Remember Poppy and Noriega? Remember the '80s and Cocaine?
BOGOTA, Colombia: President Alvaro Uribe on Tuesday publicly denied accusations that he befriended and helped a world-renowned drug kingpin in the 1980s.
Uribe denied any connection to Pablo Escobar, who was killed in a police shootout in 1993, responding to a new tell-all book by a former television news anchor who was Escobar's lover.
In "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar," Virginia Vallejo claims that in the early 1980s Uribe, as head of the civil aviation authority, authorized flights and landing strips for members of Escobar's Medellin cartel and even allowed the drug boss to smuggle in exotic pets for his flamboyant Napoles ranch.
Interviewed by Colombia's two main radio broadcasters, Uribe said that he met Vallejo briefly, on a flight from Bogota to Medellin, the city where Escobar ran his billion-dollar cocaine smuggling ring at around the same time Uribe was getting his political start.
But the president insisted he had no dealings with Escobar.
"It is a mortifying book, like many that have been written and always published on the eve of elections," Uribe said, referring to Colombia's regional elections at the end of the month. "I was never a friend of Pablo Escobar, even when being his friend was in fashion."
Vallejo was a well-known news anchor and lace stockings model when she met and fell in love with Escobar. She left Colombia last year under the protection of U.S. authorities after allegedly providing information about the brothers Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orjuela, leaders of the Cali drug cartel.
In her book she claims that she was introduced to Uribe by Escobar, who referred to the future president as Escobar's "only decent friend."
Uribe vehemently denied these connections: "I was not a friend of Pablo Escobar, he didn't help me politically, I didn't do business with him."
Escobar ruled Colombia's drug trade in the 1980s, declaring war against the government for its policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the United States.
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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