Former President Alvaro Uribe on Thursday published unsubstantiated accusations that Colombia’s transitional justice chief once was on the payroll of the now-defunct Cali Cartel.
Uribe, whose late brother had a child with an extradited Medellin Cartel associate, said on Twitter that the official in charge of setting up the transitional court was a “beneficiary of one of the [Cali Cartel’s] front companies, the sadly famous Inversiones Ara.”
The former president has opposed the Special Jurisdiction for Peace since before its inception last week, going as far as to call it a “terrorist court.”
Uribe is facing numerous war crime charges over his alleged ties to paramilitary groups and the assassination of more than 4,000 civilians by the military that took place under his watch.
Was Uribe complicit in a 1997 paramilitary massacre?
Uribe’s latest target in his ongoing attempts to undermine the traditional justice system seems to have become the Secretary General of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, Nestor Raul Correa.
The former president is mainly upset because when Correa was president of the Superior Judiciary Council, the judicial official verbally rejected the widespread ties between Uribe, his political supporters and paramilitary group AUC.
The scandal, called “parapolitics,” left more than 50 congressmen, including Uribe’s cousin, in prison.
The former president’s brother is in jail awaiting trial for allegedly having formed his own paramilitary death squad in the early 1990s.
Uribe’s political arch-nemesis, President Juan Manuel Santos, on Wednesday implicitly slammed his predecessor, claiming that opponents of transitional justice have “angrily opposed to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, because they fear the truth” coming out about the countless war crimes committed by the state while fighting Marxist FARC guerrillas.
The transitional justice system currently being set up should provide justice to the more of 8 million war victims left by more than half a decade of political violence.