The brother of former President Alvaro Uribe denied Wednesday he was part of a conspiracy to “take down” Colombia’s Supreme Court.
Former AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso accused Santiago Uribe on Tuesday of conspiring with his cousin Mario Uribe and former presidential advisor Jose Obdulio Gaviria to discredit the Supreme Court. It’s alleged they took part in a smear campaign against judges in order to obstruct investigations into whether they used paramilitary pressure to get elected into Congress.
“It is absolutely false what Mancuso says, never did I directly or indirectly ask him, or anyone, to get information about judges of the Supreme Court, with the intention to discredit them,” said Santiago Uribe in a press release published on ex-president Uribe’s Twitter account.
He explained that “The former AUC leader seeks to blame me for being the brother of former President Alvaro Uribe Velez, of wanting to attack democratic institutions, when in fact it was he who revealed the intention of his criminal organization to infiltrate all branches of our state.”
Santiago Uribe said he was available to appear before the court to respond to these or any other allegations.
The former president’s brother and other Uribe associates have now been accused by two former AUC commanders and an allied drug trafficker of having taken part in the 2008 conspiracy against the court, in which a demobilized paramilitary accused the main “parapolitics” investigator of bribery, a statement he later retracted.
Santago Uribe has also been accused of having formed his own paramilitary group, the 12 Apostles, in the 1980s.