2023-10-19 18:39:55
Following the determination of the Superior Court of Bogotá, which in the second instance refused to preclude the investigation against former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez for alleged bribery of witnesses and procedural fraud, this Thursday the name of the prosecutor who will take over the process to replace Javier was known. Cardenas. This is Andrés Palencia, prosecutor delegated to the Supreme Court.
The official – who has gained recognition for taking on media cases, such as that of Óscar Iván Zuluaga or Luis Alberto Monsalve Gnecco – will be in charge of determining, based on the evidentiary material, whether to insist on the preclusion of the case or, on the contrary, , if he finds sufficient elements to accuse the former president.
The change of prosecutor is a requirement following the determination of the Superior Court of Bogotá, after prosecutor Javier Cárdenas had asked to preclude the process. Precisely, Palencia is the third prosecutor to face the case, after the investigation initially carried out by Gabriel Jaimes and then Cárdenas.
The new prosecutor in the Uribe case took office almost a year ago, on December 2, as a delegate to the Supreme Court of Justice. The above, after being sectional director of the César Prosecutor’s Office for nine months.
His resume includes more than 15 years of experience as a municipal criminal judge, assistant magistrate, criminal judge against criminal gangs, judge for the execution of sentences and security measures, and criminal judge of the Circuit with Knowledge Functions.
At the beginning of the month, Uribe Vélez refused to listen to the final decision of the Superior Court of Bogotá not to preclude the process that the Prosecutor’s Office is carrying out against him and that has now been going on for almost 5 years. A day before, when the ruling was read, the former president anticipated that he would be called to trial, so a few minutes after the hearing began, Uribe appeared and requested permission to withdraw.
Magistrate Carlos Andrés Guzmán told him that it was not necessary for him to be present, but first he clarified that the decision was recorded in a 270-page folio and more than 972 pieces of evidence were taken into consideration. Finally, the former president disconnected from the virtual room.
However, Uribe was not entirely right, because for now he has not been called to trial. What the Court did was tell the Prosecutor’s Office that the case could not be precluded, could not be closed, because it had not been investigated sufficiently to resolve all the doubts. Reason why the magistrates ordered the bunker to continue with the investigations until reaching a conclusion, either to accuse the former president and take him to trial, or to request preclusion again, but with greater grounds.
The case against Uribe dates back to 2014, when Senator Iván Cepeda led a political control debate against his then colleague in Congress for alleged paramilitary links. At that moment, the former president stood up from the session and stated that he would go to the Supreme Court to provide evidence that Cepeda had pressured former paramilitaries to speak against him. But the high court changed the case and instead of investigating Cepeda, it opened a process against Uribe.
The determination not to allow the Uribe case to be precluded comes five months after the 41st Judge of Bogotá, Laura Barrera, had ruled in the same sense. She went further and said that there were elements of evidence that, “with probability of truth,” would demonstrate Uribe’s alleged criminal conduct as a “determinator.”
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