Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe found guilty of bribery

A Bogotá judge ruled Monday that former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) is criminally responsible for bribing witnesses in criminal proceedings and for procedural fraud , in a case dating back to 2012.

Bogotá's 44th Criminal Court Judge, Sandra Liliana Heredia Aranda, announced in a six-hour hearing that Uribe is guilty of bribery in criminal proceedings because, through his lawyer, Diego Cadena, he tried to bribe, among others, former paramilitary Juan Guillermo Monsalve.

Heredia has found that the founder and honorary president of the conservative political party Centro Democrático offered benefits, through emissaries, to incarcerated individuals for his own benefit in several open cases . The judge has also proven that Uribe tried to manipulate witnesses to link Senator Iván Cepeda to illegal acts.

The former president has also been acquitted of simple bribery charges, but has been convicted of procedural fraud based on a series of documents, among which Heredia has highlighted one signed by paramilitary Carlos Enrique Vélez, the content of which has been proven to be false and which was presented with the intention of initiating an investigation and condemning Senator Cepeda , according to Colombian radio station Radio Caracol.

After the ruling was read, the judge announced the sentencing hearing for Friday, August 1st, at 2:00 PM (local time). For her part, the First Prosecutor before the Court, Marlenne Orjuela, requested that the former president be sentenced to at least 108 months in prison , or more than nine years. However, the former president's defense has five days to file an appeal against Heredia's decision.

The case began in 2012 when Uribe filed a complaint against Senator Iván Cepeda, claiming that the latter had toured the country's prisons to present false testimony against him about the rise of paramilitarism in the Antioquia region.

However, after the evidence was presented, several versions indicated that the former president's lawyers sought to manipulate witnesses to point the finger at Cepeda , so the latter went from being accused to being a victim, unlike Uribe, the plaintiff, who became a suspect.