Iván Cepeda: “Uribe has made immense efforts to obstruct the work of justice” | International

Iván Cepeda (Bogotá, 1962), senator of Colombia for the Polo Democrático, is a victim in the process for manipulating witnesses against former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who has spent the last month under house arrest at his El Ubérrimo farm by order of the Supreme Court of Justice. The intricate case involving the former president, political mentor of President Iván Duque and leader of the Democratic Center, the ruling party, went to a new stage this week, when the high court decided to send the file to the Attorney General’s Office as a result of the resignation. de Uribe to his seat in the Senate.

The case began in 2012, the year in which Cepeda tried to demonstrate Uribe’s alleged links with paramilitarism. Uribe then presented a complaint against Cepeda to the Court, in charge of investigating the congressmen, accusing him of a plot with the purpose of involving him in those activities. The investigations were turned upside down in 2018, when the high court refrained from prosecuting Cepeda and instead asked to investigate the former president on the suspicion that it was he and his lawyers who manipulated witnesses in Colombian jails against the left-wing senator.

Cepeda, who had defended that the Supreme Court should maintain its jurisdiction in the Uribe case, presented this Wednesday a challenge against the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, a close friend of President Duque, to withdraw from the investigations due to the lack of guarantees of impartiality. The senator accuses the former president of an “attitude of attack on institutions” in this telephone interview with EL PAÍS.

Question. In his opinion, the Supreme Court should maintain jurisdiction in the case against Álvaro Uribe, but the high court sent the process to the Prosecutor’s Office. What do you think of that decision?

Reply. It is a decision that I do not share, but that I abide by. I believe that a case of this dimension and significance, with a figure who has such political power, cannot be assumed simply by a prosecutor or a judge of an ordinary circuit. Because if the pressure that has been unleashed against the members of the Supreme Court has been of the depth and nature that we have seen, what can we expect when this reaches the hands of a judicial operator who will have much greater vulnerability. The Court has presented legal arguments, I respect them. But a new situation is configured, and it will be necessary to go step by step and evaluate what are the behaviors and decisions that the prosecutor makes.

P. Why did you decide to recuse the prosecutor Francisco Barbosa?

R. Because it is clear that he has a close connection with the president, with the government, with the ruling party. And in those instances, and in relation to the president, Uribe is a determining person. Although the prosecutor may not have had a friendship or intimate relationship with Uribe, this does not mean that his behavior and decisions do not determine that environment to which the former president belongs, and to which the prosecutor Barbosa is undoubtedly indissolubly bound.

P. Can’t this challenge end in new and greater delays in the process against the former president for bribery and procedural fraud?

R. No, it seems to me that it is an absolutely legitimate procedure and typical of any instance. Here it is not a question of delaying or prolonging this, but neither is it about our rights being violated, and in that we must take the time that is necessary.

P. The former president has alleged that he had no guarantees in the Supreme Court. Do you think he had them?

R. What I think is that Uribe uses justice as a kind of suit, or a restaurant menu. He likes it until he fulfills his interest and his purposes, but once he observes that the decisions or the actions of the magistrates do not conform to what he thinks they should be, a phase of attacks begins, first moderate and then a pitched battle against justice. And so it has been on other occasions. What has happened with this story, in which we have been for nine years, is that Uribe denounces me, takes all the evidence; When the investigation begins to take shape, Uribe miraculously begins to say that he has no guarantees, when he has presented all the evidence, he has had all the means to accuse me, and then to defend himself. It is a furious campaign in which the magistrates are accused of gangsters, kidnappers, in which a company is hired to discredit them in the United States. This is not a lack of guarantees, it is an attitude of attack on the institutions and of disloyalty to justice. Uribe is not a democrat.

P. The Attorney General’s Office recently asked to send the file to the Prosecutor’s Office, but also confirmed his acquittal. Why does Uribe’s defense insist on asking for his case to be reviewed?

R. Because he is not resigned to having lost that battle. Uribe is a deeply vengeful man, he is not used to losing, he does not have the ability to admit his defeats or his mistakes. And it is obsessive. He will die asking that this process be opened against me, perhaps his last words and wishes are those.

P. What do you think of the former president’s legal strategy?

R. It is a strategy full of actions that have led the Court to investigate him for crimes today. More than a judicial strategy, here there has been a kind of conspiracy to commit a crime.

P. What is your expectation regarding the progress of the process in the Prosecutor’s Office?

R. There is one of a legal nature. I hope that progress will be made towards a trial and that Uribe will be convicted for having committed these crimes, but also that progress will be made in other legal proceedings against him. Because this case is a consequence of other cases. If what is being investigated is true, Uribe would be trying to cover up events from the past, which are very serious. Having created a paramilitary group, that this paramilitary group has committed massacres, that it has buried people who disappeared on its farm, it is necessary to clarify it from the judicial point of view. But there is another plane, just as or more important, political and political pedagogy. It is very important that Colombian public opinion can compare what are the attitudes and behaviors of Uribe and mine in the face of justice. In that there is an abysmal difference, and that is that I respect justice. Whatever the result. If I see that there are no guarantees, I will say that there were none, but I will adhere to a respectful behavior of the institutions. That is not Uribe’s attitude.

P. Should the investigation start over or resume from where it left off in court?

R. There is no valid reason for what has been investigated to be overturned. Uribe has been investigated by the Supreme Court of Criminal Justice in Colombia. What reason would there be to annul the proceedings of that court? That would be a prevarication if the prosecutor does it.

P. Should the Prosecutor’s Office immediately release Uribe, as his defense demands?

R. No way. The measure was taken because the Court said that Uribe could obstruct justice, and if something has become clear in this month that has elapsed after his arrest, it is that, even while under that home confinement, Uribe has deployed immense efforts and resources to obstruct the work of justice. What has been shown is that the measure was totally fair and necessary.