Álvaro Uribe Vélez (born 4 July 1952) is the 39th President of Colombia and is currently serving his second term in office. In August 2010 he was appointed Vice-chairman of the UN panel investigating the Gaza flotilla raid.
Uribe started his political career in his home department of Antioquia. He has held office in the Empresas Públicas de Medellín and in the Ministry of Labor and in the Civil Aeronautic. Later he held office as the mayor of Medellín in 1982, then he was Senator between 1986 and 1994 and finally Governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997 before he was elected President of Colombia in 2002. Under his presidency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have suffered a series of military defeats, the main paramilitary groups have gone through a demobililization process and he has spearheaded several Free Trade Agreements with different countries.
Before his current role in politics Uribe was a lawyer. He studied law at the University of Antioquia and completed a post-graduate management program at Harvard University.[2] He was awarded the Simón Bolívar Scholarship of the British Council and was nominated Senior Associate Member at the St Antony's College, Oxford in the University of Oxford after completing his term in office as the governor of Antioquia in 1998.
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In May 2007, the American Jewish Committee gave Uribe its "Light Unto The Nations" award. AJC President E. Robert Goodkind, who presented the award at AJC's Annual Dinner, held at the National Building Museum in Washington stated: "President Uribe is a staunch ally of the United States, a good friend of Israel and the Jewish people, and is a firm believer in human dignity and human development in Colombia and the Americas".
During the previous eight years of outgoing President Uribe’s and Defense Minister Santos’ rule, over 2 million, mostly rural poor, were forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums. The Uribe-Santos regime relied on both the military and the 30,000 member paramilitary deathsquads to kill and terrorize entire population centers, deemed “sympathetic” to the armed insurgency, affecting several million urban and rural poor. Over 20,000 people were killed, many, according to the major Colombian human rights group, falsely labeled “guerrillas”. Santos as Defense Minister was directly implicated by the Courts in what was called “false positives”. The military randomly rounded up scores of poor urban youth, shot them and claimed a resounding victory over the FARC guerrillas.
