Former Colombian Presidential Candidate Answers to Spy Charges

Edited by Ivan Martínez
2015-01-31 12:38:44

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Bogotá, January 31 (RHC-teleSUR) -- Around 800 members of Colombia’s right-wing Democratic Centre Party participated in a demonstration Friday outside the attorney general’s office in support of the party’s president and last year’s presidential candidate Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, who has been summoned to testify about his alleged role in an illegal spying scandal.

Zuluaga, the leading opposition candidate in Colombia’s 2014 elections, is being interrogated following allegations that surfaced last week regarding his suspected role in the illegal spying operation on the ongoing peace negotiations between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government.

The former presidential candidate publicly criticized the peace talks that began in 2012 that are aimed at ending the country’s 50-year conflict that has left over 220,000 people dead and millions displaced. He was openly against the negotiations and referred to the FARC rebels as “terrorists.”

Zuluaga is backed by former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe who has continued his efforts to hamper the peace talks and who is linked to paramilitaries and drug trafficking. Uribe decimated rebel ranks with a relentless U.S.-backed military campaign.

The former candidate of the Democratic Center party allegedly held strong ties to a secretive, military-run spy center that has been charged with providing classified information to Zuluaga’s campaign team during the 2014 elections.



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