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(CNN Spanish) - To speak of the former president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez (Medellín, 1952) it is necessary to do it with caution, trying not to fall into the division that his name causes. The politician who was once declared as 'The great Colombian' arouses both love and hate in the politics of his country.
Uribe Velez was president of Colombia between 2002-2006 and 2006-2010. He went from being director of the Civil Aeronautics, mayor of Medellin, governor of Antioquia and then president of a country mired in the toughest violence by armed groups and in the despair that a failed peace process had left: that of the president Andrés Pastrana whom the FARC left planted in an appointment in San Vicente del Caguan in an image that passed into Colombian history as 'the empty chair'.
"Former President Uribe arrived at a time when the country was going through a complex situation and he changed things," Colombian analyst Ariel Ávila, an armed conflict expert and deputy director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, PARES, told CNN in Spanish. .
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BOGOTA, COLOMBIA: The newly elected president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez with his vice president Francisco Santos greet his followers in 2002 in Bogotá. (Credit: LUIS ACOSTA / AFP / Getty Images)
A report from the 2001 Week Magazine - a year before Uribe came to power - said that “Colombia had never been as close to the abyss as it feels today” and attributed to the Government of then President Pastrana (1998-2002) a "Lack of leadership, with rampant insecurity, with the kidnapping triggered and with the escalation of the war coming to the cities".
"Colombians want a man with pants," Semana said. "And Uribe Vélez, who looks like shorts and looks like an imberbe teenager, has the image of having them very well put on."
During his presidency, Uribe led a strong military offensive against the FARC that changed the course of the conflict. Its policy of “hard hand” and democratic security meant that in its eight years of government they went from 1,645 in 2002 to 709 actions in 2005, and even the numbers of kidnappings fell considerably.
“For a large group of people, what he did (Uribe) was necessary,” says Ávila, the PARES analyst. "For another group of people, basically what he did is a crime."
The accusations against Uribe
False positives
Ávila refers, among others, to the so-called “false positives”, which occurred between 2002 and 2008. It is the name given to extrajudicial killings of civilians who were later falsely qualified as killed in combat.
According to Human Rights Watch, the "false positives" began to be perpetrated extensively and systematically in 2002 with the aim of fraudulently increasing the number of casualties in combat. According to this NGO, in three years at least 2,500 civilian victims were victims of this practice. But an investigation cited by the National Center for Historical Memory entitled "Extrajudicial executions in Colombia 2002-2010: blind obedience in fictitious battlefields," about 10,000 cases of false positives would have been filed across the country.
Regarding these accusations, Uribe has denied that he had ordered murders and said that during his administration he faced and sanctioned "all human rights violations."
The former president said that "hiding" on the issue of human rights, "some spokesmen for terrorism" said that "terrorists were not discharged but that peasants were murdered."
“I ordered that when there was a casualty, that body could not be moved by the Armed Forces but by the representatives of the Attorney General's Office of the CTI. This was done. Some even went on to state that it was the repeal of the military criminal jurisdiction due to excesses of the Prosecutor's Office, which made an accusation to the soldiers and police of each corpse, ”he wrote in a letter in his Twitter account in 2017.
"Likewise, in 2008, complaints about false positives were immediately known, I withdrew 27 senior military from the Armed Forces," the former president added.
Uribe has defended the military forces and said that the false positives have served to "cover up false and unjust accusations against some members of the Armed Forces."
“In many cases, he obeyed drug trafficking actions, which unfortunately, with isolated participation of members of the Armed Forces, sought impunity and presented the appearance that the murder of innocent citizens occurred to combat drug trafficking, which was not true "
In these cases, more than 800 members of the army, mostly from lower ranks, have been convicted of extrajudicial executions between 2002 and 2008, while some 16 active and retired army generals are being investigated for these crimes, but none have been formally charged.
Illegal interceptions and the Aro massacre
Ávila also refers to a series of scandals that have obscured for years the figure of today Senator Uribe Vélez. Among them are the illegal interceptions of journalists and magistrates during his administration, which Uribe said he did not participate or order and for this reason two close associates of his were convicted.
In the case about his alleged responsibility in the massacres of El Aro and La Granja, and the murder of the social leader Jesús María Valle, the former president was accused of facilitating “the work of the paramilitaries,” a case in which Uribe says that “ there is nothing credible ”that compromises it. In this case, the Superior Court of Medellín forced copies to investigate Uribe as governor and in 2015 the Prosecutor's Office ordered the investigation of the former president “because when he was governor of Antioquia he would have facilitated the work of the paramilitaries” who perpetrated it.
In May 2018, the Supreme Court of Justice declared the crimes associated with these two massacres against humanity, plus another known as that of San Roque and the murder of Valle. This decision implies that the punishable facts do not prescribe, that is to say that they have no expiration of time to be investigated and judged.
Uribe does not face criminal charges for these facts, only a prior inquiry on the part of the Supreme Court of Justice.
Uribe, who founded the Democratic Center party in 2013, has denied all accusations against him and defended his innocence on several occasions. A few months ago, he asked his followers to "defend" him if they accused him of making any "mistake."
I come to humbly ask you to defend me and when you say 'is that Uribe made such a mistake', say: forgive him that man wants the country pic.twitter.com/lWxAXANf8e
- Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) September 1, 2017
Your collaborators in prison
In addition, several of his close government collaborators have been imprisoned. The former director of the missing Administrative Department of Security, DAS, María del Pilar Hurtado, and the former private secretary of Uribe, Bernardo Moreno, were convicted in 2015 by the Supreme Court of Justice for illegal interception of communications, abuse of authority, concert to commit crimes and peculated, in the case of the 'Chuza-DAS'.
Former Interior Ministers, Sabas Pretelt, and Health Minister Diego Palacio, were sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison in 2015 for the crime of bribery. The former ministers were convicted of offering two congressmen bureaucratic positions in exchange for voting in favor of modifying the constitution in 2004 to allow the re-election of Álvaro Uribe. The scandal is known as the "Yidispolitics", in the name of Yidis Medina, one of the congresswoman to whom the gifts were offered. Medina was sentenced to three and a half years in prison by the Supreme Court of Justice for the crime of bribery.
The constitutional amendment allowed him to run for Uribe again to the president for his second presidential term. In those elections Uribe was re-elected for four more years.
In addition to his former Minister of Agriculture, Andrés Felipe Arias, weighs a sentence of 17 and a half years in prison for diverting money from an agricultural assistance program for farmers to rich families in the country, known as Agro Ingreso Seguro.
“It is with the excuse of fighting the FARC, a group of people say we can travel, the FARC did not take power, etc. and another group of people say that it cost (thousands) executions, corruption scandals like Yidispolitics, the purchase of reelection, corruption scandal like Agro Ingreso Seguro, ”says Ávila.
Detractors of former President Álvaro Uribe demonstrate against him before the appearance of the senator before the Supreme Court of Justice. Bogota, October 2019. (Credit: RAUL ARBOLEDA / AFP via Getty Images)
A divided country
In Bogotá, this week a group of supporters and detractors from Uribe met on the outskirts of the Supreme Court where Uribe came to testify in the case of alleged manipulation of witnesses. In this case, the former president went from whistleblower to whistleblower, because in principle he judicially denounced Senator Iván Cepeda, of the opposition Democratic Pole, assuring that he offered legal benefits to several prisoner exparamilitaries to link him with those armed groups of the extreme right.
Afterwards, the Court not only did not find sufficient elements to exonerate Cepeda, but also decided to investigate Uribe by finding those he considers new evidence and testimonies that would involve the former president in the same practices he accused of Cepeda.
"I never thought that the defense of honor, in my love for Colombia, from the front and with respect to the citizens, would create these judicial difficulties for me," Uribe said before his court appearance.
The day before the investigation. With patriotic spirit I face these judicial difficulties. pic.twitter.com/qrxvy84PHL
- Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) October 7, 2019
On September 4, he told CNN that: “There are many witnesses who have said they manipulated them against me. That they went to offer them benefits and that is what is now in process. The court is calling them all. Now he is doing what the court should have done before calling me into inquiry. ”
Senator Iván Cepeda has preferred not to comment further and asked to respect the independence of the magistrates.
Then, upon arriving at the Court on Tuesday, some - who call him "eternal president" - shouted his name and defended his innocence, others called him "murderer."
This was the moment when Uribe arrived at the Supreme Court
Between shouts of "Uribe, Uribe!" and "Murderer, murderer!" the former president of Colombia came to investigate 🎥 @RamosCNN https://t.co/clXOGfjpkD pic.twitter.com/6pOgoyj0PW
- CNN in Spanish (@CNNEE) October 8, 2019
"The admiration for Uribe is visceral," analyst Jorge Andrés Hernández, coordinator of the Democracy Observatory in PARES, told CNN in Spanish. "He always manages to create the image of persecuted by justice, by some pillos, of persecuted by the traitor."
Hernández says that Uribe has managed to channel his political discourse into an "existential dilemma" creating an apocalyptic atmosphere in which he constitutes salvation.
This is the uribista senator Paloma Valencia, one of the strongest defenders of the political leader.
"President Uribe was the man who gave hope to many Colombians," Valencia said Tuesday in the program Question Yamid about the hearing before the Supreme Court of Justice. "For many Colombians, President Uribe is synonymous with trust in institutions."
However, despite the fact that Uribe is recognized by his hard hand against the FARC, his critics also criticize him because during his two governments they escalated events such as displacement and forced disappearances, according to the Unique Registry of Victims.
"Uribe is one of those people who has two faces, and the most dramatic thing is that both parties are right," Avila added. “That Uribe changed the country? Of course he changed it, but at a very high cost. ”
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Its popularity fades
Upon his arrival in power, Uribe consolidated himself as the president with the highest approval rates in recent history, even reaching 86 points with the Jaque operation in 2008, according to the pollster Gallup, something historical that no president in the last twenty years achieved.
But soon, with the end of his first term, Uribe's exacerbated popularity would begin to fall. One of the breaking points was the peace process with the FARC signed by his successor Juan Manuel Santos in 2016. Although the peace agreement had overwhelming international support, the former president led the campaign against him arguing that the agreement gave impunity to the FARC fighters.
At that time, the unfavorability of Uribe began to fall, leading him to have a negative image of 61%, compared to only 34% of favorable opinion, according to the Gallup survey of August 2019.
"The former president has been affected [by] all the scandals that might have occurred in his government and that has begun to emerge," says Avila, who adds that due to the large number of scandals that have come to light there has been a " disenchantment ”towards him.
“Two years ago it was impossible to see Uribe in this situation,” says Ávila about the proceedings against Uribe.
"But the country has been losing fear," he says.
Álvaro Uribe Vélez