Uribismo after Uribe

Miguel Uribe Turbay, a Colombian senator and presidential candidate for the far-right Centro Democrático, died from gunshot wounds on 11 August after nearly three months in hospital. The authorities have six suspects in custody but it remains unclear who was behind the assassination. Some fingers point at one of the FARC dissident groups, though no one knows. Uribe Turbay’s death marks the country’s first magnicide since the elections of 1990, in which three left-wing candidates were assassinated.

President Gustavo Petro – elected in 2022 following a cycle of radical protest and mobilisation without precedent in contemporary Colombian history – stayed away from Uribe Turbay’s funeral, at the request of the family. Cardinal José Luis Rueda said mass in the Plaza de Bolívar before mourners proceeded to the Catedral Primada de Colombia, where Uribe Turbay’s mother, Diana Turbay Quintero – murdered by Pablo Escobar in 1991 – is buried. The coffin was draped with the Colombian flag. Uribe Turbay’s father, Miguel Uribe Londoño, thanked Álvaro Uribe Vélez, his son’s political patron, and sounded the charge for the elections next year. The Bogotá Philharmonic played, and Yuri Buenaventura sang ‘El Guerrero’.

Uribe Vélez’s wife and son were at the funeral, along with the US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, but Uribe Vélez himself, the president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, couldn’t be present because he was under house arrest. On 28 July, he was convicted of witness tampering and fraude procesal and sentenced to twelve years of home confinement. Hundreds of Uribe’s former political allies and close associates, including his cousin Mario, have been sent to prison for their ties to paramilitary organisations, but Uribe Vélez is the first former president to be convicted of a crime.

On 19 August, however, a court released him from house arrest, pending his appeal. Uribe Vélez isn’t considered a flight risk. Since he owns a sizeable portion of Colombia’s prime ranch land, it’s hard to imagine him far from Antioquia or Córdoba for long.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Uribe Vélez’s trial, apart from its finishing before the allotted time expired in October, was the fact that Juan Guillermo Monsalve (a former paramilitary, now in prison) and Monsalve’s ex-wife, Deyanira Gómez (in exile), survived to testify. Over the years, most witnesses turned up dead. In 2012, after Senator Iván Cepeda – whose father, a left-wing politician, was murdered by paramilitaries in 1994 – denounced Uribe Vélez’s crimes in the Senate, Uribe accused him of bribing witnesses. In 2018, the court dismissed the case again Cepeda, and opened an investigation into Uribe Vélez.

Though his fate will be less ignominious than that of Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru who spent most of his later life in prison, Uribe Vélez’s conviction is a remarkable triumph for the independence of Colombia’s judicial branch from political control. The trial was the most important stress test the courts have faced since the 1991 constitution was ratified. Judge Sandra Heredia and her family received credible death threats.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, tweeted that the verdict had to be politically motivated, given Uribe Vélez’s close relationship with the US – a sentiment that Uribe Vélez and his sons echoed. This is close to the opposite of the truth. (Trump and Bolsonaro have also claimed that judicial action against them was politically motivated.) Uribe Vélez could face further charges in the future, relating to his alleged involvement in two massacres that took place while he was governor of Antioquia.

Questions remain as to how the far right, on the one hand, and progressives on the other – although social movements are numerous and diverse, there is no organised left in Colombia – will respond to Uribe Turbay’s death and Uribe Vélez’s conviction. Since the shooting in June, the far right has made political hay through mass demonstrations and fearmongering, using Uribe Vélez’s playbook (security, terrorism, communist subversion, Venezuela). Uribe Turbay’s widow, Maria Claudia Tarazona, may be considering a run for president.

The rhetoric is likely to ratchet up ahead of the elections next March. And violence from FARC dissidents plays into the hands of the uribista right. Yesterday (21 August) a car bomb at a military flight school in Cali killed six and injured more than sixty, while twelve police officers died in a separate drone attack on a helicopter in Antioquia.