In an investigative action carried out in just four months, the Office of the Attorney General arrested, prosecuted and achieved the conviction of former president of the Santander Triathlon League, Óscar Mauricio Uribe Pinilla, for designing an illegal model of consultancies to process visas to The United States, in which he modified the profiles of the applicants with false information about their socioeconomic, labor and family status.
The evidence presented by a prosecutor of the Special Directorate against Criminal Organizations was approved by the Eighth Criminal of Bucaramanga (Court hearing the case) which sentenced the former leader to 50 months in prison and ordered him to pay a fine of 35 legal minimum wages for the commission of human smuggling.
After his arrest in the month of March, Uribe Pinilla pleaded guilty to the charges that the Office of the Attorney General brought against him at the time.
The investigation revealed that the defendant gave certifications of the Triathlon League or the sports institute Instituto de Deportes de Santander to his ‘clients’ in order to impersonate them as high- performance athletes or employees of these entities in positions such as doctors, physiotherapists, massage therapists, logistics staff, among others. In this way, they increased the probability of obtaining the entry permit into the United States before the Embassy.
The testimonies and documents which are in possession of the Office of the Attorney General show that Óscar Mauricio Uribe Pinilla advised 64 people in two years. 59 of them obtained the respective visas. Many of the petitioners were Venezuelan migrants who paid between 500 and 900 thousand pesos to process the documents.