Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe was sentenced to 12 years in prison for using fraud and bribery to try to frustrate investigations into his family’s alleged ties to paramilitary groups.
Judge Sandra Liliana Heredia, who declared Uribe guilty of fraud and bribery on Monday, sentenced the former president to 144 months in prison, according to the ruling.
Uribe will be allowed to serve his sentence at one of his family’s estates after paying part of the $830,000 fine he received on top of the prison sentence.
The former president will additionally be barred from holding public office for eight years.
The court published the verdict, a document of 1,114 pages, in which Heredia also explained the reasons behind the conviction and the prison sentence.
The ruling exposed the “choreography” and the “script” of Uribe’s “criminal plan” to employ dozens of loyalists inside his far-right political party, Democratic Center, and in prisons throughout Colombia.
The person who played the biggest role in Uribe’s conspiracy was Diego Cadena, who dubbed himself a “gangstattorney” in one of the wiretaps that ended up convicting the former president.
Eager to be considered “Uribe’s lawyer,” Cadena paid money to multiple jailed paramilitaries to discredit the claims of Juan Guillermo Monsalve and Pablo Hernan Sierra, to former members of “Bloque Metro,” the paramilitary group allegedly founded by the former president and his brother, Santiago Uribe.
Cadena additionally conspired with one of Monsalve’s cellmates to pressure the former paramilitary into retracting his claims that the Uribe brothers were among the founders and early sponsors of the Bloque Metro.
Monsalve was also pressured by an acquaintance who had been recruited by the current president of the National Electoral Council, Alvaro Hernan Prada, to also seek a retraction.
Both Monsalve and Sierra have maintained that the Uribe family supported the Bloque Metro, whose terror campaign in the Antioquia province left thousands of people dead between 1996 and 2003.
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