ANDRÉS FELIPE ARIAS IS A VICTIM OF THE POLITICAL REVENGE OF SANTOS

Andrés Felipe Arias is a victim of the political revenge of Juan Manuel Santos

The following is the text of the press release of the defense lawyers of Andrés Felipe Arias

By Jared Genser/ Perseus Strategies

November 1, 2017

LEGAL TEAM PUBLISHES WHITE PAPER ON THE CASE OF ANDRÉS FELIPE ARIAS LEIVA OF COLOMBIA

Andrés Felipe Arias, former Minister of Agriculture of Colombia, was wrongly convicted by the Supreme Court of Colombia on charges of corruption; Faces extradition to Colombia while his application for asylum remains pending.

Washington, D.C. – Today, the international legal team for former Colombian Minister of Agriculture Andrés Arias published a detailed White Paper explaining the political persecution against the former minister suffered in Colombia under President Juan Manuel Santos and his allies in the judiciary. Santos pressed for Arias’ wrongful conviction at the hands of a corrupted Supreme Court on charges of illegally contracting and misappropriating funds from an agricultural subsidy program in July 2014. Though Arias managed to travel to the United States prior to his conviction to seek political asylum in the country, the Santos administration continues to persecute him by seeking his extradition to Colombia.

The author of the White Paper is Jared Genser, who has served as counsel to such clients as former Czech Republic President Václav Havel and Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Aung San Suu Kyi, Liu Xiaobo, Desmond Tutu, and Elie Wiesel. In publishing the White Paper, Genser said:

“Andrés Arias is not merely a victim of a vendetta of President Santos against him and others aligned with former President Uribe, but he is actually innocent of the charges on which he was convicted in Colombia. It was very disturbing that President Obama began Andrés’ extradition proceeding on the very day Santos announced his deal with the FARC. It is surprising that President Trump continues to act on the extradition request from Santos, who himself has publicly said there is no extradition treaty in force between the U.S. and Colombia. And this dire situation is made all the worse by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services failing to abide by its own guidelines in refusing to expedite the process of Andrés’ claim for asylum. Andrés should be immediately released and granted asylum in the United States with his wife and children.”

On September 28, 2017, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida cleared the way for Arias’ extradition to Colombia, despite serious questions about the validity of the U.S.-Colombia Extradition Treaty, and he has been held in the Federal Detention Center of Miami ever since. He is appealing his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Meanwhile his application for asylum remains stalled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which has failed to follow its own guidelines in delaying his case for years. Andres’ case was recently chronicled by Jay Nordlinger in the National Review, who on October 24, 2017, published “Asylum Now: The Awful Case of a Splendid Man.” Other important background can be found here:

Álvaro Uribe, Ongoing Political Persecution Will Turn Colombia Into Venezuela, The Hill, May 17, 2017
Jared Genser, The Ignoble Act of a Nobel Laureate, Washington Times, February 2, 2017 (Español – El Espectador)
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Takedown of a Candidate, Bogotá Style, Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2016

Santos has gone after Arias because of his close ties with former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. Though both Arias and Santos had served in Uribe’s cabinet, Santos had a very public falling out with Uribe upon succeeding him as President in 2010. As President, Santos reversed Uribe’s forceful stance on the drug trade and crackdown on guerilla groups such as the FARC, which led to strong vocal condemnation from Uribe, Arias, and other Uribe allies. In response, Santos began publicly persecuting Uribe allies and critics of his Administration, including Arias.

President Santos and the leaders of the FARC

Allies of Santos in the media made allegations against Arias regarding an irrigation subsidy program that Arias enacted during his tenure as Minister of Agriculture. Through the subsidy program, Arias had hoped to make the Colombian agricultural sector more competitive by making subsidies for upgraded irrigation equipment available to Colombian farmers. Like many of his predecessors in the Ministry, Arias outsourced the administration of the subsidy program to the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, a technical body of the Organization of American States (OAS-IICA).

In February 2009, as President Uribe’s term was coming to an end, Arias resigned as Minister of Agriculture in order to run for the nomination of the Conservative Party for the 2010 presidential elections; this part belonged to the coalition that supported the Uribe Administration in Congress. However, his campaign was short-lived. When news broke in September 2009 that several wealthy Colombian landowners had manipulated the subsidy program to their advantage, Arias was wrongly accused of being responsible, even though Arias had no role in the administration of the program. These false accusations overshadowed the primaries and ended up costing him the presidential race.

Though Arias had been cleared of wrongdoing by the Attorney General’s office after these allegations surfaced, when Santos took office in 2010, his appointed Attorney General re-opened an investigation into Arias’ alleged involvement in this corruption scandal. Arias was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing by four other independent government agencies including the General Comptroller’s Office, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca, and National Electoral Council. Though the Inspector General’s Office imposed an administrative sanction on Arias, it urged that he be cleared of all criminal wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, he was still put on trial before Colombia’s Supreme Court, in a proceeding that was plagued by due process abuses and lacked any incriminating evidence against Arias whatsoever. Additionally, Arias was tried before highly-biased Supreme Court Justices, many of whom had clear conflicts of interest and a plurality of whom have since become embroiled in a far-reaching corruption scandal. Given the rampant politicization of the Supreme Court, and fearing an unfair conviction, Arias traveled to the United States to seek asylum in mid-2014, where he was joined by his family a short time later. The Colombian Supreme Court sentenced him in absentia on July 17, 2014 to 17 years and 5 months in prison and a fine of more than U.S. $15,000,000. As documented in the White Paper, Colombia arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced Arias to prison in violation of Colombia’s obligations under international law.