On November 8, the Colombian ambassador to Washington, Daniel García-Peña, met with senior White House security officials. When he left, he confirmed the news that El Tiempo had obtained from confidential sources: During the government of Iván Duque, Colombia purchased an Israeli spyware called Pegasus.
Pegasus is a software produced by the Israeli NSO Group and is secretly enabled (without users’ consent) in electronic devices through a jailbreak, and reads texts, tracks calls, collects passwords, locates phones, and extracts information from applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
The serious and controversial aspect of the matter is that Colombia acquired the software for USD 11 million without informing President Duque. In addition, the purchase was allegedly financed entirely by the United States. The payment would have been made in cash to Israel. According to El Tiempo‘s sources, the use of Pegasus ended before Gustavo Petro began his presidential term. In this regard, the Colombian Secretary of State, Luis Gilberto Murillo, expressed his concern about the degree of infringement of national sovereignty and the apparent independence with which some Colombian institutions act.
“The most important thing is that all the information can be known, in a transparent manner, about how the software was used and in which specific cases so that we have the guarantee that this will not happen again,” Murillo said.
During the day of celebration of 105 years since the creation of the Colombian Air Force (now called the Aerospace Force), Petro said that the purchase and use of the Pegasus spying software (although he never names it directly) violated national sovereignty. “Cyber defense is not the same as espionage and in that, we must draw a border,” he said. “Unless the 1991 Constitution is useless. Unless our democracy has been weakened.”
Petro added that “our sovereignty is not only to wave our flag, it is that the main decisions that are made in Colombia are made by Colombians. If they are made by other people, whoever they want them to be, then we have lost sovereignty.”
Additionally, the head of state alluded to the case in a post on X, stating that any predetermined action of a national “against national sovereignty is a crime and it is called: ‘treason to the homeland.'”
Petro explained that his government will hold talks with the United States regarding its national sovereignty, in this case calling into question the independence of Colombian institutions with regards to the wishes of the US government, “The president must enforce national sovereignty. That sovereignty is not only about the directions Colombia should take, it also has to do with that issue of knowing this cyber defense, which should be in national hands.”
For now, both the Colombian Attorney General’s Office and the Colombian Prosecutor General’s Office are investigating the incident, which reportedly occurred in 2020. Although it was promised that Pegasus would only be used only against drug traffickers, in other countries such as Mexico and El Salvador it has been used to spy on other categories of people, including against political opponents.
The controversial revelations raise a series of doubts about the real independence of Colombia and the methods of action of the United States in Latin America. In this regard, the former president of Colombia, Ernesto Samper, posted on his X account: “Now the Pegasus case has become complicated! Questions remain, only questions: Why until now, after the elections in the United States, does the Biden administration claim responsibility for the purchase of the diabolical system? How can acquiring an electronic espionage system for 11 million dollars, paid in cash on two clandestine flights to Israel, be considered a “day-to-day” operation? How come President Iván Duque and his security cabinet should not have known about it because it was a ‘routine’ purchase? Who guarantees that the system was not used for political espionage? Where the hell is Pegasus today, what does it do, who is operating it, who is it spying on?”
