Miguel Uribe, Colombian senator shot at campaign event, dies at 39

Sonia Ballen, left, marches in support of conservative Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay, who was shot in the head during a political rally the day before, in Bogotá, Colombia, on Sunday, June 8, 2025. After nine weeks in the hospital in which he underwent multiple surgeries, Uribe has died at 39, according to a statement posted by his wife. (Federico Ríos Escobar/The New York Times)

By Genevieve Glatsky and Julie Turkewitz

Miguel Uribe, the Colombian senator and presidential hopeful who was shot in the head at a campaign event two months ago in an attack that shocked the nation, has died at 39, according to a statement posted by his wife.

Uribe had spent nine weeks in the hospital after the shooting in Bogotá, undergoing multiple surgeries before succumbing to his injuries. The hospital had announced in a statement this weekend that Uribe’s condition had worsened and that he was experiencing bleeding in the brain.

In a photo posted on Instagram on Monday, Uribe’s wife, María Claudia Tarazona, addressed her late husband, promising to take care of their children.

“You will always be the love of my life,” she wrote. “Wait for me, because when I fulfill my promise to our children, I will come looking for you and we will have our second chance.”

The killing of Uribe, a conservative politician and a grandson of a former president, is for many Colombians a traumatic reminder of the country’s long conflict in which armed rebel groups, paramilitaries and narcotraffickers have fought for land, power and money.

Despite a 2016 peace deal between the government and the country’s main rebel group, the conflict and killing continues.

Uribe’s mother, Diana Turbay, a prominent journalist and daughter of a former president, was killed in 1991, when Uribe was a child, after being kidnapped by a drug cartel.

The senator’s shooting in June, captured on video, had both divided the nation over how to address violence in the country and united people of disparate political backgrounds around a shared tragedy.

On Monday, María José Pizarro, a senator on the left whose own father was assassinated on the presidential campaign trail in 1990, called the moment “a day of national mourning.”

Like Uribe, Pizarro had announced her intentions to run for the presidency next year. While she and Uribe stood on opposite sides of the political aisle, she said on Colombia’s W Radio that Uribe was “a man who fought for his ideals.”

She called for “reconciliation” before next year’s presidential vote, with a first round set for May. She also urged investigators to find the perpetrators behind the crime.

It is still not clear who masterminded the assassination or why.

Uribe campaigned for an aggressive approach to the country’s armed groups, but he was not more vocal on the issue than other politicians on the right, and he was not viewed as the front-runner in the coming presidential vote.

Authorities have arrested six people in connection with the June 7 shooting, including a 14-year-old boy identified as the shooter, but have not disclosed a motive.

At least three adults — Carlos Eduardo Mora, Katerine Martínez and William González — are facing charges for using a minor to commit a crime.

The director of Colombia’s national police, Carlos Fernando Triana, has called another arrested man, Elder José Arteaga, known as el Costeño (“the man from the coast”), as among the people who orchestrated the assassination.

The police director has also said investigators are examining whether an armed group called Segunda Marquetalia is behind the killing.

The group is led by former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who returned to arms after striking a peace deal with the government in 2016.

Violence in Colombia has not returned to the levels of the 1990s and early 2000s. But it has risen from a low about 10 years ago, when the government struck a peace deal with FARC.

Since the peace deal, new armed groups have emerged from the remnants of old ones, fracturing as the years went on and creating an ever-more-complicated security picture.

Targeted killings and kidnappings have mostly been limited to the countryside. Uribe’s shooting, in a park in the capital, Bogotá, at a crowded campaign event, was uncommon and alarmed many.

In a post on social platform X on Monday, former President Álvaro Uribe, a mentor of the assassinated senator (though not a relative), said: “Evil destroys everything, they killed hope. May Miguel’s struggle be a light that illuminates Colombia’s rightful path.”

Both Álvaro Uribe and Miguel Uribe, along with other conservatives, have argued for a hard-line approach to armed groups, which members of the Uribes’ party, Democratic Center, call “democratic security.” The country’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has promised to strike peace deals but has failed to do so.

Miguel Uribe was the father of a son about kindergarten age — the senator’s age when his own mother was killed. He is also the stepfather to three girls.

His death is likely to cast a long and dark shadow over the 2026 presidential vote in Colombia, heightening concerns about security for other candidates and elevating pressure to address the violence.

On W Radio on Monday, José Obdulio Gaviria, a member of the Democratic Center party, said the death of older people was often regarded as an arrival at a port. But in this case, he said, “Miguel’s death is more like a shipwreck.