Stories of Corruption Episode 3

On the 12th of September, the president posted this. Colombia has four terrible cancers, corruption, drug trafficking, contraband, and illegal mining. And I'm going to fight them head on, no matter who falls. That's a quote. He put corruption first, and he was right to. It raises a question that's bigger than Colombia. Why is corruption so rampant in countries Spain built? Every one of them have fought it, from Mexico down to Argentina. And every one of them got it from the same place. It came over on the ships, and it's been here for 500 years. It started in year eight. Columbus landed in 1492. And in 1500, the Crown sent a judge across the ocean to investigate him. The judge arrested him, put him in chains, and shipped him back to Spain. The charges were abuse of power, mistreating the settlers, and enslaving the native people. The first governor of the Indies was in irons eight years in. And from there, it got organized. This show is free, and it stays free whether you back it or not. Nobody's locked out. However, it isn't free to make. If it's worth something to you, the link's on the screen. And everything else is at columbiaunfiltered.live. Now, let's get back to it. Three years after Columbus came home in chains, a royal order handed Spaniards groups of indigenous people to work for them. It was called the Ecomendia, no, Ecomienda. Ecomienda, and it was the law. The selling of public office came from Spain itself. In 1494, Ferdinand and Isabella passed a law to stop officials from selling their posts on the side. It didn't work, and by the middle of the 1500s, the Crown had stopped fighting it and started doing it. The sale of office became a regular part of the royal income. Notary posts went first, then seats on the town council, then treasury jobs. By the late 1600s, they were selling judgeships on the high courts. You didn't win the job, you bought it. And after 1606, you could sell it onto somebody else. On top of the price, you paid the Crown half of your first year's salary just to take the post. So picture a man who just paid a fortune for a job that actually pays very little. He's got a district full of people, and the law's on his side. He makes them buy their goods from him at the price he sets. That's how the job was paid. Say you'd taken land that wasn't yours, even land that belonged to an indigenous village. You paid the Crown a fee, and the title became yours. None of that was a crime. It was how the empire made its money. And most of it put a man in prison today. Sometimes an order came from Madrid that an official had no intention of carrying out. He'd set the king's paper on his head as a mark of respect, and he'd say, I obey, but I don't comply. And then he did nothing. That lasted about 300 years, and independence didn't end it. The new republics kept the same officials, the same families, with the same habits. Every country Spain built inherited this, and every one of them has had to fight its way out. Some have gotten further along than others. It's taken them generations. Chile is one of the cleanest countries in Latin America today. Even so, in April, a court there convicted 28 people for stealing 28 billion Chilean pesos from their own national police. And the man leading them was a retired police general. Colombia's still in the middle of that fight. Ask business owners here, and nearly all of them say bribes get offered. They put the price of winning a public contract at about 17% of the contract. Today, I got four cases. A mayor of this city, Armenia, who signed away the roads before he ever took office. The mayor of Bogota, who ran the city's contract like a business. The men who took the money that was meant for thirsty children bought votes with it. And a man in Cali who sold a house he didn't own. One of them wrote down how it happens. From a prison cell this January, the man who carried the suitcase said, I chose the short path. So Carlos Mario Alvarez was a teacher, trained in philosophy. He spent his working life in classrooms, and then in this city's social development office, the department that runs the programs for the poor. In 2015, he ran for mayor of Armenia. He said he was a different kind of mayor, and the city believed him, and he won with 20,000 votes. He was a different kind of mayor. He stopped the sprawl by decree. In other words, he drew a line and says, the city's not gonna grow beyond this. He said the job was to protect the water and the landscape. He built the first bike lanes the city ever had. All those bike trails you see, it was from him. Amounts to eight kilometers of them, and those lanes are full on weekends now. Before any of that, before he ever sat in a chair, he signed a piece of paper. He needed money to run. So he borrowed six billion pesos from the husband of the mayor he was running to replace. He signed a promissory note for it. The note said how he'd pay it back, with city contracts. Once he was mayor, he walked into the job owing money. The mayor he replaced was Luz Valencia, and everyone here remembers her for rebuilding the roads. She paid for them with what's called a valorization. That's a levy on every property owner in town. 111 billion pesos of road work went to one contract and his partners. He paid her husband 10% of every contract. The prosecutors put the husband's take at 22 billion pesos. That's who that teacher borrowed from. Half alone was paid out of city contracts before Alvarez even took office. The other half was to come from the next valorization. If you own property here, that was on your bill. He signed other notes like it to other people who put money into the campaign, but then he stopped paying one of them. Well, that lender took the note to a law firm, and that law firm went after the mayor of Armenia to collect the debt. It was actually a campaign bribe, signed and dated, was handed to the lawyers by the man who owed it. In April 2018, they arrested the mayor, the mayor before him and her husband. Five of her officials and a dozen contractors went with them. She took a plea deal, six years and five months. Her husband got 12. The contractor cooperated. Then the prosecutors found the same men doing the same thing out in San Andreas, and it was the same 10%. Only this time in San Andreas, they got 120 billion pesos that was for schools and parks. They arrested the governor of the island and the governor before him. Alvarez, he spent two years locked up in his house waiting for a verdict. January 2022 at 54, he died at his house in El Caimo, just south of here. The verdict never came. Two days later, the newspapers here said goodbye to him, and in the headline, they called him a different kind of mayor. Samuel Moreno was the grandson of a president. He was elected mayor of Bogota in 2007, and his biggest promise was a bus line down Calle 26 to the airport. Excuse me. The prosecutors say he ended up running what they called the carousel. The contractors paid, the officials collected, and the same people kept coming around. When the contractor on the bus line collapsed, Calle 26 stayed torn open for years. A lot of the shops along that road, they closed up. Moreno was convicted three times, and he died in 2023. The bus line was finished after he was gone. In La Guajira, Wayu children have been dying for years because they don't have clean water. The Constitutional Court ordered the state to fix it in 2017. It still hasn't. In 2023, the National Disaster Agency bought 40 water trucks for those communities. The prosecutors say nearly a quarter of the price was overcharge. The government needed votes in Congress for its reforms, and by the account of the men who ran the agency, the money went to buying them. Officials in the agency carried suitcases of cash meant for the presidents of the Senate and the House. The advisor who took the cash is in jail, and both presidents of Congress are charged before the Supreme Court right now. The deputy at the agency broke first and told the prosecutors everything. He wrote to the judge that it was eating him from the inside. He wrote that after he confessed, he felt lighter, even knowing he was going to prison. His boss confessed, too, and says justice abandoned him. The man they both named above them was the president's chief of staff, Petro. He left the country, and Nicaragua gave him asylum. There's a picture of him that went viral on the internet. He was dancing in a club in Nicaragua, in Managua, and next to him was the ambassador from Colombia. The 40 trucks never delivered water. They sat in a military base until the tires went flat for years. That same agency is actually handling the earthquake right now, the funds for the earthquake. This last case has no politician. A Colombian living abroad wired $45,000 for a house in Cali. The house belonged to somebody else. The deed he was shown looked real. Somebody inside the notary's office had taken an old page out of the notary book and put a fake bill of sale in its place. This is a known practice. The people inside the notaries sell them. The used page is more than 10 years old because by then, the forgery can't be prosecuted. As of the last report on this case, nobody has been charged, but that money's gone. One document would have stopped it, and this is important. It's why I'm telling this particular part of the story. If you're ever gonna buy property here, pay attention. It's a Certificado de Tradición y Libertad. Easy for you to say. And it comes from the National Registry. It shows every owner and every mortgage, so the fake sale would have shown up as basically a missing link in the chain. It costs about 20,000 pesos. You get it back the same day, and you can order it right on the internet. So if you're buying property in this country, get that certificate yourself before you sign anything. Now, every one of these men had something worth doing in front of them, something good, something positive, roads for a city, a bus line, water for children, but every one of them decided the way to get that good thing ran through doing a bad thing. So remember the 17%. The husband in Armenia at 10% was actually charging less than the going rate. When the president says he'll fight corruption no matter who falls, people want to believe him, but keep in mind, he ran on cleaning up the criminal groups. He wants to solve corruption. He didn't run on solving corruption the way he did for the criminal groups. So here's the issue. Uribe, Santos, Duque, Petro, they all promised the same thing. They all put forward a plan to solve corruption in Colombia. So Colombia's been hearing it forever from presidents. They get elected and it kind of goes away. And those water trucks in La Guajira, that's part of the reason they're not really believed anymore. So the man in the cell is the only one who answered the question. He said he chose a short path and that after he told the truth, he felt lighter. The details of every case are on the website with the sources and you can check me out. It's columbiaunfiltered.live. Once again, I apologize that for whatever reason, the live stream didn't work and I'm late getting this up, but it's done. And as a matter of fact, I kept revising and working on this thing throughout the week, even though Monday is when I started recording this. It is now Saturday. So tomorrow I've got yet another one coming up and it's about the earthquakes, the swarms that have been taking place. I don't know if you're noticing, paying attention, but there's been swarms in Chaco where the earthquake recently, the big one, there's been thousands of around 4.0 quakes. And in Tolima, not far from here in Armenia, last I checked, there was over 740 swarm quakes over the course of five or six days. And I checked that two days ago. And so they're still happening. So tomorrow's video, it's going to be about that. And with that, I want to thank you and I'll see you tomorrow. Oh.