Colombian ex-president Alvaro Uribe will learn his fate Monday in a witness tampering case that saw him become the South American country’s first-ever former head of state to be put on trial.
The 73-year-old, who was president from 2002 to 2010, is charged with “bribery of witnesses” in a separate investigation against him, and risks a 12-year prison sentence in the highly politicized case.
The matter dates to 2012, when Uribe accused leftist senator Ivan Cepeda before the Supreme Court of hatching a plot to falsely link him to right-wing paramilitary groups involved in Colombia’s long-standing armed conflict.
The court decided against prosecuting Cepeda and turned its sights on his claims against Uribe instead.
Paramilitary groups emerged in the 1980s in Colombia to fight Marxist guerrillas that had taken up arms against the state two decades earlier with the stated goal of combating poverty and political marginalization, especially in rural areas.
The plethora of armed groups adopted cocaine as their main source of income, the genesis of a rivalry for resources and trafficking that continues to pit them against each other and the state.
Uribe was a politician on the right of the political spectrum — like all Colombian presidents before current leader Gustavo Petro, who unseated Uribe’s Centro Democratico party in 2022 elections.
Uribe on Sunday gave an hourlong speech in his native Medellin in which he criticized the left-leaning Petro administration.
“We need an enormous victory in the coming year,” Uribe said, in reference to presidential elections that will be held in 2026.
During his tenure, Uribe led a relentless military campaign against drug cartels and the FARC guerrilla army that signed a peace deal with his successor Juan Manuel Santos in 2016.
After Cepeda accused him of having had ties to paramilitary groups responsible for human rights violations, Uribe is alleged to have contacted jailed ex-fighters to lie for him.
He claims he only wanted to convince them to tell the truth.
In 2019, thousands protested in Bogota and Medellin when Uribe — who remains a prominent voice on the right — was indicted in the case.
More than 90 witnesses testified in his trial, which opened in May 2024.
– ‘Vengeance’ –
The investigation against Uribe began in 2018 and has had numerous twists and turns, with several attorneys general seeking to close the case.
It gained new impetus under Attorney General Luz Camargo, picked by Petro — himself a former guerrilla and a political arch-foe of Uribe.
Prosecutors claim to have evidence from at least one paramilitary ex-fighter who claims to have been contacted by Uribe to change his story.
The former president is also under investigation in other matters.
He has testified before prosecutors in a preliminary probe into a 1997 paramilitary massacre of small-scale farmers when he was governor of the western Antioquia department.
A complaint has also been filed against him in Argentina, where universal jurisdiction allows for the prosecution of crimes committed anywhere in the world.
That complaint stems from Uribe’s alleged involvement in the more than 6,000 executions and forced disappearances of civilians by the military when he was president.
Uribe insists his trial is a product of “political vengeance.”
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