Do we like them?

Do we like Álvaro Uribe?

Our score: 4 out of 10. A long record of serious allegations and a hard-edged war on rebels, with no court holding him liable and thin evidence I could read of his own words on LGBTQ+ people or climate.

Uribe is the man who defined Colombian politics for two decades: a former governor of Antioquia who won the presidency in 2002 and ran the country until 2010 on a hard-line 'Democratic Security' platform against the FARC guerrillas. He built a party, Centro Democrático, around that legacy and has stayed its most powerful voice ever since.

The big story is the court case. In July 2025 a Bogotá judge found him guilty over allegedly pressuring jailed former paramilitaries to change testimony given to his political rival, Senator Iván Cepeda, and sentenced him to 12 years of house arrest. Uribe called it political persecution. In October 2025 an appeals court overturned the conviction, and Cepeda and victims said they would appeal further.

That is the fight he keeps coming back to, but it isn't the whole file. Colombian prosecutors have long looked at alleged paramilitary links, and in June 2026 the Attorney General opened a fresh probe and summoned him. He denies wrongdoing, and nothing I could read shows a court finding against him on those claims. His brother, Santiago Uribe, was separately sentenced in November 2025 to 28 years in a paramilitary case, which is his brother's case, not his.

On the harm test, I have to be honest about the gaps. I couldn't open and read his own statements on LGBTQ+ rights, women, migrants or the climate, so I'm not going to put words in his mouth. What sits on the record is the company and the camp: he led the campaign against the 2016 peace deal, and critics have argued that campaign leaned on anti-LGBTQ+ messaging, which is a claim about the campaign rather than a quote from him.

Supporters credit him with pushing the FARC back, cutting kidnappings and freeing high-profile hostages in a daring rescue operation. Critics point to the 'false positives' scandal, in which soldiers killed civilians and passed them off as combatants, which peaked during his presidency. In the sources I read, he has not been convicted of ordering those killings, so where you land depends on whether you weigh the security gains or the human cost more heavily.

So: not a clean yes, and not a slam-dunk no. The conviction was overturned, so he gets the benefit of the doubt there, but a new probe, a brother in prison and a career of fierce partisanship don't sit well with a house rule of 'be nice, support everyone'. We'd want to see how the new probe lands before getting comfortable.