Exiled police major gives deposition on Colombian militia

By Juan Forero

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- A retired police major who is in exile in Argentina was deposed Tuesday by the Colombian attorney general's office after he accused President Álvaro Uribe's brother of having led a right-wing paramilitary group in the early 1990s.

A high-ranking prosecutor, Hernando Castañeda, traveled to Buenos Aires and took a three-hour deposition from Juan Carlos Meneses, the former police official. Meneses told The Washington Post in May, when he was living in Venezuela, that Santiago Uribe had led an illegal militia in the town of Yarumal that killed guerrilla sympathizers and suspected rebels.

Officials in the attorney general's office said Meneses's declaration would be evaluated in Bogota to determine if a long-dormant case against Uribe could be reopened.

Meneses, who was commander of the Yarumal police force in 1994, had publicly recounted how he and Uribe planned killings. Briefly jailed but not convicted, Meneses said he fled Colombia in October after associates in the security services warned him he would soon be killed for knowing too much. He went to Venezuela but has also been in Argentina, where he has met with the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

Santiago Uribe has denied the accusations, though he said in a May interview that he expected the case to be reopened on the basis of the new allegations. The Colombian government has vigorously defended the president's brother, accusing Meneses of being paid by a drug-trafficking outfit to make the claims.