Colombia buries assassinated presidential candidate

BOGOTA (AFP): Colombia buried murdered presidential candidate Miguel Uribe on Wednesday, with his widow tearfully warning that the country must shake its dark and long history of political violence.

The 39-year-old conservative senator was shot in June while campaigning in the capital, Bogota, and died this week of his injuries.

“Our country is going through the darkest, saddest, and most painful days,” Maria Claudia Tarazona told a packed cathedral funeral service as she prepared to bury her husband.

Police have blamed Uribe’s murder on left-wing guerrillas who shunned 2016 peace accords. Six people have been arrested in connection with the alleged plot.

For most Colombians, the assassination represented a shocking spasm of political violence after years of relative peace.

Four presidential candidates were assassinated during the 1980s and 1990s, as drug cartels and various armed groups terrorized the country.

Uribe’s own mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in a botched 1991 police operation to free her from cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.

On Wednesday Uribe’s father, Miguel Uribe Londono, remembered the day 34 years ago when she was killed.

“With all the pain in my soul, I had to tell a little boy of barely four years old the horrendous news of his mother’s murder,” he said at the service.

“In this same holy cathedral, I carried Miguel in one arm and the coffin of his mother, Diana, in the other.”

“Today, 34 years later, this senseless violence also takes from me that same little boy,” he said.

As Colombia reels from the assassination, conservative lawmaker Julio Cesar Triana, a vocal critic of the government, escaped unharmed after his vehicle came under fire in the southern Huila region where dissident members of the defunct FARC guerrilla group are operating.

Uribe’s wife vowed at the funeral that his death at the hands of a suspected 15-year-old hitman would not be in vain, and that his young son and stepdaughters would live a life filled with love.

“Miguel, I will love you every day of my life until my time comes to meet you in heaven,” she said.

“I promise to give Alejandro and the girls a life full of love and happiness, without hatred and without resentment.”

Colombia will hold elections in 2026 to replace incumbent leftist leader Gustavo Petro, who is constitutionally barred from running again.

President Petro, himself a former guerrilla, said he chose not to attend Wednesday’s funeral at the family’s request.

“We’re not going, not because we didn’t want to,” he posted on social media. “We simply respect the family and we avoid the funeral of Senator Miguel Uribe from being taken over by supporters of hate.”

It was expected that some of those marking their respects may have booed the president, who has taken a conciliatory approach to armed groups.

That stance has been strongly criticized by those on the right wing of Colombian politics.

Former presidents Juan Manuel Santos, Ernesto Samper, and Cesar Gaviria attended the funeral.