The Prosecutor’s Office argued that the highest court is competent to advance the process against the senator
Carlos Antonio Lozada, former FARC commander and now a member of the political party Comunes, speaks during an act of recognition, in Bogota, Colombia June 23, 2021. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez
In the last few minutes it transpired that by decision of the Attorney General’s Office, the Supreme Court of Justice will, from now on, be in charge of investigating the senator of the Comunes party Julián Gallo, also known as Carlos Lozada, for discrepancies between his testimonies and those of Reinel Guzmán, also a former Farc combatant, about the authorship of the murder of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado.
According to the document that the Prosecutor’s Office sent to the high court, in Given that Gallo is qualified, the jurisdiction for the investigation belongs to the Supreme Court.
Regarding the clash of versions, it should be noted that the senator of the Commons would have pointed out, on different occasions, three people as witnesses who could attest that the extinct guerrilla would be the author of the assassination of Gómez Hurtado. One of those three was Reinel Guzmán, who claimed to have no information to support this version.
According to a recording leaked in August 2021, Guzmán told Lozada that he never knew of that crime and that, if the FARC did it, it was a decision of the secretariat, because that information did not reach the Eastern Bloc.
Also in August 2021, Guzmán, in an interview on W Radio, reiterated his version: “I did not know that the FARC was the one that had caused that situation, that fact”, and insisted that he He was not a member of the secretariat, so he never knew about the order that was allegedly given to assassinate the conservative leader.
Thus, contradicting Lozada, he stressed that he only learned of the Farc’s responsibility in the assassination when it was publicly known through the media. And he insisted that he only knew of the probable authorship of the extinct guerrilla when, through a letter, the JEP announced that they had claimed responsibility for that and five other representative homicides.
“I came to be clear that it was the FARC when they took over the spokesperson when they said that they were the authors of those events with those characters, because at that time I was a member of the Bloc’s General Staff, but I was not there to make decisions. ” Guzmán told W Radio at the time.
Guzmán also revealed that he had denounced the senator from the Comunes party before the Prosecutor’s Office for an alleged threat, recorded in the recording that was leaked on last year, in which at the end of his meeting with Lozada, he told him: “I would pay to see how you end up, the day you bury me or I bury you, we’ll talk”, which for Guzmán was a clear intimidation.
Álvaro Gómez Hurtado’s family has asked the JEP to expel Lozada from the case
It is worth remembering that, although Gómez Hurtado’s family had asked the JEP to open an incident of noncompliance against Carlos Antonio Lozada, senator of the Comunes Party, due to alleged inconsistencies in his testimony about the assassination of the former conservative leader, the court definitively rejected the request on March 8.
The JEP had already rejected the appeal of the family of Gómez Hurtado, with which the former member of the Farc would have been expelled from the jurisdiction, arguing that it is not the procedural moment for said discussion.
“The process of early contributions to the truth is not, as has been indicated on various occasions, the procedural moment for that discussion. This procedure seeks to determine if the Special Jurisdiction for Peace has jurisdiction to hear these cases and, if it so decides, the procedure to follow”, said the JEP