“That money over there Absolutely nothing was done and they ate that money with the Indians.”
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These were the words of Luis Soto Caraballo, one of the 9 directors of the Regional Association of Caribbean Municipalities (Aremca) detained for directing contracts for almost half a billion pesos of projects financed with the country’s royalties, who was being intercepted by the Prosecutor’s Office.
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‘Improve quality of life’
The contract between Aremca and Mopen SAS. Photo:Private file
Prosecutor 46 of the Anti-Corruption Unit, Andrés Vásquez, who, as revealed by EL TIEMPO in preliminary hearings, had already pointed out how the directors of Aremca not only hid information in a cove, but also provided false certificates and faked a theft during the raids in which the Prosecutor’s Office sought to obtain the accounting records of the so-called ‘club of municipalities’.
In the indictment on April 22 in which he mentioned the interception of Soto Caraballo when he said that they had ‘eaten the money with the Indians’, A contract is mentioned in Casanare to reforest an indigenous reservation.
This is a special regime process for 6,759 million pesos to implement actions that improve the quality of life of the indigenous community Resguardo Caño Mochuelo, with productive reforestation in the municipality of Paz de Ariporo (Casanare).
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“The previous studies of the analyzed contract were uploaded to the Secop platform. The uploaded document does not have signatures or dates of preparation,” assured prosecutor Vásquez, who also said that the closing document also did not have signatures.
And he revealed that Aremca sent three invitations to participate in the process, but that only a single offer came from Mopen SAS, a firm that was finally awarded the contract after A resolution issued by Emilia Álvarez Guerrero, legal representative of the ‘club of municipalities’, was also captured.
The advance and the UNGRD
María Alejandra Benavides, former advisor to the Ministry of Finance. Photo:Private file
EL TIEMPO investigated and established that the contract, signed in January 2024 and with a term of five years, had an advance payment clause of 50 percent, about 3.3 billion pesos: “The initiation of the works or the fulfillment of any of the contractual obligations are in no case subject to the delivery of the advance payment.”
Mopen SAS, the company that was awarded the contract, is a construction firm for other civil engineering works, road freight transportation and public service projects created in 2003 in Casanare.
That same company appears as one of the companies that make up the Brisas del Cravo consortium with a 90 percent stake, contracted by Aremca to build a landfill in Tame (Arauca) for 20,000 million pesos in August 2022.
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EL TIEMPO had already revealed since February 2025 that this consortium was represented by Camilo Ernesto Díaz Carrillo, whose telephone number was in the hands of María Alejandra Benavides, the star advisor of the then Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla.
Furthermore, Díaz Carrillo was one of the contacts that the advisor would have sent to Sneyder Pinilla, former deputy director of the UNGRD, to move agreements for 92,000 million pesos in Saravena (Arauca); Cotorra (Córdoba) and El Carmen de Bolívar (Bolívar).
This newspaper contacted Juan José Cepeda Pérez, legal representative of Mopen SAS, to ask him why the company appears mentioned in the interceptions of Aremca directors where it is said that they ‘ate’ the money from the millionaire contract and what is its relationship with Camilo Díaz, mentioned in the UNGRD scandal chats. but he did not answer the calls and then requested a face-to-face meeting, which he did not attend after discussing public order issues.
According to the contract file between Mopen SAS and Aremca in Casanare, No documents have been uploaded that account for the execution of the contract since 2024.
Now, the Prosecutor’s Office continues to review the contracts for 496 billion pesos with royalty money that would have been diverted.
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