By Luis Jaime Acosta
BOGOTA (Reuters) -Miguel Uribe, a Colombian senator who was vying for his party’s candidacy in upcoming presidential elections, died on Monday, two months after being shot at a campaign rally. He was 39.
Uribe, a father and stepfather, was shot in the head while giving a campaign speech on June 7 and underwent multiple surgeries during his subsequent hospital stay.
He had shown some improvement during July, but his condition worsened over the past weekend due to a hemorrhage in his central nervous system, the hospital treating him said on Sunday.
The assassination has evoked memories of intense political violence in Colombia’s past. In the 1980s and 1990s, four presidential candidates were murdered in separate attacks blamed on drug cartels allied with right-wing paramilitary death squads.
“You’ll always be the love of my life,” his wife Maria Claudia Tarazona said on Instagram early on Monday. “Thank you for a life filled with love, thank you for being a father to the girls, the best dad to Alejandro.”
“I ask God to show me the path to learn to live without you,” she added. “Rest in peace, love of my life, I will take care of our children.”
The death of Uribe adds further tragedy to his family’s fraught history.
His mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in 1991 during a botched rescue mission after she was kidnapped by the Medellin Cartel, headed by drug lord Pablo Escobar.
The family is prominent in Colombian politics. His maternal grandfather, Julio Cesar Turbay, served as Colombia’s president from 1978 to 1982, while his paternal grandfather, Rodrigo Uribe Echavarria, headed the Liberal Party and supported Virgilio Barco’s successful 1986 presidential campaign.
‘WITHOUT SECURITY, THERE IS NOTHING’
“Colombia needs leadership, unity and work. Peace cannot be reached through impunity,” Uribe told fellow lawmakers in July 2024, on the opening day of the legislative session. “Only a serious security policy will incentivize criminals to lay down their arms and submit to the law.”
“Without security there is nothing. Prosperity is reached through opportunities and opportunities with investment, but for there to be investment there need to be clear rules, incentives,” he added.
Uribe himself has enjoyed a rapid political rise, becoming a recognized lawmaker for the right-wing Democratic Center party and presidential hopeful known for his sharp criticism of leftist President Gustavo Petro’s administration.
At 25, he was elected to Bogota’s city council, where he was a prominent opponent of Petro, then the capital’s mayor, criticizing Petro’s handling of waste management and social programs.
In 2016, at 30, Uribe was appointed city government secretary, the youngest person to hold the position.
He resigned from that post in 2018 to launch an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Bogota as an independent.
In the 2022 legislative elections, Uribe led the Senate slate for the Democratic Center party with the slogan “Colombia First,” winning a seat in the chamber.
There, Uribe cemented his role as one of the primary opposition voices to Petro, criticizing the government’s peace strategy aimed at ending Colombia’s six-decade armed conflict. Uribe said the strategy had backfired, as the government had paused offensives on armed groups as peace talks failed.
He had been running to be chosen as the candidate for the Democratic Center in the 2026 presidential election.
Former President Alvaro Uribe, leader of the Democratic Center party and no relation to the deceased senator, called Miguel Uribe “a hope for the homeland.”
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Bernadette Baum)
