[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 Prosecutor’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 Prosecutor’s Office…
[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 Prosecutor’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 Prosecutor’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 Prosecutor’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 Prosecutor’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 Prosecutor’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.