Who was elected three times as president of the National Association of Prosecutors (ANF) and served for 18 years as a prosecutor in various regions of the country, lawyer Claudio Uribe, addressed in El Mostrador in La Clave what has been the long and eventful process to find the next National Prosecutor to replace the questioned Jorge Abbott.
And it is that about the management of Abbott, Uribe knows a lot. So much so, that in the midst of all the uproar within the Public Ministry, the lawyer resigned after accusing the then National Prosecutor of letting himself be carried away by “political pressure”, which led him to leave the prosecution entity for which he had worked since 2003.
As a person who spent almost two decades within the Public Ministry, Uribe gave his opinion regarding the competence of the different positions within the persecuting entity, as well as the internal struggles and their rivalries.
“Unfortunately, the Public Ministry has developed an institutional culture of very strong resentments within, of great internal struggles. The logic of long knives is everyday, an issue that seems terrible to me,” he said.
“In any case, the lack of unity here, the desperate fighting over charges, is a matter that ends up hurting the entire institution and discrediting it in front of the citizenry,” Uribe added.
On the other hand, the historic former president of the ANF referred to the troubled process to search for a new National Prosecutor, pointing out that the election further sinks the already “low” prestige that the Public Ministry has.
“I don’t know if the Public Prosecutor’s Office can be further damaged, which for quite some time has had serious image and citizen perception problems. Obviously, all the tampering that this election for National Prosecutor has been further sinks the already low prestige of the institution Uribe declared.
“Obviously it is very harmful, because it is very clear that here the different political powers try to get their hands on the election of the National Prosecutor authorities beyond the role that corresponds to them by the Constitution,” he added.
As a person who spent a long period of time within the persecuting entity, Uribe gave a series of suggestions to prevent the next contests for National Prosecutor from not being “so dramatic.”
“There are two ideas that can be worked on. The first, obviously, is to change the system for appointing the National Prosecutor. I think that with all the difficulties that it can present, for example, the High Public Management is a mechanism that could have been used” he commented.
“On the other hand, it seems to me that the power structure within the Public Ministry must be changed, which tends to be more collegiate. That power be shared more within the institution in such a way that the election of the National Prosecutor, because today all of Chile’s criminal policy depends on the visions of a particular person, and that has always seemed bad to me,” Uribe concluded.
