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From the son of the butler of the Uribe Vélez hacienda to an alleged member of the Metro Bloque de las Autodefensas, to later become a witness against former president Álvaro Uribe. This is the story of Juan G. Monsalve and what he has declared.
“He said no, that Uribe had said that I knew him very well, that he was by word of mouth.” This is how Juan Guillermo Monsalve declared to the Supreme Court about the presumed pressure he would have received to retract the allegations that he has made of links between former President Álvaro Uribe and paramilitaries. When he spoke of “him,” in this 2018 statement, he was referring to lawyer Diego Cadena, who visited him in La Picota prison and, apparently, came with a ready retraction form that Monsalve only had to sign. Since 2012, this man has been gaining relevance to the point of being called the “star witness” in the case that has advanced the most in justice against the former president.
(Also read: Uribe case: Juan Monsalve’s lawyer says that “there will never be a retraction”)
This Friday, March 5, according to several sources, the term would expire for the prosecutor in charge of the Uribe case, Gabriel Jaimes (a confidant of the prosecutor Francisco Barbosa), to decide whether to call the former president to trial or if he asks that the investigation be closed. As this newspaper has told, the prosecutor has collected multiple pieces of evidence in the six months that he has been in the investigation. Several of them have been about Monsalve: with whom he spoke on the phone, what is going on in a process for the extinction of ownership of a farm owned by his ex-wife and how a watch with which he recorded a meeting with Cadena was entered into prison, among others. Monsalve refused to speak at the Prosecutor’s Office, so Jaimes will have to use what the “star witness” declared in Court.
This statement was given by Monsalve to Sandra Lucía Yepes Arroyave, assistant magistrate of the Court, on February 23, 2018 in the La Picota prison in Bogotá. The togada asked who Cadena had told her that it was by word of mouth. Monsalve replied: “Álvaro Uribe, what I needed, that he wouldn’t let me stay here [en la cárcel] and what I needed and he promised a lot that I would get into the JEP ”. That was the starting point for the Court to launch the investigation against the former president and natural leader of the Democratic Center for witness tampering. Specifically, for the crimes of procedural fraud and bribery.
(You may be interested: the Prosecutor’s Office already has data from Monsalve’s cell phone, warns the Supreme Court)
The arrival of the assistant magistrate to the jail was not random. A few days earlier, the defense of Senator Iván Cepeda had alerted the Court that Monsalve would be receiving pressure to change his testimony. The Polo congressman and the witness had contacted years before, which led Uribe to denounce Cepeda for witness tampering in 2012. Monsalve stated in a video, which Cepeda showed in a debate in Congress in 2014, that the The Metro de las Autodefensas block was created on the Guacharacas farm, located on the border between San Roque and Yarumal (Antioquia), which was, for many years, owned by the Uribe Vélez family.
Juan Guillermo Monsalve is the son of Óscar Monsalve, former butler of Guacharacas. According to the statement he delivered in 2012, he witnessed meetings, at the end of the 1990s, with Álvaro Uribe, his brother Santiago, Luis Alberto and Juan Guillermo Villegas, Santiago Gallón and John Jairo Franco in which it was agreed to form the paramilitary group. He also claims to have been in the ranks of the Metro Block – although he is convicted of crimes not related to paramilitarism – and that, while he was in prison, it was he who sought out Cepeda to give him his version. Uribe’s defense affirms that the former president had not set foot on the ranch since the 1980s, that the family sold it in the 1990s and that Monsalve was never a paramilitary, since even Justicia y Paz rejected him.
(You may be interested: Uribe’s Defense presents a new witness and asks the Prosecutor’s Office to evaluate its veracity)
On the day of the debate in which Cepeda showed the testimony, Álvaro Uribe left the Capitol, crossed the Plaza de Bolívar and entered the Palace of Justice to expand his complaint for witness tampering against Cepeda. That process was carried out by the Criminal Chamber of the Court, which on February 17, 2018 decided to refrain from continuing to investigate Cepeda due to lack of evidence and, instead, ordered the former president to be investigated for possible pressure on the witnesses against him. Uribe’s defense had a few days to present an appeal for reconsideration and, apparently, it was then that the lawyer Cadena appeared, to seek that ex-paramilitaries to recant, send their statements to the Court and thus reverse the decision.
Through Enrique Pardo Hasche, Monsalve’s patio companion, Cadena made contact with the witness. “I was there in the Paz pavilion (in La Picota) and more or less since December a man who was confined there with me began to tell me that what did I gain from talking about Uribe and being with Iván Cepeda. What benefits did he give me? I said none, that I started by looking for Justice and Peace and he told me that he (had) a way to talk to the people of Uribe, ”Monsalve told the Court in February 2018.
(Also read: The prosecution’s time trial in the Uribe case)
One day before the assistant magistrate took her statement, Monsalve received a visit from Diego Cadena, which he recorded. Pardo Hasche was also at the meeting and that conversation, for the Instruction Room, was one of Uribe’s pressures. “Clearly, the bridge or intermediary to reach Monsalve was Pardo Hasche and if such efforts benefited the interests of Senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez and his family, it is reasonable to infer that he is the person who gave the instructions for Pardo to approach Monsalve and convinced him to retract in his favor, ”reads the order that ordered the arrest of the former president in August 2020.
Monsalve has told justice and in interviews that he began to tell about the Uribe’s possible links with the Metro Block since he sought to enter Justicia y Paz, but that they never paid attention to him. It was only after he spoke with Cepeda that his name began to be known and his life, he has said, was at risk. “On March 23, 2012, a Friday afternoon, I was finishing dinner when I was going to the cell and two boys came running and started shooting me with knives,” he told journalist Daniel Coronell in an interview last year , on the attack that claims to have lived in the Cómbita prison (Boyacá)
(See: Enrique Pardo Hasche’s contradictions in the Uribe case)
Due to the importance of his testimony, the Court ordered that the former paramilitary receive special protection measures in prison, such as cooking his own food, as he has said that they tried to poison him. Now he lives alone in a fiscal house in La Picota because, although there were other big shots from the toga cartel and Odebrecht there, after an operation, in January 2020, in which they found cell phones, computers, liquor and televisions, the INPEC sent them all to regular cells; everyone except Monsalve. Although the director of INPEC insisted to the magistrate who was handling the Uribe case, César Reyes, to remove those measures from the witness, the robed did not agree.
A profiteer?
“Monsalve has used that figure of protection to take advantage,” an INPEC source told this newspaper who asked not to be named. The viewer He learned, for example, the details of that 2020 operation, in which they found the witness a cell phone, a printer, a computer and $ 152,000 in cash. According to official INPEC documents, there were two visitors in Monsalve’s cell during the search, although who they were is not specified. And when the former paramilitary asked him if everything found was his, he confirmed it immediately, hoping that by admitting it the penalty would be less.
In the end they sanctioned him by depriving him of receiving nine visits. But this was not Monsalve’s only jail scandal. “He has an atypical behavior, he is aggressive towards other inmates,” said the INPEC source. Already in 2017, according to statements by one of his former cellmates, he had been caught at a party organized by Emilio Tapia, a convicted former contractor of the recruitment carousel in Bogotá, and was about to be transferred, but Senator Cepeda would have stopped this . Although he did not refer to the party, Monsalve declared in court: “They were going to send me to Valledupar to a punishment jail, they were going to send me there and then I told Don Iván [Cepeda] and Don Iván collaborated with me ”.
