Andean Group - May 2026

The assassination of conservative presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay, who died in August 2025, just over two months after he was shot in the head while campaigning in Colombia’s capital Bogotá, continues to cast a shadow over the 2026 presidential campaign and has sharpened candidates’ focus on insecurity. With the election’s 31 May first round fast approaching, the threat of political violence lingers. All three presidential frontrunners, ranging from left-wing to far-right, denounced threats made against their lives in April.

The murder of the 39-year-old Uribe Turbay, who was seeking the candidacy of the right-wing Centro Democrático (CD), has been blamed by the Colombian authorities on Segunda Marquetalia – a dissident offshoot of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrilla group. According to prosecutors, Segunda Marquetalia planned the hit and contracted local criminals to carry it out. The gunman, who was aged 15 at the time of the attack, was sentenced in August 2025 to seven years in prison, benefitting from a reduced prison sentence due to his status as a minor. Others convicted of involvement in the assassination have received longer sentences, while judicial proceedings continue against Elder José ‘El Costeño’ Arteaga, the alleged coordinator.

However, efforts to bring to justice the masterminds of Uribe Turbay’s murder have advanced at a much slower speed. On 24 March the attorney general’s office reportedly issued arrest warrants for seven leading figures within Segunda Marquetalia in relation to the assassination – Luciano Marín Arango (‘Iván Márquez’), Géner García Molina (‘John 40’), José Manuel Sierra (‘Zarco Aldinever’), Jhon Jairo Bedoya Arias (‘Rumba’), Alberto Cruz Lobo (‘Enrique Marulanda’), Diógenes Medina (‘Gonzalo’), and Kendric Téllez Álvarez (‘Yako’).

Another suspected member of the criminal gang in Bogotá which is believed to have carried out the assassination, Brayan Ferney Cruz Castillo, was arrested in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires on 21 April. According to Colombian media reports, Cruz followed Uribe Turbay in the run-up to his murder to build a picture of his movements and security arrangements. He is reportedly the partner of Katerine Andrea Martínez, alias ‘Gabriela’, who in February this year was sentenced to over 20 years in prison for supplying the gun that was used to kill the presidential aspirant.

Threats against other candidates

Nearly a year after Uribe Turbay was shot on 7 June, the spectre of his assassination lingers over the campaign and has intensified concerns regarding the safety of other candidates as the 31 May election approaches. All three leading candidates claimed in April that they are the target of assassination plots.

Iván Cepeda, the continuity candidate for the left-wing Pacto Histórico, who has amassed a strong lead in the polls and seems sure to reach the 21 June second round (held if no candidate wins over 50% of the vote), said on 17 April that the authorities have received intelligence of a plot to kill him. He said that the government had passed this information on to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). President Gustavo Petro elaborated on the alleged threat against Cepeda during a cabinet meeting four days later, saying that an armed group, which he did not name, was planning the hit from within the Valle de Tenza region in the central department of Boyacá.

Then, on 27 April, Paloma Valencia, of the right-wing Gran Consulta por Colombia coalition, who has polled between second and third place in recent weeks, said that she has received a warning from the authorities regarding an assassination plot against her. Valencia said that she had been “warned by the defence minister, the interior minister, and the director of the national police that a narco-terrorist group has once again put a price on my head”. She said that the threat came from the Farc’s dissident 42^nd Front, which has allegedly offered Col$2bn (US$552,000) for her murder. Valencia said that she was publicly denouncing the assassination threat “so that Colombians know what is happening in the country and the sort of conditions that we candidates are living in regarding security arrangements”.

However, despite Valencia’s claim that the warning about the alleged plot had come directly from the government, Defence Minister Pedro Sánchez took to social media the same day to say that “intelligence work ruled out any threat” against Valencia and that “this conclusion was already communicated to [her] campaign team”.

Meanwhile, the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella (Defensores de la Patria), who is vying with Valencia for a place in the run-off, claimed without providing any evidence on 6 April that the Petro administration is planning to have him killed as it views him as an electoral threat. “What the regime wants is to eliminate me,” De la Espriella told local radio station Caracol Radio, alleging that the government was also behind Uribe Turbay’s murder. “It’s the same modus operandi that they used against Miguel Uribe Turbay,” he said, again without providing any detail to back up this statement.

Adding to a sense of unease among candidates, images circulated on social media in April showing pictures of Valencia and De la Espriella’s images as part of a funeral cortege, accompanied by the words ‘Rest in Peace’ and with the year of their deaths given as 2026. The social media posts sparked cross-party condemnation and warnings that this sort of rhetoric could fuel more political violence of the sort inflicted on Uribe Turbay.

Worst terror attack on civilians in decades

A bombing on the Pan-American highway in Cauca department on 25 April killed at least 20 people and left at least 48 others injured. The attack, in the village of El Túnel in Cajibío municipality, was described by the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo as “the worst terrorist attack against civilians in decades”. Cauca’s governor, Octavio Guzmán, also said that it was the south-west’s “most brutal and ruthless attack against the civilian population in decades”. Images from the scene showed a large crater surrounded by wreckage and overturned vehicles.

      Defence Minister Sánchez said that the authorities believe the attack was carried out by the ‘Jaime Martínez’ unit of the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) – an alliance of dissident Farc units which is headed by Néstor Gregorio Vera Fernández (‘Iván Mordisco’). The ‘Jaime Martínez’ unit is headed by Iván Jacob Idrobo Arredondo (‘Marlon’). The defence ministry claimed on social media shortly after the attack that it and other terrorist attacks in the south-west were carried out “in response to the sustained pressure from the security forces on the criminal structures of ‘Mordisco’ in northern Cauca on the border with Valle del Cauca [department]”.

      The attack has sharpened scrutiny on the failings of the government’s flagship ‘total peace’ initiative, which aimed to achieve the negotiated demobilisation of all armed groups. The security situation in Cauca and the south-west is particularly complex due to the fragmentation of criminal and insurgent groups, which has complicated efforts to negotiate. The Cauca departmental government issued a statement on 25 April saying that “Cauca cannot continue to face this barbarity alone. We are facing a terrorist escalation that demands immediate responses. We demand forceful, sustained and effective action from the national government”.

More attacks in Cauca

There was an uptick in insurgent attacks in Cauca department in April. As well as the bombing on the Pan-American highway, other incidents included a 26 April car bombing that left two police officers and a child injured in the village of El Plateado, Argelia municipality, which the security forces reclaimed from the EMC in October 2024 after a six-year period under the control of Farc dissidents [SSR-24-11]. The car bomb exploded near a police building that was under attack by mortars, with the army blaming the EMC’s Carlos Patiño unit. An air traffic control radar also came under attack from drones in El Tambo municipality the previous day. Colombia’s civil aviation authority (Aerocivil) said that the radar was damaged in the attack and that this would benefit drug trafficking groups by helping their aircraft to avoid detection.

Noboa makes new accusations against Petro

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa claimed in an 18 April interview with Colombian news magazine Semana that President Petro had met with allies of the Ecuadorean crime boss José Adolfo Macías Villamar, alias ‘Fito’, who was arrested in June 2025. Noboa said that while visiting Ecuador for his inauguration for a second term in May 2025, Petro travelled to Manta, Manabí province, where “he met with members of [opposition party] Revolución Ciudadana, and some of those members have connections to Fito”. Noboa added that “I can’t say at the moment whether he met physically with Fito” but that he “was with the same group and in the same area”. Petro responded that he would sue Noboa for slander, saying he had been accompanied by an Ecuadorean security detail while he held political meetings and worked on his book in Manta.