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The Colombian Prosecutor's Office asks to close the case of witness manipulation against Álvaro Uribe

2021-03-05T13:34:28.810Z


The entity must now defend its decision before a judge, who has the power to reject it and order a trial.


Former President Álvaro Uribe after a hearing in the Supreme Court of Justice in October 2019.Luisa Gonzalez / Reuters

The Colombian Prosecutor's Office has desisted from accusing the former president and Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who faces a process for witness manipulation that kept him in house arrest for more than two months and led him to resign his seat in the Senate to leave the orbit of the Supreme Court of Justice.

The prosecutor appointed for the case, Gabriel Jaimes, has asked this Friday to close the investigation against the politician without going to trial, but now he must support his decision before a judge, so that the long case goes to a new stage before reach a denouement.

“After the comprehensive assessment of the material probative elements, the physical evidence and the information legally obtained during the course of the process, the prosecutor in the case established that several of the conducts for which the former congressman was legally linked do not have the character of a crime , and others that are, cannot be attributed to him as the author or as a participant, ”said the Prosecutor's Office in a statement early this morning.

These conclusions "will be presented in public proceedings before the Criminal Circuit judge that establishes the distribution system", in a judicial setting that is still appealable and may take months.

Only then will the arguments of the decision be known in detail.

Former President Uribe reacted immediately to the ruling, which benefits him.

Thank God for this positive step.

Thanks to so many people for their prayers and solidarity, "he wrote on his Twitter account.

Senator Iván Cépeda, recognized as a victim in the process for bribery and procedural fraud against Uribe, had already warned that since the case came to the Prosecutor's Office - headed by Francisco Barbosa, a close friend of President Iván Duque - there had been no class guarantees for victims and their lawyers.

Prosecutor Jaimes “has diverted the investigation, has belittled and abstained from the investigation carried out by the Supreme Court of Justice, from the thousands of evidence in the file and which were clearly supported by the Court in a brief of more than 1,500 pages when he gave the order to deprive Uribe of his liberty, "Cepeda told EL PAÍS before hearing the decision.

He also anticipated that if necessary he would appeal the decision.

"There is still a long way to go here," he predicted.

The case dates back to 2012, when Senator Cepeda tried to demonstrate Uribe's ties to paramilitarism.

The ex-president filed a complaint against Cepeda before the Supreme Court - with jurisdiction over graduates such as legislators - for an alleged

plot

, with false witnesses in Colombian prisons, in order to involve him in criminal activities of far-right armed groups.

But it was not until mid-2018 that the case took a turn, as the high court, after almost six years of investigations, decided to archive the process against Cepeda and instead asked to investigate Uribe - at that time a senator - under the suspicion that he and his lawyers were the ones who manipulated witnesses.

The original complaint from witnesses such as ex-paramilitary Juan Guillermo Monsalve, son of the administrator of an old property belonging to the Uribe family, indicates that on that farm, the Guacharacas farm, a self-defense bloc was formed in the 1990s, when Uribe was governor of the department of Antioquia.

Monsalve, considered a key witness in the case, refused to testify again before "a biased and partial Prosecutor's Office, where Mr. Uribe Vélez seems more like a victim than a defendant," as justified by his lawyer, Miguel Ángel del Río.

He said then that he would only testify "before an impartial judge, in a public, oral, transparent hearing."

The former president's defense has sought to discredit Monsalve's testimony.

The house-to-jail measure for a former president was unprecedented in Colombia.

Last August, when Uribe was still a senator, the Supreme Court ordered his preventive and domiciliary detention.

The ex-president then resigned from the Senate, where he was the undisputed leader of the Democratic Center, the ruling party, and the Court decided in early September to send the file to the Prosecutor's Office, considering that he had lost competence.

The high court also decided in September to send three other files to the Prosecutor's Office in which it was preliminary investigating Uribe, those related to the Ituango massacres - known as El Aro and La Granja -, the San Roque massacre - in which According to the Court, the perpetrators “apparently” used Hacienda Guacharacas as their base of operations - and the murder of human rights defender Jesús María Valle.

All occurred while Uribe was governor of Antioquia, between 1995 and 1997, but were declared crimes against humanity.

so they do not prescribe.

Despite the dozen processes he faces in court, Uribe, a permanent protagonist of the polarization that has marked Colombian society, has remained a great electoral phenomenon and is President Duque's political mentor. During the two terms of his successor, Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018), he became the strongest critic of the peace agreement with the defunct FARC guerrilla and brought together the most conservative sectors around the Democratic Center. Although during his two terms between 2002 and 2010 he maintained very high levels of popularity, his acceptance has collapsed. 58% of those surveyed had an unfavorable image of the former president in the most recent measurement of the Invamer firm that was known this week, compared to 35% of a favorable image.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-03-05

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