By Ricardo Alexandre / TSF Rádio Notícias (Portugal)
Miguel Uribe, the former presidential candidate who was shot multiple times this weekend in Bogotá, Colombia, has undergone surgery and remains in critical condition. He sustained two gunshot wounds to the head and one to the knee while delivering a speech in Fontibón, in the western part of the Colombian capital. According to the medical report, “his condition is extremely grave, and the prognosis remains uncertain.”
As a child, Miguel spent long stretches without his mother, Diana Turbay, due to her career in journalism—a profession that ultimately cost her life, leaving him orphaned at the age of four.
Now a politician, Uribe grew up rebelling against his mother, against journalism, against God—and, of course, he harbored deep hatred for Pablo Escobar, who was responsible for her death, and for César Gaviria, the then-president who ignored his pleas not to launch a violent rescue operation—an intervention that ended fatally and left Miguel with a trauma he chose to erase from memory.
Journalist Diana Turbay, director of the TV news program Noticiero TV Hoy and daughter of former President Julio César Turbay (who led Colombia from 1978 to 1982), had secured an interview with the then-commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Father Manuel Pérez. But it was all a trap. On August 30, 1990, Turbay—accompanied by five colleagues—traveled to Copacabana, Antioquia, where the Spanish-born guerrilla leader was supposedly expected to arrive.
They didn’t have to wait long—just two hours—before men in civilian clothes showed up, claiming to be ELN militants. The journalists were driven by jeep to a brick house, where they were separated into two rooms. Through a small crack, Diana Turbay could see the Medellín skyline—and, according to Las2Orillas, she thought the place felt “strange.”
On September 21, as the Turbay family grew desperate for any news of Diana, a breakthrough came: a member of the Medellín Cartel informed Todelar Radio Medellín that Diana Turbay was being held by the criminal organization, along with five other journalists: Juan Vitta, Hero Buss, Azucena Liévano, Orlando Acevedo, and Richard Becerra.
The kidnappers demanded that President César Gaviria’s government grant them the same concessions previously given to guerrilla groups like M-19 and EPL in order to begin negotiations. If the government refused, they threatened to begin killing the journalists.
Those were harrowing months for the Turbay family. Diana Turbay died on January 25, 1991, after being shot during a rescue operation carried out by government forces.
Her tragic story was later immortalized in Gabriel García Márquez’s book News of a Kidnapping.
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