BOGOTA: Colombia laid to rest slain presidential candidate Miguel Uribe on Wednesday amid emotional pleas to end the nation’s cycle of political bloodshed.
The 39-year-old conservative senator was fatally shot in June while campaigning in Bogota and succumbed to his injuries this week.
“Our country is going through the darkest, saddest, and most painful days,“ widow Maria Claudia Tarazona told mourners at the packed cathedral service.
Authorities linked the assassination to left-wing guerrillas rejecting Colombia’s 2016 peace deal, with six arrests made over the alleged plot.
The killing shocked a nation that had enjoyed years of relative calm after decades of drug cartel and guerrilla-linked political murders.
Uribe’s mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was herself killed in 1991 during a failed police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.
“With all the pain in my soul, I had to tell a little boy of barely four years old the horrendous news of his mother’s murder,“ said Uribe’s father at the funeral.
The grieving widow pledged their children would grow up without hatred despite their father’s murder by a suspected teenage assassin.
President Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla, skipped the ceremony at the family’s request to avoid politicising the sombre occasion.
Conservative lawmaker Julio Cesar Triana survived an ambush in southern Huila as Colombia grapples with renewed political violence ahead of 2026 elections. - AFP
