Family of Murdered Colombian Lawyer Accuse Ex-President Uribe of Colluding with His Killers

The family members of Colombian human rights lawyer Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo are demanding that investigations into his murder more than a decade ago include former President Alvaro Uribe.

Valle devoted his life to defending poor peasants from his home region of Ituango and revealing the atrocities committed against its people by paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño, in collusion with civil and military authorities.

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Uribe was the governor of the northeastern department of Antioquia, where Valle was working at the time that the advocate was killed in his legal office in 1998 by hitmen.

While now-Senator Uribe has been suspected of involvement in this case and other assassinations of social movement leaders, it was the statements of a former paramilitary boss, Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, alias “don Berna,” which prompted Jaramillo’s relatives to take action.

According to Murillo, Valle’s death would have been ordered by the then secretary of the government of Antioquia, Pedro Juan Moreno, who was since killed in an airplane crash.

The lawyer’s nephew, Mauricio Herrera Valle, said that if Pedro Juan Moreno was the mastermind of the murder of his uncle, the then-governor of Antioquia, Uribe, would have known about the planned hit.

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“If my uncle at that time denounced both of them …. they both had something to do with the complicity,” said Herrera on Monday.

The denunciation to which Herrera referred was made by his uncle just three weeks before his death.

In a statement made to the regional general attorney’s office Feb. 6, 1998, Valle said he believed Uribe was involved, “I always saw and thought about how there was a tacit agreement or a sort of obvious behavior of omission, skillfully plotted between the commander of the IV Brigade, the commander of the Antioquia Police, Doctor Alvaro Uribe Velez, Doctor Pedro Juan Moreno and Carlos Castaño.”

He continued, “All the power of the paramilitary groups has been consolidated by the support that that group has had with people linked to the government, the military strata, the police strata, and the ranchers and bankers of the department of Antioquia, and of the country.”

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