[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.