The brother of Colombia’s hard-right former president Álvaro Uribe led a paramilitary group that murdered civilians and carried out other human rights abuses, a court has found. On 25 November, an Antioquia court sentenced Santiago Uribe to 28 years and three months in prison for aggravated homicide and conspiracy to commit crime as a result of having co-founded the 12 Apostles group in the 1990s.
According to the court, Santiago Uribe schemed to ‘systematically murder and exterminate people considered undesirable’. The judgement concludes a long-running investigation dating back to the 1990s, when he was first accused of paramilitary involvement. The investigation was shelved in 1999 but reopened in 2010, with Santiago Uribe arrested in 2016. He has always denied the allegations. The sentence overrules a lower court ruling in November 2024 that acquitted him, with the Supreme Court set to issue a final decision on an expected appeal.
The Uribe brothers, Álvaro and Santiago, have long been implicated in the formation of paramilitary groups, using the La Carolina family ranch in Antioquia as a base of operations during the 1990s, when Álvaro served as the department’s governor. The property was used for strategic meetings, training and distributing weapons, the ruling found.
While the 12 Apostles is believed to be responsible for widespread human rights abuses, the court convicted Santiago Uribe of ordering the murder of bus driver Camilo Barrientos in 1994. The 12 Apostles targeted Barrientos after Uribe accused him of working with guerrillas in the region. As well as targeting suspected guerrilla sympathisers, the 12 Apostles murdered drug addicts, homeless people and sex workers in so-called ‘limpiezas sociales’, or social cleansings.
While convicting Santiago Uribe of ordering Barrientos’ murder, the court also ruled that ‘corresponding investigations be ordered to determine the possible criminal responsibility of Santiago Uribe Vélez in all the deaths allegedly committed by the organised power apparatus that he directed’.
Earlier this year, Álvaro Uribe was sentenced to 12 years’ house arrest, subsequently overturned, for attempting to manipulate paramilitary witnesses to incriminate Senator Iván Cepeda, a long-time critic of the Uribe brothers and current presidential candidate for the governing Historic Pact coalition. The case has provided further fuel to allegations that the Uribe family was closely linked to paramilitary groups during the 1990s and 2000s.
Álvaro Uribe’s presidency of Colombia (2002-10) was characterised by extreme violence against civilians. Findings by Colombia’s Truth Commission show that paramilitary groups were the main human rights violators during the armed conflict, responsible for 45 per cent of killings (compared with 27 per cent by guerrillas), 52 per cent of the 110,000 forced disappearances and other violations. Paramilitary forces routinely operated in close cooperation with state forces.
Furthermore, in 2021, the JEP transitional justice court found that under Uribe the army murdered 6,402 civilians and presented them as guerrillas killed in combat. In September this year, the JEP issued its first restorative sentences against army officials over the killings, commonly known as ‘False Positives’.
Former president Uribe has close links to members of the Trump administration, meeting Secretary of State Marco Rubio in both the US and Colombia between 2013 and 2015. Uribe campaigned in Florida against the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, while members of his Democratic Centre party were criticised for meddling in US elections by visiting the country to campaign on behalf of Donald Trump’s candidacy.