1984 documents suggest drug link to Uribe family

Reprinted from Miami Herald

BY GERARDO REYES
El Nuevo Herald

Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Colombia's former justice minister who led a campaign against drug trafficking in the 1980s, once said President Alvaro Uribe and his father were models of how Colombian society had been infiltrated by drug dealers, according to legal documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald.

In a sworn declaration made in 1984, Lara Bonilla's sister declared that he had cited the case of a helicopter that had been captured in a huge cocaine laboratory in the south of Colombia that, according to government information, was owned by the president's father, Alberto Uribe Sierra. He had made the statement just weeks before his assassination by ''sicarios'' from the Medellín Cartel.

President Uribe has denied any wrongdoing by either himself or his father and family, saying that the helicopter had been sold a month before the seizure. But there is no document showing the transfer of the chopper in the aeronautics registry.

Lara Bonilla's son and Colombia's current anticorruption czar, Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, told El Nuevo Herald that neither he nor his brothers had read the files of his father, who was killed in April 1984.

''Now that I know [of] these documents, I believe it is a delicate topic, and I will give a declaration the next few days,'' he said.

ALL SECTORS

Weeks before he was assassinated, Lara Bonilla complained about drug traffickers infiltrating all sectors of society.

His remarks weren't generic. They came with names, dates and places.

The sister's sworn statement, made in July 1984 as a result of Lara Bonilla's death, suggests he considered that President Uribe's father could be linked with drug dealing because the helicopter he owned had been discovered in a raid made in a cocaine-processing laboratory in a place known as Tranquilandia.

''He said that the Tranquilandia affair was serious, and it implicated very important people of the country's political sphere, that the captured helicopter was owned by Alvaro Uribe Velez's father,'' said his sister Cecilia Lara Bonilla. 'Then, he told me: `The mafia has infiltrated all the country's sectors, not only the political, but also the economy.' ''

FEAR OF ATTACK

In another sworn declaration made in the file, police Col. Jaime Ramírez Gómez, who coordinated the operation against Tranquilandia, said that he had a conversation with Lara Bonilla about his fear of an attack.

'He told me that if he were targeted, the protagonists would be the owners of all the seized properties in that cocaine laboratory. I asked him to give me more details and he said, `The owners of the helicopter and the airplanes you captured,' '' Ramírez said.

Lara Bonilla did not mention any names then.