Sixty -five days after receiving several shots during a rally in Bogotá, this Monday Miguel Uribe Turbay, 39 -year -old senator, presidential candidate on the right for the elections of May 2026 and strong critic of the leftist government of Gustavo Petro. The attack revived a collective trauma that Colombia seemed to have left behind: between 1989 and 1990 three presidential applicants were killed, in a spiral of horror and violence that prostrated the country.
Unlike then, when it was clear that Pablo Escobar freed a war to death with the Colombian State, in the case of Uribe Turbay it is not yet known who ordered him to kill. Although from the first day the hitman was captured, a minor of 15 years and in the following weeks the authorities have arrested who already hired him other people who participated in the attack, it is still unknown who is behind the magnicide. That lack of certainties, nine months after the call to the polls and when there are dozens of applicants and no clear candidate, has the country in restlessness.
The doubt for the reasons for the crime and the capacity of the State to reach those who ordered it to be the one that is also the beginning of the last year of the first left mandate in Colombia in decades. With a president who has failed to specify his greatest ambitions and that faces the final stretch with the possibility of delivering the command to an opponent, the murder of a presidential candidate has tension the fibers more.
Especially when death occurs only two weeks after his political mentor and head of his party, former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, had been convicted in the first instance for the crimes of bribery and procedural fraud. The leader of the right has not only reiterated his innocence, but has pointed out to the failure of having political motivations. Many of his followers, who left in his defense last Thursday in the middle of the national holiday, increasingly turn an anti -system speech.
That is a large intrachility test. In Colombia, a country that is usually prior to having only had four years of dictatorship throughout the twentieth century; And that with that exception celebrates periodic elections more than a century ago, the right has been institutionalist. When he has been defeated at the polls – in 1994, when the left -wing liberal Ernesto Samper defeated the conservative Andrés Pastrana; In 2014, when Juan Manuel Santos achieved re -election in front of the Uribista Óscar Iván Zuluaga, or in 2022, with the victory of Petro – his reaction has been to resign himself or, at most, to denounce before justice some alleged irregularity.
But there is no history that a leftist executive is added, the murder of one of his own and the conviction of who has been his leader during the last quarter of a century. “Evil destroyed everything, they killed the hope. That Miguel Sea Luz’s struggle that illuminates the right path of Colombia.” Uribe written after knowing the death of the senator of his party, in a quieter tone than the one he used when reacting to his sentence, when he spoke of continuing “the fight against the nascent neo-communist gag.” The choice between these two tones can mark the way for the right in a process that mixes the judicial with the electoral.
From the afternoon of the attack, Uribe Turbay was in the intensive care unit of the prestigious Santa Fe Foundation. The first days, the electoral campaign also entered therapy. Several independent candidates who collect signatures, such as the former mayor of Bogotá Claudia López, former senator David Luna or former Minister Mauricio Lizcano, suspended their events in the face of doubts for their safety. The same did the four partners of the victim who aspire to be candidates of the right -wing democratic center.
Different thesis
Even the president, who usually manages the country’s political agenda with incessant initiatives, projects and novel messages, focused for several days on the attack. He rejected “the attempts of political use” of the crime and indicated that the responsibility seemed to fall on what has called the “new drug trafficking board”, of which there are no greater data.
That thesis competes with that of the National Police director, Carlos Triana, for whom behind the attack is the second Marquetalia, the dissent of the extinct Farc led by Iván Márquez. At the moment, as the president said on Monday, it is only about theories. “The investigation must be deepened. And they will be the competent authorities for her, aided by international experts, who will pronounce themselves at the time,” he said in X, after affirming that the causes are “in investigation.” The attorney general, Luz Adriana Camargo, has endorsed that reality in her statement of condolences on Monday: “The commitment to identify and prosecute the determinants of this crime continues, a task in which no hypothesis is ruled out,” reads it.
Miguel Uribe Turbay will be veiled at the Congress enclosure until Wednesday. In the days following its attack, the Santa Fe Foundation, where it was attended, became instead of pilgrimage of congressmen, Uribistas on foot and people from the common. The sadness was mixed with a brief political truce, a respite in a crucible country from the 2022 electoral campaign and with a president who dominates the agenda with electrifying trills, which flirts with populism, with poetry or with lyric. But it lasted a little, less than a week.
On Monday morning, emotion seems to be repeated. Not only because of Uribe’s measured message, but for Petro’s equally quiet: “My condolences to Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, and Colombians all. Life is above any ideology,” he said. But ahead are the selection of candidates from all the banks, the second instance of the process against Uribe Vélez, the government ads of a new tax reform, the future of the very debated reform of the health system. The reasons for new political clashes are in sight.
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