Alleged 1991 drug business involvement of Álvaro Uribe

From Freepedia

Alleged 1991 drug business involvement of Álvaro Uribe was an article published on the first week of August 2004 by Newsweek's Joseph Contreras that questioned the recent talks with the AUC and explored the possibility of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe's administration letting fighters with ties to the drug business go free, included references to a recently unclassified 1991 U.S. military-intelligence report about the Medellín Cartel that included Alvaro Uribe's name in a list of collaborators of the organization, stating that the then senator allegedly would have had personal links to Pablo Escobar, helped the drug lord in his campaign to be elected to Congress as part of a list, and was opposed to extradition of captured drug lords to the U.S.. The same document also claimed that Uribe's father would have died due to conflicts with narcotics traffickers [1].

The text reads: "Alvaro Uribe Velez - A Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S. His father was murdered in Colombia for his connection with the narcotic traffickers. Uribe has worked for the Medellin cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria. He has participated in Escobar's political campaign to win the position of assistant parliamentarian to Jorge ((Ortega)). Uribe has been one of the politicians, from the Senate, who has attacked all forms of the extradition treaty."

The publication of this previously classified report, originally released through the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, an independent NGO [2], produced immediate controversy worldwide.

Reactions

On August 1st, the U.S. Department of State's spokesman Robert Zimmerman officially replied to the document: "We completely reject these allegations about president Uribe. We do not have credible information that can corroborate or give substance to a nonevaluated report that dates from 1991 and which ties president Uribe with the drug business." [3]

Likewise, on that same date the Colombian government released a communique in response, which pointed out that the 1991 document itself indicates that the information contained within was "not finally evaluated":

1. This information is the same one that, in its moment, was part of the attacks which President Alvaro Uribe Vélez was subjected to during his presidential campaign.
2. In 1991, Alvaro Uribe Vélez, then Senator, was in the United States in an academic program of the University of Harvard, while the Constituent Assembly met, a period during which the revocation of Congress took place.
3. Álvaro Uribe Vélez has not had businesses of any type abroad. As explained during his campaign to the media, when the subject was mentioned, he only had two banking accounts abroad: one in a Bank of Boston, associate to the University of Harvard and another one in Oxford, England, while he was in that university in 1998. He does not have a single property abroad.
4. Alberto Uribe Sierra, father of the President, was assassinated by the 5th front of the FARC on June 14th 1983 when resisting a kidnapping attempt. Uribe Sierra faced his kidnappers; his son Santiago was wounded during the confrontation.
5. Álvaro Uribe Vélez was elected Senator in three opportunities: in 1986, 1990 and 1991 as member of the Liberal movement “Directorio Liberal de Antioquia - Sector Democrático“. (Jairo Ortega, of whose list Pablo Escobar was second, was elected to the House of Representatives by a different movement in 1982).
6. In the archives of Congress of 1989, the position of senator Uribe Vélez on extradition is evidenced. It is the only one that the Senator had on the subject during his performance as Senator. A position which was restated in the year 2002 by the then-presidential candidate in interviews given to the El Tiempo and El Espectador newspapers in Bogotá and to the Radio Caracol station: "Later, in the second round, unfortunately, the Chamber of Representatives included a legal loophole to propose a referendum asking Colombians whether to accept or reject extradition in what would have been the congressional elections of 1990"..."I stood up and said that it was highly inconvenient that this referendum coincided with the congressional elections because then we were running the risk that the drug traders would put pressure on these elections. I said that an alternative should be that, if we are going to go ahead with the referendum, it should be postponed until after the congressional elections and after the presidential election, so that they would not be able to set up those pressures". (El Tiempo, March 23 2003).
7. During his time in government, Alvaro Uribe has authorized the extradition of more than 170 people as requested by different countries to be judged because of drug trafficking and other crimes, including the laundering of assets.
8. As President he is against the modification of the current mechanism of extradition." [4]

The Pentagon also publicly supported Uribe: "No conclusions can be drawn from it," said spokesman Lt. Col. Chris Conway, who added that the report was raw, uncorroborated information from a single source and that "it's not a smoking gun. The reliability and validity of this raw data is very suspect, to say the least". [5] [6] Other spokesmen said that the report was made up of a single source of unconfirmed information, and that they didn't know of the existence of any other reports directly linking Uribe to the narcotics business.

Other reactions included pointing out that the document contained several potential factual errors which would reduce its accuracy, such as including Colombian musician Carlos Vives, who apparently had performed for drug lords as an entertainer, though it is widely believed in Colombia that Vives himself never participated directly in the drug business and no form of legal action has been taken against him.

An U.S. intelligence official said that it was typical of early reports, produced after President George H. W. Bush first ordered the military to track the drug trade more closely, to consist of unedited, unconfirmed information, "passed on unedited to military intelligence analysts in Washington to avoid misinterpretation of the raw data". This would allegedly indicate that the document's information was only fully analyzed later. Another error in the document would be the listing of one drug trafficker named Fidel Castro with an alias of "Rambo", which would constitute a mistake as it was apparently intended to be a reference to a famous paramilitary commander known as Fidel Castaño Gil. [7]

Thomas E. McNamara, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Colombia until just a few months before the report was created, mentioned that senator Uribe "never came up on my screen" and "if everything said in that short paragraph were true, those of us in the embassy working the issue hard would have had him in our scopes...He wasn't." [8]

According to this position, the claims contained in the intelligence report would have constituted "raw", unverified intelligence that was never confirmed and would not serve as a credible basis to establish a link with drug lords. Critics have observed that the Colombian government has yet to directly deny any possible friendship or business connection between Uribe and Escobar and consider that the United States may not want to admit that Uribe could have had ties to drug lords in the past.

Supporters of Uribe argue that apparently U.S. authorities did not act against the then senator nor did they jeopardize his immigration status, when they could well have done so, as he was a public figure and was studying in Harvard in 1991, contemporarily to the existence of the report.

The author of the Newsweek article, Joseph Contreras, defended his work in declarations to Colombian Radio Caracol and likewise pointed to the lack of a denial about the claim of friendship between the current president of Colombia and the dead drug lord, but admitted that: "In the paragraph that corresponds to Uribe Vélez, it is evident to me that the version of the circumstances of the death of his father is not a correct version." This admission of an error in the document would tend to give credibility to the statement that the FARC may have in fact killed Uribe Sierra during a kidnapping attempt. He stood by most of the other content in the report. [9]

The National Security Archive's homepage includes a mention that apparently some of the information in the report was confronted "via interfaces with other agencies" and that the report shows signs that a significant effort may have been put into its creation. Other observers considered that directly reading the entire document itself could indicate something different, that apparently the mentioned interfaces were employed in order to identify some of the individuals involved due to their clandestine nature (while Uribe's identity was arguably public knowledge), and not to confirm the overall content of the report.

A spokesman for the National Security Archive also stated that much of the other information in the report was easily verifiable. It was also mentioned that federal censors withheld from release the source of the information and the comments section, something which would still constitute a difficult obstacle to any complete verification of the exact accuracy of the document. [10]

Repercussions

These and similar accusations had been made several times in the past against Uribe, especially during this 2002 election campaign and in the book published by Newsweek's same Joseph Contreras, one of the authors of the August 2004 article and of earlier features on Colombia. They have always been denied by Uribe and his supporters but some of his critics continue to express their preoccupation about them. They still have not committed to any legal action.

The current controversy apparently fell under most of the public's radar after the end of 2004 and no new developments surfaced. No government, mainstream or multinational anti-drug entity and no similar international politics or human rights organization has yet to directly address the content of the report, whether to confirm or to deny it.

Some individual spokesmen have stated that the information would need to be more detailed and put in context before reaching any specific conclusions about Uribe's role: "Was he turning a blind eye [to drug dealing], or was he actually part of the circle?". Alfredo Rangel, a Colombian independent defense analyst, considered that Uribe's supporters would take the report as another in a long series of unconfirmed accusations, and would not significantly change their views on the subject, and the same could be said of Uribe's opponents and those that already considered him to be responsible for previous allegations [11].