Correction Appended

A recently declassified American intelligence report from 1991 says that President Álvaro Uribe, now a staunch ally in Washington's war against drug trafficking, was at that time a close associate of Colombia's most powerful drug lord and an ardent ally of the cocaine traffickers then engulfing this country.

A spokesman for Mr. Uribe denounced the findings in the 13-year-old report, by the Defense Intelligence Agency, on Colombia's biggest drug traffickers as ''the same information'' presented in a smear campaign by political opponents in the 2002 presidential election. Senior American intelligence officials and diplomats cautioned that such reports might not be accurate. However, the statement issued by the spokesman for the president did not directly address the report's most damaging assertion: that Mr. Uribe was linked to the top drug kingpin of the era, Pablo Escobar.

The report, dated Sept. 23, 1991, and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archives, a private, nonpartisan research group based in Washington, says Mr. Uribe, then a senator from the northern state of Antioquia, was ''dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels.''

The report, which the archives is making public on Monday, calls Mr. Uribe a ''close personal friend'' of the cartel's leader, Mr. Escobar, and says Mr. Uribe took part in the drug lord's successful efforts to secure a seat as an auxiliary congressman. It said Mr. Uribe was linked to an unidentified business involved in narcotics in the United States, that as a senator he opposed extraditing traffickers to the United States and that his father, Alberto Uribe, was killed because of his drug ties.