Colombia’s Spy Chief Offered Seized Cartel Assets for Tips on a Disputed Plot Against Petro

Colombia’s Prosecutors Now Suspect the Plot Was Staged

A recording made inside the offices of Colombia’s national intelligence agency in July 2025 has become the center of a dispute over whether the government of then-President Gustavo Petro was negotiating with organized crime for its own protection, or whether two jailed drug traffickers manufactured a fake conspiracy to win their freedom. Semana published fragments of the recording on August 15, 2026, and Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) is now investigating whether the underlying plot was real or staged.

According to Semana, Jorge Lemus, then director of the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DNI, National Intelligence Directorate), met on July 18, 2025, with a retired police officer identified as Manuel Antonio Castañeda, who told him, “I’m the one they call the Narcochofer” — the narco-chauffeur. Semana describes Castañeda as having mafia connections and a history as a recurring source for Colombia’s intelligence units. Also in the room were Gustavo Arias, then the DNI’s counterintelligence director, and an analyst taking notes. It was, Semana reports, the first time Lemus had spoken with Castañeda directly.

Castañeda came to sell access to two men: alias Falcon and alias Fortuna, both Clan del Golfo bosses held in a US prison. Falcon is Juan José Valencia, arrested in May 2021 in a mansion in Llanogrande, in Rionegro, Antioquia. Investigators at the time linked him to trafficking routes running from Cartagena to Belgium, Holland, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, commanding more than 225 men inside the organization run by alias Otoniel. He was extradited, convicted in the United States, and released in late 2025, apparently for cooperating with American prosecutors, though Semana notes he still faces charges in Colombia. Fortuna is Andrés Mauricio Vélez, whom Colombian police classify as a narco invisible — an invisible trafficker who finances operations without direct involvement in trafficking itself. He served four years in the US and was recaptured on his return to Colombia in September 2025 on charges of money laundering, illicit enrichment and criminal conspiracy.

Both men were willing to hand over information, Castañeda told Lemus, in exchange for having some of the property held by the Sociedad de Activos Especiales (SAE, Special Assets Company) — the state body that administers assets confiscated from criminals — signed over to a tercero de buena fe, a third party acting in good faith, to manage on their behalf. Castañeda also said Falcon wanted an arrest warrant covering five members of his immediate family lifted.

The approach had already run through other channels. Castañeda told Lemus the first contact was made with Augusto Rodríguez, then director of the Unidad Nacional de Protección (UNP, National Protection Unit), the agency that assigns state protection details to people under threat. Castañeda calls Rodríguez “el Ingeniero” — the Engineer — on the recording, and said Rodríguez had asked for a first gesture of good faith that produced a weapons seizure in Puerto Boyacá, in the Magdalena Medio region, and that President Petro already knew about the arrangement.

Castañeda also told Lemus he had spoken that same morning with then-Army commander General Luis Emilio Cardozo, through the Presidency’s secretary of transparency, Andrés Idárraga. He said attacks were planned for July 20 — two days after the meeting — and that the traffickers would hand over two cylinder bombs, a mortar, an R-15 rifle with 100 rounds, a grenade-dropping drone and two grenades, all tied to a planned attack on Petro during a visit to the Sierra region, and separately, rifles intended for an attempt on then-Vice President Francia Márquez. The purpose, Castañeda said, was to generate a scandal resembling the assassination of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay and blame the president for it.

Lemus’s own voice is on the recording responding to Castañeda’s complaints that the government had not delivered after the Magdalena Medio operation: “No, no — but I’m committing that we’ll do it.” When Castañeda raised concerns about creating friction with the UNP director, Lemus told him, “No, no, no, because I can handle things with the SAE itself, relax.”

Semana obtained responses from four of the officials it names. Lemus confirmed that SAE properties were offered to the Narcochofer in exchange for information, telling Semana such meetings happen routinely and that an offer is not the same as a delivery — the government waits for information before acting. He acknowledged that offering state assets for information is not part of his official function, but defended it as necessary given what he characterized as a matter of national security. Rodríguez denied any agreement, saying he only received data, passed it to the president, and had no further contact once the information was verified and the weapons found. Retired General Cardozo said he referred Castañeda’s warning to a Special Forces colonel for corroboration, and that a weapons cache was found in Santa Marta. Idárraga said the matter was routed through Petro to Angie Rodríguez, then head of the presidential administrative department, and to retired General Humberto Guatibonza, the president’s chief of protection, with the SAE’s director, Amelia Pérez, tasked with evaluating the property request.

Once the meeting ended, Lemus warned his own analyst to be cautious about Castañeda’s credibility, according to Semana.

“I’ve been following this kid for a long time. He talks about a reach in the Police he never had. I have my reservations about this kid.”

— Jorge Lemus, then director of Colombia’s DNI, quoted by Semana

The reservation appears to have been warranted. El Tiempo‘s investigative unit first reported the underlying dealings on January 30, 2026, and reported in mid-August where the case has landed. Sources inside the Fiscalía told El Tiempo that the alleged plot against Petro and Márquez, along with the weapons handovers in Puerto Boyacá, Santa Marta and Medellín, are being investigated as possible falsos positivos — manufactured results. One source described the motive: in exchange for staging the plot, the two traffickers wanted their arrest warrants lifted so they could return to Colombia. The Fiscalía has refused both men a principio de oportunidad, the legal mechanism for suspending prosecution in exchange for cooperation, and the SAE denied Fortuna’s property request outright. Both men are now under investigation for possible procedural fraud and illegal possession of weapons restricted to Colombia’s armed forces, and El Tiempo reports the Fiscalía is weighing whether other people belong in the case.

Either reading of the recording reflects poorly on the state. If the plots were real, Colombia’s intelligence service was negotiating its president’s physical safety with two Clan del Golfo bosses, offering confiscated mafia real estate as currency. If the plots were staged — which the Fiscalía is treating as the working theory — two traffickers led the UNP, the Army command, the presidency’s anti-corruption office and the national intelligence service in circles.

The broader record adds context. El Colombiano, citing intelligence figures, reported that Clan del Golfo grew from roughly 4,500 members in 2022 to close to 10,000, and expanded its territorial presence from 165 to 338 municipalities — close to a third of Colombia’s total. El Colombiano put coca cultivation at around 230,000 hectares in 2022; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime measured 253,000 hectares in 2023, with potential cocaine production reaching 2,664 metric tons, a 53% increase in a single year. The Petro government ran 12 negotiating tables under its paz total — total peace — policy, and none ended in disarmament, in part because Colombia’s Congress never passed a ley de sometimiento, a submission law that would have given a purely criminal group a legal path to surrender. On October 24, 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control placed Petro himself on its sanctions list on counternarcotics grounds. In April, the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Office of the Inspector General) opened a disciplinary investigation into Lemus over separate recordings in which he allegedly offered judicial benefits to the lawyer of contraband boss Diego Marín Buitrago, alias Papá Pitufo, as a way of bringing Marín into the paz total framework.

Not every assessment of the policy is damning. In a November 2024 report, ACLED, the conflict-monitoring group, described the result as a paradox: Petro’s approach reduced violence even as armed groups grew stronger. The Clan del Golfo eventually came to a negotiating table in Qatar starting in September 2025, and Colombia’s decades of pure militarization never produced a durable peace either. But a drop in violence purchased by the state standing down, while the group across the table roughly doubles in size, amounts to a truce on the cartel’s terms with no legal permanence. The Narcochofer recording exposes the mechanism underneath the policy: not a negotiation with defined limits, but an official offering assets he has since admitted he had no authority to offer, to a source he privately told his own analyst he distrusted, for weapons the Fiscalía now suspects were planted.

The recording’s release comes as Colombia’s new government begins its own campaign against the same armed groups. Abelardo de la Espriella took office on August 7 and moved quickly: his first order transferred 117 high-profile prisoners from paz total negotiating tables into maximum-security prisons. That same day, a vehicle bomb attributed to Iván Mordisco’s FARC dissidents destroyed a newly built toll plaza in Mondomo, in northern Cauca. On the night of August 10, two Kfir fighter jets bombed ELN camps between Tibú and San Calixto, in Norte de Santander. In Algeciras, Huila, an ambush on a Ninth Brigade unit checking a cylinder bomb killed two soldiers and wounded 19. Colombia’s Gaula Militar captured alias Bonito, second-in-command of the Comandos de la Frontera, in Guamal, Meta, and de la Espriella announced Friday night that alias Momo of the Clan del Golfo had been killed in Antioquia.

The Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsman’s Office), Colombia’s national human-rights watchdog, reported that four farmers in rural El Tarra were wounded during the August 10 bombing. Semana reports that military counterintelligence is investigating a possible high-level leak that would have allowed the ELN to anticipate the strike, and is separately examining whether the ELN itself dropped explosives from drones onto the civilians to discredit the armed forces.

The same intelligence apparatus now expected to run a national offensive against these groups — and to prevent that offensive from being compromised from within — is the one whose director spent an afternoon in July 2025 offering seized property for tips from a source he privately did not trust. In June, as president-elect, de la Espriella instructed his running mate, now-Vice President José Manuel Restrepo, to file criminal and disciplinary complaints against former High Peace Commissioner Danilo Rueda over a separate set of Clan del Golfo recordings published by Noticias Caracol, and to forward that material to the United States Department of Justice. Those cases will take years to resolve. The offensive against the same armed groups is happening now.