The death of Senator Miguel Uribe, 39, on Monday (11), two months after he was the target of a shot at Bogota, revives a sad tradition of Colombia: political violence.
Uribe, who was a pre-candidate for the Conservative Central Democratic Party for the 2026 presidential election, already had a history of violence in his family.
His mother, lawyer and journalist Diana Turbay, was kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel in 1990 and the following year she was killed during a failed rescue attempt by police without family permission.
The young conservative politician is the eighth candidate for presidency murdered in the history of Colombia. The first two cases were that of General Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914 and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 – this death launched a period of instability in Colombia called La Violence, which gave rise to the conflict in which guerrillas appeared to the country to this day.
With regard to presidential candidates, the most lethal period was between 1987 and 1990, when Escobar was sending in Colombia and when they were killed Jaime Pardo Leal, Luis Carlos Galán, Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro.
Before Uribe, the most recent case had been that of the conservative Álvaro Gómez, killed in 1995. The crime was claimed by the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in 2020, but the family of Gomez maintains that the motivation would have been denunciations that the victim had been making about the alleged financing of drug trafficking to then President Ernesto Samper Pizano (1994–1998).
Colombian political violence, however, continues and goes beyond the attacks aimed at presidential candidates: a study by universities experts from the United States, Colombia and Canada reported that nearly 2,000 politicians were murdered in the country between 1983 and 2023.
In May, one of the study’s authors, Ana Arjona, a researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Northwest Illinois (USA), said in an interview with the institution’s website that these political murders reduced voters attendance in affected areas during four electoral cycles.
“I don’t think we talk enough about how it [violência contra candidatos] It is not only obviously wrong and unacceptable, but also as it can undermine democracy. If the murders are putting these communities in Colombia in a different trajectory in terms of political participation, we should be doing something to regain confidence in democracy, ”he said.
“I also think there is a trivialization of violence in the way political parties, news and opinion programs talk about it, which can also increase tolerance to violence,” warned Arjona.
At the end of June, a few weeks after the attack, Uribe’s lawyer Victor Mosquera filed a complaint against Colombian President Gustavo Petro before the Chamber of Deputies’ accusation committee, claiming that the leftist agent gave “hate speeches” against the senator.
“I am not relating it directly to the attack he suffered, but with him [Petro] Having generated an environment that may have led to this attack, ”he claimed Mosquera.
