Petro insists on an international commission to investigate alleged drug infiltration in entities

Colombian President Gustavo Petro insisted on Friday on creating an international commission to help the national prosecutor’s office investigate the alleged infiltration of drug traffickers into state and political entities, as well as other cases of international relevance such as the murder of Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci.

This is a proposal that the president has launched on several occasions as a way to get an independent committee to support the investigations already being carried out by the Colombian prosecutor’s office. Petro has suggested this type of commission for various other purposes such as reducing impunity or corruption.

In his statement on Friday, Petro urged the Colombian high courts, the prosecutor’s office and the opposition sectors to give their opinion on an international commission that investigates an alleged incidence of drug trafficking in both state entities and political sectors.

“I have discovered an opposition candidate using sources that most likely come from infiltrators in the prosecutor’s office of the so-called Drug Trafficking Board made up of major national and foreign drug traffickers,” Petro pointed out from his X accountwithout indicating which presidential candidate he is referring to or showing evidence.

According to the president, the so-called Drug Trafficking Board is seeking “the destruction” of his government and would also be behind alleged plans to assassinate him. It would be a group of drug traffickers who would have joined forces under this name and who aroused interest since Petro named them in August, without the authorities having publicly named their leaders.

An eventual international commission would also be dedicated to clarifying more details of the murder of prosecutor Pecci, which occurred in May 2022 on a private beach on the Barú peninsula, in Cartagena, where he was enjoying his honeymoon. The prosecutor was shot dead by two individuals who were traveling on a jet ski.

Colombia captured and has convicted several of the perpetrators of the crime, including the shooter and the confessed mastermind of the plan. However, the masterminds have not yet been captured either in Colombia or Paraguay, where Pecci was leading cases on drug trafficking structures and criminal organizations.

Petro has also indicated that the so-called Drug Trafficking Board would be putting pressure, with supposed help from members of the Colombian prosecutor’s office, so that the murder of the Paraguayan prosecutor goes unpunished.

The Colombian prosecutor’s office has been directed since March by Luz Adriana Camargo, an experienced prosecutor with few political ties, who was chosen from a shortlist of names proposed by President Petro, who accused the previous prosecutor of putting pressure on him to remove him from office using the power of the institution that has a monopoly on criminal action in Colombia.

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