Justice has said, for the second time, that it is not possible to file the judicial case against former President Álvaro Uribe for alleged witness tampering. The specific crimes for which the former president has been accused are procedural fraud and bribery, in a legal case that has been in court for more than a decade, but that has become a real legal labyrinth.
The judicial decision on Tuesday was in the hands of the 41st judge of criminal knowledge of Bogotá, Laura Barrera, who analyzed the arguments of the Prosecutor's Office, an institution that has argued in favor of archiving the investigation against Uribe. It is the second time that the Prosecutor's Office makes this request, and the second time that it is rejected by justice: in April 2022 another judge, Carmen Ortiz, ruled in favor of the victims of the case, saying that the investigation could not be closed and that the Prosecutor's Office had dismissed the evidence against the former president. The new judge said something similar: that there is enough evidence for the Attorney General's Office to continue investigating Uribe or bring him to a criminal trial. He explained that it should only be excluded in case the evidence leaves absolutely no doubt about the innocence of the former president. And the doubts remain, so the case must be maintained as well. "There is evidence that allows us to affirm with probability of truth that the crime of bribery did exist and that it is not disproved that Álvaro Uribe Vélez participated," Barrera said.
The case against Álvaro Uribe began in 2018, when he was a senator, and the Supreme Court reversed a criminal complaint he had filed against leftist Senator Iván Cepeda for witness tampering—the latter had insisted that the former president had ties to former paramilitaries, or AUC, in particular the Metro Bloc. And he had several testimonies to prove it. The Court, when investigating the case, considered that the one who could be falsifying information was the former president: it found evidence that pointed to the manipulation of witnesses by Uribe to muddy Cepeda. In August 2020, the Court even considered that the former president had to be detained while the investigation progressed, but Uribe, then a senator, resigned from the Legislature so that the investigation would not be in the hands of the high court but would pass to the Prosecutor's Office—he had an allied attorney general, and perhaps a better climate for his case to be filed.
The star witness in this case has been Juan Monsalve, a former paramilitary in the Metro Block. Monsalve was visited by one of the former president's lawyers, Diego Cadena, also investigated by the Prosecutor's Office for the same case. Monsalve has said he was pressured by the latter and another former paramilitary, known by his alias Caliche, to change his testimony about the former president's closeness to paramilitary groups. Such pressures are obviously illicit.
Monsalve, however, is not the only witness against Uribe. Another former paramilitary, Carlos Enrique Velez or alias Victor, has also said that Cadena offered him millions of pesos in exchange for giving testimony against Senator Cepeda. The Prosecutor's Office has tried in different ways to distort these testimonies, either by saying that they were not collected properly or that they contradict each other, but justice considers that they remain credible and valid, and it will be a judicial process that evaluates them thoroughly to determine if the former president is guilty or not.
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