Anyone who thinks the left isn't violent wherever it may be hasn't been reading the latest news from Colombia.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—Sen. Miguel Uribe, a presidential hopeful and grandson of a former president, was fighting for his life Sunday after a teenage gunman shot him in the head, reviving fears of the political violence that scarred Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s.
The conservative politician, 39 years old, was finishing an event in a park Saturday afternoon during the long run-up to next year’s presidential election. The assailant raised a handgun from behind and fired. Uribe crumpled to the ground, with supporters trying to stanch the bleeding from a head wound, videos from the scene showed.
That follows the 2023 assassination of conservative Ecuadoran presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, purportedly by drug gangs, because as a conservative, he intended to stomp out drug gangs.
It follows the 2021 assassination attempt on Colombia's conservative president at the time, Ivan Duque, by radical leftist cocaine guerrillas from FARC, who struck his helicopter with a hail of gunfire.
It follows the 2020 gunfire assassination attempt on Venezuela's legal president, Juan Guaido, by far-left pro-Maduro 'colectivos' in Barquisimento, Venezuela, wounding ten people, with the political aim obvious.
It follows the 2018 knife attack on Brazilian conservative presidential candidate Jair Bolsonero by a leftist, gravely wounded him.
It follows the 2002 FARC rocket fusillade on the presidential palace on the day conservative President Alvaro Uribe (no relation to Miguel Uribe) first took office. (There have probably been plenty of other attempts we don't know about against him as he went after FARC's terrorists like St. George slaying dragons).
It follows the 1991 assassination of Mexican conservative presidential candidate Luis Colosio in Tijuana, Mexico, again, by what have been reportedly drug dealers, but the case has never been adequately solved.
And it follows the 2024 pair of assassination attempts on President Trump, once again, by leftists, in an atmosphere of substandard personal security provided by the ruling leftists in the White House.
There have been a couple attacks on leftists, too, none successful, but the pattern is very clear: Leftist attacks on conservatives, particularly when drug or deep-state interests are involved, is common and ugly, a feature, not a bug, of the left.
The Miguel Uribe case is particularly poignant, as his mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed as a hostage held by Pablo Escobar during a failed rescue attempt. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote an incredibly wrenching nonfiction book about it called "News of a Kidnapping" (without a trace of his own lefty politics) which has been called one of his three best books, which it is.
I read this book about 20 years ago after I spent an evening with Colombia's vice president in Los Angeles, Francisco Santos, and in writing it up, I googled his background and learned that, like Diana Turbay, he had been held hostage by Escobar -- and both of these kidnappings were the topic of a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was 10 p.m., and I rushed to the nearest open bookstore on L.A.'s west side to get a copy. In triumph, I found it. At the cashier's desk, the cashier blandly told me I'd just missed Gabo, as he is known; he came in every few weeks with an assistant to buy a stack of Spanish books to read (as I later learned he was in L.A. for cancer treatment). What a miss! But the book made up for it, it was absolutely brilliant, giving one the feel for the time and place and minds involved, its every detail still sticking out to me nearly 20 years after reading it.
Now there's been another one, and I hope the poor son of Diana Turbay pulls through. It's the left, defy the left and release the demons. It comes part and parcel with the left and this is something the left needs to confront of itself.
Image: X video screen shot