Colombia’s real democratic frontier begins where a candidate can campaign without risking death

The attack on, and subsequent death of, Miguel Uribe Turbay revived a question Latin America has spent decades trying to contain: how stable can a democracy really be when participating in politics still requires wartime security protocols?

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 7, 2025, Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was speaking to supporters in Fontibón, a working-class district in western Bogotá, when a hitman opened fire in the middle of the rally. The bullets struck his head and one of his legs. The footage spread across the country with a familiarity Colombia knows too well: bodyguards firing back, supporters dropping to the ground, an unconscious candidate rushed away under emergency escort. Two months later, after multiple surgeries and weeks in intensive care at Fundación Santa Fe, Uribe died at 39.

The scene did more than pull Colombia back toward the darkest years of its political violence. It exposed something more unsettling: the country’s democratic stability still depends on whether the state can guarantee that participating in politics does not amount to a death sentence.

In Colombia, electoral violence was never truly left behind

The debate returned with force during the current electoral cycle, already shaped by threats, attacks and early warnings issued by the Electoral Observation Mission, known as the MOE. But this is no longer just a Colombian problem. Across Latin America, elections have become more frequent while political systems remain unable to guarantee that competing for power does not put lives at risk.

Colombia’s history makes that conversation unavoidable. The assassination of presidential candidates throughout the twentieth century was not a peripheral consequence of the country’s violence. It was one of its central mechanisms. The extermination of the Unión Patriótica and the murders of Luis Carlos Galán, Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro left a structural scar on the country: in Colombia, electoral violence does not simply kill individuals. It reshapes political representation itself.

That legacy explains why electoral security carries a different institutional weight in Colombia than it does elsewhere in the region. Protecting candidates is not merely a policing strategy. It functions as a guarantee of democratic legitimacy. When candidates cancel campaign stops because of threats, when entire municipalities become inaccessible to campaigns, or when political teams quietly negotiate safe passage with armed groups, the problem stops being one of public security. It becomes a fracture in sovereignty itself.

Where candidates cannot move freely, democracy cannot either

The MOE reported a rise in attacks against political leaders over the past year, with lethal violence against candidates and electoral actors remaining concentrated in departments historically marked by armed conflict, including Cauca, Antioquia and Norte de Santander. More than 190 municipalities registered incidents linked to political violence during the current electoral race.

The number matters less than the pattern behind it. What recent reports reveal is not simply persistent violence, but the mutation of electoral violence itself. It no longer revolves exclusively around insurgent groups attempting to sabotage the national political system. Today, it is fragmented, territorial and deeply tied to illegal economies seeking control over strategic corridors, local contracts and criminal revenues. Armed pressure has shifted away from ideology and toward territorial domination.

That shift has made protection schemes more complex and far more expensive. Colombia’s Interior Ministry recently confirmed that some presidential candidates now travel with armored vehicles, dozens of security agents, permanent coordination with police and the National Protection Unit, and reinforced protocols for regional travel.

Yet the sophistication of those security arrangements also exposes an uncomfortable contradiction. While national campaigns move under heavy protection, hundreds of local candidates continue campaigning virtually alone. State protection tends to increase in proportion to a politician’s national visibility, not necessarily according to the level of territorial risk they face.

This is where one of Colombian democracy’s least discussed fractures begins to emerge: the inequality of electoral guarantees. In many regions, a city council candidate or community leader faces more immediate threats than a presidential contender in Bogotá, while having vastly fewer resources to confront them. The MOE has repeatedly warned that the greatest risks now fall precisely on local authorities and territorial leaderships.

Electoral security has become a regional warning sign

The issue extends far beyond Colombia because the region is beginning to show similar symptoms. In Mexico, dozens of local candidates have been assassinated in recent electoral cycles amid the growing influence of organized crime. In Ecuador, the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio fundamentally altered regional perceptions of institutional vulnerability. Even countries with less entrenched histories of political violence, such as Panamá and Guyana, are increasingly concerned by the way deteriorating regional security is colliding with polarized elections and expanding illegal economies.

When the state cannot guarantee minimum conditions of security for all campaigns, elections stop being perceived as exercises in democratic equality and begin to resemble contests managed through fear. Once citizens begin to associate political participation with armored convoys, emergency protocols and armed escorts, the electoral process itself starts to lose its civilian character and take on the logic of a security operation.

That is why international organizations and democratic governance analysts increasingly treat electoral security as a measure of institutional stability. The Atlantic Council recently warned that rising threats against political leaders in Colombia coincide with the territorial expansion of armed groups and growing state fragility in peripheral regions.

Democratic erosion rarely arrives through military coups or tanks in the streets the way it did in the twentieth century. In Latin America, it tends to emerge more quietly: candidates who stop campaigning in certain municipalities, local journalists who stop covering politics, community leaders who abandon their territories, and citizens who end up voting under conditions shaped by managed fear.

That is why electoral protection cannot be understood merely as spending on bodyguards and armored vehicles. It is, more fundamentally, a map of who controls territory and under what rules power circulates. In countries where entire regions remain contested by criminal economies, the security of political candidates reveals something deeper than the operational capacity of the state. It reveals how far democracy is still capable of reaching its own borders alive.