Colombian Supreme Court orders arrest of former President Álvaro Uribe

The Colombian Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the arrest of former president and Colombian political giant Alvaro Uribe. Colombia is a country where all former presidents have been investigated by the justice system, but none had been deprived of their freedom. Until now. The house arrest of the former president of the country between 2002 and 2010 marks a milestone in Colombian politics.

According to the court, the detention "has as its basis a large amount of evidentiary material collected and analyzed by the Chamber" which includes "testimonial evidence, judicial inspections, film records and telephone interceptions that apparently indicate his alleged participation as a determinant of the crimes of bribery of witnesses and fraud.

The former commander, now a senator for the right-wing Democratic Centre party, was being investigated for dozens of crimes, most of them related to the emergence of anti-subversive groups in the 1990s and human rights violations.

But the legal proceedings that have led Uribe to be held in his home have their origin in a 2012 parliamentary debate that he himself brought to court.

That year, the leftist senator from the Alternative Democratic Pole, Iván Cepeda, accused Santiago Uribe, the former president's brother, of participating in the creation of paramilitary groups, such as the Twelve Apostles or the Metro Bloc, which were dedicated to confronting the guerrillas, leaving thousands of victims.

To prove these accusations, Cepeda used several testimonies of former members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, such as that of Juan Guillermo Monsalve. 

Before these accusations, Uribe asked the Supreme Court of Justice to investigate Cepeda for bribery and manipulation of witnesses. 

But the investigations into this case turned against Uribe and led the Court to examine whether the former commander tried to influence the testimony of an alleged paramilitary member to retract statements linking Uribe to the creation of paramilitary groups. The main evidence of the alleged manipulation would be some recordings between Diego Cadena, the former president's lawyer, and Monsalve, where the extortion of the former over the latter to change his testimony can be seen.

If he is finally found guilty of these crimes, Uribe could face approximately six to eight years in prison, although, according to The New York Times, he is likely to spend the sentence under house arrest. Although the judges handling the case have not yet filed formal charges against Uribe, the Colombian justice system allows judges to detain pending indictment if they believe there is a risk of flight or that there could be a tampering with the evidence.

For his part, Uribe has defended his innocence and denied any connection with paramilitary groups. "The deprivation of my freedom causes me deep sadness for my wife, for my family and for the Colombians who still believe that I have done something good for the country," the former Colombian president wrote on his personal Twitter account. Colombian President Iván Duque defended the "innocence and honorability" of his political mentor. "It hurts as a Colombian that many of those who have lacerated the country with barbarism defend themselves in freedom or are even guaranteed never to go to prison, and that an exemplary public servant, who has occupied the highest dignity of the State, is not allowed to defend himself in freedom, with the presumption of innocence," Duque said.

The other protagonist of the judicial process, Senator Cepeda, valued the decision as an opportunity to "consolidate democracy. "Colombia has been a country with monarchical tendencies in which certain political figures are untouchable. Well, here there can be no one above the Constitution, above the law and above justice," said the senator.

This arrest has plunged the Andean country even further into a political fracture among those who defend Uribe and describe him as "the savior of the homeland" because of his fight against the FARC guerrillas, during his time in government, as opposed to the other half of the country who celebrated Uribe's arrest and who see in him a criminal with links to the killing of peasants by paramilitaries, the murder of civilians and the so-called "false positives" - extrajudicial executions - as well as corruption and spying on opponents.

This polarization was seen in the streets of Colombia. Groups of supporters and opponents of the former president took to the streets of the main cities to demonstrate for or against house arrest.