April 21, 2022
The influence of Álvaro Uribe Vélez in shaping Colombian reality dates back more than 20 years. He has been the personal representation of a transnational project that has not only sought to turn Colombia into a safe enclave of raw materials but a geostrategic one from which to influence the rest of South America and the Caribbean.
It can be accurately said that Uribism has ruled Colombia since 2002 because former President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018), was its political ally and projected himself politically after being an official of a Uribist government.
Inequality and Uribe-branded crimes
One of the determining aspects of the Uribista legacy has been the deepening of social inequality by strengthening the direct and indirect drivers of this scourge, one of which has to do with land tenure which, together with the neoliberal intoxication of the economy, sustains a process of accumulation that produces exclusion and violence in an accelerated manner, even when macroeconomic figures say otherwise.
Land grabbing is a big part of a structural problem in Colombia, it is the origin of the political dispute that has led to 200 years of war in the country with the cruelest oligarchy in Latin America that tends to concentrate land ownership not for production, but for speculative purposes or territorial control. The guerrilla movements, parapolitics, massacres and the displacement of millions of peasants are fed by this dispute.
The degree of inequality in the distribution of an asset such as land is usually measured through the Gini Index, a measure that ranges from 0.0 (absolute equality) to 1.0 (a single landowner owns the entire asset). According to the 2015 National Agricultural Census, Colombia has a Gini Index for land of 0.90 and this makes it the country with the 5th highest concentration of land.
Farms larger than 500 hectares, which were 32% of the land in 1995, grew to 62% of the national surface in 2015, controlled by 4% of the owners.
Much of the analysis of Uribe’s criminal legacy focuses on the continuous human rights violations carried out during Uribe’s governments, which are a mark of his political legacy due to the fact that several people from his entourage have been imprisoned, and others have judicial processes, for cases such as the Yidispolitica, where votes were bought in Congress to approve his reelection.
In the Agro Ingreso Seguro case, landowners divided their land to access multiple subsidies and in the DAS “chuzadas” case, where telephone communications were intercepted and opponents were followed. The networks of informants put the population at risk and turned them into actors of the conflict and in 2018, the Superior Court of Antioquia requested to initiate an investigation against Uribe Vélez for his possible relationship with the paramilitary massacres and his possible links with
paramilitaries and it was made known to the public that there are more than 28 judicial processes against him in the Supreme Court of Justice that are stuck and not advancing.
The voracious construction of power
Beyond this bloody legacy as such, there is the fabric of power and illicit enrichment that have been woven in a dizzying and unstoppable way. The investigative journalism portal Cuestión Pública published a timeline of Álvaro Uribe Vélez as a public servant and his wealth.
The political leader, born in Medellín in 1952, began his career as a public servant in 1976-1977 when he was appointed head of assets at Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), a time when the company Inversiones Uribe Vélez Ltda. was also registered. He went through other positions as secretary general of the Ministry of Labor, director of the Administrative Department of Civil Aeronautics (1980-1982), mayor of Medellín (1982), councilman of Medellín (1984-1986), senator of the Republic (1986-1994), governor of Antioquia (1995-1997), president of the Republic (2002-2010) and again senator (2014-2018).
His family ties are fundamental to analyze his behavior not only in politics but also in business, his father Alberto Uribe Sierra died at the hands of FARC-EP guerrillas in June 1983, it is said that after his death the Uribe Velez family suffered a big economic crisis and that these events determined his sponsorship of paramilitary groups in revenge for the murder of his father. The FARC-EP denies responsibility for the assassination.
Allegedly, the businessman and cattle rancher Uribe Sierra had relations with drug trafficking sectors; his helicopter was found in the largest cocaine laboratory owned by Pablo Escobar, called Tranquilandia, in 1984. The press reported that, after his death, the helicopter that his son Álvaro Uribe used to reach the farm to pick up his corpse was also owned by Pablo Escobar.
Alvaro Uribe married Lina Moreno in 1979, a philosopher who signed as a “housewife” when she bought from the former mayor of Cereté (Córdoba), Alfonso Spath Spath, the property “California” for 4.7 million pesos, in the rural area of Montería. Today, the Balmoral Country Estate is being built on this property, a development that has been the object of investigative interest due to many inconsistencies.
In 2008, then President Uribe and his former Minister of Agriculture Andrés Felipe Arias signed Decree 732, which ordered to inject resources to the district of Mocarí, among others, where the California property, now Balmoral, is located.
The congressmen, Alirio Uribe and Iván Cepeda, state in their book Por las sendas de El Ubérrimo that former president Uribe has benefited in a non-accidental way from State investments in areas close to his properties because the referred signature could have been made to “prioritize investments that favored his own properties and those of his wife and children’s company and he did not declare himself impeded to do so”.
The core of Uribe’s praxis
Since 1981, when Sociedad Uribe Vélez Asociados Ltd. was founded, there have been many businesses of the Uribe family and also many properties acquired. According to Cuestión Pública, they have bought 80 properties and sold 22.
The livestock company Agropecuaria El Uberrimo S.A.S. was founded by the Uribe Moreno family in 1990, it is the icon that prefigures the image of the Uribe owner, the former first lady Lina Moreno de Uribe, is its legal representative and holds 50% of the shares.
In particular, together with her sons Tomás and Jerónimo have founded or participated in companies such as Área Proyectos Inmobiliarios S.A., in Medellín (2001), Ecoeficiencia Co S.A.S., dedicated to the recycling business (2003) and Achlys Investment Corporation, a Panamanian company dissolved in 2014, about which the sons of the so-called “Matarife” would have recognized their ownership in the midst of the scandal over the lands of the Zona Franca de Occidente along with another of his companies, Yogur S. A, founded in 2008 and called Desarrollo e Innovaciones Inmobiliarias S.A.S. which is “in liquidation”.
The process of enrichment of the Uribe Moreno brothers from the valuation of some properties in the municipality of Mosquera, when they were declared Free Zone, was stopped when the political opposition to Uribe Vélez exposed it.
They are also mentioned as shareholders in other companies such as Promotora Gransabana SA (2007), Ecoindustry S. A. (2008), Innovative Andina S.A. (2009) and in Asia American Investment S.A. (2009). (2009) and Asia American Investment Corporation, which was incorporated in the commercial registry of the British Virgin Islands in 2008, as it was revealed through the Offshore Leaks, an investigation of the International Consortium of Journalists (ICIJ), later the Uribe brothers said they canceled the investment.
In real estate, the Uribe Moreno brothers own shares in Sapia C.I. S.A.S., which in 2009 absorbed Salvarte (2001), a handicrafts company and from where they exited in 2017. Also 31416 SAS (2013), Vele Inv S.A.S.(2013), and Jaguar Capital SAS, promoter of a network of shopping centers called “Nuestro”, where Tomás Uribe Moreno is legal representative. The latter has opened malls in Apartadó (Antioquia, 2015), Soledad (Atlántico, 2017) and Montería (Córdoba, 2017). Jerónimo Uribe Moreno has been the legal representative of Servicios de Ingenieria de Datos S.A.S., an IT consulting firm.
The slow pace of justice
Last April 13, the Constitutional Court upheld Uribe Velez’s indictment for his alleged bribery of witnesses and procedural fraud by a vote of 9 to 0. His defense pointed out that there was a “violation of impartiality and judicial independence” by some of the judges who made the decision and argued that this represents a “violation of the fundamental right to due process”, for which reason they requested the annulment of the ruling.
This is one of the cases in which justice has made more progress but remains in a non-decisive phase, however it motivated his surprise resignation from the Senate in 2018. The case began in 2014 when the former president denounced Congressman Iván Cepeda for allegedly visiting witnesses in prisons to testify against him.
Cepeda had denounced Uribe for the link he had with two paramilitaries identified as Pablo Hernán Sierra and Juan Guillermo Monsalve, to form the Metro Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá in the Las Guacharacas hacienda, then owned by his family and where the murder of his father occurred.
In February 2018, the Court archived the process against Cepeda and considered that there was evidence that it was the other way around, and that the one who was the victim of the alleged false witnesses was Cepeda and not Uribe Vélez. Some facts:
Sierra and Monsalve told Cepeda that in the late 1990s, when Uribe was Governor of Antioquia, the paramilitary group emerged.
Sierra indicated that Álvaro Uribe, his brother Santiago, and other ranchers in the region “were the bosses and creators of that structure,” and linked them to the orders for several homicides.
According to the Supreme Court, lawyer Diego Cadena contacted former members of paramilitary groups in different prisons to prepare writings and videos in favor of Senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez and his brother Santiago, in exchange for legal favors and money.
The former prosecutor of Justice and Peace (process of “pacification” of paramilitary groups), Hilda Niño Farfán, and Álvaro Prada Artunduaga, senator of the Democratic Center (Uribe’s party) in Huila, collaborated with Uribe’s cause.
In Colombia there is an interdependence between land possession and the income of the possessor and, although it is a colonial heritage, Uribism has intensified it. The spiral of enrichment and accumulation of power by Uribe Vélez, his family and allied sectors, allows a certain doctrine of shock to prevail, in which the armed conflict and the arms trade benefit the elites. They also benefit from the lack of control over property rights, which makes it one of the countries with the highest rates of displacement in the world, resulting in more social inequality and cultural dispossession.
On the other hand, drug trafficking in Colombia has generated an almost independent economic system and with it sources of low payed illegal labor, of low without any benefits worker, while the juicy profits are enjoyed by a few capos without even paying taxes or contributing to any economic development of the country.
It is in this chain of realities where Uribe sits as a top predator.
Source: Mision Verdad, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English