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Colombia’s toughest politician is now under space arrest, bringing the country back to the orderly political war he has been seeking to succeed for years.
By Julie Turkewitz
BOGOT, Colombia – Former President Alvaro Uribe has ruled Colombia’s political landscape for decades as the country’s top beloved and hated politician.
For some Colombians, he is a savior, the only leader who is willing to take the necessary steps to repair security in a country hit by a long and ruthless civil war.
For others, he is a criminal whose unwavering fight against the insurgents has shown little respect for human rights and left thousands dead, many of them civilians.
His space arrest, ordered through the Supreme Court this week in a case that dealt with some of the darkest facets of the war, has intensified the country’s deep left-to-right divide, which has brought Colombians back to the country’s political battle. seeking to succeed for years to come.
“The country has so many injuries,” said Paloma Valencia, a senator and Uribe’s supporter who began to follow him as a student, “makes any form of reconciliation much more difficult.”
Just hours after the announcement of Uribe’s arrest, his supporters of the right and his detractors on the left took to the streets of the country, honking or waving pots in outrage or celebration. Political commentators said the move threatened the country’s fragile reconciliation after a 2016 peace agreement that ended the conflict, which had been the longest ongoing war in America.
The next morning, Uribe’s party had rekindled a call for a review of the justice formula, an obvious measure to end the long-term arrests that were unfair, and the current president, Ivon Duque, a faithful best friend of Uribe’s, attacked the court’s ruling. to stop. your mentor.
Soon, the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic, which oversees the conduct of public servants, issued an urgent appeal to public servants to “respect and attack the justice system.”
Colombians, the office said, will have to “stop aggression and excessive polarization that can only lead to new scenarios of violence. To the crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic, we cannot raise a pandemic of hatred that obscures the future.” , threatens democracy and overwhelms us in a new afternoon of pain.
In a busy rally in favor of Uribe in Medellin after the decision, a multitude of cars covered with Colombian flags covered a main street in the city center. And the protesters said they were outraged that their hero had been arrested when thousands of former guerrillas broke the 2016 peace agreement.
Santiago Vásquez, 23, called Uribe “the most productive president Colombia has ever had,” and described him as the guy who paralyzed the country’s largest insurgent group, known as the FARC. He feared that the arrest of the former president would go left, marking the beginning of the old days of violence.
“Uribe! Friend! Colombia is with you! Mr. Uribe’s allies shouted.
Hundreds of miles away, in Bogota’s capital, Colombians looked at houses on the other side of the city, beating pots at a frantic party. The families of those who died during the war would never be called to court to answer for their role and were able to hear the news.
“I pray that he would pay for all the pain,” said Lucero Carmona Martínez, 61, who said that his son Omar, 26, had been killed by security forces at a time when Mr. Uribe was president and military, under pressure to build the number of corpses in combat, killing civilians with insurgent fighters.
In the more than 40 years, Uribe has gone from being a small bureaucrat to the country’s top tough politician, employing his air of mystery to create a whole political movement, Uribism, in his name.
He’s long since said his father killed through the FARC, which the organization denied.
When he assumed the presidency in 2002, a decades-long insurgency that began as an opposite battle of inequality had turned into devastating violence. Roadblocks, kidnappings and bombings in cities were normal events and much of the country desperately needed someone to repair order and defeat the FARC.
Mr Uribe has made the opposite fight to the insurgents the most sensible precedence of his government. Many others characterize it with a significant weakening of the FARC and put an end to much of this terror.
“Without President Uribe, Colombia would be a democracy,” Senator Valencia said. “It would be a state in bankruptcy like Venezuela.”
But while Uribe’s fighting left-wing guerrillas, his critics accused him of overseeing an era of horrific abuse not only through the army, but also through paramilitary teams that would have done the government’s dirty work.
“He thought the end justified the means,” said Ivón Cepeda, a political opponent.
While Uribe was president, Colombian infantrymen killed thousands of innocent people, many of them peasants, according to years of investigations through prosecutors and human rights groups. The soldiers tried to look at the dead as guerrillas to prove they were winning the war.
José Miguel Vivanco, who heads Human Rights Watch’s Americas division, said he had raised the factor several times with Uribe over the years, but discovered that the former president was derogatory, furious, and unwilling to address the problem.
“Their human rights are deplorable,” Vivanco said.
Mr Uribe has long denied any ties to the paramilitary groups, saying that he had fought them.
In an unforeseen turn, the investigation that led to Uribe’s space arrest examines misdemeanors, at least in relation to crimes that are at the center of other investigations opposed to him.
In this case, the Supreme Court considers whether Mr. Uribe participated in the bribery, fraud and forgery of witnesses in order to influence the testimony of an alleged paramilitary, Juan Guillermo Monsalve. It is suspected that he prompted Mr. Monsalve to retract one in which he related Mr. Uribe to the creation of paramilitary groups.
Among other investigations into Mr. Uribe’s conduct, several are examining a imaginable link to paramilitary massacres. His brother Santiago has been charged with alleged involvement in a paramilitary group.
The former president, who is now a senator but is likely to be suspended from that charge, has not been officially charged in the case. But Colombia’s judicial formula allows him to be arrested while the investigation continues whether judges who manipulate witnesses can occur.
If convicted, the former president could spend six to eight years in prison, according to law professor Francisco Bernate.
Uribe’s lawyer, Jaime Granados, denied the fees Wednesday and said “President Uribe did not ask to bribe the witnesses.”
His supporters, Mr. Duke, denounced the detention as unfair.
“It hurts, as a Colombian,” Duke said, that an “exemplary official, who held the top of the state, has no right to protect himself in freedom, with a presumption of innocence.”
Mr. Uribe now lives in a rural area called El Ubérrimo in northern Colombia. On Wednesday, others close to him said he had tested positive for Covid-19, adding that he was not in a serious condition.
The space, on a giant lot, has an equestrian track, a swimming pool and a stable. For now, his space arrest does not require guards or policemen, the court said, but only asks him to sign a contract and pay bail.
Uribe served as president until 2010, and left after a court ruling prevented him from running for a third term. But it retains vital power. Uribe’s was a must-have for Duke’s victory, who promised to preserve his mentor’s legacy.
When the government reached an agreement with the FARC, ending more than five decades of bloody conflict, many expected the historic treaty to heal deep wounds. But the country’s divisions remained strong in the following years.
Opponents of the agreement argued that he was too lenient with insurgent fighters, and were furious that it was approved despite a national vote against it. And his supporters accuse Duke of missing the will to put it into force altogether. Hundreds of veterans and network leaders have died since its adoption, leading critics to accuse Duke of failing to protect them. And many rural communities are still waiting for the roads, schools and electricity they had been promised.
Among the main parties to the conflict of the terms of the agreement, Mr Uribe, who thinks the agreement is too simple for insurgent fighters.
His arrest, many said this week, has reinforced divisions, fueling the resentment of the right and reinforcing the concept of the left that the former president is a criminal.
“This is a step forward in terms of justice,” said Francisco Gutiérrez Sanon, a Colombian political scientist, noting that many of the country’s tough figures did not have to answer in court. “But on the other hand, it radicalizes and makes Uribism more extreme.”
This week in Medellin, Nora Villa, 58, Uribe’s supporter of the aid march, promised to fight left. “We’ll see more division,” he said.
In Bogota, Luz Marina Bernal, 60, an activist whose 26-year-old son, Fair, was killed by security forces during Uribe’s tenure, said something about Uribe that he might not have imagined saying a few days ago: “I think it’s imaginable that he’s condemned for everything he’s done.
The reports were through Jenny Carolina González and Sof’a Villamil in Bogota and Megan Janetsky in Medellin.
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