Miguel Uribe Londoño, a conservative Colombian presidential candidate and father of assassinated 2026 frontrunner Miguel Uribe Turbay, accused Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela of playing a role in his son’s death following Maduro’s arrest this weekend.
Uribe Londoño made the accusation in a video statement addressed to President of the United States Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, congratulating them on their work to bring Maduro and his wife, “first combatant” Cilia Flores, to justice.
“President Trump and Secretary Rubio, congratulations for having ended the nacro-terrorist dictatorship of Maduro in Venezuela,” Uribe Londoño shared. “Long live a free Venezuela, with democracy and without narco-terrorism.”
“Maduro supported and protected Colombia’s narco-terrorists. The money to pay for the assassination of my son Miguel came from Venezuela to Colombia,” he continued. “I will continue to be your ally to defend and protect freedom and democracy in Colombia and in our hemisphere.”
On Monday, Uribe Londoño shared a speech that his son, a senator at the time of his death, had delivered against the Maduro regime shortly before his assassination.
“In Colombia, there will never be peace if there is no freedom in Venezuela. Our destinies are absolutely linked and that is why we cannot be indifferent to what goes on there,” Uribe Turbay had said in a campaign speech shortly after Maduro stole the 2024 sham presidential election. “Today we have to tell the world that the complicit and cowardly silence of Gustavo Petro does not represent most of us Colombians… Maduro is nothing less than the mirror of Gustavo Petro.”
Gustavo Petro is the current president of Colombia, the first-ever leftist president of the country. He is term-limited out of office, but his leftist movement has appointed Senator Iván Cepeda as its candidate to maintain the status quo in the Colombian government. Petro entered politics through membership in the Marxist terrorist organization M19, which at its peak killed 11 Supreme Court justices, and he regularly boasts of his association with that group. Petro has also repeatedly expressed support for the illegitimate Venezuelan socialist regime and repeatedly attacked the Trump administration, including making personal threats against Trump. Trump, in turn, has warned Petro to “watch his ass.”
Miguel Uribe Turbay was a fierce critic of Petro in his lifetime, including during Petro’s term as mayor of Bogotá before winning the presidency. Uribe Turbay consistently polled as the frontrunner in the 2026 presidential election last year, both before and after he had been shot in the head.
Senator Uribe Turbay was shot by a 14-year-old boy while leaving a presidential campaign event in Bogotá in June 2025. He survived in unconscious condition until August, when he died. Thousands of Colombians attended his funeral, not including Petro.
Colombian police officials revealed shortly after the initial shooting that they had discovered evidence the child in question did not act alone. In October, police announced the arrest of an individual named Simeón Pérez Marroquín, known as “El Viejo” (“the old man”), identified as the person “in charge of planning, executing, and ordering the assassination component and the homicide of the senator.”
Marroquín, police added, is associated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s most potent Marxist narco-terrorist organization.
“Today, the strongest hypothesis is that the criminal structure responsible for the homicide is the Segunda Marquetalía,” National Police director William Rincón told police in October. Segunda Marquetalía is the active terrorist wing of FARC that emerged from the failed 2016 peace deal that won former President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. The group is known to operate in Venezuela with Maduro’s approval.
In addition to the evidence around “El Viejo,” police identified a 17-year-old Venezuelan child as a witness in the case, allegedly telling police he was recruited to commit the killing. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the boy declined to take the job, then fled a Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) center where he was receiving support. His whereabouts are reportedly unknown.
The 14-year-old identified as the shooter, Petro himself admitted in June, had been a member of his government’s “Youth in Peace” program, a failed initiative to integrate young guerrilla terrorists back into society.
“The district government had already identified the murderous child’s troubled nature, took him into one of its programs, and transferred him to one of my government’s programs: ‘Youth in Peace,’” Petro claimed.
Uribe Turbay’s assassination left the conservative lane in the 2026 presidential race in even more disarray than it had been previously when 75 people had declared an intent to run. At press time, Cepeda, the leftist candidate, is consistently polling at the top due in large part to a lack of competition to his left. The candidate replacing Uribe Turbay for the Democratic Center party, Senator Paloma Valencia, is among the top spenders on social media but has struggled to separate himself from a pack that includes Uribe Londoño, former ambassador to the United States Juan Carlos Pinzón, and businessman Abelardo de la Espriella.