An assailant or assailants shot Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe, thought of as a likely presidential candidate in the 2026 election, in the head at a rally in the nation’s capital over the weekend. Authorities arrested a 15-year-old in possession of a pistol at the scene.
Distinguishing between politicians and criminals struck Uribe as an increasingly difficult task.
His age comes as a convenience. In Colombia, minors — those under 16 — face a maximum of seven years of incarceration for crimes such as murder. Those 16 and older may face trial as an adult.
The country’s left-wing president noted this but reminded that “the laws and norms oblige us to protect the child for being a child.” President Gustavo Petro promised to find the true “intellectual authors” of the assassination attempt. To some, the promise sounded like O.J. Simpson’s vow to find the “real killers.”
A month ago, voters almost anticipated such an outcome in their responses to an AtlasIntel poll.
When asked about the top concern, they named corruption. At 79 percent, that issue received more than double the share of responses than the next highest concern. When asked about the likelihood of Colombia facing certain challenges in the next six months, corruption again ranked as the top answer, with “increase in attacks or murders related to criminal factions” coming in second. Though Mr. Uribe polled in the middle of the pack among various figures discussed as a possible next president, 44 percent said they preferred an opposition candidate to just 31 percent who wanted one supported by President Gustavo Petro, who cannot run for reelection because of constitutional term limits.
The assassination attempt on the conservative politician feels disturbingly familiar, and not just because Pablo Escobar’s forces kidnapped Uribe’s mother, who lost her life in the attempt to rescue her in 1991, three days before her son’s fifth birthday.
Leftists increasingly revert to bullets when ballots do not go their way. Consider the recent assassination of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C., allegedly by a left-wing activist, last year’s murder of the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare in Manhattan allegedly by another such kook, and the attempt on Donald Trump’s life allegedly by a small-dollar Democratic Party donor bearing a Kamala Harris bumper sticker on his vehicle.
More commonly, the organized Left sics the law upon politicians they regard as threatening to their designs.
In neighboring Brazil, one court barred former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking office while another seeks to try him on charges to include the abolition of the democratic rule of law (rich!). In Romania, where opposition candidate Călin Georgescu led in the presidential polls by a 2-to-1 margin, the government ironically banned him earlier this year from ballots on the grounds that he did not “respect the Constitution and defend democracy.”
In France, where Marine Le Pen led in presidential polls by double digits, a court earlier this spring sentenced her to four years in prison and banned her from running for office for five years because it claimed she used European Union aides for political purposes. Donald Trump, of course, faced 717.5 years in prison on various trumped-up charges before a jury of the American people found his pursuers guilty last November.
Unlike Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Trump, and Georgescu, Uribe looked like a long shot to win the presidency of his country. So, possibly a criminal rather than a political outfit sought to murder him because of his various positions that stand athwart their interests. Distinguishing between politicians and criminals struck Uribe as an increasingly difficult task.
“Every day Petro is in power,” he tweeted earlier this year. “Colombia bleeds. [Western Colombian administrative department] Chocó today is experiencing the consequences of Petro’s complicity with the bandits.”
Was Petro complicit with Saturday’s bandits? “No resource should be spared,” President Petro vows, “not a single peso or a single moment of energy, to find the mastermind.”
Phew.
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