The conviction of Colombia's ex-president is a sign of hope amid autocracy's rise
The attorney Jesus Maria Valle had been pleading with the state governor, Álvaro Uribe, for over a year to stop the paramilitaries' brutal takeover of the countryside and collusion with the military. Instead, Uribe labeled Valle an 'enemy of the armed forces'. In a statement to prosecutors after the El Aro massacre, Valle asked for a full investigation into what he described as an 'alliance' in Antioquia among paramilitaries, the military and Uribe to kill civilians and seize their land, in the name of fighting the country's leftwing FARC guerrillas. Within days, two men in suits strode into Valle's law office in downtown Medellin and shot him dead.
On 1 August, Uribe, who went on to become Colombia's president in 2002, was sentenced to 12 years of house arrest after a Colombian court convicted him of bribing a witness who had linked him to the paramilitaries. The conviction could still be overturned on appeal, but the fact that it has happened at all is a striking development that would have seemed almost inconceivable a decade or so ago. In a time of rising autocracy and abuse, including in the US, it also offers reasons for hope.
For decades, Uribe seemed almost untouchable. As president, he gained domestic and international acclaim – including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W Bush – because of his successes, with billions of dollars in US military aid, in beating back the abusive FARC. When I met him in 2004, he strode about his conference room, lecturing me and my then colleagues on how nobody had done more than he had to bring safety to the country.
Glowing portrayals of Uribe's record at the time routinely glossed over his efforts to pass laws favoring the paramilitaries and to undermine investigations of their links to those in power. During his presidency, the Colombian supreme court conducted what became known as the 'parapolitics' investigations into about one-third of members of Congress for collusion – including in many cases electoral fraud – with the paramilitaries. Uribe engaged in a furious smear campaign against the justices and his intelligence service engaged in illegal surveillance of the justices and independent journalists.
Yet over the years, senior paramilitary leaders have testified as to the involvement of the army and Uribe's chief of staff in Antioquia, Pedro Juan Moreno, in the El Aro massacre. Multiple investigations have documented widespread collusion between paramilitaries and important sectors of the military and political establishment at the time. There is also evidence – including statements that I obtained in a prison interview with a paramilitary leader – that Uribe's office, when he was governor, had close ties to paramilitaries, and that Moreno approved Valle's murder. Uribe has repeatedly denied it all.
The conviction this week emerged in the context of a supreme court investigation into allegations that Uribe started a paramilitary group in the 1990s. Uribe claimed early on that the allegations were manufactured by a member of Congress, but the court found there was no basis to his claims. Instead, the supreme court ordered a new investigation into possible witness tampering by people working for Uribe (then a senator), including alleged payments to paramilitaries to change their testimony. Uribe quit his Senate seat, forcing the case to be moved from the supreme court to a lower court, and – with prosecutors seemingly unwilling to move it forward – it looked for years like the case might just die out like many other previous investigations. However, with a new chief prosecutor in place, the case picked up steam again, finally resulting in this week's conviction.
Not surprisingly, the administration of US President Donald Trump has been trying to discredit Colombia's courts, with Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, decrying the 'weaponization of Colombia's judicial branch'. But this is all now part of a tired playbook.
It's the same rhetoric Trump and allies have been using to discredit US courts – even Trump appointees – that have ruled against them. It's how Trump has talked about the case against his buddy Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and about the investigations conducted by the international criminal court. And it's how Uribe himself smeared activists like Jesus Maria Valle in the 1990s and sought to undermine the Colombian supreme court in the early 2000s.
But, to me, this week's ruling stands for something else: that no matter how much power leaders may amass, they are not ultimately above the law. And no matter how desperate the situation, with courage and commitment, there is much we can do to create a path toward accountability.
Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is CEO of RepresentUs and the author of the award-winning book There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia. She spearheaded Human Rights Watch's work on Colombia during most of Uribe's presidency
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The massacre of sleeping settlers that unleashed a savage war in central Queensland
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Horatio, who had developed positive relationships with the Djab Wurrung people in Victoria, arrived in central Queensland as long-simmering tensions between the local Aboriginal people and the colonists were about to boil over. Queensland had been established as a self-governing colony just two years earlier. The frontier was moving north, assisted by the notorious native police – contingents of Aboriginal troopers led by white officers tasked with protecting the livelihoods of settlers and punishing Aboriginal resistance. The native police had carried out a 'string of massacres' and 'terrorised' peaceful camps of Aboriginal people in the region in the years before 1861. About the same time there were reports of two Aboriginal boys being kidnapped from the area by white men. 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Sign up: AU Breaking News email Tom survived. He had been sent to collect supplies from a nearby town days earlier. So did two shepherds, one of whom rode to alert the nearest neighbour – Gregson – of the massacre. Gregson quickly assembled a group of settlers to bury the bodies. A dispatch from Queensland's first governor, George Ferguson Bowen, would later describe how 'an uncontrolled desire for revenge took possession of each heart'. The group set out to track the killers. They found them within days. As dawn approached, they surrounded the sleeping tribe. Official records show at least 30 Gayiri people were killed that day. Then the native police arrived. 'So this is where the native police caught up?' McPherson asks. He and Black are standing on a quiet road off the highway, looking across a paddock to a small mountain with a sheer cliff face at its peak. 'There were vigilantes and troopers, [they] chased them all the way through this range,' Black says. 'They shot them off the end of the hills here. They were in view of their range – that's what gets me every time. They were nearly home.' An article published in the Sydney Morning Herald two months later said the native police had shot 60 or 70 people, only stopping when they ran out of ammunition. 'One of the blacks who was shot, cried out, 'Me no kill white fellow!' showing plainly they well comprehended the proceeding,' it reads. Other letters boasted that 300 Aboriginal people had been killed. The exact number of casualties will never be known. In contrast to the Wills massacre, the details of the Gayiri's slaughter are scarce. The commanding officer of the native police wrote only: 'Their loss was heavy; and I consider that many were killed from falling over the cliffs.' Guardian Australia and the University of Newcastle's massacre map shows there were at least six mass killings of Aboriginal people in the months that followed. 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'Like dead cows or horses – open them up, pull out the insides and actually hide inside so you couldn't get found.' Ross has spent much of his life trying to find out who he is and where his people came from. His mother grew up on a mission at Woorabinda, away from her country, where she was discouraged from speaking her native language or acknowledging her culture. Her own mother had died young and she didn't know who her people were. Ross was raised between Melbourne and Katherine in the Northern Territory. After decades of research, he obtained documents from the Queensland State Archives confirming his ties to the Gayiri people. In 2008 he went to his country for the first time, spending an unsettling two days in Springsure. 'I'm a spiritual person,' he says. 'I couldn't sleep. I was having nightmares.' Aside from his great-uncle, Ross has been unable to track down many other kin. 'The legacy is just a tribe that's wiped out and forgotten about,' he says. 'It affects me directly because now my family is tiny. People are responsible for decimating a tribe – a tribe of beautiful people – and there's no repercussions.' The memorial site for the Wills massacre is a popular, if grim, tourist attraction. A mowed pathway leads to three graves: one for Horatio; another for the brother of Tom's former teammate, farmhand George Elliott, and a fellow worker, Thomas; and a mass grave for the rest of the workers and their children. Horatio's headstone says the group was 'barbarously murdered by the blacks'. The bones of the Gayiri killed in retribution were left where they fell. There is no memorial for them. The body of one of the dead men, shot while hiding in a tree, was displayed in the Australian and South Sea Islander Museum in Melbourne. From the early 1900s most of the Aboriginal people who remained in the region were taken to missions or reserves under new laws, ostensibly designed to 'protect' Indigenous people – but which placed strict controls over every aspect of their lives and kept them working in conditions tantamount to slavery. Cullin-la-ringo was taken over by Tom's younger brothers, Cedric and Horace, who came to blame Gregson for their father's death. The property was eventually sold but Cedric's great-grandson, also called Tom Wills, still owns a cattle station adjoining it. The younger Tom, now in his late 60s, inherited tomes of family letters, journals and memorabilia, which are carefully catalogued and stored in a shed. His grandparents didn't speak of massacres – 'they didn't talk about anything like that' – but his father had a keen interest in the family history that he passed on to his son. Tom says the family went on to build good relationships with Aboriginal people, despite what happened at Cullin-la-ringo, later employing them to work on the station. 'They talk about reconciliation – I think reconciliation started in the 1860s,' he says. Gregson – who helped slaughter dozens of Aboriginal people in the region – went on to become the longest-serving superintendent of the Australian Agricultural Company, better known today as AACo, a publicly listed $830-million company that controls the country's largest cattle herd. Tom Wills the elder, unsuited to farming life, returned to Melbourne. He went on to coach the first Aboriginal cricket team. Alcoholism ended his sporting career and, ultimately, his life. He killed himself in a state of delirium in 1880, aged 44. He was buried in an unmarked grave and disowned by his family. But the sportsman's image has undergone a transformation since the release of his biography and a fictionalised account of his life in Martin Flanagan's 1998 novel, The Call. He is now celebrated as an early pioneer for reconciliation and listed in the Australian Sporting Hall of Fame. There is a statue of him outside the MCG. There has been much debate over whether he was involved in killing Gayiri people after his father's death. A researcher sparked a furore in 2021 when he told the ABC he'd found a US newspaper article from 1895 in which an author, known only as 'G', claimed to give an account of Tom's involvement in a massacre. The Chicago Tribune article, which contained several inaccuracies, quoted him as saying: 'I cannot tell all that happened, but know we killed all in sight:' Several contemporaneous letters appear to support the theory, or at least show Tom's animosity towards Aboriginal people in the region after the massacre. Four days after returning to its scene, he asks his cousin to send him workers who 'will shoot every black they see'. A month later his mother writes to her children that 'Tom and the settlers around have well revenged [Horatio's] death'. But the younger Tom Wills, and Terry Wills Cooke, another family historian based in Victoria, are adamant that he did not take part in any killings, claiming that family records show Tom was elsewhere – at least during the first retaliation raid. Guardian Australia understands that the AFL, Cricket Australia and the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) commissioned a report by the Indigenous historians John Maynard and Barry Judd. The report, never released but seen by this masthead, was unable to find conclusive evidence to confirm or deny Tom's involvement in the direct massacre of Aboriginal people – but says 'where there is smoke, there is generally fire'. Its authors recommended that the three sporting bodies 'lend support' for a 'truth-telling process to be undertaken nationally'. Guardian Australia approached the AFL, Cricket Australia and the MCC for comment, but did not receive a response before publication. Yamba Konrad Ross accuses the organisations of 'trying to shovel the dirt under the carpet and just cover it up with their nice fancy rug'. To move forward, he wants to see further investigation and recognition of the Gayiri people alongside the tributes to Wills. The younger Tom Wills reckons the characterisation of his ancestor as a trailblazer for reconciliation is an accurate one. Wills Cooke says he was a 'very flawed character' and the broader context should be considered when evaluating words and actions from that time. 'We tend to judge what happened then as if it was today, but it wasn't,' he says. John McPherson, descended from Horatio's sister, is perhaps the only member of the family to believe that Tom Wills probably did kill Aboriginal people. He inadvertently stumbled on to the horror of Cullin-la-ringo while writing a thesis about the origins of AFL. His subsequent deep dive into Queensland's violent past caused him to face significant mental challenges. 'I just read so much material, way more than just the Cullin-la-ringo stuff, about people boasting about their killings,' he says. 'Like this is in the 1890s in Brisbane, people are around having high tea and it's like, 'Yes, let's go out on an Aboriginal hunt this weekend.' I was just horrified.' But the experience – and his interactions with Black in Springsure – have strengthened his resolve that these truths should be exposed. 'We need to acknowledge our history, because this isn't all that far in the past and generational trauma is a very real thing,' he says. Black continues to tell anyone who will listen about the people who were largely eradicated from the land. 'I see some of these people, when I'm trying to get them to come along, I see the ones who are a bit standoffish and don't really want to do it,' he says. 'But then, I love it when these types of people come along, because if you can make change with them, then you know you're doing all right.' Indigenous Australians can call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for information and crisis support; or call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 Lorena Allam is a professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous research at the University of Technology Sydney
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an hour ago
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