Colombia’s Ketchup-Bottle-Case

It may well be Colombian literary culture shining through when the presiding judge of the case against former President Álvaro Uribe, Judge Sandra Liliana Herrera, cited the French aristocrat: “As Montesquieu rightly said, the law must be like death, which spares no one”. The verdict of 144 months (12 years) in prison, which Uribe will be allowed to serve at one of his fincas, has been 14 years in the making. Thus, Judge Herrera is certainly correct that the law in Colombia can indeed catch-up with you, regardless of how powerful you are. The most important implication of this case is neither the verdict itself, nor the length of the sentence – it is its nature as a “Ketchup-Bottle-Case”: the opening for more than 100 cases in the system that include crimes against humanity carrying life-in-prison sentences (with the earliest opportunity for parole after 30 years).

An “ironic” case

This specific case goes back to 2011, and, even though it involves a back and forth of pressing charges and counter charges, is in fact straight forward but also quite ironic. Senator Ívan Cepeda had pressed criminal charges against Uribe, citing the testimonies of two former members of the paramilitary organization AUC, Pablo Hernan Sierra and Juan Guillermo Monsalve. They attested that Uribe and his brother Santiago were deeply involved in the creation of the precursor to the so-called Bloque Metro paramilitary group in 1996. Uribe countered by charging before the Supreme Court of Colombia that Cepeda had bribed Sierra and Monsalve. That court absolved Cepeda in 2018 and opened criminal investigation against Uribe, who was a Senator in Congress at the time, for manipulating witnesses to bring the conspiracy charges against Cepeda. In the Colombian constitutional system, Members of Congress are investigated by the Supreme Court. In order to dodge this “constitutional privilege”, and in a clearly strategic move, Uribe resigned from Congress, which also meant that the case would be moved to the “ordinary” criminal justice system. Uribe was the political protégé of President Ívan Duque, essentially ensuring his electoral victory in 2018, and Duque repaid the favour by appointing attorney generals that put in every effort to smother the investigations. After Gustavo Petro became President in 2022, and Luz Adriana Camargo was selected as the new attorney general in 2024 – taking over from Duque stooge Francisco Barbosa – that strategy did not work any longer, and the case took its course. Now, seven years after the criminal investigation began, Uribe was found guilty of that witness manipulation. As insightcrime.org already noted in 2018:

“The situation is ironic in that, in 2013, Álvaro Uribe sent Iván Cepeda to the Supreme Court for witness tampering, and now it is Uribe who is being investigated for the same crime”.

The story of Uribe

To fully appreciate the implication of that decision, it is imperative to place Uribe himself on the pedestal that ought to be rightfully his place: the most extra-ordinary and impactful Colombian politician of, at least, the last three decades (and this includes Presidents that have won Nobel Peace Prices, a former guerrillero breaking through to the presidency, and one caught red-handed for taking money from the Calí Cartel). When Álvaro Uribe was elected President in 2002, he not only won in a landslide, his victory also officially ended the traditional bi-partisan political system. Since 1849, public offices were won by either the Conservative or Liberal Party. Even Colombia’s propensity for civil conflict throughout those one and half centuries has been attributed to bi-partisan hatred. Uribe was the first President, who ran, and won, as an outsider of that traditional party system. His record as President was actually much more checkered than assumed by many at the time, but there cannot be any doubt over his astronomical popularity that never dipped below 60 percent and reached hights North of 80 percent for extended period of times. In fact, his popularity was so great, he initiated constitutional reform processes to change presidential term limits – once with success, once without.

Uribe’s popularity was nourished by his undeniable successes in fighting the FARC guerrilla in the early 2000s. When he took the presidential oath in September 2002, Colombia was almost considered a failed state. In fact, the FARC lobbed a welcome grenade from the outskirts of Bogota into the city centre, close to the where the ceremony took place. After taking office, and with the help of large military support from the United State, his Democratic Security policy, aimed at securing a clear monopoly of violence, changed that fairly rapidly. Within two years of his presidency, hostage taking by armed actors reduced significantly, highways could be travelled on again, and the FARC had its military capacity dented considerably.

In his second term, Democratic Security policy generated the most spectacular successes – liberating Ingrid Betancour from FARC capture and killing a number of high-ranking guerilla commanders – that ultimately ensured the aforementioned astronomical popularity ratings. While his popularity and public support for Democratic Security could not pave the way to a third term, which was turned down by the Constitutional Court on grounds that it substituted the constitution, his political influence and transformative capacities did not wane in effect. He essentially handpicked his successor (his Minister of Defence, Juan Manuel Santos). Subsequently, he broke with Santos over the peace process with the FARC and mobilized the entire right against the future Nobel Peace Prize winner. His political movement successfully led the “No”-campaign against the first iteration of the peace treaty with the FARC, and he guided Iván Duque to the Presidency in 2018. He was also elected Senator in 2014 and 2018 (with some of the highest margins ever recorded) and could thereby affect politics from within Colombia’s national political institutions.

The dark side

To be sure, this is not a value judgement of Uribe’s political capability, but merely a description of the facts: Colombian politics are incomprehensible without grasping the significance of the Antioquian powerbroker. To be equally as clear, there is a very dark side to Uribe’s politics, and it is that side that makes this decision so important. Coming from the Antioquian hinterland of Medellín, he appears to have been involved at every intersection of Colombia’s violence in the last five decades.

Born into a well-connected ranchero family, his political trajectory intersected with key developments in the privatization of security that culminated in the paramilitary project of the AUC in the 1990s: his father is alleged to have been an associate of Pablo Escobar; his brother did business with the Ochoas (also of the Medellín Cartel) and has been accused in court to have sponsored the “12 Apostles” paramilitary group; as governor of his home department in 1995, Uribe himself was the strongest supporter of the CONVIVIR vigilante program that allowed paramilitaries to thrive along state institutions; and as President, vast numbers of his allies in Congress (including his cousin Senator Mario Uribe) were indicted for conspiring with paramilitaries to get elected: paramilitaries delegated votes to their preferred candidates, who in turn produced legislation very much in the interest of the paramilitaries (for example, a transitional justice process that, had it not been for the country’s constitutional court, would have given paramilitaries “Persil Schein” for past crimes).

The brutality of paramilitaries, who were responsible for the majorities of massacres during their expansion in the 1990s, should not escape the reader. A simple fact shall suffice: their weapon of choice while committing those massacres was the sledgehammer. In order to displace the guerrilla from their strongholds, they used very overt terror to instill fear in the local populations to drain local support. Once territorial control was established, they turned to selective assassinations of potential political opponents (usually civil society actors).

The fact remains that Uribe has not been indicted and convicted for being a paramilitary. He has been convicted for manipulating witnesses – themselves former paramilitaries – who said that he was indeed part of the paramilitary coalition in Colombia’s periphery. Amongst those cases against Uribe in the docket, there are many that hold him directly responsible for some of the worst crimes committed during Colombia’s long civil war – the most serious being the El Aro Massacre in Ituango from October 1997 when Uribe was Governor in Antioquia. The hope of victims is that these cases, too, will finally get their day in court – and that the manipulation case will turn out to be something akin to the opening of a ketchup bottle, resulting in a prolonged flow of judicial accountability of the former President.