President
Álvaro Uribe, the Bush administration’s closest ally in Latin America, faces an intensifying scandal after a jailed former commander of paramilitary death squads testified Tuesday that Mr. Uribe’s defense minister had tried to plot with the outlawed private militias to upset the rule of a former president.
Speaking at a closed court hearing in Medellín, Salvatore Mancuso, the former paramilitary warlord, said Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos had met with paramilitary leaders in the mid-1990s to discuss efforts to destabilize the president at the time,
Ernesto Samper, according to judicial officials.
Mr. Mancuso also said that Vice President Francisco Santos had met with paramilitary leaders in 1997 to discuss taking their operations to the capital, Bogotá.
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These revelations followed the disclosure this week of an illegal domestic spying program by the national police force and additional arrests of high-ranking political allies of Mr. Uribe on charges of ties to the paramilitaries.
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Mr. Uribe tried to contain the newest scandal by forcing 12 generals in the national police to resign Monday over illegal wiretaps of political opponents, government officials and journalists.
Among those whose phones were tapped was Carlos Gaviria, an opposition leader who ran for president against Mr. Uribe last year. “This cannot happen under a democratic government,” Mr. Gaviria said.
The purge of the generals came after the newsmagazine Semana published transcripts of cellphone calls from imprisoned paramilitary leaders in which they orchestrated murders and cocaine deals. It was not clear whether these intercepted phone calls were part of the police surveillance program.
Mr. Santos, the defense minister, said neither he nor Mr. Uribe knew of the police wiretapping operation. Still, the report has hurt the credibility of Mr. Uribe’s government, already suffering from a perception of being soft on the paramilitaries ...
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