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Viviane Morales, who took over Colombia's top judicial post this month, faces tough challenges amid high expectations
Putting Colombia's top criminals behind bars, securing high-profile convictions implicating the country's elite, and clearing a heavy backlog of judicial cases are just some of the tough challenges facing Colombia's first female attorney general.
Last month, Colombia's supreme court elected Viviane Morales as the country's new attorney general, ending 17 months of stalemate stemming from clashes between the previous government and the judiciary.
Expectations of 48-year-old Morales, who took over the helm of Colombia's top judicial post earlier this month, are high.
Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, sees the attorney general's office as the frontline in the fight against corruption in the private and public sectors. Morales will head a new elite task force of special investigators set up to fight graft.
President Santos is also pinning his hopes on Morales to restore much-needed credibility to the country's justice system, which solves few crimes.
"Viviane Morales will help advance Colombia's progress in the fight against impunity," he said recently.
Impunity in Colombia is widespread. For example, around 95 percent of crimes involving the murder of trade unionists in Colombia remain unpunished, and there are few convictions for crimes committed against rights campaigners, according to Human Rights Watch.
CHALLENGES AHEAD
Morales, a lawyer and former congresswoman who has studied in France, has a steep hill to climb. One of her first priorities will be to investigate claims of illegal wiretapping of journalists, judges and opposition politicians by state agents from the Colombian intelligence agency, known as DAS, dating back to the government of the previous president, Alvaro Uribe.
She will also oversee investigations into high-profile corruption scandals, including accusations of fraud in tendering major public infrastructure contracts at the office of Bogotá's mayor and claims of misuse of government subsidies.
Colombians are also looking to Morales to secure convictions in over 2,000 cases involving poor, young men allegedly murdered by the army, which passed them off as rebels killed in battle to boost the guerrilla body count.
Another urgent task for Morales will be to speed up the war crimes trials of dozens of former right-wing paramilitary chiefs who demobilised under a controversial peace deal during Uribe's government.
During their reign of terror in the 1980s and 1990s, the paramilitaries were responsible for murdering nearly 180,000 civilians, according to the attorney general's office.
So far, prosecutors have made few convictions and little progress has been made in recovering illegal assets and land grabbed by the paramilitaries.
In addition, Morales will oversee investigations involving members of the Colombian congress and senate accused of conspiring with paramilitary groups in election fraud and even murder.
In recent years, dozens of Colombian lawmakers have been imprisoned for their links with paramilitary groups. Today, the attorney general's office is sifting through nearly 400 similar investigations.
Morales will also be expected to move fast in prosecuting those believed responsible for the murder of two university students on a beach earlier this month, a crime that has shocked Colombia and dominated the headlines.
DYSFUNCTIONAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
Yet perhaps the toughest challenge confronting the new attorney general will be getting Colombians to believe in their justice system as efficient and fair.
With a backlog of up to three million cases, many regard it as dysfunctional.
The judiciary is widely thought to be plagued with corruption and nepotism, in a country where public officials can be paid off and drug kingpins still hold sway.
To tackle these problems, Morales has promised to improve hiring processes in the judiciary and provide better training to her staff of over 20,000 officials, in particular state prosecutors and special investigators.
She also aims to improve government witness protection programmes, so that key witnesses in high-profile drug and murder trials feel safe to come forward and testify.
While violent crime has declined in Colombia in recent years, there were 15,238 murders last year alone, according to police figures.
In contrast to her predecessor, Morales has also emphasised the need to make her institution more open and approachable.
"It seems important to me to create an attorney general's office that has a friendly face," she said recently.
Some experts say, however, that despite Morales' best intentions and obvious determination, making progress within the confines and restrictions of Colombia's overstretched and underfunded judiciary will be nothing short of a titanic struggle.
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