An arrest mid-hearing
The case that for a year brushed against the governing bloc reached it head-on this week. On 18 June 2026, the Investigation Chamber of Colombia’s Supreme Court ordered the detention of Pacto Histórico senator Martha Peralta Epieyú while she was giving testimony in the corruption scandal at the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD). The decision was taken by the reporting magistrate, Cristina Lombana, who had already ordered the police to bring the lawmaker in after her defense sought two postponements of the hearing.
The measure was set as temporary detention at her residence, under police watch, to ensure that Peralta would appear for the continuation of the questioning on Friday 19 June. That day, magistrate Lombana upheld the custodial precautionary measure and denied the habeas corpus filed by the defense, which considered the detention improper. El Espectador noted that the detention would be served at the home of the accused following a request by the Public Ministry about the location.What the Court is investigating
The file rests on a negotiated testimony, and it is worth stating plainly: what now weighs on Peralta comes, in essence, from the statement of a former government ally she had backed in Congress. According to Semana, the investigation is based on the cooperation deal that former UNGRD director Olmedo López negotiated with the justice system, in which he named brothers Issa Francisco and Jorge Rizcala as people the senator allegedly recommended to secure a yellow-machinery contract in La Guajira. López told prosecutors that in September 2023 he held a meeting at the UNGRD with Peralta and the Rizcalas, in which she allegedly asked him to process a deal for the maintenance of jagüeyes, the wells that collect water in the department.
El Colombiano reported that the Chamber took up the file for the alleged crimes of influence peddling and bribery, and that an entry log would place the senator at the agency’s offices on 19 September 2023 alongside the contractors. According to that same report, Inversiones IRL, a Barranquilla firm, obtained a machinery-rental contract for jagüey maintenance a month later.The individual case sits inside a far larger one. In the indictment of former interior and finance ministers Luis Fernando Velasco and Ricardo Bonilla — now cast by prosecutors as alleged “masterminds” of the scheme — the prosecution described a “criminal organization” with a division of tasks in which contracts were handed to lawmakers to widen the majorities the government’s reforms required. The case prosecutor named Peralta as one of the alleged “brokers” of the scheme to secure legislative backing, and credited her with leading the strategy to line up votes in the Senate’s Seventh Committee for the pension reform. Peralta chaired that committee between 2023 and 2024; the reform she handled remains under review at the Constitutional Court over alleged procedural defects.
What the senator says
Against that account there is another, and data journalism requires holding both until a judge decides. Peralta has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and calls the process “political persecution” stemming from her defense of indigenous communities and of the government’s reforms. On arriving at the Court she said: “I have always shown my face, I have always acted with transparency, and I have come to clear up any doubt the Court may have.” She also said she would keep cooperating with the justice system to prove her innocence and called the precautionary measure “excessive.”
The procedural status is worth recalling. Outlets such as Radio Guatapurí stressed that the senator retains the presumption of innocence while the process advances in the information-gathering stage, and that the questioning is the moment she is formally tied to the investigation. A precautionary measure is not a conviction: it is a provisional decision, and the defense itself announced it would contest it.
Why it matters beyond one name
The arrest does not happen in a vacuum. The UNGRD scandal already has other congressional leaders in custody: former Senate president Iván Name and former House president Andrés Calle are among those arrested, and in March the Court upheld the order to send the former leadership board to trial. El Colombiano put at more than 571 billion pesos four projects at the road agency Invías and at more than 40 billion pesos five UNGRD projects that, according to prosecutors, were part of a scheme of “indicative quotas” handed to lawmakers in exchange for votes and quorum. These are the prosecution’s figures, still subject to challenge at trial.
The political fact is hard to ignore for its timing. Peralta backs Iván Cepeda’s presidential bid and was re-elected for the 2026-2030 term through the Movimiento Alternativo Indígena y Social within the Pacto Histórico, with just over 61,000 votes in the indigenous constituency. Her detention came in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, a detail her defense uses as proof of “persecution” and the prosecution attributes to the ordinary course of the file.
What comes next
With the questioning closed, the next stage will decide whether the case moves toward an order to stand trial. Until then, two verifiable statements coexist without contradiction: that the Court adopted a custodial measure grounded in a cooperator’s testimony and documentary records, and that this decision is not yet a conviction nor does it foreclose the senator’s right to contest it. The outcome will tell whether the UNGRD looting, which began with water trucks and machinery, ends up redrawing responsibilities inside the very bloc that pushed the reforms.