FDLP-Ecuador: The Sentence of Álvaro Uribe, a Reformist Hoax by the old Colombian State

We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement published by the Defense Front for the Defense of the Struggles of the People in Ecuador (FDLP-EC).

On August 1, 2025, a Colombian court convicted Álvaro Uribe Vélez to 12 years of imprisonment House arrest, a bill and prohibition from exercising functions public.

Uribe was not prosecuted for crimes against humanity, terrorist acts, massacres or links with the paramilitary; no, the charge was for witnesses manipulation and judicial fraud. “Better than nothing” some opportunists will say, without understand that this sentence does not show anything other than the incapacity that the old Colombian bourgeois-big landlord State has to purify itself by itself.

In essence, this sentence does not is an act of justice, but a legal staging, carefully orchestrated to whitewash the image of a murderous State and to guarantee the continuity of the power structure of the big bourgeoisie and the latifundium, which Uribe represented and served with fanatical criminal devotion.

Álvaro Uribe was more than a ruler. In addition to embodying the comprador bourgeoisie, he was the main representative of the feudal big landlords, responsible for implementing old repressive doctrines whose strategic axis consisted of depopulating violently the Colombian countryside to facilitate the armed occupation by gangs criminals who later operated as foremen of the new latifundium, sustained in illegal economies.

Uribe was the most brutal face and effective counter to State terrorism in Colombia. During his administration, thousands of poor young people were murdered by the Army and presented as “guerrillas killed” in the case known as the “false positives.” People murdered in order to increase statistics, collect rewards, obtain promotions and legitimize a dirty war against the people. And yet, this barbarism, like many other things that he promoted and covered up, were never taken to court.

The conviction against Uribe does not affect the root of the problem. It does not question its role in consolidating the paramilitary, in the expansion of drug trafficking under institutional protection, nor in the systematic persecution and murder of social leaders, trade unionists, peasants and students. He is not being prosecuted for genocide or crimes against humanity, nor for his role as the main executor of the imperialist counterinsurgency doctrine applied with brutality in Colombia. It only sanctions him for procedural fraud. It rewards him with a lenient sentence, which includes privileges such as “house arrest”; that is, a house converted into prison. Could there be a more outrageous outcome for such a criminal?

Uribe has been, a US imperialism’s key piece in his country and in the Andean subregion for years. He applied with precision the Plan Colombia, which not only meant the intensive militarization of the country, especially of rural regions, but also the systematic dispossession of land, the forced displacement of peasant and indigenous communities, and the massacre of tens of thousands of poor people in the countryside. He led the policy of “democratic security” with the support from the CIA, the Southern Command and Israeli advisors, under the false under the pretext of combating against “terrorism,” when in reality it was carrying out a plan of extermination of the trade union, peasant, and people’s movements. Not only that: exported the Plan Colombia model to countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador, as part of the counterrevolutionary and anti-national Yankee imperialism’s project.

Everything, absolutely everything acted upon by the Colombian justice system has a marked class character. When this “justice”, this State, lightly “sacrifices” the butcher, the paramilitary, the criminal Álvaro Uribe, does so not in the name of the law, but in function of the interests of imperialism and the old bourgeois-big landlord order. They won’t send him to prison, to the hell into which he threw thousands of peasants, unionists, students, indigenous and people’s leaders whom he imprisoned, tortured, murdered, disappeared or displaced. No, they punish him halfway, through a legal figure that is more like a forced retirement from national politics than a real criminal sanction.

If there are those who still believe that the Petro’s government is bringing justice to the broad masses, are deeply mistaken, daydreaming. This judicial farce is nothing more than a ‘salute to the flag’. Because all those who today have the power in Colombia, big bourgeoisie, and big landlords, those who promoted, financed and directed the actions of the Uribe hordes, including the military and judicial structures that protected him, continue untouched. The beneficiaries of dispossession and terror remain where they were. Uribism has not died: it has been recycled and reprogrammed with a speech of “national reconciliation”. And not even the current government, bourgeois and reformist, has shown the political will to dismantle it.

It must be remembered that the Ecuadorian people also are forced victims of Plan Colombia, of the Uribe’s brutality, of paramilitary and of criminal violence exercised by the repressive apparatus of the Colombian State in ‘our’ territory. Let us remember the bombings of Angostura, or the forced displacement of peasants and indigenous communities along the Ecuador-Colombia border; therefore we do not celebrate or show ourselves sympathetic to this “condemnation”, presented as a travesty of justice. We denounce this farce, which is nothing more than an insult to the masses of peasants and poor people who were targeted by this criminal. We reject this maneuver by the Colombian government and State, which attempts to appear just without dismantling, at least, the machinery of death that made it possible.

The proletariat and people of the Ecuador strongly reject the unrestricted support issued by the former Presidents Osvaldo Hurtado, Guillermo Lasso, Lenin Moreno and Jamil Mahuad, in favor of Álvaro Uribe and against his “lukewarm” ruling. Similarly, we reject the “support” campaign that the ‘Colombian butcher’ received from Noboa regime’s officials; in fact, t is obvious that what was stated by the former presidents and the government does not express the feeling of the vast majority of the country’s exploited and oppressed. And, above all, we reaffirm that true justice will not come from institutions that administer impunity, but of the mobilized, conscious and organized people. Let us remember, only the people punish their executioners, and the sanction would not be precisely a flattering retirement to a property with hundreds of hectares, pure blood horses and sunny sunrises. No! Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic (1961), Carlos Prats, former commander of the Chilean army in 1974 and Anastasio Somoza (1980) are a clear example of the destiny that the murderers of the people must necessarily have.

NEITHER FORGIVENESS NOR FORGET FOR THE EXECUTIONERS OF THE PEOPLE!

ORGANIZE, COMBAT AND RESIST!