The senators of Graciela Bianchi National Party and Sergio Botana filed a complaint with Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the apparently illegal leak of private chats that are part of certain case files. This was after conversations from a group of WhatsApp of white legislators, taken from the cell phone of Gustavo Penadés; although the fact that generated the most stir was the exchange that the former senator had with Pablo Iturralde.
“If they leak what was discussed by senators, not to mention the defenselessness of the common citizen. Someone did not protect, did not eliminate what was not and someone facilitated the leak,” wrote Sergio Botana in a tweet in which he shared the complaint filed, which was by violation of written correspondence.
The presentation is based on article 28 of the Constitution, which establishes that correspondence of any kind is inviolable; understanding that WhatsApp conversations are covered by the category, so “they are included in the protection.” And in article 208 of Code of Criminal Procedurewhich maintains that all material that is not incorporated in the investigation must be destroyed, something that was not fulfilled in the Penadés case, while his messages were leaked on several occasions.
Likewise, and although they assured that the complaint is not against the media, the senators emphasized the complaint about the publication of the chats in the press or by journalists, something that would be a “communication crime,” as Botana explained.
“These chats are being leaked illegally, that in itself constitutes a crime and we are going to begin to see if there are responsibilities, whatever they may be,” Bianchi warned, for his part.
The Iturralde scandal and the accusation about an “espionage” center
Although the reason for the complaint is the leak of a conversation between white senators regarding the impeachment trial against the mayor of Montevideo Carolina Cosse —in which Bianchi referred to the fact that there were white mayors who “have little things to cover”—, the truth is that the biggest scandal was that of the former president of the Board of Directors of the National Party, Pablo Iturralde.
On May 23, the weekly Busqueda published some chats between Iturralde and Penadés in which the former president of the Board of Directors referred to the prosecutor. Alicia Ghione as a “friend” and talked about putting pressure on the attorney general of the Court Juan Gomez to obtain good results in the investigation against the former senator for crimes of abuse and exploitation of minors that had just begun.
Although the publication led to a scandal and the resignation of the party leader, there were several nationalist leaders whose first reaction was to insist that these were private conversations, such as the pre-candidate Alvaro Delgado.
For his part, the former Minister of National Defense and senator, Javier Garcia established the possibility of a prosecutor acting in the Prosecutor’s Office “political operations center” and “espionage” who then delivers the information to the media. “It’s obvious,” he assured Channel 10.
“Someone is spying, it’s like espionage, someone is spying and says: ‘this works.’ This is objective, that he is in there, that he is there or that he has contacts, because that’s where it comes from, it comes from inside the Prosecutor’s Office,” García insisted, with a leading role in Delgado’s campaign. “There is someone who is watching, spying and using, and providing, and that is very serious. You cannot naturalize what is serious,” he noted.
“When it happens in the Justice It is serious, because their individual guarantees are at stake, and their freedom may be at stake. And for your freedom, even if I think differently, I kill, for your freedom I kill,” added the senator.
Source: Ambito
