Ex-envoy recalls doubting Uribe

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Sunday, 02.15.09
Ex-envoy recalls doubting Uribe

A former U.S. diplomat said he was disappointed in then-governor Alvaro Uribe's responses to his questions in the 1990s about alleged drug ties.
BY GERARDO REYES
El Nuevo Herald

A former U.S. ambassador to Colombia says he once asked President Alvaro Uribe about his alleged ties to drug-trafficking when he was governor of Antioquia province in the mid-1990s -- and was not satisfied with the answer. ''I returned disappointed . . . that is, he washed his hands of the matter,'' Myles Frechette, who served as U.S. ambassador in Bogotá from 1994 to 1997, told El Nuevo Herald.

Uribe has repeatedly and strongly denied the allegations of links to traffickers when he was governor of Antioquia, whose capital is Medellín, which have surfaced occasionally over the past two decades.

Frechette recalled confronting Uribe with a report by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency in 1991 that listed him as a facilitator for Colombian drug cartels.

Frechette said he told Uribe that Washington was concerned about Uribe's appointment of Cesar Villegas to a Civil Aeronautics position that could be used to approve registrations for planes owned by drug traffickers. After Villegas left his post in 1986, he was convicted of illegal enrichment related to his links to the Cali Cartel. He was killed by hit men in 2002 in Bogotá.

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