On Wednesday, Colombia buried Miguel Uribe, a presidential candidate who was murdered. His wife tearfully urged the country to break free from its long, violent political history.
Uribe, a 36-year-old conservative senator, was shot in June while campaigning in Bogota and died this week from his injuries.
“Our country is going through very dark and painful days,” his wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, told people gathered at the packed cathedral for his funeral.
Police say left-wing rebels who rejected the 2016 peace deal are behind his murder. Six people have been arrested.
For many Colombians, his killing was a shocking return of political violence after years of relative peace. In the 1980s and 1990s, four presidential candidates were assassinated, and drug cartels and armed groups terrorised the country.
Uribe’s mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in 1991 during a failed police rescue from Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel. At the funeral, Uribe’s father remembered that day, saying he once carried a four-year-old Miguel in one arm and his mother’s coffin in the other. Now, 34 years later, violence had taken that same boy from him.
The country was still in shock when conservative lawmaker Julio Cesar Triana survived an attack on his car in southern Huila, where former rebel fighters still operate.
At the funeral, Uribe’s wife promised that his death, allegedly at the hands of a 15-year-old hitman, would not be in vain. She said she would raise their young son and stepdaughters with love, not hate.
Colombia will hold its next presidential election in 2026. Current president Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla, did not attend the funeral at the family’s request, saying he wanted to avoid turning it into a political confrontation. Many on the right have criticised him for being too soft on armed groups.
