Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe died two months after being shot in the head at a campaign event, his wife announced early August 11, 2025. AFP
Uribe's life was forever changed at the age of four when his mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in a botched police operation in January 1991 to free her from cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel.
Turbay, 40, was snatched on her way to what she had been falsely led to believe would be an exclusive TV interview with a guerrilla commander.
Instead, she became a pawn in the terror campaign Escobar launched to try to stop the extradition of drug traffickers such as himself to the United States.
Nearly five months after she was taken, Turbay was critically wounded in the gunfight that broke out when police stormed the kidnappers' lair.
Robbed of their mother, Uribe and his older sister Maria Carolina grew up in a prominent family as the grandchildren of former president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978 to 1982).
Moments before a teen gunman opened fire at close range on June 7, shooting him in the head and leg, Uribe had been reminiscing about his mother and described himself as someone who had experienced violence "in the flesh."
As a child, he was a chess fanatic with dreams of becoming world champion. But he studied law instead, and obtained a master's degree in public administration at Harvard University.
Uribe was elected to Bogota's city council at age 26, later becoming its youngest-ever chairperson and then the mayor's right-hand man.
In 2019, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Bogota, but three years later, he was elected a senator -- receiving the most votes of any candidate in the country.
He took a seat for the conservative Democratic Center party, with which he had been hoping to go all the way to Colombia's presidency.
But on June 7, as he addressed a political rally in Bogota, Uribe was shot at close range three times -- twice in the head -- allegedly by a 15-year-old who was hired for the job.
After two months in intensive care and signs of progress, doctors said Saturday that he had suffered a new brain haemorrhage.
His wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, with whom he had a son, announced two days later that Uribe had died.
Forgiveness
Uribe's shooting has shocked a nation trying to extricate itself from decades of violence perpetrated by armed groups, who compete over illegal mining and the drug trafficking trade, fighting each other and the state.
Four presidential candidates were assassinated during the worst phase of violence in the 1980s and 1990s under Escobar, who terrorized citizens of Bogota, Medellin and elsewhere with a campaign of bombings.
In a 2021 interview with Bocas magazine, Uribe said he had forgiven those responsible for the kidnapping of his mother, who wrote in a diary during her captivity that she was worried about the future of little "Miguelito."
"Reconciliation is the only thing that helps one ... overcome such a difficult moment," he told the publication.
"I understood that ... nothing I did would bring my mom back, and that forgiving, on the other hand, would enrich me as a person and allow me to live without burden."
'Hope of the country'
Former president Alvaro Uribe -- founder of the Democratic Center party and unrelated to the assassinated senator -- said on X the attacker had sought to extinguish a "hope of the country."
During his political career, the younger Uribe had made security a key campaign issue.
His mother's death forged in him "a firm conviction to fight against violence and narco-terrorism," according to his website.
Despite not being able to fulfil his chess ambitions, he founded an organisation to bring the sport to underprivileged young people "as a tool for personal and social development."
He also played the guitar and accordion, and liked to sing.
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