Álvaro Uribe

Álvaro Uribe (born July 4, 1952, Medellín, Colombia) is a Colombian politician who served as president of Colombia (2002–10).

Uribe earned a law degree from the University of Antioquia, Medellín, and later studied management and administration at Harvard University. In the mid-1970s he worked in the state government of Antioquia before serving as secretary-general in the Ministry of Labour in Medellín and as a director of civil aeronautics at the national level. He was mayor of Medellín from 1982 to 1984. During this time his father, a cattle rancher, was slain during a botched kidnapping by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia; FARC) guerrillas. Uribe served consecutive terms as a national senator between 1986 and 1994 and was governor of Antioquia from 1995 to 1997.

In his campaign for president, Uribe had split from the traditionally dominant Liberal Party and run as an independent. He established the Colombia First electoral movement and adopted the campaign slogan “Firm Hand, Big Heart.” Uribe promised a tougher line against guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers after the failure of the previous administration to negotiate a settlement with any of these armed groups. He also stressed the need for sweeping political reforms to make the government more efficient and to reduce corruption. The success of his campaign strategy garnered him 53.1 percent of the votes cast when Colombians went to the polls on May 26, 2002.

On August 7, the day that Uribe formally took office as president of Colombia, explosions rocked the centre of the country’s capital, Bogotá. Just blocks from the site of Uribe’s inauguration ceremony, bombs claimed the lives of 19 people and injured at least 60. Although no one claimed responsibility for the attack, authorities blamed the FARC. The attack came on the heels of Uribe’s announcement that his government would negotiate with armed groups only after they had abandoned “terrorist” activities and ceased hostilities. Soon after his inauguration, Uribe declared a state of emergency and invoked powers to expand Colombia’s military and police forces.

As president, Uribe promised to keep bureaucracy in check and to run an austere administration. He made clear his intent to reduce the number of government ministries, and he nominated a single minister of justice and interior—a de facto merging of the two entities. He also proposed eliminating several posts at the state and local levels. On his first day in office, he sent to Congress a large package of proposals, including the establishment of a single legislative chamber, the use of roll-call vote procedures to make decision making transparent, the elimination of “substitute” legislators, reform of congressional resources and financial management, a list of reasons for which legislators could be removed from office, and a process by which early elections could be called.

In 2003, however, all but one of Uribe’s planned austerity measures and political reforms were rejected by voters in a national referendum, and several members of his administration resigned. Moreover, the conflict with the FARC insurgency and the emergence of illegal right-wing armed groups became major obstacles for Uribe. In December 2003 a peace agreement was negotiated between the government and a right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia; AUC), and by 2004 AUC members had disarmed. Some members of the FARC and the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional; ELN), another Marxist guerrilla group, gave up their weapons as well, in exchange for what they were told would be a lighter punishment.

Uribe was reelected for a second four-year term in 2006. In response to continued guerrilla attacks, he implemented antiterrorism laws that allowed the police to more easily arrest suspects. Meanwhile, paramilitaries who had agreed to cooperate with the government threatened to end that cooperation, and the FARC demanded a military-free area in which they could conduct their business before setting free any hostages. (Together the FARC and the ELN were holding captive several hundred people, most of whom were being held for ransom.) Uribe released some FARC guerrillas from jail in the hope that the FARC would then release its hostages. When this did not occur, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was called in to broker negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC leaders. But Uribe and Chávez’s differing ideological viewpoints soured relations, and Chávez was essentially “fired” from his role as mediator.

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A high point for Uribe was the release in July 2008 of former member of Congress and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, perhaps the FARC’s most high-profile hostage, after six years of captivity. Moreover, Uribe’s intensive security operations against the FARC were productive overall, as the number of crimes, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks in Colombia had significantly decreased since 2000. Relations between Colombia and Venezuela were on the mend by late 2008, and several paramilitary warlords were sent to the United States on drug trafficking charges. In January 2009 Uribe received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

The Colombian constitution prevented Uribe from running for a third consecutive term as president. The June 2010 presidential election was won by Juan Manuel Santos, one of the cofounders of the party created by Uribe supporters, the Social Party of National Unity (Partido Social de Unidad Nacional). Santos, who had served as Uribe’s minister of defense (2006–09), pledged to maintain Uribe’s strong law-and-order stance.

When Santos confounded those expectations by beginning peace negotiations with the FARC in 2012, Uribe became a prominent hawkish critic of those efforts. In 2014 he helped found Democratic Centre, an umbrella political party formed in opposition to Santos’s peace initiative. That year Uribe was elected to the Senate, becoming the first Colombian former president to return to the legislature. Uribe’s protracted opposition to the peace agreement ultimately negotiated by Santos bore fruit in early October 2016. Just one week after Santos had signed a final agreement with FARC leader Rodrigo Londoño (“Timochenko”), the Colombian electorate narrowly rejected the agreement in a referendum, 50.21 percent to 49.78.

In late November, however, a renegotiated accord was ratified by the House of Representatives and the Senate. Although the agreement included many changes that had been demanded by Uribe, some of the opposition’s key proposals were left out, and, complaining that they had not been allowed to review the new accord, Uribe and the opposition denounced it. The process by which FARC guerrillas were to concentrate in some 20 transition zones and turn over their weapons to UN monitors went ahead, and on August 15, 2017, the Colombian government declared an official end to its conflict with the FARC.

In March 2018 Uribe’s Democratic Centre Party took the most seats (19) in the election for the 108-seat Senate and finished second, with 32 seats, in the election for the 172-seat House, but no party was able to gain a clear majority in either chamber. Uribe remained adamantly opposed to the peace agreement, as was his handpicked candidate for the 2018 presidential election, Iván Duque. When Duque triumphed over former Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro in the presidential runoff election in June, Uribe’s influence looked to be ascendant. His fortunes changed rapidly, however, when, facing charges of bribery stemming from events in 2012, Uribe resigned his seat in the Senate in late July, saying that the investigation had left him “morally impeded to be a senator” and that he was leaving office to focus on his defense. Some skeptical observers wondered whether Uribe had chosen to leave the Senate because, under Colombian law, office holders came under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, whereas everyday citizens were investigated by the Prosecutor General’s office, which had a reputation for corruption and inefficency.