Witness Testimony in Uribe trial re-implicates the ex president in old crimes
Testimony from the historic trial has likely already opened new criminal investigations. Could the historic trial be a step away from institutional corruption in Colombia?
Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s criminal trial over accusations of witness tampering has resumed after courts rejected the latest legal delay stratagem by defense attorneys — this time a claim that the judge handling the case, Sandra Heredia, was biased against the defense and had violated Uribe’s right to a fair trial.
The controversial leader, who once enjoyed an astronomical 91% approval rating, suffered an ignominious fall from grace after leaving office amidst a torrent of accusations of collusion with right-wing death squads, civilian massacres, and involvement in the country’s infamous “false positives” cases— in which thousands of innocent people were killed to inflate casualty statistics during Colombia’s civil war.
“Uribismo”, the political movement named for the the man who once had the full backing of both the United States government and the country’s elite, has similarly fallen from grace, in particular during the administration of Uribe’s hand-picked successor, Ivan Duque, who after a disastrous presidency left office the least popular President since records have been kept.
Uribe was initially charged with fraud and the bribery and intimidation of witnesses as part of an investigation into his paramilitary connections in February 2018, but his legal team has been able to delay the case through a series of challenges and procedural delays.
These most recent proceedings, which began in February, have not gone well for Uribe. Witness testimony and recordings of phone conversations presented by prosecutors will almost certainly open new investigations beyond the allegations of witness tampering.
To understand where in the process Uribe stands, however, we need to first take a walk through the labyrinthine series of legal twists and turns that brought us to this point.
In 2012, Uribe filed a libel suit against leftist senator Iván Cepeda, who had been conducting an investigation into Uribe’s links to paramilitaries. Cepeda, and witnesses who spoke with him, claimed that the Uribe family was instrumental in not only creating but also funding “Bloque Metro”, a division of the infamous United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)— a paramilitary coalition that committed grave human rights abuses during the country’s civil war.
But in 2018, after examining the evidence and collecting witness testimony, the court dismissed the charges against Cepeda and launched an investigation against Uribe instead.
In 2020, Uribe was briefly placed under house arrest under accusations that he had attempted to bribe, threaten, and otherwise influence witnesses who spoke out against him, and also fabricated witnesses wholesale to defend his character.
That process was halted, however, when Uribe resigned from the Senate. Colombian law moved the cases from the Supreme Court, which handles criminal cases against politicians in the country, to normal criminal courts. This started the process from scratch.
As part of the ongoing criminal trial in civilian courts, Uribe has denied flipping witnesses but acknowledged seeking interviews with former paramilitary members to “verify testimonies” that were also being used in a trial against his brother, Santiago Uribe.
Uribe is the first former president in the country’s history to face criminal charges, and if convicted could face up to 12 years in prison.
The defense, however, argues that the charges of witness tampering expire in October under the statute of limitations. Their defense has included dozens of delaying tactics, presumably as part of a strategy to avoid a resolution of the trial before that date is reached.
A series of ex-paramilitary leaders, operatives, and corruption investigators, however, have given testimony in the current court case that deeply implicates Uribe in the original 2012 accusations of directly supporting paramilitary structures, as well as testimony tampering charges.
Juan Guillermo Monsalve, a former Bloque Metro leader, testified that the division was founded, with support from Uribe himself, at a meeting held at the Uribe family estate in San Roque, in the department of Antioquia.
Monsalve told the court that he initially contacted Senator Ivan Cepeda because he was afraid his attempts to testify as part of AUC demobilization efforts would cost him his life.
These fears became more imminent after the Supreme Court in February 2018 decided to formally accuse Uribe over his alleged role in trying to silence Cepeda and the two living witnesses through bribery, according to Mosalve.
He testified this week that he was attacked with knives after he refused to take bribes from one of Uribe’s fixers, the lawyer Diego Cadena.
Prosecution lawyers have also presented wiretapped phone conversations in which the former president can be heard discussing efforts to flip two former paramilitary fighters who were set to testify against him. Uribe said the conversations, held with his then-lawyer who quit shortly afterward, were intercepted illegally.
They have also presented evidence that prosecutors in Antioquia, where the ex-president still holds considerable support, for years systematically ignored or shuttered investigations into Uribe’s wrongdoing.
The evidence seems overwhelming. Defense lawyers often decline to cross-examine witnesses at all, simply claiming that they are liars participating in a politically motivated case— instead focused on constant delays, such as asking for personal days, issuing appeals whenever they can, and requesting additional time to respond to court queries.
Their tactics may work, though Judge Heredia is visibly losing patience with defense lawyers. But even if their statute of limitations arguments work in the end, testimony from the case has almost certainly already caused new investigations into very old allegations against Uribe.
It would seem that “Uribismo” is finally coming to an end, at least in name. The party of Uribe, Centro Democratico, declined to even present a serious candidate in the last election cycle, which resulted in the presidency of Gustavo Petro.
Colombia’s civil war left deep scars upon society, perhaps nowhere more evident than in its domestic justice system, where prosecutors regularly protected business interests and elite families from investigation.
That corruption runs deep and is far from corrected today. But the transparent process against Uribe, who once ruled the country, in his own words, with “an iron fist”, is a crucial step in that direction.
The Big Headlines in LATAM
Colombia and the United States have agreed to collect and share biometric data on migrants in an attempt to fight informal migration in the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem met with President Gustavo Petro, and described the move as a way to combat the “dangers of illegal immigration.”
The move seems like a continuation of the U.S. policy of criminalizing migrants across the continent.
U.S. President Trump’s claims over those detained in El Salvador continue to unravel as more families of those held there come forward, contacting media companies and demanding answers.
We’ve written about this dynamic extensively at PWS, but in case you missed it last week, the U.S. is clearly turning violent border policy inwards on the domestic population.
What We’re Writing
The grisly discovery of a mass-grave and alleged crematorium in Jalisco, Mexico inspired outrage across the country this month. But the discovery has also put “buscadoras”, the mostly female civilian search collectives who found the site, in the crosshairs of organized crime and the state itself.
Joshua and Daniela interviewed the women who form part of those collectives for a story at NACLA, focused on the buscadoras who have devoted their lives to finding answers for the more than hundred thousand “forcibly disappeared” in Mexico.
Spanish Word of the Week
“La cosa se puso color de hormiga” - “that thing turned the color of an ant”
Someone said this phrase to Joshua this week in Colombia, and he was completely confused. “You mean it was brown? Or red? Or black or something?" he responded.
But the speaker was kind enough to explain the intended meaning: the phrase is used when a situation becomes dire, dark, or complicated. Joshua isn’t very clear about the etymology or the origin there.
But he is sure of one thing: he is certain that at many points over the last few weeks, Uribe’s defense team has thought to themselves, “mierda, esta cosa se puso color de hormiga.”
Hasta pronto, piratas!
Brilliant article Mr. Joshua!!!