October 2007

President Álvaro Uribe’s ties to Medellín cartel drug lord Pablo Escobar surfaced again in October in the newly released autobiography of Escobar’s former mistress and one-time TV diva Virginia Vallejo. According to Vallejo’s memoirs, Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar, Uribe was central to Pablo Escobar’s success in drug trafficking. From his position as director of the Aviation National Agency, Uribe “granted dozens of licences for landing strips and hundreds for aircraft and helicopters on which the drug trafficking infrastructure was built”. She went on to recall that when Uribe’s father was killed in a 1983 aborted kidnapping attempt by FARC in Northeastern Antioquia, Escobar lend him one of his helicopters to bring Uribe’s brother, also wounded in the attack and the deceased father to Medellín.

The allegations were not new -- a declassified 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency report [1] listed him among Colombia’s top drug traffickers. But Uribe’s responded with a furious attack on journalists not related with the book at all, so intense that one of them, Miami Nuevo Herald correspondent Gonzalo Guillén, received dozens of death threats and fled into exile.

As if that weren’t enough scandal, President Uribe publicly attacked a Supreme Court prosecutor, claiming that he was victim of a conspiracy of the high tribunal to accuse him of ordering the death of a paramilitary warlord. The Supreme Court is responsible for investigating the highest ranking officials –namely members of Congress- implicated in the parapolitica scandal.

The casualties of Uribe’s ire this month were press freedom and the independence of the judicial system. It remains to be seen what impact, if any, these episodes will have on US-Colombia relations.