Judge Releases Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A guarantees judge in Colombia ordered the release of Álvaro Uribe Vélez on Saturday, the country’s president between 2002 and 2010, as petitioned by the politician’s defense counsel. He is facing trial for witness manipulation and had been under house arrest for over two months on his farm in El Ubérrimo, in the north of the country, following a Supreme Court ruling. The ex-president will now be investigated while free, as both President Iván Duque and the ruling Democratic Center insistently demanded.

“Dr. Alvaro Uribe Vélez will be immediately released,” Judge Clara Ximena Salcedo decided at the end of a heated virtual hearing, although she made it clear that her decision did not concern the annulment of the Supreme Court’s proceedings. The representatives of the victims in the case, who argued for the validity and enforcement of the investigations so far, appealed the decision with the aim of having it revoked in a second instance. “Thank God,” the ex-president said almost immediately. US President Donald Trump also reacted on Twitter, congratulating Uribe and describing him as a “hero”.

Uribe’s house arrest was unprecedented in Colombia. The influential ex-president, founder of the Democratic Center, undisputed head of his legislative bench and Duque’s mentor, had also become the most voted senator in the country’s history in 2018, with over 800,000 votes. However, on August 18th, he resigned to escape the Supreme Court, which is in charge of judging those with privileged jurisdiction, such as legislators. In early September, the Court briefing session decided to forward the case to the Prosecutor General’s Office, in connection with alleged crimes of bribery and procedural fraud, considering that it no longer had jurisdiction. The ex-president, with an extensive history of clashes with the high courts, claimed that the Court breached procedural guarantees, while his detractors denounced delaying tactics by his defense attorneys.

Much of the confusing virtual hearing to decide Uribe’s release, which had begun last Thursday during an uninterrupted 12-hour session, focused on discussing technicalities on the implications of the change in the procedural framework due to the referral of the case to ordinary courts. Representatives of Senator Iván Cepeda, recognized as a victim in the case of witness tampering against the ex-president, had asked to proceed under the old law that governs court cases, while Uribe’s attorneys wanted to move on to the more recent criminal prosecution system, as in fact occurred.

Behind this intricate legal debate, with various interpretations, is one of the core aspects of the case. In addition to the release of the ex-president, the Court must establish the point from which to resume proceedings in the Supreme Court, where Uribe had already presented a prior defense and was formally bound to a criminal investigation. But his attorneys even argued that the Prosecutor’s Office should restart the investigations from scratch. The defense would have to lodge a formal request before another judge for the proceedings to be overturned. “There is no valid reason to overturn everything that was investigated. Uribe was investigated by the Colombian Criminal Justice Supreme Court,” Senator Cepeda said in a recent interview with EL PAÍS.

The witness manipulation case is the most advanced among the approximately ten investigations Uribe is facing in Colombian courts. This case dates back to 2012, when the ex-president lodged a complaint against Cepeda in the Supreme Court for an alleged plot that, according to his version, involved false witnesses in Colombian prisons with the aim of linking him to activities of paramilitary groups. But the Court acquitted Cepeda two years ago and ordered that Uribe be investigated under the suspicion that he and his attorneys were the ones who had manipulated witnesses against his political opponent.

The Court’s investigations had focused on determining whether people surrounding the ex-president had paid in cash and offered benefits to ex-paramilitaries to recant their statements. The original denunciation of one of the paramilitary, Juan Guillermo Monsalve, states that on a former Uribe family property, the Guacharacas farm, a self-defense group was formed in the 1990s, when the politician was governor of the department of Antioch.

Diego Cadena, one of the ex-president’s attorneys, has been under house arrest since August, while he is being investigated for the same crimes of bribery and procedural fraud in a parallel lawsuit to Uribe. Cadena is considered a key player in the investigations, accused of offering benefits to several inmates to testify in favor of the ex-president and against Cepeda. Uribe said he was unaware that Cadena had offered the benefits.

President Duque was personally committed to defending Uribe’s “honor”. He repeatedly stated from the outset that he should be tried in freedom, which various sectors interpreted as undue pressure and lack of respect for the separation of powers. “I believe and will always believe in the innocence and honesty of the one who, through his example, has earned a place in the history of Colombia,” declared Duque, from the presidential pulpit, hours after the Supreme Court announced the house arrest that the judge reverted on Saturday.

The Court also decided to refer three other lengthy cases to the Prosecutor’s Office last month, in which it was investigating the ex-president on a preliminary basis. These are related to the Ituango massacres (known as El Aro and La Granja), the San Roque massacre (in which, according to the Court, the perpetrators “apparently” used the Guacharacas farm as its operational base) and the murder of human rights activist Jesús María Valle. They all occurred while Uribe was the governor of Antioch, between 1995 and 1997, but crimes against humanity were declared, so that they will not be time-barred. The High Court argued that it lost jurisdiction to investigate them, since Uribe is no longer a senator.

Source: El País