COMMENTARY The historic conviction of ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe offers his countrymen — including the South Florida diaspora — an opportunity to share blame for their national conflict.
When former right-wing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was found guilty this week on witness tampering and bribery charges, a colleague of mine who knows Colombia as astutely as anyone drew this conclusion:
“I’m sure Uribe is guilty,” she texted me. “I’m also sure Colombia’s courts are corrupt.
“Both things can be true.”
Indeed they can. And that’s something Colombians — especially here in the large South Florida diaspora — need to start appreciating more fully if the country is ever really going to extricate itself from the awful, half-century-long civil war that supposedly ended there a decade ago.
The historic Uribe verdict is an apt moment to do that.
It’s an opportunity to see Colombia’s chronic conflict not behind the blinders worn by partisan militants in some García Márquez epic — but through a more panoramic telescope that reveals Colombia’s violence was the fault of Colombians on all sides.
The case of Uribe, who was president from 2002 to 2010, seems to encapsulate that reality.
READ MORE: Hilarious hypocrisy: Trump's Republicans accuse Colombia of politicizing justice
The war that erupted over Colombia’s epic socio-economic inequality in the 1960s, and which killed more than a quarter million people, pitted the military against leftist guerrillas like the FARC, and leftist guerrillas against right-wing paramilitaries.
Each side — soldiers, guerrillas and paramilitaries — terrorized and murdered Colombian civilians for five decades.
Not just one side. Each side.
Uribe’s father was killed by leftist rebels in 1983. So it wasn’t surprising, though gravely disturbing, to hear jailed paramilitary members in 2011 testify that when Uribe was governor of Antioquia state in the 1990s, he aided their units.
Likewise, it was hardly a shocker that leftist politician Iván Cepeda — who lost his father to a right-wing death squad in 1994 — was the guy who videotaped the 2011 testimony against Uribe and then publicly accused him of being a paramilitary sponsor.
What nailed Uribe, as they say, wasn’t so much the crime but the cover-up: his efforts to bully and bribe the paramilitary witnesses to retract their story. Now he faces up to 12 years in prison.
I too applauded President Uribe's success on the battlefield — but that doesn't mean former President Uribe has to be innocent in the courtroom.
But Uribe’s legions of fans — los Uribistas, who include U.S. conservatives like Secretary of State Marco Rubio — insist his prosecution was a political witch hunt by a left-leaning Colombian judiciary. They venerate Uribe because, during his presidency, he beat back and ultimately enfeebled the leviathan FARC in a U.S.-financed offensive.
I, too, applaud Uribe for turning the civil war’s tide. But I reject the notion that his success on the battlefield somehow demands his innocence in the courtroom.
Viciously victimized
After covering Uribe’s dark ruthlessness for a quarter century, I’m all too aware — like my colleague — that he’s all too capable not just of the crime he’s been convicted of, but of colluding with the paramilitaries.
And I just as adamantly repudiate the related idea — so often pushed by the mostly Uribista expat community in South Florida — that the FARC was responsible for all of the civil war’s horrors, and that the military and paramilitaries get a pass because they opposed the FARC.
I certainly sympathize with the fact that so many Uribistas here left Colombia because they were victimized by the FARC. But I also understand that Colombians who were just as viciously victimized by the paramilitaries tended to be poorer, less urban folks who didn’t have the resources to emigrate to Florida.
Hence the one-sided story about Colombia we usually get here.
Still, I get the complaint, as my colleague noted, that “Colombia’s courts are corrupt” — and that Uribe’s guilty verdict unfortunately has to be viewed through that prism as well. Study after study finds the Colombian judicial system’s independence from political and economic influence is inconsistent at best.
That includes right-wing as well as left-wing pressure. But even if “lawfare” didn’t seem a factor in Uribe’s trial, experts agree many Colombian judges are prone to liberal bias.
Colombia’s progresistas, or liberals, need to admit that — just as they have to acknowledge more seriously that the cocaine-trafficking, ransom-kidnapping FARC were as much Mafia as they were Marxist.
It means current Colombian President Gustavo Petro, himself a former member of the M-19 guerrillas, should remember that if Uribe’s right-wing ideology helped tear Colombia apart for half a century, so did his own left-wing dogma.
Both things can be true.
You can watch Tim Padgett's video commentary Americas Decoded here.
