Colombia senator, 39, dies weeks after being shot at campaign event

Colombian presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe, who had been fighting for his life since he was shot in June during a campaign event, has died, according to his family.

Uribe, a 39-year-old senator and a potential presidential candidate from the right-wing opposition, was shot in Bogota on June 7 during a rally and underwent multiple surgeries before his death.

“I ask God to show me the way to learn to live without you,” his wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, wrote on social media. “Rest in peace, love of my life, I will take care of our children.”

Uribe enjoyed a rapid political rise, becoming a recognised lawmaker for the Democratic Centre party. He was seeking to run in the 2026 presidential election.

A 15-year-old boy was arrested at the scene with a “9mm Glock-type firearm” and has pleaded not guilty after being formally charged on June 10 with attempted murder, the prosecutor’s office said. Five other suspects have also been arrested.

“Today is a sad day for the country,” Colombian Vice President Francia Marquez wrote on X.

“Violence cannot continue to mark our destiny. Democracy is not built with bullets or blood, it is built with respect, with dialogue,” she said.

‘Security beefed up’

President Gustavo Petro had previously blamed an international crime ring as being behind the attack on Uribe, without providing details or evidence, and has beefed up security for government officials and opposition leaders since it happened.

The assassination is reminiscent of political violence in Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s, when four presidential candidates were murdered in separate attacks blamed on drug cartels allied with right-wing paramilitary death squads.

Uribe’s death also adds to his family’s fraught history, with relatives prominent in Colombian politics.

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.

Meanwhile, Uribe’s 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.

Uribe was elected to Bogota’s city council at 25. In 2016, at 30, he 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, criticising the government’s peace strategy aimed at ending Colombia’s six-decade armed conflict.

Former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, leader of the Democratic Center party with no relation to the deceased senator, called Miguel Uribe “a hope for the homeland”.