President Luis Lacalle Pou arrived at Uruguay after his trip to USA, in the midst of the scandal unleashed around the delivery of the passport to the drug trafficker Sebastian Marset. Far from a moment of rest, an afternoon full of meetings with different leaders and political leaders awaits the president in an attempt to avoid the institutional crisis at the door. “We never hid ourselves,” he briefly told the press.
In the Air Base No. 1 the vice president was waiting for him Beatriz Argimón, the minister of National Defense, Javier García, and the interim chancellor—replacing the recently resigned amid the scandal, Francisco Bustillo—, Diego Escuder. The president’s arrival, which was initially expected at 3 p.m., was brought forward within the framework of the urgency of the events that also awaited him.
Saturday’s agenda for Lacalle Pou is tight: he will first meet at Montevideo with Vice President Argimón and the Secretary of the Presidency Alvaro Delgado, with the aim of finishing refining the definitions regarding the future of the Minister of the Interior Luis Alberto Heber, the undersecretary Guillermo Maciel and the presidential advisor Roberto Lafluf —involved to a greater or lesser extent in the controversy of the Marset case, based on the statements of the former vice-chancellor Carolina Ache.
Likewise, starting at 5 p.m., the leaders of the Multicolor Coalition They are summoned to a meeting with the president at the residence of Suarez and Reyes. There, government partners hope to hear pertinent and “sufficient” explanations about the scandal whose main protagonists are the leaders of the nationalist kidney. Above all, they hope Cabildo Abierto and its leader Guido Manini Ríoswhose pulse did not tremble when suggesting—or even affirming—the involvement of Lacalle Pou in the events reported by Ache.
Finally, at 6:30 p.m. it will be the turn of the president of the Frente Amplio, Fernando Pereira, also in the presidential residence. And once he finishes the official agenda, the head of state will give a press conference in which he will provide the corresponding public explanations regarding the decisions he adopts with the intention of avoiding an institutional crisis in Uruguay.
Bustillo declared in the Prosecutor’s Office
For his part, yesterday morning it was the former chancellor’s turn Francisco Bustillo to provide a statement before the prosecutor for Complex and Specialized Crimes, Alejandro Machado. At the end of his appearance, the one identified by Ache as one of those involved in the attempt to hide the scandal surrounding the delivery of the passport to marset, distributed a statement to the press with some clarifications.
“I had no participation whatsoever, nor even knowledge of the processing of Mr. Marset’s passport,” said Bustillo in the last of the seven points that make up the statement he gave to the press upon leaving the Prosecutor’s Office, after clarifying that there is reservation about their statements. “In Parliament, I didn’t miss the truth“he emphasized.
In the letter he explains that, within the framework of that investigation, Ache was asked three times to provide the messages, but he refused each time; on the third opportunity, with the former vice chancellor’s lawyer, Jorge Díaz, present. “Tired of Ache’s repeated and continuous statements, and to end this dialogue that in no way linked me, is that I figuratively told him to ‘lose’ the phone. in the conversation she surreptitiously recorded, isolating and decontextualizing what had been happening all that time, during which he constantly raised his doubts with me,” Bustillo said in the text, adding that “later, when he was required to deliver the messages to the contentious administrative justice system, he told me in writing that “I would only do it if I ordered it.”
In the following points, the former head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalls that at the time of the issuance of the Uruguayan passport to Marset, he was Ache who was in charge of the portfolio since he was on an official mission abroad. “In short, the processing of the passport by the MRREE was adjusted to the regulatory framework in force on that date (Decree 240/018),” he noted.
Source: Ambito
