Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe said Wednesday that accusations of a former paramilitary leader who testified that Uribe formed a paramilitary group in the 1990s are “slander” and called congressman Ivan Cepeda, who filed charges against the ex-president, a “moral assassin.”
“It hurts me to interrupt the [political promotion] campaign to respond to moral assassin Cepeda who teamed up with paramilitary prisoners who were his executioners,” Uribe said on his Twitter account.
According to Uribe, the leftist Cepeda is “desperately seeking more calumnies” against him.
“I will continue to fight the vengeance of narcoparamilitaries and narcoguerrillas who apparently are connected to moral assassin Cepeda!” the former President added.
Uribe’s tweets followed the publication of a testimony given by jailed paramilitary boss “Alberto Guerrero” who said that Uribe, his brother Santiago and other businessmen from Uribe’s home department of Antioquia, formed the Bloque Metro paramilitary group when Uribe was governor of the department in 1996.
“Alberto Guerrero,” whose real name is Pablo Hernan Sierra Garcia, told Cepeda in jail that he wants to be included in the Justice and Peace law, which grants him a shorter sentence in exchange for his testimonies and reparation of his victims. Sierra Garcia never was included to this law, created especially to allow the demobilization of the AUC between 2003 and 2006, because his Cacique Pipinta Bloc officially never demobilized.
The former AUC member had accused Uribe of paramilitary ties before.
Uribe’s attorney, Jaime Granados, announced he would file charges against Cepeda and Sierra Garcia.
The lawyer told W Radio that the allegations “are yet another chapter of this criminal vengeance of people who ex-President Uribe handed over to justice.”
Uribe, who has seen several of his closest allies been convicted for ties to the paramilitary AUC, has always denied any connection to the organization accused of having killed tens of thousands of Colombians.