Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s right-wing former president, was found guilty on July 28 of bribing witnesses and procedural fraud. The ruling, which his team plans to appeal, marked a stunning potential end to the political career of a man who, at one point, had the approval of 80 percent of Colombians.

The roots of Monday’s ruling stretch back to 2012, when Uribe accused Senator Iván Cepeda of bribing paramilitary members to claim that Uribe and his brother Santiago had created a paramilitary group. In 2018, Cepeda was found innocent. Uribe, on the other hand, was suspected of having sent his lawyer to bribe a former paramilitary to retract testimony that damaged him, which led to the opening of an investigation. In 2020, to prevent any potential obstruction of justice, Uribe was sentenced to house arrest. In response, he resigned his seat in the Senate, a move that enabled the case to be transferred to the Attorney General’s office, then headed by an ally. After years of obstruction, the case finally went forward in 2024, when he was formally accused of simple bribery, the bribery of witnesses in a criminal case, and procedural fraud. On Monday, he was found guilty on the latter two charges. 

While Uribe has long been known to have ties to right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers, his outsized stature in the country lent him an air of invincibility. Indeed, Uribe has shaped the country’s politics more than anyone in the 21st century. As president from 2002 to 2010, he waged an aggressive military campaign against the FARC, the country’s left-wing guerrillas. His successful weakening of the guerrillas brought him immense popularity—enough to change the constitution and successfully run for re-election in 2006. But it was accomplished through violent means. Uribe’s war weakened the country’s democratic institutions, displaced millions of peasants, and offered cushy peace deals to paramilitaries responsible for far more deaths than the guerrillas. It also depended upon the commission of horrific human rights abuses, including a scandal in which thousands of civilians were killed by the military, many of whom were framed as guerrillas so that soldiers could collect cash bonuses. 

Uribe capitalized on the popularity he garnered from the fights against the FARC to birth a less-democratic, less equal, and more precarious Colombia. While he succeeded in attracting foreign investment, as president, he slashed the social safety net, railed against the rights of the LGBTQ community, and invited right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers into the country’s political mainstream. After leaving the presidency, he worked assiduously as a senator and leader of the far-right Centro Democrático party to tank the country’s 2016 referendum on a peace deal with the FARC. 

Uribe’s political project has shaped more than just Colombian politics. He and his party’s close ties to the United States, support for regional coups, and right-wing populism have cast a long shadow over the entire region. Uribe is, in many respects, the region’s original Nayib Bukele: a far-right politician whose “iron-fist” security crackdown brought a temporary boost in security at the expense of the rule of law and the rights of vulnerable groups. His right-wing populism, like Bukele’s, foregrounded a revanchist cultural politics in order to obscure the devastating social, economic, and environmental consequences of his fundamentally neoliberal project. 

While Uribe has remained a prominent political figure—shepherding into the presidency his protegee Ivan Duqué in 2017—in recent years, his influence has waned. By 2020, when the investigation into him was heating up, support for the former president had fallen significantly—as low as 10 percent in some polls.

Still, Uribe’s supporters in Colombia fervently defended his record and accused the judge overseeing his case of judicial prosecution. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a similar argument, posting on X that the ruling demonstrated the “weaponization of Colombia’s judicial branch by radical judges.” The Trump administration has recently made the exact same argument in the ongoing trial of former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (see blurb below).

For those progressive activists who bore the brunt of Uribe’s war on the guerrillas and civil society itself, the ruling sparked pure jubilation. Along one of Bogotá’s busiest streets, an impromptu viewing party of the trial turned into a celebration after the guilty verdict. Graffiti sprouted up around the city conveying a dream of Colombians, young and old, that had finally become reality: “Uribe Culpable.”

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

People gathered in Bogotá on July 28 to celebrate former right-wing President Álvaro Uribe's conviction on charges of bribing witnesses and procedural fraud. They convened in front of the "las cuchas tenían razón"  ("the old ladies were right") mural, a work of street art dedicated to the mothers of children lost to the country's armed conflict. The mural, which started in Medellín and spread around the country after that city's right-wing mayor called for its destruction, was updated in Bogotá with the words: "URIBE GUILTY." As if by divine intervention, a rainbow emerged as Uribe's sentence was made public. (L.L.)

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