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In a Dec. 1 letter to U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Enrique Gomez Hurtado, a Conservative Party member and a former president of the Colombian senate, and Rafael Nieto Navia, a former justice at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and a former magistrate for the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, warn that the relative peace Colombia has achieved in recent years is not secure.
One "grave concern," Messrs. Gomez and Nieto write, is "the resurgence of narco-terrorism by the [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC], the [National Liberation Army, ELN] and criminal gangs." They say kidnapping is increasing; extortion and attacks on pipelines continue; villages and towns are targeted; and children are murdered or forcibly recruited to the rebel ranks.
Why gangsters still have the space they need to operate may be explained by the second phenomenon that Messrs. Gomez and Nieto describe: "the deterioration of the justice system." It is not an accident, the letter writers charge: "We raise the alarm to warn of the infiltration of [narcoterrorism's] agents in our judiciary, as well as in [nongovernmental organizations] where under the guise of human rights defenders they support actions to attack democratic institutions."
These are extraordinary allegations and they are not made without examples of what appear to be clear miscarriages of justice. "An emblematic case" they cite is the conviction of two army officers on the charge of forced disappearance in the 1985 rescue of hostages from the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. Messrs. Gomez and Nieto do not summarize the case in their letter but it is worth reviewing here.
The infamous siege at the Palace of Justice by the left-wing guerrilla group known as the M-19 was an effort, on behalf of drug lord Pablo Escobar, to force the Supreme Court to rule extradition unconstitutional. The rebels breached security by killing two guards and commandeered the building. The military stormed the premises and was able to rescue more than 200 people. But the guerrillas took hostages and set a fire to destroy court records. When the smoke cleared all the rebels were dead and so too were some 40-50 hostages whose bodies were burned beyond recognition. Eleven individuals were never accounted for.
Army brigade commander General Jesús Armando Arias and the officer in charge of one of the battalions that went to the palace, Colonel Alfonso Plazas, were both praised as heroes in the aftermath of the massacre. A 1986 tribunal investigated the case and laid the blame for carnage at the feet of the M-19.
The left did not give up. Subsequently two separate affidavits were used to accuse the army in the disappearance of the 11 unaccounted for. The first notarized affidavit, presented by former policeman Ricardo Gámez in 1989, was thrown out when it was learned he was not at the palace during the crisis and could not have been a witness. The fraudulent document had been brought before the prosecutor by a Jesuit priest well-known for his accusations against the army and his leftwing politics. Neither Mr. Gámez nor the priest faced any consequences for their roles in the affair.
In 2007, another affidavit allegedly signed by Cpl. Edgar Villamizar was used to put Col. Plazas in jail and later convict him. Gen. Arias was found guilty by association. But during the appeal process, Mr. Villamizar emerged to say that he was not at the palace that day and investigators admitted that the signature on the affidavit is not his. Nevertheless, a three-judge court in Bogotá last month ruled 2-1 that the Plazas conviction should stand.
This is hardly an isolated case. Hundreds of uniformed Colombians have been convicted based on unreliable testimony accepted by the court.
In other recent news the nation's attorney general, Viviane Morales, has remarried her ex-husband Carlos Alonso Lucio, who happens to be a former member of the M-19 and a former adviser to both the ELN and the paramilitary. He was in jail when they married the first time. In other words, the attorney general's husband has spent years cavorting with the type of people she is supposed to be investigating. One wonders how Americans would have reacted if Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the assistant U.S. attorney general during prohibition, had married an alleged mafioso. Requests for comment from the Colombian government, made via the embassy in Washington, went unanswered.
It was Colombia's highest criminal court that chose Ms. Morales for her job, from a list of nominees submitted by President Juan Manuel Santos. That court has made other unfathomable decisions, including one that says that evidence from computers of FARC leader Raúl Reyes that were seized during a 2008 raid cannot be admitted in court.
If the Colombian judicial system has been infiltrated by gangsters, as Messrs. Gomez and Nieto claim, the nation has not won any part of the war on drugs. The terrorists have only changed fox holes.
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com