Between Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior there is a small warwith low crossed signals, to see who has part of the responsibility for the two scandals that are complicating the government this year related to passports: the Marset case and the Astesiano case.
In this context and seeking to defend his actions in the Marset case, The Undersecretary of Foreign Relations, Carolina Ache, blamed Guillermo Maciel, Undersecretary of the Interior, for having printed Sebastián Marset’s passport knowing that he was a “very dangerous and heavy drug dealer”.
“Whoever was telling me that did it from the place where the passport ended up being printed”said Ache in an interview with El País.
In the first days of November 2021, Maciel warned Ache about the danger of Marset, who at the time was detained in a Dubai jail and was trying to get a Uruguayan passport.
The conversation between Ache and Maciel begins with a message from the head of the Interior. “Hello Caro, we can know what happened to this criminal arrested in Dubai for a false document. He is a very dangerous and heavy drug dealer. (We want) to know if he is still in custody or if he was released, which would be terrible.”Maciel wrote on November 3, 2021.
“Hello, let me find out for you. Kiss,” Ache replied.
as he learned The Observer, At that time and until a few days before the questioning of August 2022 on this issue, Ache did not inform Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo of the exchange he had had with Maciel.
More than a month earlier, on September 21, 2021, Maciel had asked Ache with what documents Marset had entered the United Arab Emirates, to which Ache forwarded all the information that had come to him from Dubai.
Three weeks after the message that Maciel sent him, Ache received the lawyer Alejandro Balbi in his office, who was taking steps so that his client Marset obtained the Uruguayan passport “urgently” to get out of prison.
According to what Balbi declared in the foreign ministry’s administrative investigation and according to Ache, the dialogue between them was limited to one question: When did the diplomatic bag leave for the United Arab Emirates?
A day later, on November 25, the Ministry of the Interior printed the document that the defense of Marset used as an element to get out of prison.
In August, Carolina Ache, had told The Observer that he did not intervene in any instance of the Marset passport process and that at no time did he instruct anyone in the Foreign Ministry to “hurry up or expedite” the issuance of the passport.
“Anyone who says that is blatantly lying. There was no verbal or written instruction from me to any official of the Foreign Ministry that he should act in that regard. I categorically deny having intervened in the processing of Marset’s passport, ”said Ache, to whom she was linked to the matter as a result of a communication that she had with Balbi.
Ache declared that in November he received Balbi in his ministry office in the same way that he receives “anyone who asks for an audience,” but denied that Marset’s lawyer had made any request.
