Colombia:President Alvaro Uribe faced a new scandal over alleged wiretapping of political opponents and journalists, one day after he ordered the arrest of 19 present and former politicians accused of signing a "devil's pact" with right-wing paramilitaries.
In a news conference on Tuesday, minister for defence Juan Manuel Santos disclosed that the Uribe administration had uncovered a broad and systematic practice by the national police of wiretapping prominent public figures, including members of his own government.
The 12 top generals in the national police were dismissed or forced into retirement on Monday over the scandal, including Colombia's police chief, Gen Jorge Daniel Castro, and the head of police intelligence, Gen Guillermo Chavez.
Mr Santos insisted that neither he nor Mr Uribe was aware of the wiretaps.
As minister for defence, Mr Santos is responsible for the Colombian armed forces, including the 130,000-member national police. He said the wiretaps had been going on for as long as three years.
The disclosures come as Mr Uribe deals with a growing scandal involving allegations that many of his political supporters have colluded with outlawed paramilitary groups blamed for numerous human rights violations, including mass murders.
The Uribe government said it became aware of the alleged illegal wiretapping on Sunday night, when it began investigating how transcripts of wiretapped conversations appeared in Semana, a Bogota-based weekly news magazine. The article embarrassed Mr Uribe with its portrayal of jailed paramilitary leaders running criminal enterprises from their cells.
Human rights organisations and opposition groups have long suspected they were the objects of surveillance and eavesdropping, said Jorge Rojas Rodriguez, president of a leading Colombian human rights organisation based in Bogota.
"The government has a lot to explain from a democratic point of view, how it uses military intelligence to find out what the opposition says," Mr Rojas said. "It only shows this is a police state that puts a premium on arbitrariness over the rule of law."
At the news conference, Mr Santos said there was no proof that the national police commander or his intelligence director knew of the wiretap practice. He said he "lamented" that both had to resign, but added that they had to take "political responsibility" for the actions of the force.