The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office prosecuted nine people who were part of a criminal network dedicated to irregularly sending migrants from the Colombian Atlantic coast to the United States, Europe and South American countries.
Through its Twitter account, the Colombian prosecutor’s office @FiscaliaCol specified that two of the accused persons are Colombian Migration officials.
One of those officials, Rolando Iglesias Sanjuan, would be the leader of the group and apparently from his job in Paraguachón, La Guajira, he contacted foreigners and offered them identity documents as if they were Colombians, or extensions in their passports, so that could leave through the airports of Cartagena and Soledad.
For his part, Rafael Púa Ríos, the other public servant, is accused of stamping passports and endorsing the passage of migrants through the migration filters at the Barranquilla airport.
The other captured would have various roles as forgers, brokers or intermediaries to obtain civil records in different notaries and registrars in cities on the Atlantic Coast, he noted. Time from Colombia.
Five Venezuelan migrants died on one of the trips
After an investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office in Bolívar and with the support of the Colombian Police and Immigration, it was found that in the cases that the illegal network would have acted is one that ended with a fatal outcome.
The case occurred in February of this year when five Venezuelan citizens died, including a minor, who were illegally mobilized along with other migrants on a bus that covered the Maicao (La Guajira) – Guayaquil (Ecuador) route.
The car had an accident on the La Magdalena bridge in Ipiales (Nariño), before crossing the border area. Another 24 foreigners were injured in the incident.
Another of the cases documented by the researchers was in September 2021, when four Venezuelans, members of the same family, were detained at the Cartagena airport, before they boarded a plane to Mexico for carrying false extensions in their passports.
Likewise, in August 2021, a young Venezuelan woman would have left the Cartagena airport with a false extension in her passport that was provided to her by the criminal network.
Upon arrival in Mexico, the authorities detected the illegality and deported the woman to Colombia and later she was expelled from Colombian territory.
There is also a case from November 2020 when four Dominicans were captured at the Cartagena airport for carrying Colombian passports that would have been processed with false civil records that accredited them as born in Colombia.
For these events, the Colombian authorities captured the nine people allegedly involved in proceedings carried out in different municipalities of Atlántico, Córdoba and La Guajira.
