The fraud and bribery practices of Colombia’s far-right former President Alvaro Uribe failed to obstruct mounting criminal investigations into his family’s decades-long ties to organized crime.
These criminal investigations are mainly due to the Uribe Clan’s alleged ties to paramilitary groups that killed thousands of people in the former president’s native Antioquia province alone.
In particular, Uribe tried to obstruct investigations into his family’s role in the creation of the 12 Apostles and Bloque Metro paramilitary groups between 1992 and 1997.
Both groups were allegedly created in the Antioquia province under the leadership of the former president’s brother, Santiago Uribe, and other associates of the Medellin Cartel.
According to the prosecution of war crimes tribunal JEP, Santiago Uribe was the commander of the 12 Apostles, which assassinated at least 525 people in northern Antioquia between 1992 and 1996.
Medellin courts have additionally ordered investigations into the alleged key role in the creation and expansion of the Bloque Metro played by both Uribe brothers between 1996 and 2003.
The Prosecutor General’s Office additionally reopened investigations into the former president’s allege role in three massacres and the 1998 assassination of a human rights defender who had denounced Uribe’s alleged ties to paramilitary organization AUC.
Multiple former member of the Bloque Metro have publicly accused the former president of providing military support to the paramilitary group that was allegedly formed in response to an ELN attack on the Uribe family’s estate in northeast Antioquia in 1996.
As the governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997, Uribe legalized the front company that allowed the Bloque Metro to receive funding from both drug traffickers and “legitimate” businesses through so-called “security cooperatives.”
These security cooperatives were banned by the court in 1998 because of their role in the surge of paramilitary violence and “social cleansing” campaigns that killed thousands of people in Antioquia alone.
The surge of paramilitary groups like the 12 Apostles and Bloque Metro escalated Antioquia’s homicide rates in the second half of the 1990’s to levels even higher than those caused by the Medellin Cartel’s war on the State.
The mass assassination of prosecution investigators and potential witnesses of paramilitary crimes made investigating the Uribe Clan virtually impossible until after the demobilization of the AUC between 2003 and 2006.
Since then, at least three witnesses of the Uribe Clan’s role in paramilitary violence and the subsequent cover-up have been assassinated.
The key witness in the fraud and bribery trial, Juan Guillermo Monsalve, allegedly survived two assassination attempts since revealing the Uribes’ alleged role in the creation of the Bloque Metro.
Despite the violence and the witness manipulations, investigations into the Uribe Clan continue.
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