Colombia’s powerful former president Álvaro Uribe has announced that he will resign from his senate seat in order to focus on battling a widening supreme court investigation.

Uribe, a hardliner who led a brutal campaign against leftist rebels from 2002 to 2010, has long dodged accusations of involvement in paramilitary massacres that occurred during and before his tenure.

He could, however, come unstuck in the face of new charges of bribing and intimidating witnesses related to those death squad cases.

On Wednesday, Uribe accused the British intelligence agency MI6 of colluding with his former defence minister and eventual successor as president, Juan Manuel Santos, to supply recordings that implicate him in crimes.

“There are repeated allegations that the recordings were made by the British agency MI6, friends of Juan Manuel Santos,” he tweeted. “Foreign authorities in a ruse against me.”

It is unclear what recordings Uribe was alluding to, though investigators have referred to intercepted phone calls.

Uribe and Santos were once allies but split in acrimony when Santos became president and pursued a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc) rebel group.



Uribe’s sudden resignation on Tuesday came as a shock to many Colombians who saw Uribe’s star rising once again after his latest protege, Iván Duque, was elected to succeed Santos last month, signaling a shift back to the hardline conservative politics that defined Uribe’s presidency.

That victory – which many attribute to the former president’s charismatic hold on his base – followed Uribe’s successful 2016 campaign to vote down a peace deal with the Farc in a referendum. The deal, later ratified in Congress, ended 52 years of civil war that left at least 220,000 dead and 7 million displaced.

Uribe has long been accused by human rights watchdogs of using rightwing death squads to help fight the Farc during his presidency, and he is alleged to have conspired with paramilitaries to organise a massacre in his native province of Antioquia while governor in 1997.

Fifteen people died in the massacre at El Aro and nearly 1,000 were displaced, while an unknown number of villagers were raped.

A separate scandal led to the abolition of the country’s domestic intelligence agency in 2011 after it was revealed that Uribe had used it to spy on opposition members and journalists. Several witnesses in other cases have turned up dead.

Uribe has denied all the accusations and dismissed the latest charges as politically motivated. But the new allegations of witness tampering seem to have riled him enough to step down from office.

His current legal battles stem from another feud with the leftist senator Iván Cepeda, who has long sought to clarify Uribe’s alleged involvement with death squads. Uribe accused the senator of intimidating and bribing witnesses in his investigations, something the supreme court dismissed before levelling the same allegations at the former president.

Uribe’s brother Santiago is currently awaiting trial for allegedly running his own death squad known as the Twelve Apostles.

Where Uribe’s critics see a blood-soaked disrespect for human rights, others see a no-nonsense approach to warfare that ultimately brought the Farc to the negotiating table.

“He’s the best president Colombia has had,” José Botero, a young supporter whose father was murdered by the Farc, told the Guardian last month. “He brought us law and order.”

Duque, who on the campaign trail floated the idea of restructuring the judiciary without the supreme court, stuck by his mentor in the fallout from Tuesday’s developments. “We are witnesses of his honour, his correctness, his patriotism and his unquestionable service to the country and to the rule of law,” the president-elect told reporters Tuesday night.

Duque will take office on 7 August.

