VENEZUELA: Case Closed in Prosecutor’s Murder

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 14 2006 (IPS) - Venezuelan Attorney General Isaías Rodríguez announced that prosecutors were closing the case against those who were charged with planning the assassination of prosecutor Danilo Anderson, the highest-profile murder case in Venezuela in years.

Rodríguez said the decision had to be reached by a Thursday legal deadline, and that insufficient evidence was available without the testimony of a “star witness” from Colombia, Rafael García.

The case was thus closed against banker Nelson Mezerhane, retired general Eugenio Añez, landowner Fernando Moreno, and Salvador Romaní, the son of an anti-Castro Cuban exile of the same name, said the attorney general.

Something similar could occur in the case of journalist Patricia Poleo, director of the Caracas daily El Nuevo País, if she returns from the United States, he explained. Her case has been frozen, because no one can be tried in absentia in Venezuela.

The official said it was unfortunate that the Colombian government had not allowed García, former head of computer systems in Colombia’s Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS) police intelligence service, to travel to Venezuela to testify.

García is serving an 18-year sentence in Colombia for “purging” DAS files on drug traffickers and members of right-wing paramilitary militias.

Prosecutors believe that García’s computer – “a veritable Pandora’s box” in Rodríguez’s words – contains information regarding a supposed plot by Colombians and Venezuelans to trigger chaos in Venezuela and perhaps to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Anderson’s murder is considered part of that plot.

Rodríguez has thus closed the case against the men who prosecutors see as the “intellectual authors” behind Anderson’s murder, after saying he is caught between “a rock and a hard place” because of the time limits faced in the case.

The attorney general said a ruling that set deadlines and limits on extensions in the case was “unconstitutional,” and added that he would not comply with it fully.

That statement drew immediate criticism from jurist Marino Alvarado of the local human rights organisation PROVEA. “It is very bad that the attorney general himself announces that he will disobey a ruling because he differs with it, or will confront the law if it does not authorise him to do what he believes is best,” Alvarado told IPS.

Rodríguez said the case could be reopened in the future if García is allowed to testify.

He described García as a “star witness of Colombia’s Supreme Court,” which, based on statements by former heads of the DAS, is investigating the ties between members of the ultra-right paramilitary militias and legislators belonging to Colombia’s ruling right-wing coalition.

For the past two years, the Anderson case has been another factor of polarisation between the leftist government and the opposition, with the Chávez administration accusing a number of prominent members of the opposition involved in a short-lived April 2002 coup d’etat of conspiracy.

At the time of his death, Anderson was investigating a number of businessmen, politicians and other prominent figures for their participation in the 2002 coup in which the president was overthrown for two days by dissident military officers and members of the opposition.

The prosecutor was killed on Nov. 18, 2003 when a powerful bomb went off under his car on a street in Caracas.

Buried with special honours, Anderson became a hero for the president’s supporters and is seen as a victim of right-wing coup plotters. Posters and murals with his name and image still adorn streets in poor neighbourhoods of the capital.

Shortly afterwards, a childhood friend of Anderson’s came forward with a different version, saying the prosecutor had offered the people he was investigating, especially bankers, to let them off the hook in exchange for huge sums of money.

In January 2005, Interior Minister Jesse Chacón said “the investigation has revealed that there were two groups of lawyers, one that served as links between people with money (who may have included some of those who were facing charges), and the other linked with Anderson, which supposedly demanded money from the big shots in exchange for not going after them”

Some of those allegedly involved in Anderson’s murder died in shootouts with the police.

Three men belonging to the same family, Juan, Rolando and Otoniel Guevara, were arrested as the “material authors” of the murder and sentenced in late 2005 to lengthy prison terms.

Colombian witness Giovanny Vasquez, who accused the Guevaras, also testified against Mezerhane, Añez, Poleo, Romaní and Moreno.

Presenting himself as a double agent of the DAS and Colombia’s right-wing paramiliatary umbrella group AUC, Vasquez said he had taken part in meetings in Panama and the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo with people planning Anderson’s murder and a wider plot.

Rodríguez stated in public that he had “read the sincerity in the eyes” of Vasquez, and that he believed “85 percent” of what the witness said.

Those accused of planning the murder all spent several weeks in prison in late 2005, with the exception of Poleo, who fled to the United States.

Charges were not brought against Vasquez, who was provided with protection as a witness. Meanwhile, media investigations revealed that he was not a psychiatrist, as he claimed to be, and that he was in prison at the time of the supposed meetings in Panama and Maracaibo.

In August, Rodríguez finally admitted that “Vasquez fooled me.”

“I make mistakes, I’m not infallible,” he told reporters. However, he did not drop the charges against the prominent members of the opposition accused of plotting Anderson’s murder, and asked the court to provide an extension, which expired Thursday, for presenting his conclusions.

“We presume that at some point we will have, from Colombia but not Venezuela, the information necessary to reopen the case,” said Rodríguez.