Álvaro Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010 and founder of the Democratic Centre (CD) party. He left office with an approval rating of 75%. On August 1st 2025 he was sentenced for bribery and perverting the course of justice to 12 years under house arrest—the first Colombian president to be convicted in court. His supporters claim he is a victim of political persecution.
Mr Uribe's father was kidnapped and murdered by the FARC in 1983. When he was elected in 2002, Colombia was close to becoming a failed state. The communist FARC, other guerrilla groups and the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) controlled large swathes of the country.
Promising security, Mr Uribe built up the army and the police, enabling the state to recover much territory. He slashed coca cultivation, depriving armed groups of income, and persuaded the AUC to demobilise; some of its leaders were jailed. His security build-up enabled his successor and former defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, to reach a peace agreement with the weakened FARC. Out of office, he turned on Mr Santos and campaigned against the 2016 peace agreement.
The biggest stain on Mr Uribe's record was the "false positives": some 6,000 young men killed by the army and passed off as guerrillas, though they were not. Mr Uribe claimed not to know, but critics argued he had set incentives to raise the army's "kill rate". His intelligence service snooped on judges and opponents before being shut down.
The case dates to 2012, when Mr Uribe filed a criminal complaint against Iván Cepeda, a left-wing senator who had brought witnesses into Congress to claim that the Uribe brothers had formed a right-wing paramilitary group on one of their ranches in the 1990s. To advance his case, Mr Uribe hired Diego Cadena, a lawyer notorious for working for some of Colombia's top drug-traffickers. Mr Cadena was accused of having offered jailed paramilitaries money and legal benefits to change their testimony against Mr Uribe; some of the conversations were taped. The Supreme Court in 2018 quashed charges against Mr Cepeda and opened a case against Mr Uribe. The judge said Mr Uribe "knew his action was illicit."
On August 1st 2025 Mr Uribe was sentenced for bribery and perverting the course of justice to 12 years under house arrest—the first Colombian president to be convicted in court. On October 21st 2025 the conviction was overturned. Gustavo Petro immediately alleged that Donald Trump, "allied with these politicians and with Uribe", would seek sanctions against his government. Mr Uribe's supporters have cried "lawfare" and Mr Trump's administration quickly echoed that.
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