Colombia: Jurisdictional Squabbles Highlight Trial of ex-President Uribe

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The charges against Colombian ex-president and ex-senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez may soon be brought before the nation’s Prosecutor General (Procuraduría) and not, as is currently the case, by the Supreme Court.

The constitutional body announced so itself and called on the Highest Court to forward the case. Concurrently, recently declassified documents that had previously been secret have raised questions about US authorities’ knowledge of Uribe‘s relations with paramilitaries and drug cartels.

A day after Uribe stepped down from the Senate, his defense counsel stated that with Uribe’s departure, the Supreme Court had lost jurisdiction over the case.

Since the Supreme Court only deals with charges that are directly related to his role as a legislator, the defense’s argument was upheld. “There is no evidence that Dr. Uribe Vélez – at the time of the crimes he was accused of – abused his office or that he effectively gained access to a position of power,” the Chief Inspector’s Office said in its statement.

The accusations relate to a period outside political or election campaigns, so that a connection between these events and the goal of obtaining a seat in the Senate cannot be established.

Uribe’s case, for which he has been under house arrest since August 12th, stems from a charge brought against him by Colombian human rights attorney and politician Iván Cepeda for alleged support of paramilitary groups. Uribe’s defense was based on the fact that Cepeda had provided false testimony.

However, as early as 2018, the Supreme Court found that there was no evidence of such action by Cepeda, but rather there were indications that Uribe had tried to manipulate witnesses.

The allegations against the human rights attorney that he had made contact with detained para-militaries to have them testify against Uribe were never substantiated. Cepeda has since been exonerated. The Inspector General’s office opened disciplinary proceedings against Cepeda, who is a congressman for the Democratic Pole, for allegedly buying witnesses.

The recently declassified documents could ultimately compromise Uribe’s defense strategy. The National Security Archive, a non-profit research and archiving facility at George Washington University in the US capital, has provided documents to the Associated Press (AP) which show that concerns about Uribe’s connections to para-militaries hired by large landowners to protect them from the guerrillas may have reached the highest echelons of the Pentagon.

“Uribe almost certainly had dealings with the para-militaries when he was governor of Antioquia,” Peter Rodman, then a senior Pentagon official, wrote to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a confidential 2004 dispatch.

Further indications that the Colombian military, Uribe’s important allies – and possibly the president himself – were forming alliances with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the paramilitary umbrella organization, are reportedly found in dispatches by US agencies, according to a first assessment.