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- BBC News World
28 April 2022, 05:04 GMT
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The 69-year-old former president and political mentor of the current president, Iván Duque, is accused of procedural fraud and bribery.
In a hearing that lasted more than 12 hours, which was broadcast live, Judge Carmen Helena Ortiz denied the request to file the case against former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.
The request had been submitted by the Attorney General’s Office in March 2021, appealing to the absence of a crime in the conduct of which the former president is accused.
“It is clear to the office that there is a possible hypothesis about the materiality of the crime of bribery in criminal proceedings,” Judge 28 of Knowledge of Bogotá said during the hearing.
And added that “The office rejects the request for preclusion of investigation for the crimes of bribery in criminal proceedings and procedural fraud”.
That decision may be appealed by Uribe’s defense before the Superior Court of Bogotá, which would make the final decision.
This in the midst of a process that has been going on for years and just before the next presidential elections in which the right, to which Uribe belongs, is risking his permanence in power.
A controversial and surprising process
The process against Álvaro Uribe has been surprising, not only because he is the most popular former president in recent Colombian history (senator and president for two terms between 2002 and 2010), but he could be a judge, and not a high court. , who determines whether Uribe is innocent or guilty, despite the fact that the same Prosecutor’s Office hoped not to reach that instance.
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The case, which began in the Supreme Court of Justice, went to the Prosecutor’s Office in 2020 when Uribe, after being detained in house arrest, resigned his seat as a senator, lost his status as a judge and regained his freedom.
That move was interpreted by Uribe’s detractors as a maneuver so that his case would be transferred to an entity in which his party, currently in power, could influence.
The former president, for his part, has said that he faces a political persecution and that he resigned because he did not have guarantees in the Court.
What is Uribe accused of?
It all started in September 2014, when, during a debate in Congress, Senator Ivan Cepedaof the left-wing Alternative Democratic Pole party, accused Uribe of having links with paramilitary groups and drug traffickers.
To support his accusations, he presented several testimonies from former paramilitaries.
Specifically, he accused Uribe of having founded, together with his brother Santiago, the Metro Bloc, a branch of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the armed group that bloodily confronted the guerrillas for decades and left thousands of civilians dead.
image source, Getty Images
In 2014, Senator Iván Cepeda accused Uribe of having ties to paramilitary groups and drug traffickers.
In response to the debate in the Senate, the former president sued Cepeda before the Supreme Court of Justice, whom he accused of searching Colombian prisons for former paramilitaries with the aim of having them serve as false witnesses against him.
The Supreme Court investigated the case for several years, in which both Uribe and Cepeda testified, as well as all the witnesses involved.
In 2018, the Court dismissed the accusations against Cepeda and, surprisingly, opened a formal investigation against Uribe for witness tamperingwhich entailed the crimes of bribery and procedural fraud.
The case has 42 witnesses, many of them former paramilitaries who are in prison. One of the main ones is Juan Guillermo Monsalvea former member of the AUC Metro Bloc, who is serving a 40-year sentence in a Bogotá prison.
Monsalve was one of the witnesses used by Senator Cepeda to support his accusations against Uribe.
He testified that massacres were planned on a farm owned by the family of the former president in Antioquia, which were later carried out by these groups outside the law.
However, Monsalve later wrote a letter retracting these claims, although he later said that his change of position was adopted “under pressure.”
And here comes another of the key characters in the case: diego chain, one of Uribe’s lawyers. Both Monsalve and other witnesses assure that Cadena pressured them or paid them to modify his testimonies.
In fact, Monsalve claims to have a recording of the moment in which Uribe’s lawyer pressured him.
Several witnesses have claimed to have received money from Cadena. The lawyer has acknowledged having given small financial aid to some of the prisoners as “humanitarian aid”.
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