Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a Colombian presidential hopeful who had warned that the nation was slipping back into its violent past, died two months after being gunned down while campaigning in Bogotá. He was 39.
Mr Uribe was shot in the head while speaking to supporters in the capital’s Modelia neighbourhood on June 7th. Several neurosurgeries since the attack failed to save him, and he passed away at around 2am on Monday.
“Rest in peace, love of my life,” Maria Claudia Tarazona, his wife, wrote in an Instagram post.
Authorities have detained six people, including a teenager who was apprehended at the scene and formally charged this month with attempted murder and illegal possession of a weapon. The investigation is ongoing and it remains unclear who ordered the murder.
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The assassination is the starkest sign yet that the country’s stability is unravelling a year before president Gustavo Petro is set to leave office. Mr Uribe’s killing will likely reshape Colombia’s 2026 presidential race – which so far lacks a clear frontrunner – and potentially sideline candidates hoping to defend Mr Petro’s legacy.
“Our institutions will continue to work hard to identify and bring to justice all those responsible for this attack,” Defense minister Pedro Sanchez said in a post on X. “We will not allow violent individuals to intimidate or silence the political voices that our democracy requires.”
Mr Uribe, a senator from the right-wing Democratic Center party and grandson of former president Julio César Turbay, was a critic of Mr Petro’s “total peace” strategy. He warned that the policy of negotiating with guerrillas and criminal groups had emboldened them and left swathes of the country vulnerable again.
The senator’s death evokes memories of a darker era when four presidential candidates were murdered in the 1980s and early 1990s during the height of cartel violence. His own mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in a failed rescue attempt in 1991 after being kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel.
Presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was gunned down in 2023 in neighbouring Ecuador, where drug gangs have grown in power in recent years. The targeting of mayors, lawmakers and social leaders by organised crime is common in Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador.
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“This is a sad day for the country. Violence can’t continue to mark our destiny,” Colombian vice-president Francia Márquez said in a post on X.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio said that the US “stands in solidarity with his family, the Colombian people, both in mourning and demanding justice for those responsible”.
Thousands of Colombians clad in white have marched across the country in support of Mr Uribe’s recovery and against violence. The march in Bogotá was the capital’s biggest demonstration in more than a decade.
Mr Uribe, who studied at Bogota’s Universidad de los Andes and Harvard’s Kennedy School, had no direct relation to former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, but was a close ideological ally. “May Miguel’s struggle be a light that illuminates the right path for Colombia,” the former president said on X. – ©2025 Bloomberg LP
