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Colombian opposition senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe has died in hospital two months after being shot by an assassin in an attack that revived memories of the country’s history of political violence.
The 39-year-old politician’s widow, María Claudia Tarazona, announced his death in a social media post on Monday, saying: “Rest in peace my love, I will look after our children.”
The Santa Fe hospital where Uribe had been in intensive care since the shooting in early June said he died at 1.56am local time on Monday.
Uribe’s murder has caused alarm that next year’s presidential and congressional elections could prompt a return to the violent power struggles that scarred the South American country in the 1980s and 1990s.
Uribe was shot as he spoke to supporters at a political rally in a Bogotá park in June. Police detained a 15-year-old as he tried to flee the scene of the crime, accusing him of the shooting.
Five other people have also been arrested and accused of involvement in what prosecutors say is a conspiracy, but it remains unclear who masterminded Uribe’s killing.
The senator, a member of the conservative Centro Democrático party, was aiming to secure nomination as the party’s official candidate in next year’s presidential election to succeed leftwing incumbent Gustavo Petro, who cannot run again.
Uribe was a staunch critic of Petro’s government, which has lurched further to the left as the president nears the end of his four-year term. The senator cited threats to institutional stability and the country’s deteriorating security as key concerns.
Pollsters say security is likely to be the biggest worry for voters. Guerrilla groups and drug traffickers have become more powerful during Petro’s presidency as the government has pursued a failed policy of “total peace”, offering negotiations and ceasefires that did not hold.
Uribe’s lawyer has accused the country’s president of creating a “hostile” environment towards the senator in the weeks before his death, citing social media posts by Petro.
Two days before the shooting, Petro called Uribe “the grandson of a president who ordered the torture of 10,000 Colombians”, referring to unproven accusations against the senator’s grandfather, former President Julio César Turbay Ayala.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio has blamed Uribe’s shooting on “violent leftist rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the Colombian government”, a charge rejected by the Petro administration.
On Monday morning, Rubio said that the US “stands in solidarity with his family, the Colombian people, both in mourning and demanding justice for those responsible”.
Uribe’s mother, Diana Turbay, a well known journalist, was herself murdered during a failed rescue operation in 1991 after she was kidnapped by the Medellín drug cartel, led by Pablo Escobar.
Uribe is not related to Colombia’s former president Alvaro Uribe Velez, who was last month sentenced to house arrest for witness tampering and bribery, though the two men were political allies.
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