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

On October 25, 1997, paramilitary groups went down to the agricultural city far from 300 people from El Aro, in the Colombian state of Antioquia. Over the next five days, drug paramilitaries have shot 17 people, raped several women and burned the city, forcing the townships remaining to flee.

Lawyer Jesus Maria Valle had pleaded with the governor of the State, Álvaro Uibe, for more than a year to stop the brutal takeover by the campaign paramilitaries and collusion with the army. Instead, Uibe described Valle as “enemy of the armed forces”. In a declaration to the prosecutors after the massacre of El Aro, Valle asked for a complete investigation on what he described as an “alliance” in Antioquia among the paramilitaries, the military and the uribe to kill civilians and to grasp their lands, in the name of the fight against the guerrillas farc from the left of the country. In a few days, two men in costumes entered the Valle law firm in downtown Medellin and killed it.

On August 1, Uibe, who became the president of Colombia in 2002, was sentenced to 12 years of assignment at home after a Colombian court sentenced him to bring a witness who had linked him to the paramilitaries. The conviction could still be canceled on appeal, but the fact that he occurred is a striking development which would have seemed almost inconceivable about a decade ago. During the increase in autocracy and abuse, including in the United States, it also offers reasons of hope.

For decades, Uibe seemed almost untouchable. As president, he has acquired a national and international renown – including the American presidential medal of George W Bush – because of his successes, with billions of dollars in American military aid, by defeating the abusive farc. When I met him in 2004, he traveled his conference room, giving me conferences, me and my colleagues, on how nobody had done that he should bring security to the country.

Brilliant representations of the Uribe record at the time regularly shone on his efforts to adopt laws promoting paramilitaries and undermining surveys on their links with people in power. During its presidency, the Colombian Supreme Court led what has become known as the “parapolitical” investigation in approximately a third of the members of the Congress for collusion – including in many cases of electoral fraud – with paramilitaries. Uibe has embarked on a furious defamation campaign against judges and its intelligence service has embarked on illegal surveillance of independent judges and journalists.

However, over the years, senior paramilitary leaders have testified on the involvement of the chief of staff to the army and uribe in Antioquia, Pedro Juan Moreno, in the massacre of El Aro. Multiple research has documented a general collusion between paramilitaries and the important sectors of military and political establishment at the time. There is also evidence – including statements that I have obtained in an interview in prison with a paramilitary leader – that the Uribe office, when he was governor, had close ties with the paramilitaries and that Moreno approved the murder of Valle. Uibe has denied everything on several occasions.

This week’s condemnation emerged in the context of a Supreme Court investigation into allegations according to which Uibe launched a paramilitary group in the 1990s. Uibe said very early that allegations were manufactured by a member of the Congress, but the court concluded that there was no basis for his complaints. Instead, the Supreme Court has ordered a new investigation into a possible falsification of witnesses by people working for Uribe (then a senator), including alleged payments to the paramilitaries to change their testimony. Uibe has left his seat in the Senate, forcing the case to be transferred from the Supreme Court to a lower court, and – with the prosecutors apparently unapproved to move him forward – he seemed years as if the case could well go out like many other previous investigations. However, with a new chief prosecutor in place, the case resumed Steam, finally causing the conviction of this week.

Unsurprisingly, the administration of American president Donald Trump tried to discredit the courts of Colombia, with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, denouncing “the armament of the judicial branch of Colombia”. But all this is now part of a tired game book.

It is the same rhetoric as Trump and the Allies used to discredit the American courts – even the nominees of Trump – who ruled against them. This is how Trump talked about the case against his boyfriend Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and the investigations carried out by the International Criminal Court. And this is how Uibe himself coated activists like Jesus Maria Valle in the 1990s and sought to undermine the Colombian Supreme Court in the early 2000s.

But, for me, this week’s decision represents something else: that no matter how much the leaders of power can raise, they are not ultimately above the law. And no matter how desperate the situation is, with courage and commitment, we can do a lot to create a path to responsibility.

• Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is CEO of representus and the author of the award-winning book, there is no death here: a story of murder and denial in Colombia. She directed the work of Human Rights Watch on Colombia during most of the presidency of Uribe