Colombia's Supreme Court upholds 28-year sentence for Santiago Uribe in paramilitary killings case

Colombia's Supreme Court has issued its final word: Santiago Uribe Vélez, the brother of former president Álvaro Uribe, will spend 28 years in prison for leading a paramilitary death squad that systematized murder across the northern mountains of Antioquia in the 1990s. The court's decision, delivered this week in a 605-page ruling, closes a judicial odyssey that began three decades ago and wound through acquittal, reversal, and now, definitive conviction.

The group Uribe led was called Los 12 Apóstoles—the Twelve Apostles—a grimly named organization founded in 1992 by ranchers, businessmen, police officers, and even a priest who claimed they were defending their communities against guerrilla expansion. What they actually built was a machine for eliminating people deemed undesirable. The court found that Uribe directed this apparatus with deliberate intent, orchestrating what amounted to systematic extermination across three municipalities: Campamento, Yarumal, and Valdivia. The group would later merge with a larger paramilitary confederation, expanding its reach and its body count.

The case against Uribe rested significantly on the murder of Camilo Barrientos, a bus driver shot dead on February 25, 1994, after being falsely denounced as a guerrilla collaborator. A retired police major, Juan Carlos Meneses, testified that Uribe had shown him a paramilitary training facility on his ranch and displayed a handwritten list of twenty to twenty-five people marked for death. Barrientos was among them. The prosecution built its case around this and other evidence of Uribe's direct command over the killings, his knowledge of the targets, and his coordination with state security forces who looked the other way.

The path to this conviction was neither straight nor swift. Investigators first opened a file on Uribe in 1995, but the case was shelved four years later. It lay dormant until 2010, when Meneses's statements resurfaced and prosecutors moved to reopen it. Uribe was arrested in February 2016 and held in preventive detention for two years while the judicial machinery ground forward. The trial itself consumed seven years—four in hearings, three waiting for a verdict. In November 2024, a first-instance judge acquitted him, citing prosecutorial errors and doubts about key witnesses, though he acknowledged that Los 12 Apóstoles was no myth but a documented reality that had devastated the region. A year later, an appellate court reversed that decision, finding sufficient evidence that Uribe had indeed commanded a criminal organization engaged in social cleansing. The Supreme Court has now affirmed that judgment.

Former president Uribe, through a post on social media, called the conviction "a devastating matter for my family." His lawyer, Jaime Granados, who has represented the ex-president in other cases, declared the sentence unjust and vowed to continue fighting, despite the finality of the ruling. Granados suggested that sixteen years of involvement with the case had revealed what he sees as a miscarriage of justice, though he offered no specifics about what evidence he believes was mishandled.

The human toll extends far beyond the single murder that anchored the prosecution. Los 12 Apóstoles is credited with more than three hundred selective killings, forced displacements, disappearances, and threats across the region. The group participated in at least one documented massacre. But even that accounting may be incomplete. Colombia's transitional justice system, established after the peace accord with the FARC guerrillas, has collected testimony suggesting the true death toll could reach five hundred and twenty-five homicides—all carried out by hired killers operating under Uribe's orders. The transitional court does not typically handle paramilitary cases, yet it has made exceptions to document these crimes and preserve the record.

Uribe will now exhaust his legal remedies. The Supreme Court's decision is final. What remains is the question of whether the broader network of paramilitarism in Colombia—the state agents who enabled it, the commanders who profited from it, the structure that sustained it—will face similar reckoning, or whether this conviction of one man will stand as the exception rather than the rule.