It was all captured on video.
An assassination attempt against a Colombian senator and presidential hopeful on Saturday night has horrified much of the nation, and not just because it represents the highest-profile political violence in the country in years.
The attempt against Miguel Uribe Turbay, 39, a conservative politician and the grandson of a former president, took place at a campaign event in the capital, Bogotá, while a small army of cellphone cameras rolled. Videos that spread rapidly online and were verified by The New York Times show the suspect listening to Mr. Uribe deliver a campaign speech, then shooting him from behind, running away, and finally being pinned to the ground as Mr. Uribe bleeds profusely nearby, held up by his crying colleagues.
A white car smeared with his blood, pictured in numerous videos and photos, has quickly become a symbol of the attack. And the videos, taken together, have come to reflect some Colombians’ fears that the nation is headed back to the violence that shaped it from the 1980s to the early 2000s, when attacks linked to drug traffickers and left-wing guerrillas were regular occurrences in major cities.
“We lived through a terrifying time,” said Sonia Ballen, 61, who on Sunday marched many blocks with other supporters of Mr. Uribe to the hospital where he was being treated. “And here we are starting to see it again.”
On Sunday morning, the medical director at the hospital, the Santa Fe Foundation in Bogotá, said that Mr. Uribe’s condition was “extremely serious.” The director, Dr. Adolfo Llinás Volpe, said the hospital would not release information about the senator’s prognosis.
While authorities have announced the capture of one suspect, a minor, they have offered no motive, fueling speculation about what led to the attack. Mr. Uribehas argued for a hard-line approach to the country’s armed groups, in contrast to Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, a leftist who has promised to strike peace deals with them.
Mr. Petro’s failure to do that, and a rise in kidnappings, displacement and violence, mostly in the countryside and smaller cities, has led to criticism from both the right and left.
The country’s largest remaining leftist guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army — once thought to be open to a deal with the president — has since become openly hostile to him.
Mr. Uribe has been a vocal critic of the National Liberation Army, known by its Spanish initials as the E.L.N., and of Mr. Petro’s approach to the group. The two politicians have frequently sparred online over security and other issues.
But Mr. Uribe has not been any more outspoken or critical on those topics than other conservatives in Colombia, and he was not considered a leading presidential candidate.
Instead, the senator was viewed as a symbol of the country’s past — and now, the fear that it could be repeated. His mother, a journalist named Diana Turbay, was killed in 1991 after being kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel, a highly publicized case. Mr. Uribe was just 4 years old at the time.
Juan Abel Gutiérrez, a Colombian political strategist, said that whoever had was behind the shooting Saturday likely wanted to send a message to the country.
“If you are going to attack a candidate in a political rally where there are 500 cellphones, that is the guarantee that the horror is going to spread quickly and that people are going to be gripped by fear,” he said.
Mr. Uribe comes from a prominent, wealthy political family in a nation where tensions over inequality and class divides have fueled decades of deadly struggles.
His grandfather, Julio César Turbay, was president from 1978 to 1982 during a period of intense guerrilla violence. During that time, he relaxed constitutional standards to allow for wiretapping, warrantless home searches, arbitrary arrests and other measures that critics said unfairly targeted prominent intellectuals, according to Federico Gómez Lara, the director of the Colombian political magazine Cambio.
Mr. Uribe’s mother — daughter of the president — was one of the country’s best-known journalists in the 1980s. She was kidnapped at a time when Mr. Escobar was targeting people “from the so-called high society,” said Mr. Gómez, to protest the extradition of Colombians to the United States.
Mr. Uribe started young in politics. At 25 he was elected to the Bogotá City Council. At 29, the mayor of Bogotá appointed him secretary of government, a prominent position. He later launched a failed bid for mayor of the capital, and in 2022 joined the senate.
The next presidential election is not for a year, with a first round slated for May 31. Mr. Gutiérrez, who is advising an independent presidential candidate in the race, said that in the wake of the attack the campaigns had been communicating with one another.
All of them “are collapsed with fear,” he said. They are particularly concerned about traveling to areas beyond Bogotá, where armed groups have a stronger presence.
The country was already deeply divided before the shooting over how to tackle conflict in the countryside, insecurity in the cities and issues like inequality, health care and labor regulation. A day after the attack, dueling events in the capital highlighted that polarization.
In the morning, supporters of Mr. Uribe marched through a wealthier part of the capital, wearing white and yelling: “Miguel is alive! But where is the motive?!”
Outside the hospital, they chanted loudly, at times criticizing the president. “Petro get out!” they said.
Among those at the march supporting Mr. Uribe was Ingrid Betancourt, a former presidential candidate who was kidnapped on the campaign trail in 2002 by left-wing guerrillas and spent six years in captivity.
Surrounded by body guards, she called for national unity.
“I couldn’t sleep thinking about what I had seen,” she said of the shooting videos. “They can’t keep dividing us between left and right.”
In the afternoon, in the city’s central plaza, backers of Mr. Petro gathered for a previously scheduled concert meant to rally support for the president’s political initiatives. The headliner, Al2, dedicated his performance to two young Colombians who had died in street protests against a previous right-wing government.
Some Colombians criticized Mr. Petro’s decision to let the concert go ahead less than a day after the attack on Mr. Uribe. But several concertgoers said defended it.
Luis Ramírez, 38, said that people were injured or killed every day in Colombia — but that no one cancels a concert for them.
“It’s regrettable that an important right-wing politician” was attacked, he said, then added: “But he shouldn’t be the only important one. Everyone in Colombia has equal worth, regardless of their social status.”
Julie Turkewitz is the Andes Bureau Chief for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia, covering Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.
Genevieve Glatsky is a reporter for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.
Devon Lum is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times, specializing in open-source techniques and visual analysis.
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