Martinelli praises "drug lord fixer"

On June 16, ex-president Ricardo Martinelli rushed to proclaim on social networks a judicial victory against the Spanish newspaper  El Mundo.

A Madrid court ordered the newspaper to rectify a news item published in October 2019, referring to the case against executives of the construction company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (FCC) for bribery payments in Panama.

According to the court, the former Panamanian president is not investigated for this process, and therefore he demanded that the newspaper publish a retraction.

“I congratulate the prominent Colombian lawyer, Dr. Diego Cadena, for the excellent work accomplished in Spain, so that the media in that country publish the right of reply,”Martinelli wrote on Twitter along with a photo with Cadena.

The photo even caught the attention of Colombian media.

Citytv titled: “[ex-Colombia president] Uribe’s investigated lawyer now works for another former president.”  Uribe and his lawyer are  under house arrest, accused of  bribing witnesses.

What Martinelli did not say is that the “prominent” lawyer is the protagonist of a sordid judicial scandal in Colombia, which links him to the alleged bribery of witnesses and procedural fraud. On Tuesday, July 28, he was charged with the alleged commission of these crimes.

Drug lord fixer
Eight days ago, the renowned Colombian journalist Daniel Coronell, president of Univisión news, on the Los Danieles website, He made an X-ray of the plot by which Martinelli’s lawyer is being investigated. Entitled “The Collapse,” Coronell describes the lawyer as “a fixer of drug lords to avoid going to trial, a prison visitor to draw letters from his distinguished guests, and a bandit gatherer to favor his clients.”

Cadena, according to Coronell and a Colombian prosecutor’s office, paid large sums of money to a former paramilitary prisoner to testify against Senator Iván Cepeda, and allegedly benefit one of his clients: former President Alvaro Uribe, who also has a post in the parliament of Colombia.

Last Friday, a new chapter in this plot was finalized. The Colombian Attorney General’s Office asked that the lawyer be placed under house arrest.

It is not known how Martinelli got to Cadena, reports La Prensa, but when he underwent the extradition process in Miami, he former president hired David Markus and Ricardo Bascuas, lawyers who also defended Andrés Felipe Arias, a trusted man and former Minister of Agriculture Uribe, who in those days was facing an extradition case to Colombia.

At that time, Uribe also wrote a letter to the American judge Edwin Torres, who was leading the process against Martinelli. “He was a constant ally in our country’s fight against terrorism and drug trafficking, threats that affect the United States,” he said.