Colombia: Dimensions of the Judicial Ruling Against Former President Uribe

In addition to the legal dimension, the ruling against former President Uribe can be interpreted in terms of its potential sociological, geopolitical, and institutional dimensions.

From a sociological point of view, the legal proceedings in Colombia embody the confrontation between two key social sectors in contemporary Colombian history. On the one hand, Uribe represents the new rentier bourgeoisie, which emerged from the rise of drug trafficking in the 1970s; on the opposite side is the movement of victims of state crimes, led by left-wing Senator Iván Cepeda, son of the historic leader Manuel Cepeda, who was assassinated in the midst of the widespread attacks against the Patriotic Union: a systematic partisan elimination campaign coordinated by the armed forces, drug traffickers, and paramilitaries.

The victims denounced the responsibility of the upper classes in establishing a social order based on the concentration of wealth through practices of dispossession, systematic killings, and control of state institutions.

It is worth remembering that, according to the Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD), the country has reported a chilling 126,895 disappearances in the last three decades. Since 1985, more than seven million people have been forcibly displaced, according to research by the Single Victims Registry. Beyond the figures, these dimensions of the conflict reveal the real motives behind the political project of the upper bourgeoisie and the rentier bourgeoisie embodied by figures such as Uribe. In other words, the Colombian elite has managed to establish itself as the most fratricidal in the hemisphere, and its democracy is a virtual reality that hides its dynamic of criminal enrichment.

From a geopolitical point of view, the trial against Álvaro Uribe has allowed for the creation of a collective memory around the systematic nature of the so-called “new forms of intervention,” whose origins date back to the Reagan Doctrine, when the United States decided to reorient its interventionist practices by outsourcing financing and armament to local agents. In the case of the Middle East, it did so through the mujahideen, and in Latin America, through drug trafficking. This was made explicit in the “Iran–Contra” scandal, when it was discovered that the Medellín Cartel’s money was being used to finance the Contras in Central America. The instrumentalization of drug trafficking in these new types of wars has consolidated deeply violent armed elites that have ultimately hijacked state institutions (see the case of Afghanistan).

In Colombia, the new rentier bourgeoisie, born out of the strategic needs of US imperialism, forced the takeover of public corporations by resorting to organized crime in the 1980s and 1990s, under the leadership of Pablo Escobar and his family. In fact, it was the notorious Antioquia drug lord who assassinated Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984, after the official denounced Escobar—who at the time was a congressman for the Liberal Party—as the actual leader of the international cocaine trafficking network. Sadistically, the forces allied with Escobar’s business permeated public institutions. Álvaro Uribe himself began his political career in the Civil Aviation Authority in 1980, sponsored by the Ochoa Clan, associates of the Medellín Cartel led by Escobar.

Since then, the Uribe family’s footprint has been discovered throughout the continent. In 2012, Dolly Cifuentes, Uribe’s sister-in-law, was imprisoned for acting as a front for Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In 2021, following the imprisonment of a drug pilot on the island of Providencia, Raya magazine published an investigation proving that Uribe was not only aware of the activities of these operators close to him, but also made efforts to cover up the scandal that, once again, exposed his dangerous proximity to transnational crime.

From an institutional perspective, the possibility of prosecuting a president for the first time in Colombian history reveals a previously nonexistent limit on the abuses of the upper oligarchy. Recent history shows that presidents such as Julio César Turbay, a contemporary of Operation Condor, resorted to state terrorism while articulating the transnational agenda of drug trafficking in line with the interests of the United States and the Reagan Doctrine.

Another memorable case of class-based impunity was the theft of the 1970 presidential elections by Misael Pastrana, father of former conservative president Andrés Pastrana. The electoral fraud of 1970 allowed the upper bourgeoisie and the new rentier bourgeoisie to appropriate large portions of the national territory through the signing of the Chicoral Pact (1972), which laid the foundations for the agrarian counter-reform. From then on, impunity became an expression of the hijacking of the state. In other words, this historic ruling against Uribe breaks a long-standing structural dynamic that has made possible the para-institutional hegemony of the Colombian elite.

Colombia’s Courts Finds Álvaro Uribe Guilty After 13-Year Judicial Process

Finally, from a legal standpoint, the legal guidelines expressed by Judge Sandra Liliana Heredia and the lawyers representing Álvaro Uribe’s victims vindicate the capacity of justice institutions to reform themselves, making it possible to project a judicial practice focused not only on the independence of powers, but also on the expression of corporate ethics. The power of a social state governed by the rule of law is possible thanks to a correlation of forces that allows the real interests of the Colombian criminal elite’s economic project to be confronted.

Ultimately, the only path to peace for the country is based on conditioning the entire framework that has made mass fratricide possible; that is, on limiting the operational action of the new rentier bourgeoisie and the transnational upper bourgeoisie, both through social mobilization and institutional reform.

(Diario Red) by Diana Carolina Alfonso

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/SL/DZ