A close political ally of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe wanted for allegedly backing illegal militias surrendered to police on Tuesday night after Costa Rica denied him political asylum.
Colombia’s chief prosecutor had ordered the arrest of former senator
Mario Uribe, President Uribe’s second cousin, earlier on Tuesday on charges of criminal conspiracy for “agreements to promote illegal armed groups.” The former senator had immediately entered the Costa Rican embassy in Bogota to seek asylum but was denied.
Amid protesters’ shouts of “murderer,” Mario Uribe left the small, one-story embassy and departed in a black SUV escorted by four motorcycle police, who cut a path through reporters and some 50 protesters, the chief prosecutor’s office said.
Reporters saw two people in the vehicle’s back seat whose heads were covered with jackets.
The arrest ended a long, tense day that brought a scandal linking politicians and right-wing paramilitaries deeper into the president’s inner circle.
It comes after the Democratic leadership of the US Congress spurned a bid by the Bush administration this month to force a ratification vote on a free-trade agreement with Colombia.
Some Democrats have cited the scandal as a reason.
Mario Uribe, 58, who resigned from the Senate in October when he came under formal investigation, is one of the most powerful officials to be enmeshed in the scandal.
He has long been close to President Uribe, and in 1985 the two founded a political party together.
In a statement read by his spokesman on Tuesday evening, the president said the arrest warrant “hurts me. I assume this pain with patriotism and without diminishing the fulfillment of my duties, with the sole aim of protecting institutions.”
The reference was to the chief prosecutor’s office, which said earlier in a brief statement that it was investigating an alleged meeting between Mario Uribe and former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso prior to the 2002 congressional elections. It was also looking into a 1998 meeting with Jairo Castillo Peralta, a former paramilitary chauffeur.
Mancuso has alleged that Mario Uribe sought his support in the 2002 Senate race. Castillo Peralta, who lives in exile, has said Mario Uribe met with paramilitary warlords in 1998 seeking cheap land near the Caribbean coast.
Mario Uribe has denied those allegations.
More than 30 current or former members of the 266-member Congress, the vast majority allies of the president, have been arrested for allegedly backing and benefiting from the right-wing paramilitaries.
President Uribe has nevertheless remained highly popular due to his get-tough approach to leftist rebels, which has made road travel safer and helped spur foreign investment.
His political opponents said they found it difficult to believe he didn’t know about Mario Uribe’s alleged contacts with paramilitaries.
Claudia Lopez, an independent investigator whose research helped precipitate the scandal, said that Mario Uribe, in seeking asylum, was in effect saying “there are no guarantees he’ll be judged fairly in the country governed by his cousin.”
The paramilitaries initially formed in the 1980s to protect wealthy landowners from guerrilla kidnapping and extortion and seized control of nearly the entire Caribbean region in the late 1990s.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home