Conservative former President of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez on Wednesday claimed Colombian Supreme Court Justice César Augusto Reyes, who placed him under house arrest in 2020, was a USAID “contractor.”
Uribe published a letter addressed to President Donald Trump in which he made the allegations hours before the start of a criminal trial against him on Thursday in which the former President stands accused of bribery and procedural fraud. If found guilty, Uribe could face up to 12 years in prison.
In his message, Uribe accused Justice Reyes of working as a USAID contractor in service of former President Juan Manuel Santos for the purported “peace deal” that Santos’ administration signed with the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group in 2016. While Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the agreement, in reality, FARC is still active. In 2024, local authorities denounced FARC, saying it is using the Chinese social media platform TikTok to recruit children into its ranks.
Uribe, who led a fierce crackdown against the FARC throughout his presidency (2002-2010), enthusiastically opposed the “peace deal” and pointed out in his letter that Santos went ahead with the peace deal despite the Colombian electorate voting against it in an October 2016 referendum.
“Mr. Reyes was also [a] contractor in Santos’ government for the agreement with FARC while I was one of the leaders in opposition to this accord,” Uribe said. “Remember that we won the plebiscite with the NO vote that Santos disregarded in clear violation of our Constitution.”
“The agreement with FARC legalized Narco trafficking and Colombia lost Plan Colombia, 14 billion dollars contributed by the United States,” he continued.
Uribe did not provide an explanation for his public questioning of Justice Reyes’s alleged links to USAID. The former Colombian president issued the message amid the Trump administration’s ongoing dismantling of USAID and the suspension of the U.S. agency’s foreign financial aid assistance programs.
As part of the Trump administration’s plans to merge USAID into the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that President Trump appointed him as USAID’s acting administrator. The Trump administration is also reportedly planning to dramatically cut down the U.S. agency’s total workforce, going from more than 10,000 employees to fewer than 300.
The trial against Uribe, which started on Thursday, is the result of a convoluted legal process that began in 2012. Uribe, at that time serving as a Senator, sued leftist lawmaker Iván Cepeda for allegedly looking for paramilitary members to testify against Uribe and link him to the purported creation of a paramilitary group in the 1990s on a ranch that belonged to Uribe’s family.
In 2018, the Colombian Supreme Court dismissed the complaint against Cepeda and instead opened a new case against Uribe on allegations of fraud and witness tampering in his lawsuit against Cepeda.
In 2024, as part of the legal proceedings, Uribe presented new documentation that he claimed could demonstrate that Justice Reyes “favored” Cepeda and “helped” him so that he would not be incriminated.
According to Uribe, Reyes allegedly interrupted a 2019 interrogation of Cepeda that sought to determine if Cepeda had “destroyed” a chat conversation with former paramilitary fighter Juan Guillermo Monsalve. Uribe accused Reyes of preventing Cepeda from answering the question with the intention of protecting the leftist lawmaker as the answer “could have led to self-incrimination.”
In August 2020, Justice Reyes ruled alongside the other members of the Colombian top court that Uribe be placed under house arrest as part of the ongoing probe. Uribe was released two months later, in October 2020, after a judge ruled that he should be tried under a different legal framework designed for ordinary citizens and that, since he was only under investigation at the time, he should be released.
In addition to denouncing Justice Reyes, Uribe, citing Colombian journalist Gustavo Rugeles, accused Cepeda’s wife Pilar Rueda of also being a USAID consultant. Rugeles claimed in 2019 that Justice Reyes was a USAID consultant when Rueda coordinated post-conflict proceedings following the 2016 FARC “peace deal.”
Uribe, who said on Thursday that “there is no risk that I will declare myself guilty” at the start of the trial, announced on that same day on social media he will present his defense on Monday once the judge allows him to do so.
“My defense against an accusation made against me by a prosecutor appointed and promoted by Eduardo Montealegre,” Uribe said. “A prosecutor who did not have the loyalty to justice to declare his conflict of interest.”
“My defense against an unfair trial carried out by political enemies, some sympathizers and others defenders of terrorism,” he continued.
Following Uribe’s public denunciation of Justice Reyes, far-left President Gustavo Petro proclaimed his “solidarity” with Reyes through a Thursday evening social media post.
“We can disagree, but we respect [each other],” Petro said.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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