Security & Strategic Review October 2011 (ISSN 1741-4202)

COLOMBIA | Pattern of DAS links with the underworld. The magazine Semana, after gaining access to ‘thousands of entries in the databases’ of the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS, the national intelligence agency), came up with 15 incidents it concluded were indicative of a pattern of collusion of ‘a percentage of its members’ with acts of terrorism and the activities of paramilitary and drug-trafficking organisations. One of these incidents was a 2005 attempt to kill Germán Vargas Lleras, the current minister of the interior, with a truck bomb. The attack was blamed on the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrillas by Jorge Noguera, then director of the DAS, now convicted of having aided the paramilitaries. Two others were failed attempts on the life of Víctor Carranza, the man known as the ‘emeralds’ czar’, on behalf of rivals in paramilitary organisations.

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