ECUADOR-POLITICS: Judges Hold Centre-stage

By Gonzalo Ortiz Reprint | | Print |

Gonzalo Ortiz Crespo

QUITO, Jan 18 1996 (IPS) - The justice system in Ecuador is upstaging politicians in media coverage as the country gears up for presidential elections in May.

Newspaper readers and TV viewers have eyes only for three big criminal trials – two concerning corruption scandals and the third involving seven peasants from the northeast accused of murder and terrorism.

The first of these cases involves the alleged fraudulent use of some 10 million dollars in secret government funds controlled by former Vice President Alberto Dahik. He resigned office last year and fled to Costa Rica.

Then there is the question of fuel imports where 20 to 30 million dollars were siphoned off in a scam involving former energy minister Francisco Acosta Coloma, now also a fugitive.

The seven peasants – six men and a woman are charged with laying an ambush that killed 11 soldiers and police along a border river with Colombia in December 1993. Human rights defense lawyers, religious organisations and other organisations have protested the innocence of the peasants, some of whom are illiterate, and have declared the evidence against the seven consists only of statements extracted under torture.

The trial that has generated the most excitement, however, is the one that began three months ago pitting the President of the Supreme Court of Justice Carlos Solorzano against Vice President Dahik and other high officials.

Dahik, a powerful figure in the Sixto Duran Ballen administration that took office in 1992, fled to Costa Rico in October after getting wind of an order to imprison him. Dahik left a written resignation, which Congress accepted.

Dahik’s flight followed those of his two personal secretaries, Juan Mario Crespo and Gladys Merchan, and former chancellor Diego Paredes.

The court had ordered preventive detention for all three after evidence emerged that funds had been diverted from the Vice President’s discretionary account to checking accounts opened in a Quito private bank in the name of Dahik’s secretaries.

Solorzano is expected to complete the indictment stage of the trial this week but, beyond the legal technicalities, the public is waiting somewhat impatiently to learn who will be found guilty.

Speculation is rife that the still-unknown beneficiaries of the checks dispensed by the former Vice President’s secretaries will be charged with fraud or at least made to return the money.

All should soon be revealed as Solorzano, whose reputation as an upright and tenacious judge recently earned him the title of “man of the year” from several media organisations, has announced that the indictment stage of the trial will be concluded because he has obtained all the information he needs.

Ecuador’s other public corruption trial is also characterized by a number of fugitives and no detainees.

Acosta Coloma, who was minister of energy until the beginning of 1995, is charged along with his cousin Alfonso Darquesa with defrauding the state of 20 to 30 million dollars through fuel sales made by their private Hiperoil company last year.

The purchases were filled with irregularities that were overlooked during the supposed fuel emergency that Ecuador experienced when a drought caused energy rationing between the months of August and November and at other times last year.

The detention orders issued by the criminal court judge were delayed for three days before they reached police. Acosta and Daruea, however, had left the country weeks earlier after the local media broke the scandal, with one of them fleeing to Miami and the other to Ipiales, Colombia.

The final judicial hearing in the case against the seven peasants charged with being guerrillas and murderers will be held at the end of January in the Amazon city of Tena, 185 kilometers east of Quito.

A diverse group of non-governmental organizations interested in the case have formed a committee to defend “the Putumayo Seven,” as the peasants are called.

“The statements obtained through torture during arrest and interrogations held in military and police precincts cannot be used as evidence,” the Catholic bishop Gonzalo Lopez Maranon told IPS.

Amnesty International, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, Americas Watch, the Washington Office on Latin America and other international organizations have already intervened in the case, sending fact-finding groups and letters to the Ecuadoran government and judiciary.

The case stems from an incident when a joint Ecuadoran police and military patrol was ambushed on Dec. 16, 1993 in Piedra Colorado near the Putumayo River along the border with Colombia and 11 members of the security forces died.

Guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) took credit for the ambush, but the Ecuadoran armyswept through rural dwellings in the area and detained dozens of peasants.

Eleven of those held were detained more than eight days during which time, it was later confirmed, they were tortured. The army then turned them over to the civilian authorities, accusing them of having confessed to being guerrillas and of having killed the 11 soldiers and policemen.

Charges against four of the detainees were dropped in the course of the judicial procedure but six were held while another has been freed but faces cover-up charges.

“What I find most outrageous is that the Pichincha prosecutor himself expressly acknowledged in December 1994 that the seven had been tortured. And the only evidence against them is their confessions, extracted by torture,” Luis Angel Saavedra, of the committee to defend the peasants, told IPS.

Bishop Lopez Maranon noted that the alleged confessions made by the peasants, some of whom are illiterate, were given the lie by the very terms and writing used, which reveal a military style and include words that are unknown in the countryside.

The priest and other committee members are urging journalists and well-known Ecuadorans to attend the final hearing in Tena to act as a counterweight to the “military pressures” that they claim are being put on the sentencing judges.