Uribe released from house arrest as part of appeal process
The historic sentence is suspended until his last remaining legal processes are exhausted
Today’s ‘Daily Wire’ is by Adriann Alsema from Colombia Reports
The Bogota appeals court on Tuesday ordered the release of Colombia’s former president Álvaro Uribe while considering the appeal of his fraud and bribery conviction.
Uribe’s defense attorney, Jaime Granados, had requested the suspension of the 12-year prison sentence, which courts were allowing Uribe to serve at home. Uribe’s defense team claims the sentence violated the former president’s “right to dignity, due process and the presumption of innocence.”
The court agreed to suspend the sentence for the duration of the appeals process while still maintaining the conviction.
Senator Ivan Cepeda, one of the victims of Uribe’s fraud and bribery practices, said that he and other victims “respect, but do not agree with the decision.”
Cepeda told the press that “we are certain that the convicted former president has been pressuring the justice system and campaigning against us.”
“We believe that the measure imposed by Judge Heredia was meant to protect us” against apparently ongoing efforts of Uribe’s convicted fixer, Diego Cadena, to smear the former president’s opponents in court.
The former president and Cadena were convicted for bribing demobilized paramilitary fighters into providing testimony that would protect Uribe from investigations into his family’s alleged ties to paramilitary groups.
The investigations followed a debate in the Senate in which Cepeda revealed Uribe’s ties to the Medellin Cartel and testimonies of demobilized members of the Bloque Metro paramilitary group, who claimed that the former president and his brother Santiago were involved in the creation of the paramilitary group on one of the Uribe family’s estates in the Antioquia province.
You can also donate a one-time gift via “Buy Me a Coffee”. It only takes a few moments, and you can do so here.
And if you can’t do any of that, please do help us by sharing the piece! We don’t have billionaire PR teams either. haha
Hasta pronto, piratas!