Miguel Uribe, the Colombian senator and presidential hopeful who was shot in the head at a campaign event two months ago in an attack that shocked the nation, has died at 39, according to a statement posted by his wife.
Mr. Uribe had spent nine weeks in the hospital after the shooting in Bogotá, undergoing multiple surgeries before succumbing to his injuries. The hospital had announced in a statement this weekend that Mr. Uribe’s condition had worsened and that he was experiencing bleeding in the brain.
In a photo posted on Instagram on Monday, Mr. Uribe’s wife, María Claudia Tarazona, addressed her late husband, promising to take care of their children.
“You will always be the love of my life,” she wrote in Spanish. “Wait for me, because when I fulfill my promise to our children, I will come looking for you and we will have our second chance.”
The authorities have arrested four people in connection with the June 7 shooting, including a 14-year-old boy identified as the gunman, but have not disclosed a motive.
Prosecutors charged all four with attempted murder and illegal firearm possession. The three adults, Carlos Eduardo Mora, Katerine Martínez and William González face charges for using a minor to commit a crime.
All four have pleaded not guilty and have told prosecutors they were acting on orders from Elder José Arteaga, known as “El Costeño,” meaning “the man from the coast,” according to the attorney general’s office. Prosecutors have provided no further information about the man.
The killing of Mr. Uribe, a conservative politician and a grandson of a former president, is for many Colombians a traumatic reminder of the country’s troubled past — his mother, Diana Turbay, a famous journalist, was killed in 1991, when Mr. Uribe was a child, after being kidnapped by a drug cartel.
“Evil destroys everything, they killed hope,” Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the former Columbian president, said in a Spanish-language post on X. “May Miguel’s struggle be a light that illuminates Colombia’s rightful path.”
The attack on Mr. Uribe during a campaign rally in June evoked widespread fears of a return to an era of political violence that many Colombians thought they had left behind.
The country is also deeply divided over how to address intensifying violence fomented by criminal groups, many of which have roots in the Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict. Mr. Uribe and other conservatives have argued for a hard-line approach, while the country’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, has promised to strike peace deals but failed to do so.
Ali Watkins contributed reporting.
Genevieve Glatsky is a reporter for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.
The post Miguel Uribe, Colombian Senator Shot at Campaign Event, Dies at 39 appeared first on New York Times.
