Colombia’s prosecution called former President Alvaro Uribe to testify about his alleged involvement in three massacres and the killing of a human rights defender.
Uribe requested the hearing after he was accused of being involved in a 1997 massacre in the village of El Aro by former warlord Salvatore Mancuso before war crimes tribunal JEP.
Uribe helped plan 1997 massacre, former warlord tells Colombia’s war crimes tribunal
The former president will also be heard about massacres committed by the now-defunct paramilitary organization AUC in La Granja and San Roque when Uribe was governor of the Antioquia province.
Last but not least, Uribe is expected to testify about his alleged role in the 1998 assassination of human rights defender Jesus Maria Valle in Medellin.
The Supreme Court ordered the prosecution to also investigate the former president’s alleged complicity in the homicide and the massacres in 2020 already.
Colombia’s judicial branch has supposedly been investigating Uribe’s alleged role in the El Aro massacre since 2015 when a Medellin court ruled that the former president was a suspect.
Was Uribe complicit in a 1997 paramilitary massacre?
Despite the three-year radio silence, the prosecution said that it had “carried out countless investigative activities and gathered abundant evidence to achieve the full clarification of the facts” related to the massacres and the homicide.
Prosecutor General Francisco Barbosa has gone out of his way to avoid an investigation that could reveal Uribe’s alleged ties to the AUC when the far-right politician was governor of Antioquia.
The former president has long contradicted evidence suggesting that he and other former Medellin Cartel associates founded on of the AUC’s first units, the Bloque Metro, in 1996.
The hearing has been scheduled for Monday.