However, his government did not go without criticism for some of the brutal tactics used to combat guerillas, and the "false positives" scandal where soldiers would falsely identify civilians as guerillas, kill them, and look to wrongly collect a bounty.
When the "false positive" scandal was first reported, Uribe's government dismissed the allegations as a guerrilla smear campaign.
According to some estimates, since 2003 5,000 innocent people have been systematically selected and murdered by the Colombian military, through the infamous "False Positives" scandal.
Páez said: "Today, every time I see the army announce it has killed guerrillas in combat, I wonder how many civilians are included in those numbers". When the "false positive" scandal was first reported, Uribe's government dismissed the allegations as a guerrilla smear campaign.
He lost his close aide, Patrick Pelata, COO of Renault- Nissan, in the false spying scandal earlier this year.
Patricia believes her husband was a victim of what has become known in Colombia as the "false positives" scandal.
The extent of the "false positives scandal" is still not fully known, but so far the attorney general's office is investigating cases involving more than 2,000 victims.
When asked, he brushed off uncomfortable questions about the "false positives" scandal saying his reaction to the issue was a further reason for the Colombian people to back his bid for president.
Most notable has been the so-called "false positives" scandal in which members of the Colombian military seemingly murdered innocent victims from poor neighbourhoods in Bogota and dressed their bodies up as left-wing guerrillas to claim greater victories in the war on drugs.
The "false positive" scandal erupted in 2008 when it was found that a group of poor young men had been recruited from the slums of Bogota, promised well-paying jobs in the province of Norte de Santander, then murdered in cold blood and their bodies presented in rebel uniforms as having been killed in combat.
