Petro says that revealing the alleged guerrilla infiltration in the State seeks to influence Colombia's electoral climate

Bogotá.- Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced this Friday that the information seized from a dissident faction of the FARC in the middle of last year, and used this week to point out a presumed guerrilla infiltration in State organizations, took 16 months to be made public because it seeks to affect his Government in the midst of an electoral period. In a televised address, the president stated that part of the material released by Noticias Caracol and the newspaper El Tiempo about the alleged infiltration corresponds to "falsified" conversations with artificial intelligence, and pointed out that the fact that certain information reached the press before his Executive has "the intention of politically hitting the government" because the country is "in electoral times". «Saying it now, in elections, affects us politically. And delaying it 16 months affected us operationally», Petro affirmed, who also demanded a «serious explanation» about why those files seized from the FARC dissidents on July 23, 2024, were not delivered promptly to the Presidency. The controversy over this case erupted on Sunday, when Noticias Caracol revealed emails, chats, and communications attributed to the Estado Mayor de Bloques y Frentes (EMBF), a dissident faction of the FARC led by alias Calarcá. According to the investigation, those files would indicate a high level of infiltration of that guerrilla group into the Army and the intelligence service, and would involve General Juan Miguel Huertas and the high-ranking official of the National Intelligence Directorate (DNI) Wilmar Mejía, whom the Attorney General's Office (Public Ministry) provisionally suspended from their duties yesterday.

President Gustavo Petro's Defense of Officials

Petro insisted that some of the alleged chats linking Huertas to alias Calarcá were subjected by the Government to an AI verification program and "it turned out that they were not copies of the chats, but artificially constructed conversations". Furthermore, the president insisted that, in July 2024, Huertas "was not part of the Government," as he was removed from the Army in 2021, during the previous administration, and was not reinstated as head of the Army Personnel Command until three months ago. Petro also said that El Tiempo published "lies" by attributing to Mejía the voice of a recording between private individuals that, according to him, has no relation to any official of the Executive. Initially, Petro downplayed the scandal of the journalistic revelation, which also evidenced alleged support from the dissidents to his 2022 campaign, and attributed the "errors" of Noticias Caracol to sources from the United States National Intelligence Agency (CIA). However, today, the president reiterated his request to the Attorney General's Office to conduct a forensic IT examination to clarify which part of the material is authentic and which is manipulated or artificially created.