Democratic Colombia Party

The Democratic Colombia Party (Partido Colombia Demócrata) was a political party in Colombia founded in 2003. After 2006, the small party was decimated by the parapolitics scandal, in which four of its five congressmen were forced to resign and several found guilty.

The party originated from the Sector Democrático (Democratic Sector), a faction of the Colombian Liberal Party in Antioquia led by then-senator Álvaro Uribe Velez, his cousin Mario Uribe Escobar and other politicians, created in 1985. The faction formed a legal entity in 1994 to support Álvaro Uribe's candidacy for governor of Antioquia in that year's regional elections.

In 2002, Álvaro Uribe ran for President as the candidate of the Colombia First movement, collecting signatures. Mario Uribe and William Vélez ran for Congress as candidates of the Movimiento de Renovación Acción Laboral. In 2003, Mario Uribe and Vélez, alongside other congressmen, founded the Democratic Colombia Party, of which Mario Uribe was made the president in 2004.

In the 2006 congressional elections, the party won 3 seats in the Senate and 2 in the Chamber of Representatives. The party's three senators were Mario Uribe, Miguel Alfonso de la Espriella and Álvaro Alfonso García while the party's representatives were William Vélez elected for Antioquia and Erik Morris elected for Sucre. During the campaign, the party initially welcomed Eleonora Pineda and Rocío Arias, expelled from other uribista parties for their alleged ties to paramilitary groups; however, Mario Uribe was compelled to expel them due to pressures from the US embassy. The presence of politicians suspected of ties to drug traffickers and paramilitary groups on the party's lists in 2006 led former President and then-Liberal Party leader César Gaviria to comment that the party's list was "full of narcos and paras, it's a mafia list."

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