Did Colombian ex-President Álvaro Uribe Cooperate with Cartel Chief “El Chapo”?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – US and British media have reported evidence of the involvement of the current senator and former President of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), in the export of cocaine for the head of the Sinaloa cartel between 2006 and 2008.

Uribe is said to have received US$1 million (R$4 million) and an emerald so that the head of the Mexican cartel known as “El Chapo”, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, could move ten tons of cocaine from Bogotá International Airport to Mexico. The information is based on an investigation by Richard Maok, a former agent of the Colombian Investigation Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office (CTI), who is currently exiled in Canada.

The owner of Colombian carrier Air Cargo Lines, Raúl Jiménez, had personally closed the deal with Uribe. He is said to have been given the go-ahead by the President for the construction of a special cold storage facility at Bogotá airport. The ten tons of cocaine belonging to “El Chapo” and his partner Ismael Zambada, also known as “El Mayo Zambada”, are said to have been stored there.

In addition, Jiménez had bought Uribe’s approval for the landing of a DC-8 cargo aircraft because the aircraft failed to comply with Colombian security regulations. The Sinaloa cartel used the DC-8 to carry the cocaine to Mexico. The ten tons had been divided into six shipments.

These details were obtained from an ex-policeman and ex-head of security of Air Cargo Lines. The exiled Maok interviewed him in a 45-minute audio and broadcast it on his YouTube channel a few weeks ago. Maok’s informant himself had been involved in cocaine shipments until 2009.

However, he was later forced to flee from paramilitaries abroad because he no longer wanted to be involved in the drug business. While still involved in the supply network, he carried US$1 million from Bogotá to Medellín and handed it over to two of Uribe’s envoys.

The former Air Cargo Lines head of security had also handed over a bag with 5.7 caliber guns to the “Mono Vide” paramilitary in Bogotá. He was told that the guns were a gift from Uribe. The guns were part of a larger shipment of weapons and US dollars that had been flown in from Mexico.

Two senior civil aviation officials and the head of the airport’s drug control authority, police major Luis León, were also involved in cocaine exports. León had received US$300,000 and two plane tickets to Panama for his cooperation. Other parties involved were two Colombian drug dealers and two pastors of a Protestant sect, who had mediated the contact between Jiménez and Uribe. Emir Abreu, an agent of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), had also been aware of the cocaine shipment from Colombia, but had taken no action. The informant witnessed meetings between Jiménez and Abreu.

This is not the first time Uribe has been implicated in contacts with the Sinaloa cartel. His brother Jaime, who died in 2001, had had two children with Dolly Cifuentes, a woman of the Cifuentes drug clan. Uribe’s sister-in-law and niece were extradited to the USA in 2001 for drug trafficking. The ex-president at the time claimed that he knew nothing of the relationship between his brother and Cifuentes and only knew Jaime’s first wife and their two children.

Uribe has denied all of Maok’s claims about the new scandal. He was merely a fugitive from justice who, with the help of Uribe’s opponents, had fled to Canada, where he enjoyed total impunity. In 2002, Maok had denounced connections between the prosecutor’s office and the paramilitaries. After the then chief prosecutor had denounced him for abuse of confidential internal information, he went into exile.