President George W. Bush congratulates President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia after presenting him with the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009, during ceremonies in the East Room of the White House. (White House photo by Chris Greenberg)
First Ever Criminal Conviction of a Former Colombian Head of State
Declassified Documents Detail Uribe’s Alleged Ties to Paramilitaries and Narcotraffickers
Washington, D.C., July 29, 2025 - In a historic decision, Alvaro Uribe Velez yesterday became the first former president of Colombia to be found guilty of a crime, a landmark ruling that could clear the way for him to be prosecuted for more serious violations. While the conviction is for bribery and procedural fraud, at its core the long-running case is about Uribe’s alleged support for paramilitary groups and narcotraffickers responsible for massacres and other acts of violence.
On Monday, the former president, senator and governor from Antioquia Department was convicted of trying to bribe a paramilitary witness to change damaging testimony that incriminated him, a serious crime that could land the 73-year-old in jail for a decade or more. With his guilt now established by the court, it seems an appropriate time to review how the U.S. evaluated the many allegations that have been leveled against Uribe over the years.
The first major National Security Archive revelation about Uribe came more than 20 years ago with the publication of a declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report from 1991 on “Important Colombian Narco-Traffickers.” Listed on page 10 next to cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar and international arms trafficker Adnan Khashoggi is “Alvaro Uribe Velez,” who is identified as “a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels.” Uribe is described as “a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who has “worked for the Medellin Cartel.”
U.S. and Colombian media reported widely on the DIA report linking Uribe to Escobar, and subsequent Freedom of Information Act requests later revealed that the news reached the highest levels of the Pentagon. The September 2004 memo to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from Peter Rodman, one of his top aides, informed the Pentagon chief that, “A recently declassified 1991 U.S. military intelligence report linked Colombian President Uribe to narcotraffickers, specifically Pablo Escober, head of the Medellin Cartel.” While Rodman seemed skeptical about Uribe’s alleged ties to Escobar, he wrote that, “Uribe almost certainly had dealings with the paramilitaries (AUC) while governor of Antioquia—it goes with the job.”
Despite Rodman’s doubts, a collection of declassified State Department documents published by the National Security Archive in 2018 (and also featured in the New York Times) shows that for years U.S. diplomats harbored serious concerns about Uribe’s links to the narcos—listing him, for example, on a cable identifying suspected Colombian “Narcopols.” In another case, an Uribe ally told the Embassy that the notorious Ochoa Vásquez brothers, co-founders of the Medellín Cartel, had “financed” Uribe’s Senate campaign. In another cable, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Morris Busby, who coordinated U.S. efforts to help Colombia take down Pablo Escobar, said he believed there was “substance to the rumors” that Uribe and other politicians had ties to narcotics interests.
A somewhat more vivid account from the U.S. Embassy in Colombia in 1997 tells the story of Jorge Valencia Cardona, a dentist, rancher, and congressional alternate who at the time represented a rural district in eastern Antioquia that was home to the AUC’s Metro Bloc and the Uribe family’s “Guacharacas” ranch.
Though they represented rival political parties, Valencia said he admired then-governor Uribe for his hardline position on the guerrillas and his strong endorsement of the government-backed “Convivir” militias. Valencia also said that Uribe was among a group of cattle ranchers who paid paramilitaries “to go after guerrillas,” according to the cable.
According to Valencia, Uribe strongly supports the Convivirs and hates the guerrillas, in part because the latter murdered his father. Uribe has ties to local cattle ranchers and other landowners, and was himself a cattle rancher. These landowners in turn pay paramilitaries to go after guerrillas.
The congressman told the Embassy that some of the local Convivirs backed by Uribe “probably cooperate actively with paramilitaries” and were passing information to them instead of the Colombian Army. Valencia “drew a diagram to show the web of relationships between the governor, Convivirs, landowners, paramilitaries, and guerrillas.”
Underlining his point, Valencia described a harrowing encounter with paramilitaries who threatened to kill him when he was unable to provide the information that they wanted. “What saved him,” according to the cable, “were some documents in his briefcase that showed he knew Antioquia Governor Alvaro Uribe Velez.”
“Saying, ‘Oh, you know El Viejo,’ his captors released him and have not bothered him since,” according to Valencia’s account, using a nickname for Uribe that means “the old man.”
Interestingly, “El Viejo” is the same moniker used by Uribe confidant Carlos Eduardo López to refer to the former president in his intercepted communication with Juan Guillermo Monsalve, the imprisoned paramilitary member whose testimony, and Uribe’s efforts to suborn it, are the central features of the current case.
Accounts like Valencia’s are supported by the recollections of eyewitnesses who said the Uribe family ranch was the operational base of a deadly paramilitary group. Key testimony in that case was reviewed by the New York Times and the National Security Archive in 2018.
Critics of Uribe celebrated the conviction and hope that the first-ever criminal conviction of a Colombian president will clear the way for Uribe to be held responsible for far more serious allegations, including the formation of a paramilitary group during the 1990s and the murder by Colombian Army soldiers of some 6,400 civilians in the so-called “false positives” scandal that tarnished his eight-year presidency.
Even with the historic conviction, Uribe and his legal team are likely to appeal the ruling, guaranteeing that the process will drag on for years to come. The National Security Archive will continue to report on new developments in the case and to fight for the timely declassification and release of information pertinent to these and other human rights crimes in Colombia.