US State Secretary Marco Rubio has called the former president’s trial ‘the weaponisation of Colombia’s judicial branch by radical judges’

A judge in Bogota ruled on Monday that Uribe, who governed from 2002 to 2010, was responsible in the first instance for bribery of witnesses and obstruction of justice after a more than 10-hour hearing.

The case centres on allegations that the right-wing leader dispatched intermediaries to prisons to pressure former members of illegal armed groups into altering their testimony – retracting accusations against him and instead implicating left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda.

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