Álvaro Uribe
Álvaro Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, the first elected in the first round since the two-round system began and the first re-elected, after a constitutional amendment he had passed for the purpose, the rancher's son from Antioquia whose father had been killed by the FARC in 1983 in a kidnapping attempt. He was elected to fight them. The democratic security policy doubled the army and police, put soldiers on every main road, paid a network of civilian informants. It drove the FARC from the towns and the highways into the mountains, cutting the murder rate by half and the kidnappings by ninety per cent. In 2008 the army bombed the FARC's second-in-command in Ecuador, its leader Marulanda died, and Operation Jaque tricked the guerrillas into handing over Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages to soldiers dressed as aid workers. The other ledger was the demobilisation of the paramilitaries under a law that gave them eight-year sentences and extradited their leaders when they talked. There was the parapolitics scandal in which a third of the congress that supported him was found to have paramilitary ties. There were the false positives, the murder of thousands of civilians whom the army dressed as guerrillas to inflate its body count, and the wiretapping of judges and journalists by his intelligence service. He was born in Medellín in 1952, studied law at Antioquia, was the director of civil aviation at twenty-eight under Turbay, when the cartel's planes were licensed, and mayor of Medellín for five months in 1982 before the governor removed him. He was a senator through the 1990s and governor of Antioquia in 1995-97, where he created the Convivir self-defence cooperatives that became the paramilitaries' cover. The approval ratings of seventy per cent sustained the two terms and did not survive the attempt at a third, which the constitutional court struck down in February 2010. He founded the Democratic Centre in 2013 to oppose Santos's peace agreement, which he beat in the plebiscite of 2016 by fifty thousand votes. He was placed under house arrest by the supreme court in 2020 for witness tampering, convicted in 2025 and sentenced to twelve years, and acquitted on appeal that October. He remains the figure the country's politics is for or against.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, politician
