This week it was not hallway gossip that arrived. It was a formal statement of charges from Colombia's Procuraduría General de la Nación, the national inspector general. The Archipielago Press published it on 5 November, and Diario La Libertad and Nación Colombia had reported it on the 3rd: the Procuraduría filed charges against Cristian Fernando Cañón Bernal, who served as Infrastructure secretary of the Governor's Office of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina from 2024 to 2026, for allegedly exercising public functions while barred from office.

This has to be said without shortcuts. A statement of charges is not a verdict. It does not find anyone guilty and it does not take away Cañón Bernal's right to defend himself, present evidence and contest what is attributed to him. That is not a lawyer's technicality: it is the minimum rule of a state that cannot turn into a mob. What does stand, because the Procuraduría reported it and those outlets reproduced it, is that the oversight body moved the case to that stage and provisionally classified the conduct as a serious offense committed with intent (dolo).

What the inspector general's office says

According to those publications, the Procuraduría maintains that the person under investigation allegedly disobeyed and failed to comply with a disciplinary decision that was already final: removal from office and a general ban of eight years and six months, related to his previous work as deputy director of the regional environmental authority of the Canal del Dique, Cardique. The oversight body, according to those reports, says he allegedly continued to perform public functions consciously and voluntarily, even though he knew about the restriction that applied to him.

Eight years and six months is not a note to file away. It is a general ineligibility: the kind of sanction that, if final, bars someone from holding public jobs. If the Procuraduría's account holds, someone occupied one of this department's most sensitive secretariats while a ban was in force. If the person under investigation shows that was not the case, the charges will not stand, and that should be said just as clearly. What we cannot do is treat the file as a distant formality, written in Bogotá so that nobody here reads it.

Why this is not an abstract piece of paper

In the Archipelago, the Infrastructure secretariat does not run a glass building. It touches what people walk on: roads, public works, drainage, the concrete promised after every storm. The charges we know about do not mention a specific contract, and they do not, by themselves, make Cañón Bernal responsible for the unfinished works the island still lives with. They speak to something earlier and more basic: whether the person who occupied that office could, legally, be sitting there.

A final ban exists so the state does not contradict itself. Disciplinary oversight is worth little if the same state then hands over a post again. That is why the question does not end with the name of the person under investigation. It extends to the procedure that appointed him, swore him in and kept him there.

What the Governor's Office should put on the table

Without pointing to any other official — because the published reports contain no ruling that would allow it — the islands have a right to ask the Governor's Office for documents, not press releases:

  • What is the administrative act of appointment and the swearing-in record of Cañón Bernal as Infrastructure secretary?
  • Which Procuraduría disciplinary background certificate was checked before that appointment, on what date, and with what result?
  • Did the Legal Office or the General Secretariat flag any ineligibility? If they did, what happened to that warning?
  • On what date did he leave the post, and what reason was recorded?
  • Will the administration, through internal control, review the inventory of acts signed in that period, without prejudging their validity?

These questions do not convict anyone. They keep the next appointment from being made blindly again. In a department where every peso spent on public works is felt in the street, screening a résumé cannot be a last-minute formality.

The Procuraduría has already done its part by filing the charges. It is now for the person under investigation to present a defense, and for the Governor's Office to explain how ineligibilities are checked when the job is not decorative. On a small island, trust is not repaired with silence. It is repaired with files placed on the table.

Armando Archbold, journalist trained at Universidad Externado with a master's in politics, editor of WiNyuuz

Sources