Álvaro Uribe

Álvaro Uribe Vélez

Became President	August 7, 2002
Predecessor	Andrés Pastrana
Date of Birth	July 4, 1952
Place of Birth	Medellín

Álvaro Uribe Vélez (b. July 4, 1952) is the President of Colombia (since 2002).

Running as an independent liberal candidate (having previously been a member of the Colombian Liberal Party), he was elected President of Colombia in the first round of the 26 May 2002 elections with 53% of the popular vote.

His electoral platform was centred around the policy of confronting Colombia's main guerrilla movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC). This new approach was adopted after four years of unsuccessful attempts by the previous administration, under Andrés Pastrana, to negotiate a ceasefire with the guerrillas, and amid decreasing public support for the guerrillas.

Uribe is often characterized by his opponents as a "hard-line right-winger" on account of his stance against the FARC and the ELN. In contrast to these perceptions, his socioeconomic policies are more centrist and he has remained open to a negotiated end to the conflict, contingent upon the armed groups first declaring a cease-fire.

After a considerable silence, Uribe has recently begun to publicly argue in favor of a bill currently being discussed (amid public controversy) in the Colombian Congress, which would potentially allow him to run for a second term as president.

Allegations from a 1991 document

An article published on the first week of August 2004 by Newsweek's Joseph Contreras that questioned the recent peace process with the AUC and explored the possibility of Uribe's government letting paramilitaries with ties to the drug business go free, included references to a recently unclassified 1991 U.S. military-intelligence report about the Medellín Cartel that included Alvaro Uribe's name in a list of collaborators of the organization, stating that the then Senator Uribe allegedly would have had personal links to Pablo Escobar, helped the drug lord in his campaign to be elected to Congress as part of a list, and was opposed to extradition of captured drug lords to the U.S.. The same document also claimed that Uribe's father would have died due to conflicts with narcotics traffickers. [1]

On August 1st, the U.S. Department of State's spokesman Robert Zimmerman officially replied to the document by making the following statement: "We completely reject these allegations about president Uribe. We do not have credible information that can corroborate or give substance to a nonevaluated report that dates from 1991 and which ties president Uribe with the drug business." [2]

Likewise, on that same date the Colombian government released a public communique in response, which pointed out that the 1991 document itself indicates that the information contained within was "not finally evaluated", and stated that:

1. This information is the same one that, in its moment, was part of the attacks which President Alvaro Uribe Vélez was subjected to during his presidential campaign.
2. In 1991, Alvaro Uribe Vélez, then Senator, was in the United States in an academic program of the University of Harvard, while the Constituent Assembly met, a period during which the revocation of Congress took place.
3. Álvaro Uribe Vélez has not had businesses of any type abroad. As explained during his campaign to the media, when the subject was mentioned, he only had two banking accounts abroad: one in a Bank of Boston, associate to the University of Harvard and another one in Oxford, England, while he was in that university in 1998. He does not have a single property abroad.
4. Alberto Uribe Sierra, father of the President, was assassinated by the 5th front of the FARC on June 14th 1983 when resisting a kidnapping attempt. Uribe Sierra faced his kidnappers; his son Santiago was wounded during the confrontation.
5. Álvaro Uribe Vélez was elected Senator in three opportunities: in 1986, 1990 and 1991 as member of the Liberal movement “Directorio Liberal de Antioquia - Sector Democrático“. (Jairo Ortega, of whose list Pablo Escobar was second, was elected to the House of Representatives by a different movement in 1982).
6. In the annals of Congress of 1989, the position of senator Uribe Vélez on extradition is evidenced. It is the only one that the Senator had on the subject during his performance as Senator.
   ...
   
7. During his time in government, Alvaro Uribe has authorized the extradition of more than 170 people as requested by different countries to be judged because of drug trafficking and other crimes, including the laundering of assets.
8. As President he is against the modification of the current mechanism of extradition." [3]

The Pentagon also publicly supported Uribe: "No conclusions can be drawn from it," said spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Conway, who added that the report was raw, uncorroborated information from a single source. [4]

According to this position, the claims contained in the intelligence report would have constituted "raw", unverified intelligence that was never confirmed and would not serve as credible basis to establish a link with Pablo Escobar or other drug lords. Critics have observed that the Colombian government has yet to directly deny any friendship or business connection between Uribe and Escobar.

The author of the article, Joseph Contreras, defended his work in declarations to Colombian Radio Caracol and likewise pointed to the lack of a denial about the claim of friendship between the current president of Colombia and the dead drug lord, but admitted that: "In the paragraph that corresponds to Uribe Vélez, it is evident to me that the version of the circumstances of the death of his father is not a correct version." This admission would tend to give some credibility to the statement that the FARC killed Uribe Sierra during a kidnapping attempt. He stood by most of the other content in the report. [5]

These and other similar accusations have already been made several times in the past against Uribe, especially during this 2002 election campaign and in a book published by Newsweek's same Joseph Contreras, one of the authors of the August 2004 article and of earlier features on Colombia and Uribe. They have always been denied by Uribe and his supporters but some of his critics continue to express their preoccupation about them, though they have not committed to any legal action regarding the charges.

See also: Politics of Colombia