way from Donald Trump’s cruelty at the border. If we remember the last two weeks of that campaign, in 2020 we saw a Joe Biden who promised immigration reform, who was not afraid to insult Donald Trump very clearly and very aggressively against his immigration plans. I think that in the last two months we have seen a candidate, Kamala Harris, who is much more moderate, much more conservative with his immigration plan. And perhaps we have to ask ourselves what would have happened if the vice president had put forward a message, perhaps a little more progressive and perhaps a little more inspiring and perhaps a little braver in terms of that immigration message. I think that is something that many Latinos here are thinking about.

JULIO: It is an interesting question. What other questions are there that you think can help us understand this Trump victory? Sabrina, what other questions do you think are worth asking ourselves? Or the Democrats, specifically, asking themselves?

SABRINA: Yes, well. I think that there are several questions that we can ask ourselves about immigration, and I think that Julio, I mean, you yourself asked the vice president the question that stayed with me when you said to her: “So, has Trump won the immigration debate?” And she said absolutely not, but the reality is that in her campaign she hardly talked about immigration. It’s not just that she took a more moderate position, she didn’t talk about it much. So I wrote an article recently that I was looking for data and the Republicans spent 243 million dollars on ads about immigration, while the Democrats only spent 15 million dollars. I mean, it’s a big difference. So, if we talk about four years of, I mean, people listening, of being afraid of immigrants, of the situation at the border, I mean the image that was painted of a border in chaos, of people entering an open border, and then there is no message on the other side because it’s nothing more. I mean, again, it’s nothing more than… Ah, yes, the message was moderate. If she was talking about things like the Republicans. I mean, it was almost not being talked about. I think it’s something that, again, the Democrats have to really analyze how they are going to be. I mean, what is the message on immigration in the future? And beyond that, I think it’s also going to be how we talk, how we go, how the Democrats are going to talk about the economy, how they are going to talk to the working class? I mean, it has been seen, we see, that there are people who did not graduate from college or who are working class have moved more towards Donald Trump than the Republican Party. It is being seen more as a party that represents those people. Historically it was not like that. So there are many questions to ask about how we got to this point and how that can be changed for the Democrats in the future if it is going to stay that way.

JULIO: Well, because we already saw that Trump’s victory is based on winning the largest percentage of the Latino vote, but also a larger percentage of white women. Also more men, more whites, more young people, more African Americans. And what does this say about your campaign, Paola, about Trump’s vision of the country?

PAOLA: Well, that’s the million-dollar question, huh? I don’t know. I mean, I think it simply indicates that this is a country in which these figures who perhaps present themselves as more authoritarian are not bothered by that image. I think that what people are also telling us is that this message that Trump had, not of them against us, the others, being the immigrants. That message resonated a lot, right? So I think we have to start there. And I also think that perhaps we have to present ourselves. We have to present ourselves with a question that may make us uncomfortable. And that is this idea of ​​whether perhaps this Latino community that we thought was a united community. A community that had a lot of solidarity. Yes, perhaps we are already seeing a community that is much more fractured than we want to accept. And if perhaps we are already seeing two Latino communities, right? And we also have to ask ourselves if we are at a moment where we can unite a country that is very divided, and I have many questions because Julio, I really don’t know what the answers are less than 24 hours before these elections, I don’t really know what the country is telling us. I think we will know a lot more on January 20, when Donald Trump is in the White House, when we begin to see these massive deportations, when people begin to understand well what these deportations mean. What it means for someone in a Donald Trump administration to look at us Latinos and decide, «Ok, you look like you are an immigrant. You look like you are undocumented». Once people understand that, that is where I really want to see. If those Americans who voted for Donald Trump are going to feel comfortable in that type of United States.

JULIO: Yeah. Yes, it is still early. You’re right, it’s only been, well, not even 24 hours —I don’t know— and we’re recording this podcast.

PAOLA: Like Sabrina said before, this is like therapy for us, to understand well, to understand well and process. Of course.

JULIO: If there’s something that also needs to be explained —the Democrats, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris bet a lot on the issue of reproductive rights, which would be key to mobilizing the female vote and in states like Montana, Nevada, Missouri, amendments to protect the right to abortion passed. But at the same time, voters in each of those states elected Donald Trump. How do you explain that, Sabrina?

SABRINA: These are all difficult questions today, really. Look, I’ve spoken to many voters who don’t blame Donald Trump for what happened with Roe versus Wade. I mean, it’s the message he’s given on the issue of abortion, on the issue of reproductive rights. The first one for many months. This year it wasn’t clear what his position was. I mean, he did like sometimes he would come out and talk about how he was glad that he took, you know, the responsibility for the overturning of Roe versus Wade. And then on the other side, then he would come out and say that some of the places, you know, the bans that had been put in place, that he didn’t agree with, that it was too much. So, he kind of navigated it so that it wasn’t very clear what his position was. And then at the end, he would talk about how he promised that he was not going to pass a national ban on abortion. So I think for some voters it was like, oh, well, I can vote in my state for, you know, to protect this right or to give this right back and I vote for him, because he’s not going to do anything at the national level. And I think that there is, at the level of confusion, that is, the lack of clarity about why we got to this point on this issue of reproductive rights, why it is that in 2024 we are talking about it, we are talking about it because Donald Trump put people in the Supreme Court, judges who took away that right. But I think that many people do not, they do not understand that, they do not know that. And so it has been focused – Okay, well, if I have, that is, if I can vote this time to protect it, I will protect it. And why not?

JULIO: Yeah. Now we were listening to Paola talk a little about this, about the mass deportations that are the flagship proposal of this Trump campaign, eh? But it also requires an explanation, right? How, despite this promise starting on the first day of his administration, Trump had historic support among Latinos. How do you explain that, Sabrina?

SABRINA: I think that again, a lot of what I say is based on months of talking to Latino voters in different key states. And one of the things that I have seen is that many people, I mean, they don’t take what he has said to his face. Many people think that, well, no, he is not necessarily going to do that. And I am talking about people who were going to vote for him. Clearly there are many Latinos who voted for Kamala Harris who are truly afraid and truly believe that he is going to do what he has promised. But I say, for those Latinos who were considering voting for Trump because they already expressed that they were going to support him – talking about this issue with them, when you talked about mass deportations it was, “Well, I agree that the people who are working should stay or I agree with the people who are not taking resources from the government. What I say is that we have to send the criminals away.” So it is like, well, that is not mass deportations, those are, it is not the same thing. So I think there is also a bit of a lack of education, of understanding what exactly Trump’s proposal was, because he is already talking to voters who were going to Trump’s meetings. There are many who say that he spoke about it, that is, he spoke in very clear terms about how he feels, about undocumented immigrants and their deportation plans and the same people that I met in those meetings said what I am telling you that, “Oh, no, but not everyone. Some people do or some don’t, and they weren’t very clear about how that would work, but they wanted to see him try.” And as Paola said before, I think that the part after this is going to be what the reactions are when this becomes a reality? These are plans that have been made for years, that is, they are planned so that they can do it the moment he enters the White House.

JULIO: Paola, is it really possible to carry out mass deportations like those described by Trump?

PAOLA: We don’t know, but what we do know is that they are going to try, they are going to try and as Sabrina says, they have been planning it for years. I think one of the big things that Donald Trump regrets or one of the things that he hates is knowing that Barack Obama deported more people than he did. So I think that they have been planning for years and years what these mass deportations mean. And I think that something very interesting is that obviously these mass deportations by Donald Trump are based on the plan called Operation Wetback under the presidency of Eisenhower. What happened under Eisenhower is that they did deport a little more than 1 million, mostly Mexicans, but what was seen during those years, Julio, which is interesting, is that they also ended up deporting Mexican American citizens who ended up being deported because of the way in which they were racially discriminated. That is to say, it was an administration that looked at the public and ended up saying, well, you look like you are Mexican, so you are going to be deported too. That is history. These are statistics that are real. And what was also seen in those years was that at first the American and Mexican community was in favor of these mass deportations and what happened after three or four years is that the Mexican American community ended up being against these deportations, when they realized that it was affecting them. And now we are living in a United States in which immigrants are already Americans. That is, we live in a country where there are more than 22 million people who live in mixed-status families, more than 10 million American citizens. That is, now we are talking about mass deportations that are not only going to affect immigrants, but American families. So is it going to happen? We don’t know. Are they going to try? Absolutely.

After the break, how much did the Latino identity matter when it came to voting in these elections? We’ll be back.

[MIDROLL]

This is El Péndulo, I’m Julio Vaqueiro. We’re talking with my colleague Paola Ramos, from Noticias Telemundo, and Sabrina Rodriguez, national reporter for the Washington Post.

JULIO: Let me change the angle a little bit. Because we were talking about this gender gap. Right? The difference between men and women in this election. Clearly, men, Latinos, did vote for Trump by a majority. According to NBC News exit polls, 54%. How do you understand the difference in the term gender and the role of masculinity for Latinos, Sabrina?

SABRINA: That was a big focus of Trump’s campaign. He has focused on this idea of, I mean, the gender stereotypes. He has spoken very clearly in his speeches about how he is going to be the one to protect this country, that he is going to protect women. He has spoken. I mean, he has criticized women very directly. I mean, in ways that I don’t repeat about women or Kamala Harris, specifically Nancy Pelosi, has been talked about. I mean, she has a history of talking about women in some way and… And I think that in the strategy of this campaign we have seen that focus on men. I mean, going in those that are focused on men. I mean, we saw him in the last few weeks going on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is very well known for being popular with American men. And I think that in the Latino community in particular, he has focused on a message of… Again, protecting women that the man is who he is, that is, the leader of the family of the house. And this idea that he was a great businessman who ran his company and look how he got rich and… And he has wanted to project that image towards Latino men to show that… Look, I am a person – I mean, you can idolize me. Me? I mean, if you look at me. Look, you also want to bring your family forward. You want to be a hard worker. I was a hard worker and look where I got to. And oh, dear, with that image you attract more Latino men and it clearly worked.

JULIO: Yes. He talked about that and he talked about Trump’s campaign on two main issues, not immigration and the economy, and he based it on the premise that Latino voters and their concerns are the same as the rest of the Americans used the phrase Latino Americans. Was Paola right and in that sense did Kamala Harris’ campaign fail in something?

PAOLA: Well, let’s see, I think that economic anxiety is a real anxiety. I mean, the majority of Latino voters obviously worry most about the economy, what they worry most about is feeding their children. What they worry most about is having a roof over their houses. And I think that economic anxiety that Trump was able to talk about is… I think that worked a lot for them, but I do think that they got that key message right there, right? And that is introducing the word, as you said Julio, «Latino American.» Why? Because their campaign was based on this idea and that is an idea in which Latinos have already assimilated to such an extent in this country, that perhaps if you call them Americans, perhaps in that way you can begin to attract them more to Donald Trump’s campaign. They did not accept an idea that is very simple, and that is that now we are talking about a Latino community that has mostly changed. We were born in the United States, most of us are under 50 years old. The group that is growing the most within our community are third-generation Latinos and that word “American Latinos” – perhaps it was a very powerful word. Now, I think that Harris’ campaign also tried to do the same in some way, perhaps in a slightly more subtle way. I think so. It was a campaign that understood from the beginning that being Latino in the end does not mean that we are different from any other people, we care about the same things, we care about the economy, we care about our health, we care about our security. But I think that Trump’s game of us against them, them being the immigrants, is a strategy that is based on creating fear, creating terror, creating resentment. That strategy is based on emotions and I think that worked very, very well for them.

JULIO: But I also think that the big question is, do we now have to stop thinking about identity as a fundamental point for Latinos when it comes to voting? And if so, what does it mean for the future of the Democrats? No, Sabrina?

SABRINA: That’s the question. That’s the most key question. It’s that. I mean, I have to laugh a little because we’ve talked about it in recent years about what the Latino voter means? What is the Latino vote to me? I think that today more than ever I don’t have the answer. Today more than ever I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I mean. What? What is the answer? What unites us? What unites us as Latinos today? I really don’t have that answer, because based on what we’ve seen in the difference between Latino men and Latina women, that is, the percentages are so close. I mean, it’s historic that Trump, yes, yes, the exit polls remain at these levels of 45%. It’s historic that Trump wins with the Latino voter. So, I think there are a lot of questions about what the message to Latinos is going to be in the future. But I think one of the most important things here is, I mean, what I don’t want to see is that Democrats and Republicans now do nothing or that Democrats say, oh, well, now the Latinos have gone to the Republicans. We’re not going to try, we’re so close. I mean, almost. They’re going to win. Most of us don’t do anything. I think what it reinforces is that they have to really try with the Latino voter, that they really have to try to understand the same way they tried to get white women to vote. It didn’t work for them for one reason or another, but I guarantee you that in the next election they will still try to get the white women out. And what I don’t want to see is that there won’t be this investment, this attention, this concern about Latino voters going forward.

JULIO: Yes, in any case what it shows is that you have to work for the Latino vote and it’s not guaranteed for anyone, right? Well, the campaign is over now. The election. The two of you covered it very closely for months. What would you say you have learned about the country in this process, Paola?

PAOLA: Well, well, first I don’t know if anything is over. I think at this moment. Maybe. Maybe everything is just starting. Sabrina, I think, hasn’t been home for how long?

SABRINA: Months.

JULIO: Yes, she posts Instagram photos.

PAOLA: Yeah. Well, look, I’ve already learned that maybe my work should be much more focused on listening. I mean, I think we are journalists who are used to asking questions, maybe to having very clear stories, but I think we are at a time where we have to listen to the country. We have to understand what the voters are telling us and I think that is a very difficult job because we have to leave all these stereotypes aside. We have to leave politics behind.

One way, we have to put these countries aside and listen and do and just listen so that people are not afraid to tell us exactly what happened. So I’m not answering your question, Julio, because, like many of the questions you ask me, I don’t have a very clear answer right now, but what I do know is that to understand what I’ve learned I have to keep listening more.

JULIO: No, I love it. Sabrina, you?

SABRINA: I think that what this election has shown me is how complicated each person is. I mean, my grandmother always has an expression that each person is a world. And I think that this lesson shows us that, because I have spoken with so many people who, I mean, their opinions on how they see the country, how they see the different issues that have been or have been focused on in this lesson, the candidates see things. I mean, they see things differently. I have spoken with the person who, I mean, supports reproductive rights and who is so, so frustrated with what has happened on that issue in this country in recent years. But at the same time, they were going to vote for Donald Trump because of the immigration issue or because of the economy. And I think where we can fail here in the conversation in the months after this is to think that ah, so all Latinos are conservative and I think there may be Latinos who feel anxiety about the economy, who are also worried about climate change, who also want to see the rights of transgender people who are also supporting, that is, reproductive rights. I think that each person can see the world in so many different ways and I think that is what I have learned, is that you can never. I mean, you have the idea of ​​ah, this voter thinks like this, this one like that, but no, no, and I think that in the conversation I want us to continue talking about not just the polls. But what is behind those polls? What are the conversations that Latino families are having today and in the coming months?

JULIO: Sabrina and Paola, thank you both very much.

SABRINA: Thank you.

PAOLA: Thank you.

Sabrina Rodriguez is a national reporter for the Washington Post.

And Paola Ramos of Noticias Telemundo and author of the book “Defectors.”

[MUSIC]

El Péndulo has been a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.

I am the host, Julio Vaqueiro of Noticias Telemundo. This episode was produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess [bir-jess] and Jess Alvarenga. Editing is by Daniel Alarcón, with Eliezer Budasoff and Silvia Viñas.

Desirée Yépez is the digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact checking. Music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is a senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the video journalism for the series.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

El Péndulo is made possible with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

You can follow us on social media as @ [at] central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast dot audio.

I’m Julio Vaqueiro, and thank you for listening.