New book adds to claims Uribe's brother led paramilitary group http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/16097-new-book-adds-to-claims-against-uribes-brother-that-he-led-paramilitary-group.html

A new book sheds further light on the alleged leading role of former President Alvaro Uribe's brother Santiago in the notorious paramilitary death squad, the 12 Apostles.The book, written by Colombian journalist Olga Behar and presented Saturday in Bogota, is titled "El Clan de los 12 Apostoles," (The Clan of the 12 Apostles) and focuses on the period of 1992-1994, drawing predominantly from interviews with a former Antioquian police official, Juan Carlos Meneses, the man who first implicated Uribe as the leader of the group in an interview with the Washington Post last year.

While the 2010 interview by Meneses was crucial in highlighting Uribe's role as the principal financier and strategist for the group, the book delves deeper into the relationship between the paramilitaries and the authorities, a relationship that permitted the killings of peasants, guerrillas and alleged guerrilla sympathizers by the group Behar stated in a recent interview.Rather than seeing the operational capacity of this paramilitary squad as being a result of individual failings by the police and armed forces,

Behar notes that it was down to a deliberate failing by the authorities, using cases provided by Meneses as key examples.Meneses relayed to Behar how Uribe would often order the police to retreat from their area of operation by some one or two miles in order for a massacre conducted by his gang to take place. When reports would come through to the police, they would be too far away to arrive at the scene in time to detain the perpetrators. For these services, Uribe allegedly paid Meneses personally $2,000 per month.

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