Who is Álvaro Uribe

Yes, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the President of Colombia indeed.

With occasion of his controversial visit to Spain, where he was given an official prize, I had the opportunity to find out some less known details about him (source: Rebelión, in Spanish):

In 1991, he was listed as drug trafficiking mafia leader number 82 in a, now declassified, confidential report of the US Inteligence Agency (PDF), that reads:

82. Alvaro Uribe Velez - A Colombian politician and senator dedicated to cllaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotic activities in the USA. His father was killed in Colombia for his connection with the narcotic traffickers. Uribe has worked for the Medellin Cartel and is a close friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria. He has participated in Escobar's political campaign to win the position of assistant parlamentarian to Jorge ((Ortega)). Uribe has been one of the politicians, from the Senate, who has attacked all forms of the Extradition Treaty.

(Links are mine)

Other niceties of the silverspoon narcopresident are that:

· Through his mandate as president, 995 extrajudicial killings happened, of which only 670 were vaguely investigated by the public attorney office and only a handful have finally reached trial.

· In the first term of Uribe's rule some 18,500 people were imprisioned arbitrarily in mass arrest operations.

· 72 congressmen have been investigated judicially, of which 11 have been declared guilty and 4 acquitted. Other 250 high ranking public officers in Uribe's administration are being investigated, including ministers, governors, mayors and directors of major deartments.

· Many people in the close circle of Uribe were appointed in spite of being directly connected with narcotraffic and death squads. Examples are his military advisor, Gral. Alejo del Río, who had been dismissed from active service for his many human rights violations; his former Chief of Police, Jorge Daniel Castro Castro, a well known narco; his Director of Anti-Drugs Intelligence, Gral Oscar Naranjo Trujillo, known accomplice of the coca cartels. When Castro was finally forced out of office for spying illegally nearly everybody, Naranjo took his post.

· Álvaro Uribe was Director of Civil Aeronautics in the 1980s and then gave hundreds of airplane licenses to major drug traffickers. Pablo Escobar then said of him that would not be for Uribe we all would have to go swimming to the USA to deliver the drugs.

· His cousin and close ally, former senator Mario Uribe is currently under arrest on grounds of conspiration for crime by agreements to promote armed gangs outside the law. In other words: organizing death squads.

So this is the President of Colombia who just recieved the "Prize Cortes of Cádiz to Freedom" from the neofascist mayor of Cádiz (the Cortes of Cádiz was the first liberal Spanish parliament, gathered in resistence to Napoleonic occupation and which promulgated a very progressive and democratic constitution, that survived only a few years).

This is the President of Colombia who is the third largest reciever of military aid from the USA.
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