President Uribe’s Cousin Under Arrest

The Washington Post reported the arrest of president Alvaro Uribe’s cousin. Ex senator Mario Uribe was arrested for suspected ties to paramilitary groups. He is among a quarter of the Colombian congress caught up in the “parapolitica” scandal for alleged involvement with paramilitary death squads. Mario Uribe had entered the Costa Rican embassy and requested political asylum, which was later denied. This led to his subsequent arrest by Colombian authorities. Meanwhile, according to a story in El Tiempo, defense minister (and the son of El Tiempo’s executive editor) Juan Manuel Santos testified before the Colombian Supreme Court yesterday that Raul Reyes’ laptop implicates many in congress of having ties to the Farc guerrillas, though he did not name anyone. El Tiempo’s story claims Santos “assured” the court that the “farcpolitica” scandal could be larger than the “parapolitica” scandal.

Recent News Roundup….

Since the Colombian free trade agreement was tabled by the U.S. House of Representatives, El Tiempo has published a flurry of stories dealing with paramilitary links to the Colombian congress and military, and recent efforts by the Uribe administration to prosecute those individuals with purported ties to the paramilitaries. One story describes an account of an ex DAS employee, Rafael Garcia, who has implicated multiple Colombian government entities of having ties to the paramilitaries, these include the Procuraduría, the Registraduría, the Superintendencia de Vigilancia, the Consejo Superior de la Judicatura, the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, Indumil, the Armada, the DAS and the Ministries of Interior, Transportation, Communications and Foreign Relations. Another story says that the Colombian Supreme Court is investigating the president of the Colombian congress, Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez as part of the “parapolitica” scandal. Yet another story claims that this month alone 29 members of the Colombian military have been investigated for human rights abuses and that a total of 748 members of the military are being investigated. In the same story, defense minister Juan Manuel Santos is quoted as saying “We must be very clear: if in order to defeat the monster we convert ourselves into another monster, we have not won but lost because we will have converted ourselves into what we were trying to stop”. Another story cites an investigation of 7 members of the Colombian army for possible paramilitary links.