Colombia's Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva Durán has been provisionally suspended from office for three months by order of the Attorney General's Office. The company wrote a letter of objection to the Foreign Minister of the government of Gustavo Petro, alleging that it had exceeded its obligations by not submitting a tender that had already been awarded to a company. This is about the confusing controversy surrounding the million-dollar order to produce passports.
According to the Attorney General's Office's decision, Leyva committed “two disciplinary offenses that were provisionally classified as very serious and were committed through fraud.” Firstly, by declaring the tender void without providing the factual, legal and technical basis, which could violate the principles of transparency, economy and responsibility of public procurement. The public tender, in which the only bidder was the company Thomas Greg & Sons, was declared null and void last September, a process for which the company had already filed a lawsuit for 117,000 million pesos. Secondly, the Attorney General's Office explained that it had decided to bring charges against the Chancellor “because, in the course of the development of the contract procedure, he allegedly ordered an obvious urgency without any apparent reasons for this.”
At 81, the Chancellor is the oldest member of the cabinet and, despite his numerous controversies, has survived both the attempts at political control in Congress and the ministerial upheavals over the course of his year and a half in office without any major problems.
The passport tender had kept the foreign minister in a fix for months. It even brought him a bitter debate with the then director of the state's National Legal Protection Agency, Martha Lucía Zamora. The two officials were harshly confronted late last year in the corridors of the Casa de Nariño itself, and the president decided to remove Zamora, who made allegations against Leyva.
“Why do I care if they condemn the state? “This is delaying a trial in Colombia,” shouted the Chancellor, according to the story by journalist Daniel Coronell on W Radio. “Notify me in the grave, by the time the outcome of this lawsuit comes out, I will already be dead,” he concluded. The Chancellor has denied shouting at him and President Petro has indicated that he supports this version. After his resignation, Zamora denounced a meeting between officials and those interested in this tender in a Paris hotel, which was also attended by the chancellor's son, Jorge Leyva. The defendant admitted meeting with Foreign Ministry officials in France but denied any irregularities.
Leyva usually presents himself as Colombia's foreign and peace minister. Petro has put Colombia's diplomacy at the service of his overall peace project, through which he proposes a simultaneous dialogue with several armed groups. “Colombia will contribute all the world's efforts to overcome the climate crisis and we expect all the world's efforts to overcome our endemic violence,” the president said, announcing before he took office that Leyva would be his chancellor.
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Among his first successes, the Chancellor quickly managed to restore relations with the Chavista government of Venezuela, which had been completely broken since 2019, and to put them in order with Cuba, which was caused by the diplomatic hostility that marked the period of Iván Duque (2018-2022 ) marked was severely damaged. Both Caracas and Havana play key roles in negotiating with the ELN guerrillas and were the setting for these dialogues.
However, Leyva's management has been widely criticized for privileging this agenda of negotiations with armed groups over other Colombian diplomatic interests. He also accuses the attrition of several false starts, which include the correction of failed rapprochements with the regime of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua or some statements in which he spoke of the “Department of Panama”, as well as the multiple appointments of interviewed politicians to missions. diplomatic.
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