Two months into an investigation of alleged passport forgery involving the former head of security for Uruguay’s president, questions are expanding after a newspaper’s reports that prosecutors have also found evidence of political spying and blackmail against opposition politicians.
Uruguayan Secretary of the Presidency Alvaro Delgado and Deputy Secretary Rodrigo Ferres on Tuesday testified to prosecutors in the forgery investigation of Alejandro Astesiano, who headed security for Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou.
That session came after 10 days of reports in La Diaria outlining details on the purported espionage that the newspaper says are contained in a cellphone and other digital devices obtained by prosecutors in the probe.
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La Diaria said the information about the political spying turned up in an analysis of Astesiano’s devices by Prosecutor Gabriela Fossati’s office as part of the passport probe.
The Prosecutors’ Office has not opened a separate investigation into that issue, the newspaper said.
The political espionage allegedly included interceptions of telephone calls to individuals using spy software of the Uruguayan Ministry of the Interior and the selling of such information by Astesiano, it reported.
Uruguayan Minister of the Interior Luis Alberto Heber during a Senate Securirty Committee hearing last week denied that happened.
In one report, La Diaria said that Astesiano allegedly sold state intelligence services to an Argentine soybean businessman, who accessed data involving a shipment of wheat and corn.
Astesiano and the company that made the ministry’s Guardian spy software have denied that he had access to the software.
Astesiano has said he lied to his clients about the use of spy software.
The company, Vertical Skies, is a security consultancy run by several former Uruguayan military officers based in Miami, Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
La Diaria said that the company asked Astesiano for personal information about Uruguayan senators Mario Bergara and Charles Carrera, both opponents of the government.
The objective was to pressure the senators into dropping a criminal complaint they filed against a decree giving a monopoly on operations in the port of Montevideo to the operator Katoen Natie until 2081, the newspaper said.
“The info I need is everything personal. They want to tie them up so that they withdraw the complaint,” Marcelo Acuna, manager of the company and a former military officer, wrote to Astesiano in a cellphone chat in March, La Diaria reported. “I need all the personal data and ties.”
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