Congressman Ivan Cepeda took advantage of a house debate on land restitution to call for an investigation into ex-President Alvaro Uribe’s role in land sales.
Cepeda denounced Uribe for “influence peddling” over his rulings in the cases of allocating 75,000 hectares of land to 25 companies in the Montes de Maria mountains.
Cepeda said, “The Montes de Maria are in the power of friends of ex-president Uribe”.
Cepeda exhibited a series of videos and documents that purported to show “a land grab that was sponsored by a conspiracy of businessmen from Antioquia.”
The congressman demanded the government intervene in the region to deal with criminal gangs, clean up state institutions, end the influence of paramilitaries in politics and to “not consider a single one of the buyers [of the land] to have acted in good faith.”
The Minister of Agriculture, Juan Camilo Restrepo responded that the courts should investigate the cases, adding that it was the current government that first denounced the sales.