Colombia’s former president Alvaro Uribe Velez will participate in this Sunday’s congressional election following his conviction and subsequent acquittal for procedural fraud and bribery of a public official.
While he is last in line for a seat in his party’s list, the Centro Democrático, or Democratic Center, hopes his name will help it secure between 18 and 20 seats in the 103-seat Senate.
Uribe is returning to the ballots after resigning from the Senate in 2020, when the Supreme Court began proceedings against him over witness tampering allegations.
In Colombia’s congressional elections, parties and party coalitions can run either closed lists, where voters choose only the party and seats go to candidates in a predetermined order, or open lists, where voters can select individual candidates. Since the Democratic Center is running a closed list, being number 25 means that Uribe is the least likely candidate to get a seat in Congress for his party.
“The political strategy of placing Uribe in the 25th position is highly effective for pulling in votes and taking advantage of voters’ lack of understanding [about how closed lists work],” political advisor Felipe García told The Bogotá Post.
The Democratic Center is a hyper-personalized party whose votes rely heavily on the stature of Uribe as the natural leader of Colombia’s political right. Therefore, it is likely that voters will go to the polls on Sunday to vote for whoever Uribe endorsed, regardless of whether he himself ends up being elected.
Legal battle
The legal case against Uribe centered on a libel suit he had brought against Senator Iván Cepeda Castro, the current leftist presidential frontrunner, who accused Uribe of being involved with paramilitary death squads.
Uribe and Cepeda represent opposite poles of Colombia’s political spectrum. Uribe is a conservative, hardline anti-guerrilla leader, whereas Cepeda supports peace negotiations with rebels.
While investigating a separate case to the libel inquiry, authorities overheard in a wiretap that Uribe’s lawyer, Diego Cadena, had contacted jailed paramilitaries to change their testimony in Uribe’s favor.
This evidence became key to a July 2025 ruling which made Uribe Colombia’s first ex-president to be criminally convicted, with judge Sandra Heredia sentencing him to 12 years of house arrest.
But the politician’s lawyers appealed the ruling and in October, the Superior Court of Bogotá acquitted Uribe of all charges, as the wiretap evidence against him was illegally collected.
A month before his acquittal, the Democratic Center – which was founded by Uribe – announced that its former leader would be number 25 on the party’s Senate candidate closed list.
Uribe’s 2020 resignation from the senate was seen as both a legal and political move, since it meant that his case would be picked up by the Attorney General’s Office, which at the time was headed by Francisco Barbosa Delgado, an ally of the former president.
After several failed attempts to close the case and after Barbosa left office as attorney general, the office formally charged former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez with bribery and witness tampering in May 2024. By that time, Uribe’s defense team was already alleging that the politician was the victim of lawfare.
Recently, the prosecution team in the Uribe trial and alleged victims of paramilitaries announced they would file an extraordinary appeal before the Supreme Court. The ruling is expected to carry greater legal significance than political or public impact, according to García.
Many victims’ groups celebrated Uribe’s conviction as a symbolic victory. Uribe was the president during the ‘false positives’ killings — cases in which Colombian soldiers killed civilians and falsely presented them as guerrilla members killed in combat.