This footage was filmed and produced 11 January 2024.

Colombian prosecutors on Tuesday called for former President Alvaro Uribe to stand trial for alleged witness tampering in an investigation into his involvement with paramilitary groups, the prosecutor's office said on Tuesday.

"On the basis of the evidence (...) a prosecutor delegated to the Supreme Court of Justice filed an indictment against former senator Alvaro Uribe Velez as the alleged perpetrator of the crimes of witness bribery and procedural fraud," the prosecutor's office said in a statement, without specifying when the trial, the first to be faced by an ex-president, will begin.

"President Uribe is innocent, the only thing he did was seek to defend himself from the search for fabricated testimony against him," said Senator Paloma Valencia of the right-wing Democratic Centre party, which Uribe founded.

The case
Uribe, 71, who has always defended his innocence, faces up to eight years in prison in a case he initiated and which has become a judicial boomerang, the AFP news agency reported. It all began in 2012, when the then senator filed a complaint against leftist Polo Democratico Alternativo (PDA) congressman Ivan Cepeda, whom he accused of an alleged plot with false witnesses to link him to far-right paramilitary groups responsible for human rights violations in their clandestine war against the guerrillas.

But the Supreme Court not only refrained from prosecuting Cepeda, it began investigating the former president in 2018. The court suspected that it was Uribe, not his opponent, who tried to tamper with witnesses. The high magistrates went further and in August 2020 ordered the ex-president's house arrest while they moved forward with their investigation.
Uribe then resigned from the Senate and his file was transferred to an ordinary court, which lifted the detention order against him and restarted the entire process. Cepeda received the call to trial "with great serenity but also satisfaction," he told state television station RTVC. "It is more than a decade, practically 12 years, of fighting in front of the courts of justice (...) after so many attempts to close this case, since in the end the voice of justice appears," the senator added.

The president, who is very popular for the iron fist policy with which his government weakened the guerrillas, did not react to his call to trial, a decision he had anticipated since October 2023. At that time he denounced irregularities in the process against him.

Diego Cadena, one of the former president's lawyers in the case, is also facing trial for allegedly offering money to a former paramilitary to retract his testimony against Uribe. The attorney general's office had asked the court to dismiss the case on several occasions, a request that several judges rejected on the grounds that there is sufficient evidence to bring Uribe to trial.

SHOTLIST:
1. Various Uribe (Nov 11, 2022 / Oct 8, 2023 / Jan 11, 2024 / Jun 23, 2023 / Mar 18, 2023).