Álvaro Uribe suffered a severe setback. After five months of analyzing his case, the Superior Court of Bogotá decided to reject the Prosecutor’s Office’s request to archive him due to lack of evidence to determine his guilt and he will have to go to trial.
It will be the first time, therefore, that a former president sits in the dock. Not even Ernesto Samper, who arrived at the Nariño Palace thanks to money from the Cali cartel, should have confronted justice. Now the leader of the Democratic Center will do so for alleged witness tampering and procedural fraud.
The ruling unleashed a political storm between those who defend Uribe and his detractors. “Álvaro Uribe has fought for our country all his life. It is regrettable that a preclusion requested by the Prosecutor’s Office has not proceeded, after an exhaustive investigation process where his innocence has stood out,” former President Iván wrote on his X account. Duke.
“Alvaro Uribe has finally been called to trial! Unfortunately, the same Prosecutor’s Office that already tried to close the process against him will be the one that will have to present the accusation against him. That is why the right wants to keep a puppet prosecutor,” he noted on social networks. the congressman of the Historical Pact, Alfredo Mondragón, a few words that summarize the feelings of the critics of who was a popular Head of State, between 2002 and 2008, who won his two elections, in the first round, by an absolute majority.
But the process in question dates back several years, when Uribe was no longer president and sued senators Iván Cepeda and Piedad Córdoba for seeking testimonies against him among imprisoned former paramilitaries, in exchange for getting them benefits. To general surprise, everything took a turn when Uribe went from plaintiff to accused by the aforementioned senator of bribing inmates to testify in his favor. He would have done it through one of his lawyers, Diego Cadena, something that the former president and his defender have always denied.
The decision, which is known just three weeks before the local elections, was predictable, although the former president hoped to emerge victorious. He had been touring the country for weeks to promote his party’s candidates and now his position will be weakened. And everything surrounding Uribe’s case against Cepeda has an obvious political background and could later end up in the Supreme Court of Justice, the body that the former president wanted to avoid.
It is worth remembering that Uribe resigned from the Senate to lose the jurisdiction that covers every legislator in order for his file to be passed to the Attorney General’s Office, convinced that he would receive more neutral treatment and could prove his innocence.
“There are political considerations in the process, which began in a hidden way in 2018. Since then, there has been all kinds of political and media activity, violating Uribe’s procedural guarantees,” the Democratic Center congressman and lawyer tells El Mundo. , Hernán Cadavid. “After the action of the Supreme Court of Justice, which issued a 1,500-page order depriving Álvaro Uribe of his freedom in 2020, there are a large number of evidentiary gaps such as not being able to question the star witness, Juan Guillermo Monsalve, or tapping into the former president’s phone for more than a month, without any evidence being found. When the process reaches the Attorney General’s Office, it investigates more rigorously and listens to the people that the Court had not heard. “And he concludes that there are no elements to accuse Uribe.”
From now on, a complex stage begins for the president, very active in the electoral campaign.
