The Case Against Uribe (U.S. ally, recent President of Colombia)
Friday, 15 June 2012 05:54
The Case Against Uribe
Written by Geoffrey Ramsey
While former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has faced mounting allegations of drug trafficking and paramilitary ties, he has proved to be surprisingly immune from criminal charges.
On June 9, Colombian think tank Corporacion Nuevo Arco Iris published an investigation which revealed that the United States has requested the extradition of a niece of ex-President Alvaro Uribe and her mother on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Dolly Cifuentes Villa and her daughter, Ana Maria Uribe Cifuentes, were arrested in 2011 and accused of helping Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel traffic cocaine into the US and laundering illicit profits. The two are members of the notorious Cifuentes Villa family, which allegedly smuggled more than 30 tons of cocaine into the US from 2009 to 2011.
The news sparked controversy in Colombia, as it exposed Uribe Cifuentes as the daughter of the former president’s brother Jaime Uribe, who died of throat cancer in 2001. The revelation raised suspicions that Jaime may have had links to organized crime, which would have troublesome implications for his brother, who earned a reputation for his security gains as president. These suspicions were fueled when Nuevo Arco Iris also found that Jaime had been detained in 1986 after authorities discovered phone calls made from his car phone to infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. The ex-president dismissed this as well, noting that Jaime had been freed and investigators determined that his phone “had been cloned by criminals.”
One day after the report’s publication, Alvaro Uribe sought to downplay his brother’s relationship with Cifuentes. He claimed to have no knowledge of the extramarital affair, in spite of Ana Maria’s birth certificate listing Jaime as her biological father and the fact that Cifuentes gave birth to another of Jaime’s children ten years later.
While the investigation has brought his deceased brother’s past into the spotlight, it looks as though Uribe himself has been untouched by the scandal. But this is hardly the first or most prominent instance in which criminal allegations have seemingly threatened the former president’s political profile, only for him to deflect them with ease.
More:
http://www.insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/2775-the-case-against-uribe
