However for greater than a decade, the previous president has been enmeshed in a witness-tampering scandal within the nation’s judicial system. It dates to 2012, when Uribe accused a fellow senator, Iván Cepeda, of bribing witnesses in a conspiracy to attach Uribe to the nation’s right-wing paramilitary teams. Then, in 2018, the nation’s Supreme Court docket turned the case on its head, dismissing Uribe’s accusations and as an alternative investigating whether or not Uribe had been manipulating witnesses within the case in an obstruction of justice.
The excessive courtroom in 2020 briefly ordered Uribe held beneath home arrest because the investigation continued. Prosecutors beneath earlier presidential administrations have twice requested to shut the case, requests that had been denied by judges.
Now, Colombia’s new legal professional normal, Luz Adriana Camargo Garzón, chosen by the Supreme Court docket final month, has determined to maneuver ahead with the case. Her workplace launched a press release Tuesday saying prosecutors will cost Uribe with witness bribing and procedural fraud, based mostly on the bodily and materials proof collected.
Uribe has repeatedly denied the allegations towards him and any ties to paramilitary teams.
For generations of Colombians, Uribe has been seen as a large in politics. To some, he’s a revered warfare hero who rescued the federal government from collapse by the hands of leftist guerrillas. Underneath his management, killings, kidnappings and different assaults plummeted. The nation’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also referred to as the FARC, considerably diminished in dimension and energy beneath his presidency. The Colombian authorities, beneath Uribe’s successor, would later signal a peace settlement with the FARC.
In 2009, U.S. President George W. Bush awarded Uribe the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising his “resolute and uncompromising” management at a time when Colombia “was close to the purpose of being, at finest, a failed state — or, at worst, a narco-state,” Bush stated.
However Uribe additionally presided over the nation throughout a time that has been thought-about one of many darkest in current Colombian historical past. In a scandal often known as the “false positives” case, the Colombian army carried out extrajudicial killings of hundreds of individuals falsely labeled as enemy combatants, in line with Colombia’s Particular Jurisdiction for Peace. Not less than 6,402 Colombians had been killed between 2002 and 2008 — a lot of them unemployed and poor, a few of them disabled — by troopers who claimed their deaths had been warfare casualties, in line with the peace jurisdiction.
Uribe resigned from the Senate in 2020, in a transfer seen by many as a strategic effort to drive the jurisdiction of his case from the Supreme Court docket to the legal professional normal’s workplace. The legal professional normal on the time was seen by many as carefully aligned with then-President Iván Duque, an Uribe ally.
On Tuesday afternoon, Duque launched a video defending his mentor who performed an important position in his personal election as president.
“As we speak we see with disappointment this accusation that’s made towards him,” Duque stated. “We all know that not solely will he come out forward, however for him to come back out forward would be the demonstration that in Colombia there’s true justice.”
Whereas some Uribe allies might declare the costs quantity to political persecution beneath the leftist authorities of President Gustavo Petro, the nation’s new legal professional normal is just not thought-about near the president, stated Colombian jurist Rodrigo Uprimny. Three earlier judicial selections, from the Supreme Court docket and from two impartial judges, had already held up the case.
“Former president Uribe has for years tried to evade accountability by manipulating the justice system and abusing his political connections,” stated Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch and a former Colombian congresswoman. “This choice reminds Colombians that no person is or ought to ever be above the legislation.”
