Colombian court orders investigation of ex-president Uribe in 1990s human rights killings

A judge in Medellín has ordered Colombia's prosecution office to investigate former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez and his brother Santiago for their alleged role in ordering the murders of two human rights lawyers in the 1990s. The judicial order emerged this week from judge Claudia Castro's ruling in a separate case against a former intelligence official, and it centers on the 1998 killings of Jesús María del Valle and Eduardo Umaña Mendoza—crimes that remain unsolved nearly three decades later and have been classified as crimes against humanity by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The judge's directive rests largely on testimony given in 2008 by Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández, a former paramilitary operative. Villalba swore under oath that Uribe, who was governor of Antioquia at the time, attended a 1997 meeting at a rural property called La Marranera in the Valle del Cauca region. According to Villalba's account, the gathering included prominent paramilitary commanders—Carlos Castaño, Salvatore Mancuso, and others—alongside military officers and police officials. Villalba claimed that at this meeting, the decision was made to eliminate del Valle and Umaña because they were investigating human rights violations and threatening to expose the collaboration between state forces and paramilitaries in a series of massacres. "They were bothering us about human rights violations," Villalba testified, describing the rationale for silencing the lawyers. He added that Uribe expressed concern about international scrutiny, saying the Inter-American Court would come down on them if the investigations continued. Villalba was himself murdered months after giving this testimony.

Del Valle was shot dead in his Medellín office on February 27, 1998, while investigating state-paramilitary alliances in massacres that had occurred years earlier in El Aro, La Granja, and Ituango. Before his death, he had publicly named Uribe as potentially complicit in those killings. "I have no hatred against Governor Álvaro Uribe Vélez or the brigade commander," del Valle said in an interview at the time. "I do this because this is my people and I don't want them to keep suffering." Umaña was assassinated in Bogotá just weeks later, on April 18, 1998, while conducting similar investigations into the same network of violence.

Uribe responded to the judicial order with a written statement denying any involvement. He argued that the Inter-American Court's ruling on del Valle's murder contains no mention of him, and that prosecutors had already discredited Villalba's testimony. He claimed to have been at Oxford University at the time of the alleged 1997 meeting and accused the judge of political motivation, calling the order an act of judicial misconduct. "This compulsory referral has all the characteristics of a prevarication," he wrote on social media, adding that the judge selectively cited Villalba while ignoring other alleged attendees and failing to analyze the testimony critically.

For the families of the murdered lawyers, the judicial order represents a potential turning point in cases that have languished in bureaucratic limbo. Camilo Umaña, son of Eduardo Umaña, told journalists that his father's case has cycled through multiple prosecutors, made almost no progress in nearly thirty years, and was effectively abandoned after a prosecutor once told him it was a crime of state that could not be investigated. "I hope this compulsory referral doesn't just pile up like the other hypotheses about my father's murder that are sitting in the prosecution office waiting to move forward," Camilo Umaña said. He emphasized that what has become clear through various investigations is that in the late 1990s there existed what he called "a community or perhaps an indistinction between military intelligence and the paramilitaries operating to assassinate people like my father." Whether this new judicial push will finally break through years of stalled proceedings remains uncertain, but it marks the first time in years that the case has moved forward in any meaningful way.