The victims of the fraud and bribery practices of Colombia’s far-right former President Alvaro Uribe dedicated his conviction to victims of war crimes attributed to “The Slaughterer.”
In a speech, Senator Ivan Cepeda praised judicial workers’ successful efforts to uphold the rule of law despite the far-right paramilitary violence that all but paralyzed Colombia’s justice system in the 1990’s and the 2000’s.
Cepeda, backed by human rights lawyer Reinaldo Villalba, additionally dedicated Monday’s court decision to the victims of Uribe’s alleged crimes against humanity and previous conspiracies to obstruct justice.
We also dedicate this just decision to the mothers of the boys who were disappeared, tortured and taken to mass graves or presented to the media as false positives, to those who died, the peasants who were killed in the massacres of El Aro, La Granja and San Roque, to human rights defender Jesus Maria Valle, to the magistrates who were the victims of the criminal spying of [intelligence agency] DAS. To all of them we say that we will continue until the whole truth prevails.
Senator Ivan Cepeda
Uribe was convicted of fraud and bribery after a Bogota judge found that the former president recruited an army of false witnesses to fabricate criminal charges against Cepeda and others who have investigated ties between the Uribe Clan and paramilitary groups.
Investigations into the former president and his brother Santiago were frustrated in the 1990’s because of a paramilitary onslaught on judicil workers in Medellin and the surrounding Antioquia province.
These investigations were dropped altogether in 1999 by former Prosecutor General Luis Camilo Osorio, an alleged associate of paramilitary organization AUC.
Cepeda and Villalba’s human rights organization, the Jose Alvear Lawyers Collective, have been defending the rights of alleged victims of Uribe and his paramilitary associates for more than two decades.
Their work triggered the reopening of criminal investigations into the Uribe Clan and attempts to jail them based on fraudulent criminal charges.
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