Former President Alvaro Uribe and his son Tomas began a Twitter offensive against leftist Semana columnist Leon Valencia Sunday after a column implicating the former president’s sons in 12 scandals.
According to Uribe, “ex ELN-terrorist” Valencia “defends criminals and accuses those who work honestly.” The former President also accused the columnist of being “at service of criminals” and asked “what happened to the heinous crimes of Leon Valencia?”
The former President did not respond to a tweet by Colombia Reports asking him what heinous crimes he was referring to.
The President’s oldest son tweeted that “to intellectual guerrilla @LeonValenciaA it seems funny to repeat gossip of bandits,”
The angry responses followed a column by Valencia, director of the respected think tank Nuevo Arco Iris who demobilized from the ELN in 1994, called “The truth about Tomas and Jeronimo.”
According to Valencia, Tomas and Jeronimo are linked to 12 mayor corruption and criminal scandals.
In the column, the former guerrilla recalls recent news about Uribe’s sons business with an alleged drug trafficker, the sons’ links to extradited an drug trafficker accused of having threatened Univision journalist Daniel Coronell and links to an assassinated mayor who had signed pacts with paramilitary organization AUC.
Valencia also recalled accusations by convicted congresswoman Yidis Medina and the country’s Superintendent for Notaries that Tomas was involved in offering notary offices in exchange for the support of a 2004 constitutional change that allowed Uribe to run for President two years later.
The columnist went on saying how Tomas and Jeronimo benefited financially from decisions taken by their father while in office and were accused by extradited money launderer David Murcia Guzman of being beneficiaries of a major ponzi scheme that defrauded hundreds of thousands Colombians. Tomas recently admitted to having met one of the now-jailed directors of the Nule Group, accused of corruptly having obtained millions in government funds.
According to Uribe, Valencia is compiling accusations of criminals and ignoring the “defense of the affected.”