During this week’s hearings, the Prosecutor’s Office is expected to call new witnesses such as former paramilitary Juan Guillermo Monsalve, considered the most important witness in the case, who appeared in recent days, when he implicated the former president in the emergence of illegal armed groups in the country.
After Monsalve’s statement, the former head of state made a public address in which he accused the witness of lying and of being manipulated by the Prosecutor’s Office to do so.
Senator Iván Cepeda, credited as the main victim of the case, rejected this argument and declared that former President Uribe’s strategy is a mixture of a desperate search for the statute of limitations for open aggression against the Supreme Court justices and a campaign to discredit the victims’ group orchestrated by his political organization, the Democratic Center.
“Facing the compelling evidence about former President Álvaro Uribe’s relations with the Metro Block (a paramilitary organization) and drug traffickers, like Luis Villegas, his political party launches a campaign of lies about all kinds of trivialities,” Cepeda wrote in X, adding that instead of convincingly refuting the facts, Uribe’s defense is trying to question the veracity of the testimonies through closed and simplistic questions that seek to elicit a yes or no to erase the complex reality of bribery and procedural fraud.
One of the pieces of evidence considered vital in the case is a recording made a few years ago by Monsalve during a conversation he had in prison with Diego Cadena, a lawyer who was in the service of Uribe, according to which the witness was offered legal benefits in exchange for him to make a statement favoring the former president, disassociating him from his alleged links with paramilitarism, that is, they tried to bribe him.
The legal team of the former head of state alleges that Cadena acted on his own and behind his client’s back.
All the resources used by the former president’s lawyers are described by the victims of the process as stratagems to delay the process and achieve its prescription.
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