Iván Cepeda

Born in 1962 in Bogotá^[1] into a deeply political family, Cepeda is the eldest son of Manuel Cepeda Vargas, leader of the Colombian Communist Party, and Yira Castro.^[2] At the age of 13 he joined the Communist Youth.

In 1965 at the age of 3, Cepeda and his family were forced into exile due to political repression, and during his early years lived in Prague. Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Cepeda's family would seek refuge in Havana, Cuba. Cepeda's family would later return to Colombia in 1970, but remained a target of political violence.

At age 19, Cepeda moved to Bulgaria to study at Sofia University, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in philosophy.^[2] His time in the Eastern Bloc was a period of ideological transition; Cepeda returned to Colombia in 1987 as a critic of the Soviet model, which he considered authoritarian, advocating instead for a democratic and pluralistic left-wing approach; he became involved in the presidential campaign of Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa.^{[citation needed]} Jaramillo Ossa would later be assassinated in 1990.

In 1990 Cepeda joined the M-19 Democratic Alliance party, after the former guerilla group signed a peace treaty and fully disarmed.^[1]

The defining moment of Cepeda's life occurred on August 9, 1994, when his father, then a Senator, was assassinated in Bogotá by a joint operation between state agents and paramilitary groups.^[3][4]

Following his father's assassination, he created the Manuel Cepeda Foundation together with his then wife, Claudia Girón, to identify the perpetrator of crime.

In 2003 Cepeda and others founded the National Movement for Victims of State Crimes, made up of 17 organizations that sought justice for crimes that occurred during the armed conflict in the 1980s and 1990s.^[1] This led to increased violent threats against Cepeda, leading him to go into exile in France in 2000.^[1] He would later return to Colombia in 2003 to resume his work advocating for victims of state and paramilitary violence in Colombia.

Iván Cepeda is the primary civil party in a high-profile legal dispute with former President Álvaro Uribe. The case began in 2012 when Cepeda presented testimonies to Congress alleging Uribe's involvement in the creation of paramilitary groups. Although Uribe initially sued Cepeda for defamation, the Supreme Court of Colombia dismissed the charges in 2018 and instead opened an investigation into Uribe for witness tampering and bribery. This led to Uribe’s 2020 house arrest and his resignation from the Senate, a move that shifted the jurisdiction of the case to the ordinary justice system.^[12]

The proceedings reached a turning point in July 2025, when a criminal court convicted Uribe of bribery and procedural fraud, sentencing him to 12 years of house arrest.^[12] However, the conviction was overturned in October 2025 by the Superior Tribunal of Bogotá, which cited procedural flaws in wiretap evidence and acquitted the former president.^[13] Subsequently, Cepeda’s legal team has announced the filing of an extraordinary appeal (casación) before the Supreme Court.^[14]