A Medellin court ordered the Prosecutor General’s Office to launch investigations into former president Alvaro Uribe and his brother for the murder of two prominent human rights lawyers.
The Third Criminal Court of Medellin ordered the investigation into Uribe and his brother, Santiago, following a conviction of a former deputy director of Colombia’s now-disbanded intelligence agency DAS.
The court will send the case files to the Prosecutor General’s Office for the investigation.
Copies shall be sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office so that Alvaro Uribe Velez, Santiago Uribe Velez, and General Ospina may be investigated as alleged perpetrators of the murders of Jorge Eduardo Umaña Mendoza and Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo.
Third Criminal Court of Medellin
The court order is part of former DAS director Jose Miguel Narvaez’s conviction for his involvement in the 1999 kidnapping of late senator Piedad Cordoba by the paramilitary group AUC.
The testimony that prompted the court’s decision to investigate the Uribe brothers was given by ex-AUC member Francisco Villalba in 2008.
According to Villalba, Uribe ordered the murders of Umaña and Valle because they had to be “silenced so they wouldn’t cause any more trouble.”
Who were the victims?
- Jesus Maria Valle was a human rights defender, lawyer, and professor who denounced Uribe’s failure to investigate paramilitary violence in Antioquia in 1997. The AUC assassinated him months later.
- Eduardo Umaña Mendoza was a human rights lawyer who focused on victims of state and political violence, such as the political genocide against members of the Union Patriotica. Before he was assassinated, he revealed a plot intending to murder him involving members of the Army, Prosecutor General’s Office, and Ecopetrol.
Uribe’s defense team called the testimony that implicated the former president a “fable”.
Francisco Villalba’s entire testimony is based on alleged meetings that never took place and that have been relentlessly denied , even by the paramilitary commanders themselves.
Alvaro Uribe’s Defense Team
Villalba partially retracted his statements weeks later, allegedly under pressure from both the DAS and paramilitaries.
The witness was murdered in 2009.
The former president went on a posting spree on the social media platform X and claimed that Villalba’s testimony and other claims linking him to paramilitaries were false.
The former president was convicted to 12 years in prison earlier this year for fraud and bribery in an attempt to frustrate investigations into his family’s alleged ties to paramilitary groups.
With the conviction of the former DAS official and Uribe’s conviction for witness tampering, the once discarded statements of Villalba are being reexamined.
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