Former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez will be tried for bribery and witness manipulation in a case that has been ongoing since 2012 over links between his government and paramilitarism. However, the prosecutor’s decision comes at a very delicate moment in President Petro’s pacification plan.
Colombia’s attorney general has requested the start of a trial against the ultra-conservative former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, accused of having manipulated the testimonies of former Colombian paramilitaries who linked him to the criminal activities of far-right armed groups active in the province of Antioquia, where Uribe held the position of governor for a long time.
This is the first time in the history of the South American country in which a former president is put on trial. The story dates back to 2012, when Senator Ivan Cepeda presented a parliamentary question following the publication of the investigation entitled “Álvaro Uribe Vélez: drug trafficking, paramilitarism and parapolitics”.
In this investigation, Cepeda cited the testimonies of 40 people involved in the most serious crimes committed in Colombia since the 1990s, who claimed to be able to link former president Uribe and his brother Santiago to these facts. In particular, Juan Guillermo Monsalve, a convicted former paramilitary, and son of Uribe’s butler at the hacienda from where he managed all his affairs, claimed that the former president had contributed to the foundation of the armed group Bloque Metro of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) while he was governor of Antioquia.
The AUC was a far-right armed organization created in 1997 with the support of politicians, landowners and entrepreneurs from central-northern Colombia with the aim of combating the activity of left-wing guerrillas active in the area since the 1950s. The AUC had close links with corrupt sectors of politics and the army, with drug trafficking, and it is estimated that they are responsible for the deaths of around 260 thousand people, the majority of them innocent civilians.
In 2014, Álvaro Uribe sued Cepeda, accusing him of having pressured and even paid witnesses to lie about him. According to the former president, Cepeda, the former left-wing senator – recently deceased – Piedad Córdoba, and Rodrigo Lara, former senator son of a former justice minister murdered by paramilitary groups in the 1980s, would have offered penitentiary benefits to the heads of criminal organizations extradited from the US in exchange for testimony against Uribe and his allies.
However, the Supreme Court, the only body competent to try a senator in Colombia, rejected the accusation, and six years after the complaint against Cepeda was filed instead ordered the arrest of Uribe for trying to bribe the witnesses called by the senator in order to modify their testimonies. One of the former president’s lawyers, Diego Cadena, recognized defender of some Colombian drug trafficking bosses, had in fact contacted Juan Guillermo Monsalve, his ex-wife Deyanira Gómez and another former paramilitary, Carlos Enrique Vélez, to push them to withdraw their testimony , a circumstance discovered thanks to a series of wiretaps made on the former president’s mobile phone.
Uribe then renounced his role as senator, forcing the justice system to send the case to the Attorney General of the Republic, at that time in the hands of an ally of the Uribe right, who twice asked for the case to be closed due to lack of evidence. In both cases, justice rejected the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, which renewed its authorities a few weeks ago.
The new prosecutor is Luz Camargo, a lawyer proposed by the left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, and chosen by the Supreme Court of Justice, who presented new evidence that opens the doors to a historic trial. The new institutional configuration has thus made it possible to unblock the case against the former president, who risks an eight-year prison sentence, but above all the opening of dozens of other cases linking him to crimes against humanity committed by the armed forces Colombians during his two stints as president between 2002 and 2010.
The case that most worries Uribe’s lawyers is that of the so-called False Positives, cases of innocent people tortured, killed and then passed off as guerrillas by the Colombian army. Starting in 2005, Uribe launched a program of economic incentives for soldiers who achieved concrete results in the fight against the Colombian guerrillas. All during the period of the so-called “Democratic Security” policy, which addressed the Colombian internal conflict exclusively from a military point of view and received huge funding from the United States through Plan Colombia.
Former president Uribe’s goal was for the reduction in guerrilla activity to be reflected in international indices and statistics, allowing the army to act with broad discretionary powers. But the processes opened starting from the peace agreements established in 2016 between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the guerrilla of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have opened a Pandora’s box regarding the events of those years.
The testimonies about the violation of human rights by the Colombian army were possible thanks to the establishment of a Special Court called JEP, Special Jurisdiction for Peace, introduced by the 2016 agreement, and which aims to judge the worst atrocities committed during the Colombian conflict that began in the 1950s. And it is also one of the initiatives most opposed by the Colombian right, which responds to Uribe.
The objective of the tribunal is to clarify what happened to ensure that such crimes are not repeated by the guerrillas and the army. For this reason, penalties for crimes that are not considered crimes against humanity are reduced, to incentivize perpetrators to testify.
The FARC leadership admitted to having recruited children for decades, as well as having committed massacres and maintaining connivance with drug traffickers. According to the testimonies given by former soldiers and farmers in the context of the investigations into False Positives, during the Uribe government 6,402 civilians were killed by the armed forces who were then passed off as guerrillas. And it is estimated that the president himself could end up in front of the International Criminal Court for his responsibilities in this area.
But Uribe still remains one of the most powerful men in the country. The portrait that emerges from the incendiary reportage of the weekly Semana on the Uribe case is proof of this: “While Uribe’s political enemies were celebrating, in other sectors alarms went off over the possibility of being faced with the materialization of a persecution plan against the most popular former president in the country today. The same one who cornered the FARC, whose commanders, in a paradox of history, are today in Congress, free, protected by the State itself, without any conviction and without having compensated them. their victims, eight years after the signing of the Havana agreement, during the Santos government. The slogan of the former FARC leaders is to see Uribe in the dock and condemned. The former president, for them, is a war trophy”, writes Semana.
The start of legal proceedings against Uribe, an objective pursued for years by the Colombian left now led by President Gustavo Petro, however comes at a time when the first progressive government in Colombian history is facing serious difficulties. Not only have the main social and economic reforms wanted by the executive been rejected by the conservative majority Congress, but also in terms of pacification of the country, Petro’s great promise during the 2022 electoral campaign, things are not going as expected.
The government plan, entitled Paz Total, provides for the opening of dialogue tables with all the country’s armed organizations, in exchange for a ceasefire that allows violence against the civilian population to be curbed. Among the most relevant groups that control particularly large areas of the country is the National Liberation Army (ELN), the second most important left-wing guerrilla in the country’s history after the extinct FARC; the Autodefensas Gaitanistas, the richest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in the country, with almost 9,000 members, which controls a large part of the territory bordering Venezuela; and the ex-FARC dissident groups, who did not accept the terms of the 2016 agreements and decided to continue the armed struggle. The peace dialogue with the ELN stalled in early April after the government’s decision to open parallel negotiations with some local guerrilla groups, bypassing the central unified command. The former FARC, after the first tensions at the negotiating table, even promoted the illegal deforestation of the Amazon forest in the areas they controlled to force the government to give in.
But the real problem is the Autodefensas Gaitanistas, also known as the Gulf Clan. Despite the government’s efforts, Petro has failed to establish a stable dialogue with this organization which maintains armed conflicts with all the others, and acts as a scapegoat to avoid peace: if the Gulf Clan does not launch a ceasefire, the the rest of the armed groups feel threatened and refuse to give up their weapons. In short, although justice seems to have found the way to begin to shed light on the country’s dark past, the present still seems undermined by extremely difficult challenges and obstacles for the Petro government. And above all for the civilian population, trapped in an endless war for over 70 years.
Colombia’s attorney general has requested the start of a trial against the ultra-conservative former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, accused of having manipulated the testimonies of former Colombian paramilitaries who linked him to the criminal activities of far-right armed groups active in the province of Antioquia, where Uribe held the position of governor for a long time.
This is the first time in the history of the South American country in which a former president is put on trial. The story dates back to 2012, when Senator Ivan Cepeda presented a parliamentary question following the publication of the investigation entitled “Álvaro Uribe Vélez: drug trafficking, paramilitarism and parapolitics”.
