Colombia's ex-president Álvaro Uribe sentenced to 12 years' house arrest for witness tampering
Uribe, aged 73, received the maximum possible sentence after being found guilty of witness tampering, a legal source told AFP.
The lengthy house arrest, which is due to be publicly announced on Friday, marks the first time in Colombia's history that a former president has been convicted of a crime and sentenced.
Uribe led Colombia from 2002 to 2010 and helmed a relentless military campaign against drug cartels and the Farc guerrilla army.
He remains popular in Colombia, despite being accused by critics of working with armed rightwing paramilitaries to destroy leftist rebel groups.
And he still wields considerable power over conservative politics in Colombia, playing kingmaker in the selection of new party leaders.
He was found guilty of asking rightwing paramilitaries to lie about their alleged links to him.
A judge on Monday found him guilty on two charges: interfering with witnesses and 'procedural fraud'.
Uribe insists he is innocent and is expected to appeal the ruling.
A law-and-order hardliner, Uribe was a close ally of the United States and retains ties to the American right.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, earlier decried Uribe's prosecution, claiming, without providing evidence, that it represented 'the weaponization of Colombia's judicial branch by radical judges'.
Recent opinion polls revealed Uribe to be the South American country's best loved politician.
In 2019, thousands protested in Medellín and the capital, Bogotá, when he was first indicted in the case.
On Monday, a smaller group of followers gathered outside the court wearing masks fashioned after his image and chanting: 'Uribe, innocent!'
The investigation against Uribe began in 2018 and has had numerous twists and turns, with several attorneys general seeking to close the case.
It gained new impetus under the current attorney general, Luz Camargo, picked by the current president, Gustavo Petro – himself a former guerrilla and a political arch-foe of Uribe.
More than 90 witnesses testified in the trial, which opened in May 2024.
During the trial, prosecutors produced evidence of at least one ex-paramilitary fighter who said he was contacted by Uribe to change his story.
The former president is also under investigation in other matters.
He has testified before prosecutors in a preliminary probe into a 1997 paramilitary massacre of farmers when he was governor of the western Antioquia department.
A complaint has also been filed against him in Argentina, where universal jurisdiction allows for the prosecution of crimes committed anywhere in the world.
That complaint stems from Uribe's alleged involvement in the more than 6,000 executions and forced disappearances of civilians by the Colombian military when he was president.
Uribe insists his trial is a product of 'political vengeance'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Photos from 'In Women's Words' exhibition that showcases modern Iranian women artists
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Trump dubbed himself the ‘father of IVF' on the campaign trail. But his pledge to mandate insurance cover has disappeared
Donald Trump's vow to expand in vitro fertilization (IVF) access to millions of Americans is on hold, with White House officials backing away from plans to require Obamacare health plans to include the service as an essential health benefit, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The Post reported that White House officials have privately moved away from the prospect of pushing for legislation to address the issue despite it being one of Trump's signature campaign promises, citing two persons with knowledge of internal discussions in Trumpworld. A senior administration official also acknowledged to the newspaper that changing Obamacare to force insurers to cover new services would require congressional action, not an executive order. The president has governed largely by executive fiat in his second term as he grapples with a closely-divded Congress and an unruly GOP majority in the House of Representatives. He's used those executive orders to dismantle whole parts of the federal government, including USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The president even tried to take an axe to the Department of Education, though that battle is still being waged in the courts. The Supreme Court recently cleared the way for Trump to cut roughly a quarter of the agency's staff. But many of Trump's campaign promises lie outside of his ability to influence via the hiring or firing of people and redirection of agency resources or agendas. In 2024, he laid out no direct path for his goal to expand IVF access, only telling voters that insurance companies would be forced to cover it. Still, he proclaimed himself the 'father of IVF' at at Fox News town hall, and promised during an NBC News interview: 'We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment. We're going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.' At the time, there was little to no acknowledgment of the fact that many if not most conservatives still oppose the Affordable Care Act and the same healthcare exchanges which Trump was now promising to utilize as he sought to use the power of the federal government to expand healthcare coverage. Now, with the passage of Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' without any provisions expanding IVF access, and with the prospect of further policy gains before the midterms growing dimmer, it's unclear when the White House would have another chance to press the issue in Congress. In February, the president signed an executive order directing his advisers to 'submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.' It's been crickets on the issue since then. In 2024, many of Trump's critics and the media pointed out that the policy would essentially amount to a reversal or at the very least coming in sharp contrast to the first Trump administration's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which ended in failure, and a contradiction of the conservative view that government should not exercise that level of control over Americans' health care decisions. The president's promise thrilled his party's natalists, embodied by Vice President JD Vance and an army of right-wing immigration hawks who fear the changing American demographics brought on as a result of falling birth rates and high levels of migration. It also wowed some of his Democratic and left-leaning critics, who see the policy as a means of furthering their goal of expanding access to healthcare for poorer Americans. For Vance, the issue of declining U.S. birth rates predates his MAGA heel-turn. In 2019, he told a gathering of conservatives in Washington: 'Our people aren't having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.' 'We want babies not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies because children are good. And we believe children are good, because we are not sociopaths,' the future vice president added at the time. Two years later, he'd tell a right-leaning podcast: 'I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.' During the 2024 campaign, those views emerged again as Vance attacked Democrats as 'childless cat ladies' and leaned heavily into attacking the left for supposedly being anti-family. Progressives fought back, pointing to efforts to expand the child tax credit and other benefits that aid young families under Joe Biden and other Democratic administrations, including the passage of Barack Obama's signature law: the Affordable Care Act.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Trump says pardoning ‘half innocent' Diddy would be ‘difficult' after past criticism
Donald Trump has said that he considers Sean 'Diddy' Combs 'half-innocent' but would find it 'difficult' to pardon due to his past criticisms of the US president. In an interview with Newsmax on Friday (1 August), the US president said that the two used to 'get along great' but things soured after Combs made 'hostile' comments about Mr Trump during his first presidency. Some media outlets have reported that Mr Trump has been weighing a pardon for Combs, but Mr Trump told host Rob Finnerty that he would find it "difficult" and the answer would 'more likely a no'. Combs was found guilty on two counts of transportation for prostitution purposes earlier this month but cleared of more serious offences. 'He was essentially, I guess, sort of half-innocent,' Trump remarked.
