Prosecutor's Office charged the Secretary of Health of the Valley for refusing to appoint two officials

In recent hours, the Attorney General's Office charged María Cristina Lesmes, Secretary of Health of the Valley, for prevarication by omission. According to the authorities, the civil servant committed this crime by refusing to appoint two people who were elected at the assembly held by the Users League to serve on the board of directors of the University Hospital del Valle (HUV).

The events occurred in 2017, when Lesmes was also in charge of the Valle Health Secretariat and refused to appoint Mariela Orejuela and José Antonio Plaza, who were elected to the general assembly on April 20, 2017 to serve on the hospital's board of directors.

The Prosecutor's Office explained that, after those elections were held, on May 8, 2017, the official's office requested that she, as Secretary of Health, appoint the elected ones. However, Lesmes did not carry out this task. After the official's refusal, “Mariela Orejuela and José Antonio Plaza were affected in their rights and filed the Law appeals on June 20, 2017, denied reinstatement, granting the appeal,” the Prosecutor's Office explained.

That is, after Lesmes' refusal to appoint those elected to the board of directors, they filed the respective complaint, which was first denied the reinstatement of the case, but then granted the appeal. Even so, none of these judicial remedies worked for the secretary to comply with the appointment.

But that was not all, in that year María Cristina Lesmes also received the call for attention from Dilian Francisca Toro, who at that time was official as governor of the Valley and through Resolution 010-61-1363 ordered the secretary to make the appropriate appointments. In addition, Toro reminded Lesmes that these acts of possession were not administrative, but of immediate execution.

Despite the call of the then governor, Lesmes ignored the order and the appointment of the elect was never made. The secretary was even ordered to appoint Orejuela and Plaza to the HUV board of directors in the second instance, but a review carried out on March 9, 2018 again showed that the secretary continued to breach the act.

The Prosecutor's Office insisted that “the official denied the appointment pursuant to resolution 777 of 6 June 2017”. In addition, they noted that in February 2018, the head of the Legal Office of the University Hospital told Mariela Orejuela that he would be awaiting the production of the administrative act by the Secretary of Health for the appointment.

Five years later, the Attorney General's Office decided to charge the official for prevarication by omission; however, during the indictment, María Cristina Lesmes, departmental health secretary, did not accept the charges.

For the past few years, Lesmes has been serving again as Secretary of Health of the Valley in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, recently the official recalled the first case of coronavirus that was registered in the department in March 2020 and, in turn, explained the effects that since then the pandemic crisis affected to the inhabitants of this department of the Pacific.

“We have all the social and economic impact on the department in the first year, especially with a lot of closures. We are in a process of rearrangement, in a phase of transition between the pandemic and the post-pandemic. Intensive care beds have also begun to be closed and we are in the reformulation of our service delivery network and hope that the COVID epidemic will allow us to return to our routine in the search to improve public health indicators,” the official told Blu Radio.

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