Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a contender to be the presidential candidate of the conservative Democratic Center party for the May 2026 elections, was shot twice in the head and once in the abdomen during a campaign rally early Saturday evening, June 7, in Bogotá. He survived the emergency surgery, but as of Sunday evening, June 8, he remained in critical condition in ICU, with a guarded prognosis. The 15-year-old hitman has been arrested, but the government is investigating who hired him for the hit, and who ordered it.
Security has been a major plank of Senator Uribe’s campaign; his mother Diana Turbay, had been kidnapped by the Medellín Cartel of drug dealers in 1991 and was killed during a failed rescue operation.
The attempted assassination, raising the specter of the wave of 1989-1990’s drug cartel assassinations of presidential and other political candidates, is being played as a purely Colombian matter, following the historic fault lines, which for centuries have polarized Colombia between left and right. Today, President Gustavo Petro and his supporters are on the left vs. the Democratic Center Party, led by former President Alvaro Uribe Velez (no relation to party member Senator Uribe) on the right. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly issued a statement, holding President Petro responsible for the shooting. Rubio’s charge that “this is a direct threat to democracy and the result of the violent leftist rhetoric from the highest levels of the Colombian government” constitutes an act of intervention into Colombian affairs, taken willfully and with malice aforethought, to fan the flames in an already dangerously polarized situation.
EIR has warned, since May, that the British-directed international assassination bureau has been unleashed in multiple countries to implement the old imperial “Strategy of Tension”, in a desperate drive to stop the nations of the world from successfully joining together to overturn 500 years of colonialism.
