Santiago Uribe Surrenders to Police to Begin 28-Year Sentence

Santiago Uribe walked into a police station on his own terms this week to begin serving a 28-year sentence, a moment his brother, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, announced Tuesday night on social media. The surrender came after Colombia's Supreme Court of Justice rejected Santiago's final appeal and upheld a conviction that had been building for three decades.

The charges were stark: homicide and criminal conspiracy. Santiago Uribe had been found guilty of organizing a paramilitary group called Los 12 Apóstoles and of orchestrating—or at minimum enabling—the murder of Camilo Barrientos, a bus driver in Yarumal, Antioquia. The group was also linked to the killing of Jorge Yubán Ceballos. What made the case particularly damaging was the evidence that state agents had been involved. The paramilitary operation was not some rogue militia; it had been woven into the machinery of local law enforcement.

The investigation had begun in 1995, when Los 12 Apóstoles was operating under the command of Pedro Manuel Benavides and a police lieutenant named Juan Carlos Meneses. Years later, in 2010, Meneses told investigators that Uribe had provided money for the killings and that the group maintained a room adjacent to the police station—a space that allowed them to move in and out of the building without drawing attention on the street. The arrangement was efficient and deliberate.

In the case of Barrientos specifically, court documents laid out the mechanics of the crime. Uribe received information about the target's movements and passed it along to other members of the organization. Working with someone known as Rodrigo, they identified who would locate the victim and who would carry out the execution. It was not a spontaneous act of violence but a coordinated operation.

The Antioquia Superior Court had convicted Uribe in the second instance, and when the Supreme Court reviewed the case, it found no reason to overturn the decision. The sentence was set at 28 years and three months. When Santiago's legal team filed an extraordinary appeal for cassation—a last resort in the Colombian system—the Supreme Court's Criminal Chamber rejected it as inadmissible. There was nowhere left to go.

The case is part of a longer reckoning in Colombia with paramilitary violence and the question of how deeply state actors were implicated in extrajudicial killings. Los 12 Apóstoles was not an isolated criminal enterprise; it operated with the knowledge and participation of police officers, suggesting a system in which murder could be outsourced, funded, and protected from within the institutions meant to prevent it. The group's activities were framed, in the court's language, as a campaign of so-called social cleansing—a euphemism for targeted killings of people deemed undesirable.

Now Santiago Uribe will spend the next three decades in prison, and the case will remain a reference point in Colombian legal history—a reminder that even family connections to the highest levels of power do not exempt someone from accountability when the evidence is clear and the courts are willing to act.