The attorney representing the family of conservative Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, who was shot in the head during a campaign event, revealed on Monday that the lawmaker had requested additional security over 35 times in response to death threats, but the leftist government of President Gustavo Petro ignored them.
“Without exaggerating, I could tell you that there were over 40, but being conservative, 35. In 2025 alone there were between 19 and 23 requests for reinforcements,” attorney Víctor Mosquera told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. “And with all of them, the response was always negative: no, no, no, and no.”
Those requests were made during the Petro’s presidency, he specified, which began in 2022; the last one was reportedly made on June 5. Petro is the first Marxist president in the history of the country and was a member of a Marxist terrorist organization, the M-19 guerrilla, before launching his political career.
Mosquera denounced that he received “copy and paste” rejections from security authorities, who sent boilerplate statements claiming that their vehicles could not afford the gasoline necessary to travel to Uribe’s locations and redirecting complaints to Congress.
Uribe, a popular conservative senator, was shot in the head during a public address at a campaign event in Bogotá, where Petro once served as mayor, on Saturday. He remains in critical condition as of Tuesday morning and has not been responsive to health workers since the shooting, according to the hospital caring for him.
Uribe had announced his intention to run in the 2026 presidential election in October — though he is not an official candidate yet as the campaign season has not formally begun — and is a longtime vocal critic of Petro’s administration. Shortly before the assassination attempt against him, Uribe had accused Petro of trying to rig the 2026 election by dramatically defunding Colombia’s national election authority.
Colombian law enforcement authorities have not named the person arrested for the shooting, identifying him only as a 14-year-old boy. The boy reportedly told the crowd as he was apprehended at the event that he engaged in the violence “for money” and promised to give up “the numbers,” presumably the contacts of the masterminds of the attack. His mobile phone, which appeared on surveillance footage before the attack, has mysteriously gone missing since.
Mosquera described Uribe being bombarded regularly with harassing behavior, including “being followed, intimidating messages, calls, and bombardments of insults on social media.”
“On [social] networks, through being followed, through messages,” Mosquera detailed. “It was systematic. They threatened him, above all, on social media, in text messages, phone calls, following him.”
The attorney stated that Uribe took the threats extremely seriously, but was routinely ignored.
Congressman Óscar Villamizar, a member of Uribe’s Democratic Center conservative party, similarly denounced on Monday that conservative politicians in the country regularly face threats of violence, and the Petro administration, according to him, does not take them seriously.
“A few months ago from within the party, many of us Congressmen have made a call to the national government, to the UNP,” Villamizar denounced on Monday. “From the first year [of Petro’s term] they began lowering the level of security of all of the members of the opposition.”
“I think there was filtration of information on the part of agencies of the state, when one sees that the security detail was so small,” Villamizar posited. “How this government arrived and bring in a lot of people who were demobilized from the FARC, many of us have been sent replacements of people [staffers] who… have been part of criminal organizations that we have been combatting from the political sector.”
FARC is short for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a communist terrorist organization with over a half a century of history in the country. The center-right President Juan Manuel Santos signed a “peace deal” with the FARC in 2016 that granted the terrorists positions in Colombian state offices, including in Congress. Santos illicitly implemented the deal despite Colombians voting against it in a constitutionally mandated national referendum.
Colombian law enforcement officials have not indicated at press time that the assassination attempt was in any way linked to the FARC. Petro himself, in a typically convoluted statement, claimed that one “hypothesis” regarding the shooting was that the boy arrested in the attempt had ties to unspecified international organizations. Petro also alleged that the gun used in the attack was illegally purchased in the United States.
Petro also announced that he would increase the security detail of the most prominent conservative politicians in the country, most notably former president and Senator Álvaro Uribe (no relation to Miguel Uribe) and high-ranking conservative Senator María Fernanda Cabral, among others.
The doctors caring for Miguel Uribe Turbay released a statement on Tuesday morning confirming that the senator “continues in the intensive care unit, with all the monitoring and care that he requires, remaining in critical condition.”
“Within that complexity, he remains stable and the interventions realized in recent hours are maintaining his condition,” the statement concluded. “We continue to perform the necessary actions to mitigate the impact of the injuries he received. His grave condition and prognosis remain what has been previously reported.”
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