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Calgary Herald
18 hours ago
- Politics
- Calgary Herald
Colombia presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay fighting for life after assassination bid
Article content Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay remains in a critical condition after an assassination attempt on Saturday that recalled the political violence that roiled the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. Article content The 39-year-old opposition senator is out of a 'neurosurgical' operation and a procedure on his left thigh, but his condition remains extremely serious, according to a statement from La Fundacion Santa Fe de Bogota, where he is being treated. It declined to give a prognosis. Article content Article content Uribe's wife had said the 39-year-old opposition senator is 'fighting for his life' following the attack, which happened while he was campaigning in a Bogota neighbourhood on Saturday. Article content Article content A 15-year-old youth was arrested in relation to the shooting after being beaten up by a crowd, according to Attorney General Luz Camargo. The minor is currently receiving treatment in a medical centre, she said. Authorities recovered a 9mm Glock at the scene. Article content Uribe was was hit twice in the head, according to the Attorney General's office. Article content In a national address, President Gustavo Petro said that investigators are trying to establish who ordered the teenage gunman to attempt the hit, and don't yet know the motive. Article content The candidate had visited businesses in the Modelia neighbourhood, then was speaking to about 250 people when the gunfire broke out, according to local councilor Andrés Barrios, who was with Uribe at the time of the shooting. Article content Article content A person from his security team threw himself on top of Uribe, Barrios said in an interview with W Radio. The senator was put into a car, then transferred to a passing ambulance, Barrios said. Article content The attack comes as illegal armed groups gain strength and taking more territory, emboldened by the failure of Petro's peace plan. The gunning down of a prominent candidate — a resurgence of a type of violence that had become much less common over the last three decades — could further shake investors' waning confidence in the Andean nation. Article content At the peak of Colombia's drug cartel terror in the 1980s and early 1990s, four presidential candidates were assassinated, among other prominent Colombians. Uribe's own mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was murdered by Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel in 1991. Article content Uribe, a member of the Democratic Center party, has called for a tough line against the illegal armed groups that control cocaine production, and has repeatedly warned that Colombia is backsliding into terror. Just two days before he was shot, he said in a speech in Cartagena that the country is being 'dragged back to a past of violence.'
Miami Herald
a day ago
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Colombia candidate fighting for life after assassination bid
Surgeons are operating on Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay after an assassination attempt that recalled the political violence that roiled the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. Uribe's wife said the 39-year-old opposition senator is 'fighting for his life' following the attack, which happened while he was campaigning in a Bogota neighborhood on Saturday. A 15-year-old youth was arrested in relation to the shooting after being beaten up by a crowd, according to Attorney General Luz Camargo. The minor is currently receiving treatment in a medical center, she said. Authorities recovered a 9mm Glock at the scene. Uribe was stabilized at a local medical center before being transferred to a hospital in the north of the city, where he is undergoing a 'neurosurgical and peripheral vascular procedure'. He was hit twice, according to the Attorney General's office. In a national address, President Gustavo Petro said that investigators are trying to establish who ordered the teenage gunman to attempt the hit, and don't yet know the motive. The candidate had visited businesses in the Modelia neighborhood, then was speaking to about 250 people when the gunfire broke out, according to local councilor Andrés Barrios, who was with Uribe at the time of the shooting. A person from his security team threw himself on top of Uribe, Barrios said in an interview with W Radio. The senator was put into a car, then transferred to a passing ambulance, Barrios said. The attack comes as illegal armed groups gain strength and taking more territory, emboldened by the failure of Petro's peace plan. The gunning down of a prominent candidate — a resurgence of a type of violence that had become much less common over the last three decades — could further shake investors' waning confidence in the Andean nation. At the peak of Colombia's drug cartel terror in the 1980s and early 1990s, four presidential candidates were assassinated, among other prominent Colombians. Uribe's own mother, the journalist Diana Turbay, was murdered by Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel in 1991. Uribe, a member of the Democratic Center party, has called for a tough line against the illegal armed groups that control cocaine production, and has repeatedly warned that Colombia is backsliding into terror. Just two days before he was shot, he said in a speech in Cartagena that the country is being 'dragged back to a past of violence.' Uribe has attacked Petro's policy of seeking 'total peace' through negotiations with guerrillas and the private armies of drug traffickers. The talks have so far failed to yield major demobilizations, while the groups have taken advantage of the relative lack of military pressure to expand. On Saturday evening, crowds gathered outside Fundacion Santa Fe, the hospital where Uribe is being treated. Some of those present chanted anti-government slogans. Petro's government condemned the shooting, and pledged to step up protection of candidates ahead of the 2026 presidential and congressional elections. In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the attempt was 'a direct threat to democracy and the result of the violent leftist rhetoric coming from the highest levels of the Colombian government.' The grandson of former President Julio César Turbay, Uribe was educated at Colombia's Universidad de los Andes and Harvard's Kennedy School. He has also campaigned for a pro-business agenda, and opposes Petro's attempts to increase the role of the state in the economy. His mentor, former President Alvaro Uribe, to whom he is not related, defined him as a 'hope for the motherland', and said he was praying for his recovery. In 2023, a presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was gunned down in neighboring Ecuador, where drug gangs have gained strength in recent years. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Mint
4 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Colombia Bonds Drop on Reports Fiscal Rule May be Suspended
(Bloomberg) -- Leer en español Colombia's sovereign dollar bonds dropped across the curve on Thursday after local media reported that the government might suspend the fiscal rule that limited budget spending and helped steady the markets for more than a decade. Notes due in 2054 slipped 0.3 cent on the dollar, the biggest drop in two weeks, according to indicative pricing data compiled by Bloomberg. Local government peso bonds, or TES, also fell. W Radio reported that the government's fiscal committee was discussing whether to apply the escape clause that allows the government to suspend the rule, supposedly under extraordinary circumstances. Mauricio Villamizar, a member of the central bank's board, warned against such a move. 'The absence of a credible fiscal anchor at this stage would be especially concerning for Colombia,' Villamizar wrote in response to questions. 'There does not appear to be a justified need for an escape clause within the fiscal rule framework.' The fiscal committee will announce a new budget plan next week. Until now, the fiscal rule has provided an anchor for such plans and calmed investors by placing limits on the government's ability to run up debt. 'This wasn't priced in,' said Munir Jalil, chief Andean economist at BTG Pactual, in response to written questions. 'Part of the devaluation we're seeing today in long-dated TES is due to this.' The Finance Ministry didn't reply to a written request for comment. Andres Pardo, a strategist at XP Investments, said that although he didn't think a suspension was fully priced in, 'the risk of worse deficits after 2025 was high, so I don't think it will be a huge surprise.' Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg have steadily lifted their 2025 deficit forecasts in recent weeks as tax revenues lagged expectations. At the same time, the government of President Gustavo Petro has declined to rein in spending on the scale needed, leading a finance minister to quit in March. The government said in February that it aims at a budget deficit of 5.1% of gross domestic product in 2025. However, many economists now expect a fiscal gap equivalent to more than 7% of GDP, the widest since the pandemic. 'There is no extraordinary event that compromises macroeconomic stability that would justify activating the fiscal rule's escape clause,' said Luis Fernando Mejia, head of the economic think tank Fedesarrollo, in a post on X. 'Doing so would send a terrible signal to the markets about the government's commitment to fiscal sustainability and would worsen the situation by further increasing the cost of borrowing.' --With assistance from Nicolle Yapur. More stories like this are available on
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Curfew imposed after bomb attacks in Colombia injure six
Guerrilla fighters carried out four bomb attacks that wounded six people in a restive region of northeast Colombia, prompting officials to declare an overnight curfew Thursday and stoking concerns for a fragile peace process. The police and military blamed the ELN group, with which the government called off peace talks last month, for the attacks in a cocaine-producing region near Colombia's border with Venezuela on Wednesday night. A car bomb all but destroyed a toll booth outside the city of Villa del Rosario, while explosives were also detonated at police stations in the same city and in neighboring Cucuta, police commander General William Quintero told W Radio. A source in the Norte de Santander departmental government, of which Cucuta is the capital, told AFP on Thursday that six people were injured. Cucuta Mayor Jorge Acevedo announced an 11-hour curfew starting at 7:00 pm Thursday (midnight GMT), with schools shuttered on Friday. Analysts say the security situation in Colombia has deteriorated under President Gustavo Petro's peace drive, which has seen an easing of the state's military offensive against armed groups, who are gaining strength. Petro was elected in 2022 on promises of bringing "total peace" to a country battling to extricate itself from six decades of armed conflict between leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels and the government. Talks with remaining armed groups have broken down several times since a deal inked in 2016 led to the disarmament of the FARC, the biggest among the rebel armies. The Norte de Santander department is a stronghold of the 5,800-strong National Liberation Army (ELN), which last month launched an offensive targeting rival fighters and civilians it alleged to be sympathizers in the Catatumbo region. More than 60 people have been killed and some 50,000 driven from their homes, prompting Petro's government to suspend talks with the ELN. The ELN has taken part in failed negotiations with Colombia's last five governments. The country also faces a political crisis, with deeply unpopular Petro this month asking his entire cabinet to resign on the grounds they were ineffective. One of those to quit was Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez, whom Petro replaced with Air Force General Pedro Sanchez. On Monday, the president claimed "big mafias" were plotting to down his plane with missiles. bur-das/nn/mlr/dw/acb
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Colombia's Government Shaken After Televised Cabinet Quarrel
(Bloomberg) -- Colombian President Gustavo Petro's government was thrown into disarray after a televised cabinet meeting descended into chaos and tears. State Farm Seeks Emergency California Rate Hike After Fires Transportation Memos Favor Places With Higher Birth and Marriage Rates NYC's Newest Transit Leader Builds a Worker-Driven Strategy New York's First 'Passive House' School Is a Model of Downtown Density When French Communists Went on a Brutalist Building Boom Interior Minister Juan Fernando Cristo proposed the entire cabinet resign en masse as a result, saying the current composition of the front bench 'is unsustainable.' A key aide to the president has already quit as the government teeters more than a year out from the next election. A clean cabinet slate would allow Petro 'to make the changes that he considers necessary to take on the challenges of the final stretch of government,' Cristo said Wednesday in a post on X. Jorge Rojas, the head of the presidency's administrative department, announced his resignation about an hour earlier in an interview with W Radio. He had replaced Laura Sarabia, a powerful Petro ally who took over as foreign minister, just last week. The currency's reaction to the news was moderate, with Colombia's peso trimming some of its earlier losses and moving in line with other Latin American peers. But the cabinet spat is set to deepen credibility problems for Petro's government that could hurt investor sentiment down the line, according to Gilberto Hernandez-Gomez, a Latin America macro strategist at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA. 'The issue is the country needs to reflect policy credibility on fiscal, they can't really afford another year like the last one,' he said by email. The six-hour cabinet meeting Tuesday night, which was broadcast in a bid make Colombia's democracy more transparent, saw ministers trade barbs and air personal grievances. A clear rift emerged between officials loyal to the president and those critical of his decisions amid various scandals. Vice President Francia Marquez, Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, planning chief Alexander Lopez and other key officials openly aired complaints about the return to government of Armando Benedetti, a former ambassador to Venezuela, and the promotion of 30-year-old Sarabia. They argued that the two loyalists don't represent the political project that helped make Petro the Andean nation's first leftist president. Petro defended his officials and said his government wasn't 'sectarian,' adding that everyone deserves a second chance. Colombia is facing deep fiscal problems amid lower than expected tax revenue and tepid economic growth. The government has also declared a state of emergency in its northeast, where it's confronting armed rebel groups. During the six-hour broadcast, Petro didn't touch on the ongoing crisis in the Catatumbo region, which suffered an intense outbreak of violence last month that's left more than 50,000 people displaced. And in an unexpected move at the start of the meeting, the president called on state oil producer Ecopetrol SA to sell its operations in the US, citing his government's position against fracking, which he says is destructive to nature and humanity. --With assistance from Nicolle Yapur. Amazon and SpaceX Want In on India's Satellite Internet Market Inside Elon Musk's Attack on the US Government Elon Musk Inside the Treasury Department Payment System The NFL's Flawed DEI Program Still Beats What Most Companies Are Doing Believing in Aliens Derailed This Internet Pioneer's Career. Now He's Facing Prison ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
