(CNN Spanish) - To speak about 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 hatred in the politics of his country.
Uribe Velez was President of Colombia between 2002-2006 and 2006-2010. He went from being director of Civil Aeronautics to mayor of Medellín, governor of Antioquia and then president of a country mired in the harshest violence by armed groups and the despair that a failed peace process had left: that of the president Andrés Pastrana whom the FARC left standing on a date in San Vicente del Caguán in an image that went down in 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, expert in the armed conflict and deputy director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, PARES, told CNN in Spanish .
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA: The newly elected President of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez with his Vice President Francisco Santos greet their followers in 2002 in Bogotá. (Credit: LUIS ACOSTA / AFP / Getty Images)
A report from the magazine Semana de 2001 - 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 the then President Pastrana (1998-2002) a "Lack of leadership, with rampant insecurity, with the kidnapping triggered and with the escalation of the war reaching the cities."
"Colombians want a man in pants," said Semana. "And Uribe Vélez, who looks like shorts and the face of a beardless 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. His "strong hand" policy and democratic security made terrorist actions in his government go from 1,645 in 2002 to 709 in 2005; even the kidnapping figures dropped considerably.
"For a large group of people what (Uribe) did was necessary to do," says Ávila, the PARES analyst. "For another group of people, basically what he did is a crime."
The accusations against Uribe
Manipulation of witnesses
The Examining Chamber of the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice decided to impose house arrest against the former president and current senator Álvaro Uribe for the alleged crimes of bribery and procedural fraud, as confirmed by a source from the highest court to CNN. It is for a case that continues against the exmandatario for alleged witness tampering. Uribe has always denied the charges.
"The deprivation of my freedom causes me deep sadness for my lady, for my family and for the Colombians who still believe that I have done something good for the country," Uribe wrote on his Twitter account.
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False positives
Ávila refers, among others, to the so-called "false positives" that occurred between 2002 and 2008. It is the name given to the extrajudicial killings of civilians that were later falsely classified as killed in combat.
According to Human Rights Watch, "false positives" began to be perpetrated extensively and systematically in 2002 with the aim of fraudulently increasing the number of combat casualties. According to this NGO, in three years at least 2,500 civilian victims of this practice were registered. But an investigation cited by the National Historical Memory Center entitled "Extrajudicial executions in Colombia 2002-2010: blind obedience in fictitious battlefields", around the country, some 10,000 cases of false positives were reported.
Regarding these accusations, Uribe has denied that he had ordered murders and assured that during his government he faced and sanctioned "any violation of human rights".
The former president said that "hiding" on the subject of human rights, "some spokesmen for terrorism" said that "terrorists were not killed, but peasants were murdered."
«I ordered that when there were any casualties, that corpse could not be moved by the Armed Forces but by the representatives of the CTI's Attorney General's Office. So it was done. Some even went so far as to claim that it was the derogation from the military criminal jurisdiction due to excesses of the Prosecutor's Office, which made an accusation against the soldiers and police officers of each corpse removal, `` he wrote in a letter to his Twitter account in 2017.
"Likewise, in 2008, the complaints about false positives were immediately known, I withdrew 27 senior military personnel from the Armed Forces," added the former president.
Uribe has defended the military forces and has said that the false positives have served to "cover up false and unfair accusations against some members of the Armed Forces."
"In many cases, it was due to drug trafficking, which unfortunately, with the isolated participation of members of the Armed Forces, sought their impunity and presented the appearance that the murder of innocent citizens was taking place to combat drug trafficking, which was not true ».
For these cases, more than 800 members of the army, mostly from lower ranks, have been convicted of extrajudicial executions carried out 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 the figure of today's senator Uribe Vélez for years. Among them are the illegal interceptions of journalists and magistrates during his government, which Uribe said did not participate or ordered, and for this reason two close collaborators of his were convicted.
In the case of his alleged responsibility in the massacres of El Aro and la Granja, and the murder of 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 ordered copies to investigate Uribe in his capacity as governor and in 2015 the Prosecutor's Office ordered the former president to be investigated "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 against humanity the crimes associated with these two massacres, plus another known as that of San Roque and the murder of Valle. This decision implies that the punishable acts do not prescribe, that is, they do not have an expiration of time to be investigated and tried.
Uribe does not face criminal charges for these events, only a preliminary investigation of the Supreme Court of Justice.
Uribe, who in 2013 founded the Democratic Center party, has denied all the accusations against him and has 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 that they defend me and when they say 'it is that Uribe made such a mistake', say: forgive him that the 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 disappeared 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, conspiracy to commit crimes and embezzlement, in the case of the 'Chuza-DAS'.
The former interior ministers, Sabas Pretelt, and the 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 reelection of Álvaro Uribe. The scandal is known as the "Yidispolítica", in the name of Yidis Medina, one of the congresswoman who was offered the gifts. 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 Uribe to run for president again for his second presidential term. In those elections Uribe was reelected for four more years.
In addition to his former Minister of Agriculture, Andrés Felipe Arias, he is sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison for diverting money from an agricultural assistance program for peasants to wealthy families in the country, known as Agro Ingreso Seguro.
"It is with the apology 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 Yidispolítica, the purchase of reelection, corruption scandal like Agro Ingreso Seguro, "says Ávila.
Detractors of former President Álvaro Uribe demonstrate against him before the senator appears before the Supreme Court of Justice. Bogota, October 2019. (Credit: RAUL ARBOLEDA / AFP via Getty Images)
A divided country
In the case of the alleged manipulation of witnesses, the former president went from complainant to accused, since in principle he denounced senator Iván Cepeda, of the opposition Polo Democrático, assuring that he offered legal benefits to several ex-paramilitary prisoners to link him with these armed groups of extreme right.
Later, the Court not only found enough elements to exonerate Cepeda, but decided to investigate Uribe by finding what it considers new evidence and testimonies that would involve the former president in the same practices of which he accused Cepeda.
"I never thought that the defense of honor, in my love for Colombia, head-on and with respect to the citizens, would create these judicial difficulties for me," Uribe said before his appearance in court.
"Admiration for Uribe is visceral," analyst Jorge Andrés Hernández, coordinator of the Democracy Observatory at PARES, told CNN in Spanish. "He always manages to create the image of persecuted by justice, by some rascals, 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.
In this, the uribista senator Paloma Valencia, one of the strongest defenders of the political leader, agrees.
"President Uribe was the man who gave hope to many Colombians," Valencia said on Tuesday in the program Ask 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 for his strong hand against the FARC, his detractors also criticize him because during his two governments events such as displacement and forced disappearances flared up, according to the Single Registry of Victims.
"Uribe is one of those people who has two faces, and the most dramatic thing is that both sides are right," added Ávila. «That Uribe changed the country? Of course he changed it, but at a very high cost ».
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Popularity fades
Upon his arrival in power, Uribe consolidated himself as the president with the highest approval ratings in recent history, even reaching 86 points with the Jaque operation in 2008, according to the Gallup pollster, something historic that no president in the last twenty years had been accomplished.
But soon, with the end of his first term, Uribe's exacerbated popularity would begin to drop. 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, Uribe's unfavorability began to fall, leading him to have a negative image of 61% today, 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 may have occurred in his government and that has begun to emerge," says Ávila, 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 processes against Uribe.
"But the country has been losing fear," he points out.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published in October 2019.
Álvaro Uribe Vélez