On 25 October 1997, paramilitary groups descended upon the remote 300-person farming town of El Aro, in the Colombian state of Antioquia. Over the next five days, the drug-running paramilitaries slaughtered 17 people, raped multiple women and burned the town down, forcing the remaining townspeople to flee.
The attorney Jesus Maria Valle had been pleading with the state governor, Álvaro Uribe, for over a year to stop the paramilitaries’ brutal takeover of the countryside and collusion with the military. Instead, Uribe labeled Valle an “enemy of the armed forces”. In a statement to prosecutors after the El Aro massacre, Valle asked for a full investigation into what he described as an “alliance” in Antioquia among paramilitaries, the military and Uribe to kill civilians and seize their land, in the name of fighting the country’s leftwing FARC guerrillas. Within days, two men in suits strode into Valle’s law office in downtown Medellin and shot him dead.
On 1 August, Uribe, who went on to become Colombia’s president in 2002, was sentenced to 12 years of house arrest after a Colombian court convicted him of bribing a witness who had linked him to the paramilitaries. The conviction could still be overturned on appeal, but the fact that it has happened at all is a striking development that would have seemed almost inconceivable a decade or so ago. In a time of rising autocracy and abuse, including in the US, it also offers reasons for hope.
For decades, Uribe seemed almost untouchable. As president, he gained domestic and international acclaim – including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W Bush – because of his successes, with billions of dollars in US military aid, in beating back the abusive FARC. When I met him in 2004, he strode about his conference room, lecturing me and my then colleagues on how nobody had done more than he had to bring safety to the country.
Glowing portrayals of Uribe’s record at the time routinely glossed over his efforts to pass laws favoring the paramilitaries and to undermine investigations of their links to those in power. During his presidency, the Colombian supreme court conducted what became known as the “parapolitics” investigations into about one-third of members of Congress for collusion – including in many cases electoral fraud – with the paramilitaries. Uribe engaged in a furious smear campaign against the justices and his intelligence service engaged in illegal surveillance of the justices and independent journalists.
Yet over the years, senior paramilitary leaders have testified as to the involvement of the army and Uribe’s chief of staff in Antioquia, Pedro Juan Morenoin the El Aro massacre. Multiple investigations have documented widespread collusion between paramilitaries and important sectors of the military and political establishment at the time. There is also evidence – including statements that I obtained in a prison interview with a paramilitary leader – that Uribe’s office, when he was governor, had close ties to paramilitaries, and that Moreno approved Valle’s murder. Uribe has repeatedly denied it all.
The conviction this week emerged in the context of a supreme court investigation into allegations that Uribe started a paramilitary group in the 1990s. Uribe claimed early on that the allegations were manufactured by a member of Congress, but the court found there was no basis to his claims. Instead, the supreme court ordered a new investigation into possible witness tampering by people working for Uribe (then a senator), including alleged payments to paramilitaries to change their testimony. Uribe quit his Senate seat, forcing the case to be moved from the supreme court to a lower court, and – with prosecutors seemingly unwilling to move it forward – it looked for years like the case might just die out like many other previous investigations. However, with a new chief prosecutor in place, the case picked up steam again, finally resulting in this week’s conviction.
Not surprisingly, the administration of US President Donald Trump has been trying to discredit Colombia’s courts, with Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, decrying the “weaponization of Colombia’s judicial branch”. But this is all now part of a tired playbook.
It’s the same rhetoric Trump and allies have been using to discredit US courts – even Trump appointees – that have ruled against them. It’s how Trump has talked about the case against his buddy Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and about the investigations conducted by the international criminal court. And it’s how Uribe himself smeared activists like Jesus Maria Valle in the 1990s and sought to undermine the Colombian supreme court in the early 2000s.
But, to me, this week’s ruling stands for something else: that no matter how much power leaders may amass, they are not ultimately above the law. And no matter how desperate the situation, with courage and commitment, there is much we can do to create a path toward accountability.
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Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is CEO of RepresentUs and the author of the award-winning book There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia. She spearheaded Human Rights Watch’s work on Colombia during most of Uribe’s presidency
