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 Courtroom 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 below home arrest because the investigation continued. Prosecutors below earlier presidential administrations have twice requested to shut the case, requests that had been denied by judges.
Now, Colombia’s new lawyer normal, Luz Adriana Camargo Garzón, chosen by the Supreme Courtroom final month, has determined to maneuver ahead with the case. Her workplace launched an announcement 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 in opposition to 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, often known as the FARC, considerably diminished in dimension and energy below his presidency. The Colombian authorities, below 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 greatest, a failed state — or, at worst, a narco-state,” Bush mentioned.
However Uribe additionally presided over the nation throughout a time that has been thought-about one of many darkest in latest Colombian historical past. In a scandal referred to as the “false positives” case, the Colombian navy carried out extrajudicial killings of 1000’s of individuals falsely labeled as enemy combatants, in response to Colombia’s Particular Jurisdiction for Peace. A minimum of 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 response to 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 Courtroom to the lawyer normal’s workplace. The lawyer normal on the time was seen by many as intently 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.
“At this time we see with disappointment this accusation that’s made in opposition to him,” Duque mentioned. “We all know that not solely will he come out forward, however for him to return out forward would be the demonstration that in Colombia there may be true justice.”
Whereas some Uribe allies could declare the costs quantity to political persecution below the leftist authorities of President Gustavo Petro, the nation’s new lawyer normal just isn’t thought-about near the president, mentioned Colombian jurist Rodrigo Uprimny. Three earlier judicial selections, from the Supreme Courtroom 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,” mentioned Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch and a former Colombian congresswoman. “This choice reminds Colombians that no one is or ought to ever be above the regulation.”
