Colombia: Historic Fraud Trial of Ex-President Uribe Begins
The oral and virtual trial against former Colombian President Ălvaro Uribe (2002-2010) has started at the 44th Criminal Court of BogotĂĄ, where the indictment hearing was held at the request of the Attorney General’s Office.
The hearing, which took place on Friday, May 17, is considered historic because never before has a former president in Colombia been brought to trial. The charges against the ex-president are procedural fraud and bribery of witnesses, to which another charge has been added: bribery.
The trial formally began with the reading of the indictment against the former president and former senator. The process is expected to conclude with a ruling.
A new charge against Uribe
According to the prosecutor in the case, Gilberto Villarreal, Uribe is now also charged with having committed bribery through lawyer Diego Cadena.
Villarreal said that lawyer Cadena, sent by Uribe, “contacted and interviewed” Hilda Niño FarfĂĄn “so that she would provide false testimony about the case of Uribe’s brother Santiago Uribe VĂ©lez, who is accused of having links with paramilitarism; in return for lying, she would be moved to another prison.
As for the other accusations, the Colombian Attorney General’s Office claims that around a dozen witnesses have testified that they received compensations in exchange for providing fasle testimonies denying Ălvaro Uribe’s links with paramilitaries, testimonies that favored the former president. Uribe denies these accusations.
At the hearing, Jaime Granados, Uribe’s lawyer, questioned the indictment presented by the prosecutor and requested, once again, the nullification of the entire process against his client, arguing violation of due process and the right to defense.
A historic trial
Before the trial began, Ălvaro Uribe issued a statement with 23 items of evidence claiming that he had been set up and offered his arguments pointing out the alleged inconsistencies in the legal process against him.
In the statement, Uribe claimed that he has never deceived the justice system and that those who remember his governments know that “he recognized mistakes, assumed responsibilities, and delivered successes.” “My public life knows no lies,” he added.
Palabras a la ciudadanĂa antes de empezar el juicio. pic.twitter.com/bc13uPXQjN
â Ălvaro Uribe VĂ©lez (@AlvaroUribeVel) May 17, 2024
This trial, which is generating a great deal of attention in Colombia, comes two months after Luz Adriana Camargo took office as attorney general following an uncharacteristic delay that was condemned by President Gustavo Petro as a strategy to prevent the opening of investigations linking former government officials to drug trafficking and violence.
Francisco Barbosa, the former attorney general, had requested, on two occasions, that the process against Uribe be halted, but the judiciary denied these requests. The former president gave up his senatorial investiture after learning that the Supreme Court ordered his house arrest, which was in effect for two months in 2020. Thus, when he left his senate seat, the process passed into the hands of the Attorney General’s Office, which was considered a judicial maneuver.
How the case began
This protracted legal battle began in 2012 when Uribe, then a senator, filed a lawsuit against his colleague IvĂĄn Cepeda Castro, who, in a parliamentary debate, presented testimonies of former paramilitaries collected in prison that linked the former president to the Central Bloc of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of CĂłrdoba and UrabĂĄ (ACCU), a paramilitary group demobilized during the Uribe administration.
In 2014, Uribe filed a complaint against Cepeda for seeking false witnesses to implicate him with paramilitarism. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cepeda and opened proceedings against Uribe.
The Supreme Court determined that in the investigations, which began after Uribe’s complaint against Cepeda, witnesses intervened, allegedly pressured by Uribe, to implicate Cepeda in the creation of an alleged cartel of false witnesses.
Other legal processes against Uribe that are yet to start
There are 56 accusations opened against the former president at the Commission of Accusations, and there are 28 more with the Supreme Court of Justice. None of these cases has passed to the indictment phase.
The most significant cases include:
- The murder of human rights activist JesĂșs MarĂa Valle in February 1998.
- Massacres of El Aro and La Granja (Ituango, Antioquia department), carried out by paramilitaries in 1996, when 22 people were killed.
- The case of the “hacker” AndrĂ©s SepĂșlveda, sentenced to 10 years for intercepting the peace talks in Havana. The detainee claimed that he had provided part of the recordings to Uribe.
Uribe has proclaimed his innocence in all of these cases.
Featured image: Former president of Colombia, Ălvaro Uribe. Photo: SebastiĂĄn Barrios/Getty Images.
(RT)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/SL
