The former Colombian-president Alvaro Uibe was found guilty on Monday to have tried to put pressure on a witness to avoid being associated with the militias that waged a bloody war against the guerrillas, in the first trial targeting a former Colombian state chief.
The 73 -year -old politician, president from 2002 to 2010, was accused of having sought to change the version of the witnesses in an investigation concerning him. His trial was very followed less than a year from the next presidential election.
The judge in charge of the case declared Mr. Uribe guilty of a witness subornation, during a hearing on Monday in Bogota followed remotely by the former leader.
Also prosecuted for procedural fraud, he faces up to 12 years in prison.
This first instance decision may be the subject of an appeal.
Compromising testimony
In 2012, Alvaro Uibe accused the left Senator Ivan Cepeda before the Supreme Court of having hatched a plot to bind him wrongly to far -right paramilitary groups involved in the long Colombian armed conflict.
The Court decided not to continue Mr. Cepeda and rather looked at the accusations relating to Mr. Uibe, suspected of having contacted veterans imprisoned to lie in his favor.
The former leader says he only wanted to convince them to tell the truth.
The investigation against Alvaro Uibe began in 2018 and had many twists and turns, several general prosecutors who have sought to classify the case.
His trial, opened in May 2024 and broadcast live by local media, saw more than 90 witnesses parade.
According to the testimony of a condemned paramilitary, Alvaro Uibe and his brother Santiago Uibe participated in the creation of a paramilitary group known as the Metro block in the Antioquia department in the 90s.
This witness claims that Diego Cadena, one of Mr. Du’s lawyers, put pressure on prison visits to change his statements and tried to bring him. The lawyer is the subject of a separate trial.
Key figure
The paramilitary groups appeared in the 1980s in Colombia to fight the Marxist guerrillas who had taken up arms against the State two decades earlier with the declared objective of fighting poverty and political marginalization, especially in rural areas.
In recent decades, a plethora of armed groups have adopted cocaine as the main source of income, fueling a bloody rivalry that continues in Colombia.
The court decision concerning the ex-president, appreciated by part of the population for his firmness with regard to the guerrillas but also criticized for suspicions of human rights violations during his presidency, brought a blow to the Colombian right with a view to the presidential election of May 2026.
Washington denounced on Monday an instrumentalization of the judiciary ‘by’ radical judges’, believing that ‘the only crime of the former Colombian president Uibe is to have defended and has fought tirelessly for his country’.
Alvaro Uibe, at the head of the Centro Democratico party, remains a key figure in the political scene of his country and has a great influence on the Colombian right, in the opposition since the coming to power in 2022 of the first leftist president, Gustavo Petro.
The ex-derigerator proclaims his innocence and believes that it is a political trial motivated by a desire for ‘revenge’ of the left, the former guerrillas of the Farc and the former president Juan Manuel Santos, signatory of the agreement which disarmed the FARC in 2017.
It is the subject of surveys in other cases. Thus, he testified before the prosecutors in a preliminary investigation into a paramilitary massacre of small farmers in 1997, when he was governor of the Western department of Antioquia.
A complaint was also filed against him in Argentina, where the universal jurisdiction makes it possible to pursue crimes committed anywhere in the world, for his presumed involvement in more than 6000 executions and forced disappearances of civilians by the army when he was president.
/ATS
