Colombia
The house aribe Household Assignment Alibe Lift
Current President Gustavo Petro has raised questions about a possible interference from the United States in the Uribe case.
The former Colombian president Álvaro Uibe addressed the press in Bogota on February 10, 2025, at the end of his trial.
AFP
Colombian justice raised Tuesday the residence of the former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, condemned at first instance to hinder justice and subornation of witnessespending his appeal trial.
Alvaro Uibe, 73, who ruled the country between 2002 and 2010, was sentenced in August to 12 years of house arrest in the municipality of Rionegro, about 30 kilometers from his hometown, Medellin (northwest).
Alvaro Uibe had been found guilty of having tried to put pressure on witnesses to avoid being associated with the far -right militias having delivered a bloody war to the Guerillas, in the first trial targeting a former Colombian president. He was also prosecuted for procedural fraud.
American interference
The judge in charge of the trial had decided that his sentence had to enter “immediately” in force in order to prevent him from trying to “escape” by leaving his country. But the Bogota Superior Court judged that the “criteria” of the judge to “justify the need” of the house arrest “were vague, indeterminate and imprecise”.
“Thank you to God, thank you to all my compatriots for their solidarity marks,” said the former president on the social network X, “I will devote every minute of my freedom to the freedom of Colombia”.
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For his part, the current president Gustavo Petro raised questions about a possible interference from the United States in the Uiba case and denounced a “enormous” pressure on justice.
“I do not understand how Uibe can be free (…) Is that justice?”, Bumped on the first president on the left in the history of Colombia at a meeting with his ministers broadcast on television.
Many twists and turns
When the conviction of Alvaro Uibe was made public, the head of American diplomacy, Marco Rubio, had denounced an “instrumentalization of the Colombian judicial power by radical judges”.
Alvaro Uibe, an old ally of Washington, then called thousands of people to take to the streets to defend his innocence. The investigation against Alvaro Uibe has experienced many twists and turns, several general prosecutors who have sought to classify the case.
Alvaro Uibe had accused in 2012 before the Supreme Court the left senator Ivan Cepeda of having hatched a plot to bind him wrongly to paramilitary groups involved in the long Colombian armed conflict.
Other surveys
This jurisdiction decided not to continue Ivan Cepeda and rather looked at the accusations weighing on Alvaro Uibe, suspected of having contacted veterans imprisoned so that they give false testimonies in his favor.
This court decision appears as the part of the iceberg while other surveys are underway on the bonds of the ex-head of the State with extreme right squadrons, responsible for many crimes against civilians during the armed conflict.
Alvaro Uibe remains a key figure in the political scene in Colombia, where he had a great influence on the right, relegated to the opposition since Gustavo Petro took office in 2022.
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