The father of Miguel Uribe, a Colombian presidential candidate fatally shot at a political rally earlier this year, on Tuesday launched a presidential campaign in what he called an effort keep his son’s legacy alive and build a safer and more prosperous Colombia.
Miguel Uribe Londono, 72, announced his candidacy with a speech outside the congressional building in the capital, Bogota, where his son became a well-known senator, and spoke behind a podium fitted with the campaign logo used by his deceased son.
“Together we can build a secure Colombia where people will not fear going out into the streets, and where business owners will not have to make extortion payments” to gangs, Uribe Londono said. “A democratic Colombia, where the government does not foment divisions between the rich and the poor, whites or blacks, or those who are on the left or on the right.”
Photo: Reuters
Uribe Londono was a member of the Bogota City Council in the late 1980s and a senator for the Colombian Conservative Party in the early 1990s. He had no plans to run for the presidency before his son’s death, and was not widely known by the public.
He gained new prominence during his son’s nationally televised funeral, when he delivered a speech decrying what he called the country’s descent into “madness” under the administration of left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro and urged Colombians to vote in next year’s elections.
Uribe Londono is one of five candidates that are running for the Democratic Center, the conservative party that Miguel Uribe belonged to.
The party has said that later this year, it would use opinion polls to decide on its final candidate.
Sergio Guzman, a political analyst in Bogota, said that Uribe Londono’s announcement to enter the presidential race “reinvigorates” the Democratic Center, which has struggled to find a popular candidate while its leader, former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, fights corruption allegations in Colombian courts.
The former president has no relation to Uribe Londono.
Guzman said that Uribe Londono, whose wife was murdered in the 1990s, “symbolizes the pain of many victims, especially those who are conservatives.”
Uribe Londono’s entry into the presidential race comes as Colombia faces a new wave of violence, caused largely by rebel groups and drug gangs that are trying to take over territory abandoned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the guerrilla army that made peace with the government in 2016.
Last week, seven people were killed as a FARC hold-out group set off a car bomb outside a military base in Colombia’s third-largest city. While in the province of Antioquia, rebels took down a helicopter that was conducting anti-narcotics operations, killing 13 police officers.
“I am not the only father who has lost that which he loved the most, but I would like to be the voice of the latest father, who has had to accept the cruel destiny that they want to impose on us with violence and terror,” Uribe Londono said.
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