Colombian presidential candidate shot in Bogotá

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Colombian opposition senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot in Bogotá on Saturday evening, in an attack that has shocked a country with a long history of political violence.

Uribe Turbay, 39, was leaving a campaign event in the capital city organised by his opposition Democratic Centre party when “armed subjects shot him in the back”, according to a party statement.

A witness told local newspaper El Tiempo that Uribe was saying goodbye to attendees when a man on the back of a motorcycle fired three shots, one of which hit him in the head and another in the chest. The mayor of Bogotá, Carlos Galán, said that the gunman had been arrested.

The conservative politician, who in October announced his intention to run in next year’s presidential election, has been transferred to a clinic in the capital, according to local media reports. Authorities have yet to comment on Uribe’s condition.

Videos circulating on social media following the attack show a panicked and screaming crowd, and Uribe with blood on his head and back.

The office of Colombian president Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist leader, issued a statement “categorically and forcefully” condemning the attack, and calling for an investigation. 

“This act of violence is not only an attack against the personal security of the senator, but also against democracy, freedom of thought, and the legitimate exercise of politics in Colombia,” the statement read.

The attack on Uribe sent shockwaves through Colombia, a country that has for decades been engaged in a low-level internal conflict with leftwing guerrilla armies, now-defunct rightwing paramilitaries and their successors, and organised crime groups. 

Political violence was at its worst in the 1990s, with three presidential candidates murdered during the campaign of 1990. In 1991, Uribe’s mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in a rescue operation after she was kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel. He is the grandson of former president Julio César Turbay.

Despite ongoing conflict across rural Colombia, major cities have become significantly safer this century, and many had believed that violence in the top tier of Colombian politics had been consigned to the past.

Even so, some 48 hours before he was shot, Uribe warned of rising violence. “They are dragging us back to a violent past,” he told a banking conference on Thursday. “Without security there is nothing.”

The shocking attack on Uribe also comes amid rising political tensions in Colombia. Petro has launched verbal attacks against opposition politicians — including Uribe — for blocking his reform agenda, while alleging that shadowy elites are attempting to carry out a “soft coup” against his government.

Petro’s former foreign minister Álvaro Leyva called on the president to tone down his rhetoric in an open letter in April, in which he also alleged that his former boss was a drug addict.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio issued a statement condemning the shooting, which he said was “the result of the violent leftist rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the Colombian government”. “President Petro needs to dial back the inflammatory rhetoric and protect Colombian officials,” Rubio added.

María José Pizarro, a senator from Petro’s Historic Pact party whose father Carlos Pizarro was murdered in 1990 while on the campaign trail, called for an “urgent meeting” of Colombia’s political parties in order to “agree on measures to defend democracy”.

“I am the daughter of a presidential candidate assassinated in 1990 and history must not repeat itself,” Pizarro posted on X.