Colombia: Court overturns all charges for Álvaro Uribe's 12-year home sentence

The Superior Court of Bogota overturned the conviction for bribery and procedural fraud of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

The conservative politician was sentenced to 12 years of house arrest for allegedly ordering his lawyer to bribe imprisoned paramilitary soldiers. The objective, according to the accusation, was to get them to deny the former president's relations with anti-guerrilla squads.

With the first unfavorable ruling, Uribe became the first former president to be criminally convicted and deprived of his freedom in Colombia.

Uribe's defense appealed the sentence, which was overturned on Tuesday. According to Infobae, the judges based their decision on the lack of evidence linking the former president to the crime and the lack of direct malice.

According to AFP, the court said it had insufficient evidence to incriminate the defendant, that the wiretaps used as evidence were illegal, and that there were flaws in the “methodology” of the judge who decided the case in the first instance.

In addition, the court ordered to investigate whether former paramilitary soldier Carlos Enrique Vélez Ramírez, a key witness in the case against Uribe, committed false testimony. In the present case, one more crime for procedural fraud has yet to be determined, so it cannot yet be considered complete.

Uribe was acquitted of the five cases for which he had been convicted. Three were for bribery, against Vélez Ramírez, Eurídice Cortés and Juan Guillermo Monsalve, and two for procedural fraud.

Gustavo Petro criticizes the court... and Trump

Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused the Superior Court of Bogotá of hiding "the history of paramilitary governance in Colombia, that is, the history of the politicians who came to power allied with drug trafficking and who unleashed genocide."

He also dedicated reproaches to Donald Trump, whom he has been confronting in recent days: "Now Trump, allied with these politicians and with Uribe, will seek the sanction to the president who condemned in his life the alliances between the Colombian political power and the paramilitary drug trafficking in Colombia, and he does it with the help of those who helped paramilitaries in the country."

"We are going to [the appeals court]"

Prosecuting attorney Miguel Angel Del Río assured in X that he will appeal the decision before the Supreme Court of Justice, the highest judicial instance of the South American country. "We are going to [the appeals court]. This battle is not over," he wrote.

This is a developing story.