Rightwing presidential hopeful, who had been in hospital in Bogotá since shooting, has died aged 39
Miguel Uribe, the Colombian senator and presidential hopeful who was shot in the head at a campaign event in June, has died, his wife has confirmed.
Uribe, an opposition candidate from the rightwing Centro Democrático party, was shot twice in the head and once in the leg during a campaign stop two months ago, while vying for his party’s nomination for the 2026 elections. He spent nine weeks in intensive care and had several surgeries before succumbing to his injuries early on Monday aged 39.
In a statement posted online, his wife, María Claudia Tarazona, addressed her late husband and promised to take care of their children. “I ask God to show me the way to learn to live without you,” she wrote. “Rest in peace, love of my life, I will take care of our children.”
“Wait for me, because when I fulfil my promise to our children, I will come looking for you and we will have our second chance,” she added.
Six people have been arrested in connection with the 7 June shooting, including a teenage boy identified as the gunman. In footage of his arrest, the teenager was heard shouting that he had been hired by a local drug dealer and claiming “I did it for money for my family”.
Authorities have stressed they are pursuing the “intellectual authors” of the attack, and at least three adults facing charges for using a minor to commit a crime. Colombia’s national police director, Carlos Fernando Triana, said another arrested man, Élder José Arteaga Hernández, known as el Costeño, was among those who orchestrated the attack.
The defence ministry has offered a 3bn peso (about £550,000) reward for information leading to the identification and capture of the culprits, and said that the US, Britain and the United Arab Emirates are helping with the investigation.
The assassination marks the worst incident of political violence in Colombia in two decades and has reignited fears of a return to the country’s bloody past, when organised crime and rebel groups murdered candidates, journalists and judges with impunity. Between 1986 and 1990 five presidential candidates were murdered, while grassroots political activity was frequently targeted.
Uribe’s mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in 1991 during a botched rescue mission after she was kidnapped by the Medellín cartel, headed by the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
“If my mother was willing to give her life for a cause, how could I not do the same in life and in politics?” Uribe, who was five when his mother was killed, said in an interview last year.
Despite a 2016 peace deal between the government and the country’s main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), violence has continued to grip the nation, and new groups have emerged into the vacuum. Earlier this year, fighting between two armed groups near the Venezuelan border led to the displacement of more than 50,000 people. In June, a wave of bomb attacks across Cali, the country’s third largest city, and several nearby towns, killed at least seven people and wounded 50.
Uribe hails from one of Colombia’s most prominent political families – he is the grandson of the former president Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978-82) – and enjoyed a rapid political rise. The lawyer, who held a master’s degree from Harvard University, entered politics as a Bogotá councillor aged 25, and by 2022 secured the highest number of votes within the conservative Democratic Centre party.
Known for his sharp criticism of the leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, Uribe argued for a hardline approach to armed groups. He was not considered a frontrunner in the upcoming presidential vote, the first round of which is set for May.
“With Uribe Turbay’s death, democracy in Colombia is lost, and the electoral outlook for 2026 is very uncertain,” said Isaac Morales, of the Bogotá-based Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, which monitors political-electoral violence.
María José Pizarro, a leftwing senator whose father was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail in 1990, said that while Uribe “represented ideas different from mine”, his “voice deserved respect in the democratic arena”. “Unpatriotic minorities continue to kill, understanding only the language of violence and seeking to influence the nation’s destiny with bloodshed,” she added.
Source: www.theguardian.com