Medellín judge acquits Santiago Uribe of paramilitary group charges after 27-year investigation

On Wednesday, a judge in Medellín announced that Santiago Uribe Vélez, the younger brother of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, would be acquitted of charges of criminal conspiracy and aggravated homicide. The investigation had spanned 27 years, beginning in 1997, and the trial itself concluded nearly three years before the verdict. Judge Jaime Herrera Niño, who had overseen the case since 2016, delivered the decision without immediately releasing detailed reasoning. The former president, now a prominent critic of current leader Gustavo Petro, responded quickly on social media with a simple expression of gratitude.

The charges against Santiago Uribe centered on his alleged role in founding and directing Los 12 apóstoles, a paramilitary organization that emerged in the early 1990s in Yarumal, a municipality in the northern part of Antioquia province. The group began as a self-defense militia called Autodefensas del norte lechero, composed of roughly a dozen men drawn from ranching, business, and law enforcement circles, along with a Catholic priest. The region was experiencing intensifying guerrilla activity from the FARC, the same organization responsible for killing the Uribe family patriarch. The Uribes themselves were substantial landowners in the area, and Álvaro had served as governor of Antioquia from 1995 to 1997 before ascending to the presidency, where he would later negotiate the controversial demobilization of major paramilitary groups while waging direct war against the guerrilla.

The connection between Santiago Uribe and Los 12 apóstoles had long been contested terrain in Colombian public discourse. A confidential report from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace—a transitional justice body investigating Colombia's armed conflict—presented a starkly different picture than the acquittal. That investigation, led by magistrate Pedro Díaz, characterized Santiago Uribe as the head of the organization and attributed to it at least 300 homicides, forced disappearances, and other acts of violence that went largely unpunished. According to testimony from various criminal proceedings, many of these operations were planned at La Carolina, a ranch owned by Santiago Uribe, where members of the group allegedly gathered to coordinate their activities.

A former police officer named Jairo Rodríguez Venegas, who served as interim director of the intelligence section of the Yarumal police station, has acknowledged his own responsibility in crimes committed by the group before the transitional justice court. In a November 2023 resolution, the court cited a prosecution document naming Santiago Uribe as one of the organization's cofounders. The formal accusation alleged that in the early 1990s, Uribe had formed and directed an illegal armed group from La Carolina with the explicit purpose of eliminating people classified as socially undesirable, as well as suspected sympathizers and members of leftist guerrilla organizations operating in the region. The group, according to the charges, operated with the active and passive support of members of the National Police and military intelligence personnel.

Juan Carlos Meneses, who commanded the Yarumal police during the period in question, provided crucial testimony. Before the transitional justice court, he described secret meetings held at Uribe's ranch where ranchers and businessmen offered financial backing to the paramilitary organization. The stated rationale, Meneses testified, was to maintain regional control and ensure security—a justification invoked repeatedly during Colombia's armed conflict to legitimize violence. Meneses detailed how Los 12 apóstoles operated with systematic precision: members selected targets based on information from local informants, discussed lists of marked individuals at the ranch meetings, and planned attacks with careful verification of intelligence before acting. This was one of several such organizations that had emerged across Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s.

The trial of Santiago Uribe became one of the country's most emblematic legal cases, partly because of the Uribe family's prominence in Colombian politics and partly because of the vigorous defense mounted by the former president, who remains one of the most popular leaders of recent decades in the country's divided political landscape. For some sectors, the prosecution represented a necessary effort to clarify the role of paramilitarism in Colombia's history. For others, it appeared to be political persecution. The case carried significant political weight, affecting the legacy of a president remembered by supporters as the leader who cornered the FARC and by critics as the executive who negotiated with paramilitaries while opposing the guerrilla dialogues pursued by his successor, Juan Manuel Santos.

The acquittal announced Wednesday is not Uribe's first. In 2021, another judge had declared him innocent in the murder of Camilo Barrientos, a minibus driver from the Yarumal area who was killed on February 25, 1994, by two of his passengers. The prosecution and representatives of victims have the right to appeal the current decision, potentially reopening the question of the Uribe family's connections to paramilitarism during the country's most violent decades.