Colombian Presidential Candidate and HKS Grad Miguel Uribe Dies at 39 After Campaign Shooting

Miguel Uribe Turbay, a Colombian senator and presidential hopeful, died Monday of injuries sustained from a June shooting at a campaign event. Uribe, who received a Mid-Career Master’s in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2022, was 39.

A conservative and a vocal critic of sitting President Gustavo Petro, Uribe was shot three times at a political rally in Bogotá on June 7. He spent more than two months in intensive care and received multiple emergency surgeries, but his condition deteriorated over the weekend.

News of his assassination reverberated throughout Colombia, where it sparked painful memories of a long history of political violence and cartel and paramilitary fighting. In a June statement, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced the attack, attributing it to “violent leftist rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the Colombian government.”

Authorities are unsure why Uribe — who was not considered a frontrunner in the 2026 presidential election — was targeted. A motive remains under investigation.

“It’s a very startling imagery of how political violence is one of the most cyclical phenomena we have in this country,” said Ana Bejarano Ricaurte, a press freedom advocate who attended Harvard Law School as Uribe worked toward his HKS degree and knew him from the period. “It’s very Colombian in the worst way.”

The teenage gunman, hired by a local gang, was arrested on site, and six others have since been taken into custody for their involvement in the shooting. In early July, authorities detained Élder José Arteaga Hernández, who they said orchestrated the attack.

But there is mounting pressure on authorities to solve the case — federal officials put out a $730,000 reward for information and say they have pulled in support from the U.S., Britain, and the United Arab Emirates.

If anything, the assassination raised Uribe’s profile. An estimated 70,000 people gathered in a march through Bogotá on June 15 to honor the senator, and his shooting has been a unifying force for critics of Petro’s leftist government. In a July poll, Uribe led a national poll for the 2026 presidential election for the first time, receiving 13.7 percent support.

But it is unclear whether Uribe’s right-wing party, the Democratic Center, will be able to redirect the groundswell of support toward a new candidate in a field that began with more than 60 candidates.

Luis Carlos Vélez, a Colombian CNN host who attended the same MC/MPA program as Uribe, argued the assassination was “not a casualty” but a concerted effort to “cut the head of the Colombian right” by those who feared Uribe would crack down on drug traffickers.

“The opposition is lost,” Vélez added. “Taking into account how polarized the world is, and Colombia is — and after this, even more — I don’t see right now a person who can take Miguel’s post. I don’t see that very clearly.”

Uribe’s death may well polarize rather than unify the electorate, said Esteban Santos, the son of former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and an HKS classmate of Uribe’s. Santos said Colombians will be left to choose between militaristic, right-wing strongmen and an “extreme left” that claims the shooting was staged.

“You get two terrible stories,” Santos said.

“This is why the radicals love to throw gasoline into the fire, because now everything becomes a vicious cycle,” he added.

Bejarano anticipated that the 2026 election would be a reversion to a rhetoric of polarization and “everyone hates everyone” — the type of rhetoric that all too often turns violent and deadly in Colombia.

“This is going to be like elections we’ve never seen before, and also the ones we’ve always seen, which is weird,” Bejarano said. “It’s new, but it’s also not new.”

When Uribe arrived at HKS in 2022, his political star turn felt almost preordained, according to those who knew him.

David C. King, a lecturer at HKS who taught Uribe, called the young senator “unforgettable.”

“He lights up a room,” King said in an interview after the June assassination attempt. “There’s an earnestness and a charisma about him that everybody saw, and it was clear that the future was bright.”

Classmates at HKS said the young politician seemed destined for a high-profile career in Colombia — but was also acutely aware of the risks that awaited him.

Uribe’s mother, an enterprising journalist, was kidnapped by a cartel group and killed during a failed rescue attempt when Uribe was four years old. And he has one of the most recognizable last names in Columbia politics — his maternal grandfather is a former president of Colombia and his paternal grandfather once led the country’s liberal party.

“It’s especially tragic for us as a country too, because in the collective memory, we know that he’s the child of this,” said Amelia Rey Bonilla, an HKS classmate who also worked in the Bogotá government with Uribe.

“She got murdered, and Miguel was four years old, and the whole country saw what happened. So now he has a four-year-old son, this happened, and I think it’s reviving a lot of very painful and dark history for the country,” Rey added.

But Uribe was undeterred, said Rey and King.

“He has a frozen in time memory of his mother,” King said. “And yet wanted to do whatever he could to try and make the country better.”

In an HKS yearbook put together by Rey before their graduation, Uribe was awarded the superlative of “most likely to become President of Colombia.”

After Uribe was hospitalized in June, Rey formed an “Amigos of Miguel” group chat on WhatsApp with 78 classmates from HKS and other Harvard schools. The group organized communication, provided updates on Uribe’s status, and worked to increase outreach over the past two months.

Uribe arrived at HKS for the one-year MC/MPA program in summer 2021 with his wife and children — including his baby son — in tow.

Friends said they were in awe of his ability to balance his classwork, family, and political obligations. He even managed to take online classes while concurrently running for the Colombian Senate in spring 2022.

M. Hamza Haroon, a classmate and friend of Uribe’s, said Uribe refused to come to events or get-togethers with their HKS cohort until his son fell asleep.

“He was so committed to his family,” Haroon said. “There would be moments where I would be waiting outside an event, waiting for this guy to come and show up so that we could go in together. And he would be at home trying to make his baby fall asleep.”

Rey said Uribe also liked to play chess matches on the tables in Harvard Square and would perform spontaneously on any piano or guitar in sight.

Jelena Stefanovic, another HKS classmate, recalled a party where Uribe serenaded his wife with a self-composed song, performed on his son’s toy piano.

“You can imagine this guy who is planning to run the country, and then sitting there and playing this miniature wooden piano and looking very funny,” Stefanovic said. “So he was also the performer.”

Haroon visited Uribe in the spring of 2022 while Uribe was campaigning for his senate seat, and recalled that Uribe waited to welcome him at 2 a.m. despite an 8 a.m. radio appearance. Haroon said the trip was an opportunity to watch Uribe work his magic.

“Before, Miguel was a friend, a very good friend, who happens to be a politician, but now we saw Miguel as a leader for so many people,” Haroon said.

Classmates said that Uribe was especially influenced by Ronald A. Heifetz’s adaptive leadership course, a popular but controversial class where students are intentionally challenged and provoked, often on a personal level.

“He was a big fan of Professor Heifetz,” Haroon said. “He took that class because he always felt like he had a calling for leadership in his own country, and he wanted to get better. He wanted to be a better leader, better father, better son.”

And lessons taught by Heifetz resonated on an even more personal level in the days after his assassination, his classmates said.

“Professor Heifetz always said that leadership, exercising leadership, could cost you your life. And I always thought that was a metaphor. I never took it literally,” Rey said. “Now that I’m seeing what’s happening with Miguel, maybe it was literal.”

“Maybe exposing yourself so much and maybe showing up in such a loud and powerful way can cost someone their life,” she added.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.