judicial
The former president applied to the Bogotá Supreme Court to drop investigations into him for procedural fraud and bribery in criminal proceedings.
05/25/2023
Former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez asked the Bogotá Supreme Court to grant a motion by the Attorney General’s Office to have the court barred of an investigation launched in 2018 into alleged pressure on witnesses to retract the allegations against him.
In his defence: him summarized in 74 points, Uribe claimed that he had simply asked lawyer Diego Cadena to verify the information he had about some former paramilitaries who had made allegations against him in court and now wished to withdraw them. “I never ordered him to commit illegal acts.”
“There is not a single piece of evidence of manipulation, including the offer of benefits. It, like everything else, was sent to the court for review; The judge says she should have checked everything before taking it to the court, I don’t have those powers. I am accused of urgency, of course in defense of my honor, my political rights!
The former president questioned the president’s conclusions Judge 41 of the knowledge of Bogotá, who denied for the second time last Tuesday the motion for forfeiture filed by the third prosecutor delegated before the court. Several tests were skipped for Uribe to say no to this request.
“It only reinforces the theory of the validity of the interception, but the judge joins the alleged victims in being terrified by my insistence on the truth,” the former president added, asking if the “rumours” of the witnesses cited against them, ignoring their contradictions and the fact that they claimed under oath that they knew nothing of what they had said about the defendant Connections of Álvaro Uribe and his brother Santiago to paramilitary groups in Antioquia.
In the last part of his speech, the former President did not hesitate to describe this legal case as a political process and pointed out that many of his enemies were behind it. “It makes me very sad, Madam Judge. It makes me very sad to hear yesterday how you accused me of being a paramilitary. However, you do so by giving credence to Mr. Monsalve, who headed the government that dismantled paramilitarism, as you daughter of the Eastern Plains know from direct sources. There in the Eastern Plains where the released intelligence reports identify Ms. Deyanira Gómez as a member or servant of the FARC and now she is acting as a victim.”
“The political aspect of this process makes me very sad. Because? Because Colombia is a country with an excellent institutional reputation, and when politics interferes with the judiciary, democratic institutions are weakened. It is enough to look at the defense bench, here it is illustrated by the laudatory references to Ministers Iván Velásquez, Juan Carlos Giraldo, Dr. (Iván) Cepeda and I involved in bribery and deception in court but without evidence.
For Uribe, this process was marked from the start by irregularities, prejudice and the leakage of documents. Recalls that on a radio broadcast, after hearing the summons to an investigation, Supreme Court Justice José Luis Barceló assured “that they had me and that’s why I resigned from Congress.”
“It is a political process that is affecting the institutional stability of Colombia, as judges Barceló and (Antonio) Hernández made political incitement against me on television. There is fear here of the judges who have imprisoned me, prompted by Judge Reyes, agent of Juan Manuel Santos in the Havana (Cuba) trial, of which I was an opponent,” he added.
The file will now be sent to the Supreme Court of Bogotá, which will have to decide whether to uphold the judge’s decision 41 or, on the contrary, to revoke it, thereby granting the enforcement motion submitted by the public prosecutor’s office.