00:00Colombia's left-wing president Gustavo Petro is hinting there could be an international drug cartel behind last Saturday's shooting at a rally of presidential contender, of the presidential contender, the presidential contender for, in Colombia, Senator Uribe, Uribe, who remains in critical condition.
00:27Eliza Herbert has more.
00:30A Colombian flag is draped over his empty seat, with his photo and the words, we are waiting for you.
00:41It is one of many vigils being held across the country for Senator Miguel Uribe. Mourners are praying he recovers.
00:51We don't understand why they did it. We don't understand how there could have been such a cruel perpetrator.
00:57But from here, what we have to do is call for unity around Miguel, so that Miguel feels everyone's energy, so that Miguel feels us close.
01:08The right-wing opposition senator and presidential candidate had been speaking at a campaign event on Saturday when he was shot twice in the head at close range.
01:20He was rushed straight to hospital and has since been fighting for his life.
01:26On Tuesday, doctors said he remained in a critical but stable condition and that all steps were being taken to mitigate the impact of his injuries.
01:35According to authorities, a 15-year-old suspect was arrested at the scene and a full-scale investigation has been launched.
01:43We have examined approximately 1,000 videos. It is very important work and it gives us a lot of insight into this criminal event.
01:53The country's attorney general also expressed the need to reflect on if and why a minor was caught up in a network of assassins.
02:01For many, the incident represents an eerie throwback to the 1990s, when drug cartels and rebels routinely murdered high-profile judges, politicians and journalists without punishment.
02:14And for more, let's cross now to London, Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for the America's program at the think tank, Chatham House.
02:27Thank you for speaking with us here on France 24.
02:30Thanks for the invitation.
02:31First off, this long message posted to X, formerly Twitter, by Colombia's president.
02:40He invokes a cartel.
02:43He talks about the fact that the security detail of Senator Uribe was reduced from seven to three people.
02:51What do you make of that message?
02:54I think he's basically trying to cover his own excuses.
02:58What we've seen in Colombia in recent years has been an escalation of violence.
03:03And what he's confronting right now is a fear among Colombian citizens that it may be returning to the dark days of the 1980s.
03:12Luis Carlos Galán was a senator who was running for president at the time.
03:16He was killed by Pablo Escobar.
03:20There were others, too, who were killed during a really dark period, including Supreme Court justices.
03:24And the people fear that after a year of sort of incremental but substantial gains controlling violence, controlling crime in Colombia, they're slowly slipping back, not necessarily because of Gustavo Petro's immediate policies, but because of his sort of rather naive attempt to create or establish what he called total peace.
03:47And so now he's basically trying to allay people's fears and trying to pin the blame.
03:52But the truth is, many people pin the blame on him and his rather, at times, feckless policies on security and peace.
04:00Feckless policies on security and peace.
04:03To hear the U.S. Secretary of State tell it in that tweet that he put out on Sunday evening, it's left-wing rabble-rousing.
04:12Marco Rubio blaming the left for radical rhetoric.
04:19No, I don't think there's any need to pin ideology on this.
04:23Look, presidents can be incompetent from the left and the right.
04:27There may be news to Secretary of State Rubio.
04:30But in this case, yes, Gustavo Petro comes to the left.
04:33He was a former guerrilla for the M-19 guerrilla group.
04:37But the fact is that he simply has not been an effective manager.
04:41He's engaged in feuds with his cabinet.
04:45He's downgraded the military and its role.
04:48He's purged the military in some cases.
04:50And then in this effort, again, a naive effort to establish total peace, negotiating with ELN and other fragments of former guerrilla groups that had laid down their arms only to take them back up as criminal elements.
05:02He sort of let the whole issue of security slide.
05:05But that's not because he's a leftist so much as he's just been a very ineffective president and one who does not place as high a value on security as most Colombians.
05:16President Petro also pointing to the fact that they do have a suspect in custody.
05:22It's a 15-year-old who was roughed up after the shooting.
05:28What are you expecting from the suspect?
05:33Are we going to know more?
05:36I think, first of all, I mean, it's not a surprise they were able to capture the suspect.
05:40They had him on camera.
05:41So I'm not sure President Petro should be doing a victory lap on that one.
05:46But I do think in this case we'll have to see whether he was a lone gunman or whether he was what they call a sicario, an assassin, hired by cartels.
05:53It's not really clear what he was a conservative senator, one who was running for president on a more conservative platform, certainly than Petro.
06:01But it's not really clear that this was yet a targeted attack, one that was designed by cartels.
06:08Violence has been rife in Colombia.
06:10It's been one of the at one point we had the highest murder rate per capita in all of Latin America and much of the world.
06:16This was in the mid-1990s.
06:19We'll have to see whether we're sliding back to that sort of generalized violence or whether this was a target attack.
06:24But right now it's too early to tell.
06:27You were talking about this naive approach to would you say it's policing or naive approach to handling the peacemaking with the various rebel groups?
06:41It's both.
06:42But let's let's start with sort of the naivete of this negotiated peace.
06:46And in that case, Petro has been arguing since he was sworn in.
06:50In fact, he ran on the campaign of total peace.
06:52And he was willing to declare a series of ceasefires with criminal groups and with the ELN, which was also was former guerrilla group, but now is really effectively a criminal syndicate in the hopes of negotiating this peace.
07:04And he pinned a lot on it.
07:06And despite the fact that these groups continued to break the ceasefire, he maintained his support for that.
07:11He only recently abandoned that.
07:13But what happened in those cases of the ceasefire was the army began to control less and less territory.
07:19The criminal groups began to consolidate their power.
07:22They, in fact, took over a number of villages.
07:24And so we've seen a reversal of many of the gains from the total security policies of the former president, no relation to the assassinator, the senator Uribe, but Alvaro Uribe, former president, and also the gains of Juan Manuel Santos, a former president, who negotiated a peace deal with the FMLN, some of whom split to form criminal groups, which are now running rampant in the countryside.
07:49But this has really been a case of his sort of doubling down on a failed and naive policy more than an effort that has reversed many of the security gains of the past two decades or even three decades, more than just a sort of an effort to not really engage in security, especially in urban areas.
08:10But he left the rural areas effectively to their own devices.
08:13Quick final question for you, Christopher Sabatini, with, as we pointed out earlier in our conversation, kind of an adversarial relationship right now between Bogota and Washington.
08:24Where can Colombia turn for help in getting a handle on it all?
08:28Good question. No coincidence that Petro was recently in China for a meeting of CELOC, which is the community of Latin American and Caribbean states, where he signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative.
08:40Now, in part, that reflects his disappointment. And if you were following at all the case recently of Trump trying to deport Colombian undocumented immigrants on a military plane, Petro sent them back.
08:53And another long-winded, rather rambling and incoherent tweet replied to Donald Trump.
08:59Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs and Petro climbed down.
09:03He's clearly persona non grata within the White House and in the State Department, in part because of that, but also because Secretary of State Rubio, but also Congress people from South Florida blame him for the rise in violence, but also blame him for coddling the dictator in Venezuela, the leftist, Nicolás Maduro.
09:24So there's already a long history there, and this was just another way to try to tar him as basically a leftist who stands against U.S. values.
09:33I'm not sure it's a particularly effective strategy or label, to be quite frank.
09:37Christopher Sabatini, so many thanks for joining us from London.
09:42Stay with us. There's much more to come. More news plus today's business and sports.
