Francisco Bastillo, the chancellor of Uruguay has turned in his official resignation, due to leaked evidence suggesting he tried to obstruct justice. Audios were leaked with Mr. Bastillo telling the vice chancellor to “lose her phone” to obfuscate evidence that implicated officials in handing an alleged drug trafficker a passport.
Francisco Bastillo, the minister of Foreign relations of Uruguay also known as Chancellor, has decided to officially resign from his position due to the surfacing of incriminating phone calls in which he told his vice chancellor to “lose her cell phone” with potential evidence.
The cell phone was being investigated by the courts in a case regarding an accused Uruguayan drug trafficker, Sebastián Marset, who received an official Uruguayan passport while imprisoned in Dubai in 2021.
Mr. Marset was arrested in the United Arab Emirates when he used a fake Paraguayan passport which was revised by a customs officer who felt the “bad quality” of the material of the passport. It was revised afterward by the Document Inspection Office, which found it fake and temporarily imprisoned him. The Paraguayan embassy later found that Mr. Marset did not have Paraguayan citizenship. But with the help of his lawyer and an authorized Uruguayan citizen in the UAE, the Uruguayan Chancellor’s office was informed of the “urgency” of his imprisonment and gave him a passport. Now on the run, the Bolivian government offered a reward of 100,000 dollars in July 2023 for information on Sebastián Marset.
The audio files were published yesterday by Uruguayan magazine Búsqueda, in which Chancellor Bustillo and Vice Chancellor Carolina Ache can be heard talking. The calls date back to November 2022, according to Búsqueda, at the time that several government officials were requested to show their WhatsApp text messages for the investigation of the Marset Case. These included Chancellor Bustillo, Vice Chancellor Ache and Vice Minister of the Interior, Guillermo Maciel.
In the call dated 14th of November 2022, after Ms. Ache says she is ready to present the requested information to the courts, Bustillo starts talking about finding a way to avoid the judicial obligation to show their text messages. After suggesting he uses a connection to influence the courts, he directly tells Ms. Ache to “lose her cell phone” to gain time. He then says that Mr. Maciel, the vice minister of the Interior, will present evidence implicating himself, thereby “shooting himself in the foot.”
After the conversation, according to Ms. Ache’s testimony, she managed to delay handing the information about the messages in by appealing to the court. However, when the deadline ran out on the 24th of November, she allegedly turned in a sealed letter to the chancellor’s office containing information on “private conversations between her and Maciel.” However, in the documents her office turned in to the courts, this sealed letter was not included.
On the 25th of November, a WhatsApp log shared by Búsqueda shows that Ms. Ache was requested by the president’s advisor, Roberto Lafluf, to meet with the president of Uruguay, Lacalle Pou, Chancellor Bustillo and Mr. Maciel. According to Ms. Ache, at this meeting, she was requested by Mr. Lafluf to erase the WhatsApp messages, which she accepted, and to redact a document for the courts that did not include these messages.
Ache said that she told Lafluf one day later that she would not redact a document without the messages, as this would be a crime. She turned in the redacted document to the Chancellor’s office. However, she received a call from Lafluf who said he destroyed the document. Ache argues she doesn’t know how Lafluf managed to retrieve this document. Carolina Ache ended up turning in a copy of the document to the courts on November 28th, 2022. Shortly after, she resigned from her position and thinks that if she had accepted Lafluf’s request, she would still be vice chancellor today.
Regarding the irregularities in turning in requested documents to the courts and the newly surfaced audios, Francisco Bustillo turned in a letter attacking Ache’s portrayal of events. In a letter released right after his resignation yesterday, Bustillo claims that there was “nothing illegal about the passport given to Sebastián Marset,” also claiming that “he never lied while questioned by the courts.” According to Bustillo, Ache’s claims were made in “bad faith” and promised to “bring light” to the situation.
