The conviction of Colombia’s ex-president is a sign of hope amid autocracy’s rise | Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

Álvaro Uribe was convicted of bribery in a development that would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago

On 25 October 1997, paramilitary groups descended upon the remote 300-person farming town of El Aro, in the Colombian state of Antioquia. Over the next five days, the drug-running paramilitaries slaughtered 17 people, raped multiple women and burned the town down, forcing the remaining townspeople to flee.

The attorney Jesús María Valle had been pleading with the state governor, Álvaro Uribe, for over a year to stop the paramilitaries’ brutal takeover of the countryside and collusion with the military. Instead, Uribe labeled Valle an “enemy of the armed forces”. In a statement to prosecutors after the El Aro massacre, Valle asked for a full investigation into what he described as an “alliance” in Antioquia among paramilitaries, the military and Uribe to kill civilians and seize their land, in the name of fighting the country’s leftwing Farc guerrillas. Within days, two men in suits strode into Valle’s law office in downtown Medellín and shot him dead.

Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is CEO of RepresentUs and the author of the award-winning book There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia. She spearheaded Human Rights Watch’s work on Colombia during most of Uribe’s presidency

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