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Orphaned by his mother because of Pablo Escobar, Senator and presidential candidate of Colombia Miguel Uribe, who on Saturday was the victim of a shooting attack at a political event, earned a place in the leadership of the Colombian right despite his young age.
On January 25, 1991, Uribe, who was then four years old, lost his mother, Diana Turbay, a renowned journalist who embarked on a trip where she was supposedly going to exclusively interview a guerrilla leader.
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But in reality, that was a deception by Escobar, who kidnapped her to pressure the government at the time, seeking to prevent the extradition of Colombian drug traffickers to the United States. When the army tried to free her, Turbay was murdered, leaving Miguel and his sister María Carolina orphaned.
These facts are narrated by the Nobel Prize in Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez in the exciting novel "News of a Kidnapping", which even includes a mention of little Miguel during the agonizing five-month wait between the abduction and the murder.
Miguel grew up in a family with political weight, as his grandfather Julio César Turbay was president between 1978 and 1982, and thus Uribe studied at one of the best schools in Bogotá, graduated as a lawyer and then pursued a master's degree at Harvard University.
First, he was a councilman in Bogotá, then he became Secretary of Government and candidate for mayor of the capital. In 2022, he became a senator with the right-wing Democratic Center party and last year announced that he would run for president.
In a campaign event in a working-class neighborhood of Bogotá, the 39-year-old politician was hit by bullets fired by a 15-year-old hitman, who was later arrested by the police.
Minutes before the shots, he remembered his mother in a speech to convince those who listened to him that he is a person who experienced violence "firsthand." "30 years ago I lost my mother due to kidnapping and murder," he was heard saying in a video obtained by AFP, in which he appears with a microphone in front of a tree.
"I forgave everyone who was involved" in that crime, Uribe said in 2021 in an interview with the magazine Bocas. "Reconciliation is the only thing that helps you take the step and overcome such a difficult moment."
Tough opponent to President Petro
Uribe is one of the strongest critics of President Gustavo Petro and the left in general. In Congress, he held multiple debates against the guerrillas and the president's policy of negotiating peace with them. He is also one of the main critics of the social reforms promoted by the president. Use glasses and is always perfectly groomed, but despite being well-positioned in the party leadership, he is not the most visible face and no threats against him were known.He has a two-year-old son and has a motto that he repeats like a mantra: "Colombia has a future." The natural leader of the Democratic Center, former President Álvaro Uribe, considers him a "hope of the Homeland."
He is a "great husband, father, son, brother" and "work colleague," said the influential former president who governed between 2002 and 2010, and who is not related to the young leader with whom they share a last name. When he ran for mayor of Bogotá in 2019, Miguel Uribe defined himself as a politician "transparent, without any corruption scandal."Back then, he promoted a hard-line approach to crime as a way to solve the city's security problems and the fight against drug use.
To be the right-wing candidate in the 2026 elections, they must first compete with political heavyweights close to Álvaro Uribe.
The assassination attempt against him marks one of the darkest episodes of Colombian politics in this century.
In 1948 and between the 80s and 90s, five presidential candidates were assassinated. In most cases, drug cartels allied with other politicians and state agents were allegedly behind the crimes.
