By Armando Neira, CAMBIOColombia, August 17, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
With the death of the Senator and opposition Presidential aspirant, Miguel Uribe Turbay, the country entered into a collective state of depression. In an interview with CAMBIO, the former President of the Truth Commission, Fr. Francisco de Roux, reflects about the reason why we can’t bring this terrifying spiral of violence to an end.
At 1:56 a.m. on Monday, last June 7, the Senator and opposition Presidential aspirant, Miguel Uribe Turbay, 39 years old, died after being attacked by gunfire during a meeting in the Modelia neighborhood in Bogotá.
At that moment, the country entered into a state of national mourning, accentuated by several images. The image of his father, Miguel Uribe Londoño, who 34 years ago had carried his son in one hand and the coffin of his wife, the journalist Diana Turbay, in the other. She had died from police bullets during a failed rescue attempt after she had been kidnapped by the drug lord, Pablo Escobar; and now we see the image of a four-year-old orphan, next to the flag of Colombia.
This event is one more page in the spiral of violence from which there has been no respite. CAMBIO spoke with the Jesuit priest, Francisco de Roux , who presided over the Truth Commission, about why we are not able to have a country at peace.
CAMBIO: Father, the doctors who were fighting to save the life of Miguel Uribe Turbay have recounted that they used all their scientific knowledge to save him, along with their enormous faith. Why is faith so important?
FRANCISCO DE ROUX:
The doctors delivered their capabilities and their passion to save Miguel while he was in their hands, but they couldn’t. Nothing remained but a miracle. There are many testimonies of cure or peaceful death when scientifically, the possibility of cure is zero.
CAMBIO: A miracle?
F. D. R.: Entering into a miracle is accepting the audacity of trusting in the Mystery, without any certainty of anything. Because the miracle is abandoning the patient into God’s hands. And the miracle is not in bringing about that God does what we want, but rather in that we accept that what finally happens is God’s way. The awful crime against Miguel has already happened. The miracle will happen when we accept the truth that God is telling us through his death.
CAMBIO: Why is it that in a painful situation like the one we are all living through during the burial of Senator Uribe Turbay, that we hear so many opinions that are full of hate?
F. D. R.: Because among the many motives that move the lives of Colombians, radical mistrust predominates. It’s the impulse to believe that the misfortunes than befall us were the work of others, bad people, people whom we suspect of being the enemies of us, the good people. And every public crime, “gives them a chance” for an explosion of political talk clamoring that the disasters of this country are being produced by others, while each side sees the other side as the bad ones.
CAMBIO: Are there exceptions?
F. D. R.: Fortunately, in this case came the words of María Claudia, his wife, as have also come from the direct victims, thousands of voices, voices that are calling for peace in the midst of the cacaphony of hatred.
CAMBIO: Senator Uribe Turbay was the son of the murdered journalist, Diana Turbay. Why do you think we don’t close down those cycles of violence? What do we do to get away from that?
F. D. R. : We are not closing down our spirals of violence because we haven’t finished opening ourselves to the truth. The most profound truth is that we continue to manufacture achievements in Colombia that end up in uncertainty, because we are resisting recognition of the crisis that we carry inside, personally and collectively.
CAMBIO: After this crime, where should we be going?
F. D. R.: This assassination, instead of calling for the worsening of our hatred, ought to bring us to seeing ourselves in the mirror along with the more than 3,500 social and political leaders that have been murdered. It’s enough to mention a few names: Gaitán, Galán, Álvaro Gómez, Alfonso Reyes Echandía, Enrique Low, Carlos Urán, Sister Yolanda, the indigenous Cristina and Yamile, Kimy Pernía, Guillermo Cano, Mario and Elsa, Jaime Garzón, Afro-Colombians Ana Fabrizia and Ruth Alicia, human rights defenders like Eduardo Umaña M., Nidia Erika and Esperanza Amaris, Monseñor Isaias Duarte Cancino, Father Álvaro Ulcué and Sergio Restrepo, Jaime Pardo Leal, Bernardo Jaramillo, Carlos Pizarro, Guillermo Gaviria, Gilberto Echeverry . . .
CAMBIO: The list is a long one, terrifying, of people that were so valuable . . .
F. D. R.: Yes, every one of them, with courage and inspiration all along, or beginning at one certain time, they decided to fight for peace and unite this country. They wanted to reverse this reality that produces hundreds of thousands of victims. Citizens who die by violence, dispossessed, kidnapped, displaced. If they and Miguel were alive, this country would be different.
CAMBIO: How do we grasp the account by the Senator’s father, who recalled that 34 years ago he carried the coffin of his wife, Diana, and in the other hand he held the little Uribe Turbay, to whom he now says farewell?
F. D. R.: The story of the father who carries the child in his hand to go and bury his mother shows the results of the hatred, of the greed, that have vented their fury on the Turbay family in Bogotá and in Caquetá. And that same story of fathers burying sons after children bury their mother has been repeated many times, as the photos by Jesús Abád Colorado, Colombia’s Witness, demonstrate. It’s very difficult for the soul’s cry of pain not to immediately devour all the other good intentions that we bring.
CAMBIO: Why do you think so many sectors resist recognition of the tragedy in which we are immersed, and that we have to stop going down this path?
F. D. R.: This resistance to understanding that we, as a society, have caused a humanitarian crisis, one where we even try to destroy the “other side” in public life; it’s one of the reasons for this spiral of violence. The other reason is our resistance to confronting the truth about the objective dynamics in which this hatred is nurtured.
CAMBIO: Like which ones?
F. D. R.: The drug traffic and the framework of variables that is feeding that, beginning with the destruction of the campesinos, of the indigenous, and of the Black peoples—or rather, the fear of the people—the profit-seeking concentration of the land, the expansion of the informal economy, the abandonment of the countryside that now is in the hands of the criminal economies, and the doubtfulness about security.
CAMBIO: Among other things . . .
F. D. R.: Yes. There are many. More profoundly, the failures in education and the neglect of the culture. And finally, a devastating moral crisis, in which many are pretending to live a religious life, while they scorn, distrust, and hate their brothers and sisters. As long as we don’t confront those factors with real solutions, the violence will continue in Colombia.
CAMBIO: Father, not only former President Uribe, but also President Petro explain the current situation from their respective “truths”, and they argue that they and so many of their followers have been victims, but they avoid the responsibilities that both could have for our arriving at this point. Why are we at this point?
F. D. R.: Because we don’t want to accept that there is a collective responsibility that we have to take on together, with various levels of obligation, of course, but with everybody, knowing that we think differently, that we are of different colors and ethnicities, and that that diversity, instead of justifying stories of fear and mistrust, should help us understand what it was that happened to us, and from there, undertake the transformations in those brutal dynamics that we have to attack if we want to have a tranquil future for the children and grandchildren of Colombians.
CAMBIO: Father, you presided over the Truth Commission. Why didn’t we take all its conclusions as a mirror of the past to look at ourselves and try to construct a different future?
F. D. R.: Because the Commission never aimed to have a definitive truth, but rather to place into evidence a collection of truths explained by the victims of all the sides in order to continue digging deeper, shedding more light, discussing it, and from there, to present recommendations that were not a government program but alternatives of a public morality that should be implemented in the political discussions of the democracy. If that doesn’t happen, the “normalization” of the murders and the terror in the countryside will continue, no matter who is the President.
CAMBIO: By the way, what is the truth? How do you find it?
F. D. R.: The search for that truth to build a future can never end. It’s not a truth to promote hatred and stigmatization, but rather to promote the collective understanding of what we are and where we came from and from there, build together from the differences.
CAMBIO: It will be the legal system that determines who was the “brains” behind the murder of Uribe Turbay. However, there is some evidence that it could be a group that feeds on the drug traffic. Why?
F. D. R. Of course. Any one of the armed groups that have distanced themselves from the “total peace” and dominate a territory through terror and a criminal economy might be interested in destabilizing the government, sowing confusion, and deepening the social rupture in the elections. That disperses the government’s security forces and allows the organizations to plunder advantages in territorial control and in their illegal earnings. “In troubled waters, the fishermen profit.” With the assassination of Miguel, without considering who the perpetrator was or what his intentions were, it’s evident that there will be a profound social, political, and institutional disturbance.
CAMBIO: In that context, what can be done about the drug trafficking?
F. D. R. The Commission proposed an integrated strategy that would include agrarian reform to guarantee that the campesinos’ production could be profitable in the coca-planting areas, control of small-scale drug trafficking, education and public health programs, aggressive actions against the links between business and exportation of cocaine, and establishing a route to the regulation of production and its industrial transformation, while favoring medical and food-related uses.
CAMBIO: One of the characteristics of this crime is that now it’s being managed by transnational organizations.
F. D. R: The Commission requested, as a novelty, the establishment of a mixed entity, made up of both national and foreign justices, to deal with international criminal structures that can’t be controlled from Colombia alone. Unfortunately, as far as I know, this proposal was rejected by Colombia’s courts.
CAMBIO: Economically, many, many people make their living from drug trafficking.
F. D. R. Colombian drug trafficking makes up part of an immense and complicated system of a criminal industry that combines production and marketing of cocaine with the extraction and exportation of gold, smuggling, and the “bit by bit” financial activity that has even penetrated the legal banking system.
CAMBIO: You are one of the Colombians that know the most about this reality out in the countryside. How is that situation going?
F. D. R.: In the territories where this criminal system is most consolidated, the hegemonic armed group, which is at war with anybody or anything that would try to dispute its power, exercises total control of the different illegal businesses. Besides that, it dominates transportation and communications. It demands, even in a clandestine manner, the loyalty of local officials and police, subduing all public administration both economically and politically.
CAMBIO: The group determines the people’s daily activity? Is it the economic engine?
F. D. R.: The group generates great economic value in regions that the government and the business sector consider unproductive. Unlike the FARC, who were a centralized national organization, these organizations retain the value in the territories they control, and they invest a significant part in local development; they build roads, they finance schools and health centers, and they expedite goods and services for the internal market.
CAMBIO: But with violence . . .
F. D. R.: Absolutely. The group maintains a regime of terror and extortion, and the children recruited for the war are a brutal tribute that the families are paying. That has produced a territorial fragmentation in significant areas of Colombia. The criminal economy, with its complex networks, its capacity for domination of spaces, and its new forms of generating value, is also present in the cities, in continuity with what is going on in the countryside.
CAMBIO: Why in the cities?
F. D. R.: Because the big mining, drugs, and weapons businesses are concentrated mainly in the cities. That’s where they formalize the transportation of the cocaine, the large-scale gold operations, the massive smuggling agreements, and therefore, also the corruption and the high-level extortion. The great volume of contraband accumulates in huge warehouses while the popular neighborhoods are full of stores with Chinese items that entered the country without much control by customs. The small-scale drug trafficking networks are rigorously controlled by illegal actors, as well as the systems of extortion affecting the small businesses.
CAMBIO: Where, naturally, they also impose everything by force?
F. D. R.: In the urban centers, the neighborhoods are divided physically by the criminal gangs. The criminals find a spot that suits the informal economy, which covers nearly 60% of employment in Colombia, and from there, they’re able to convert illegal money into capital in the national banking system. Our dialog would take much longer if we would start to detail the ways in which this criminal economy is penetrating our politics and our institutions, and how it multiplies the violence in the markets for weapons and paid killers, where the political conflicts and contradictions are resolved by threats and murders.
CAMBIO: With that kind of reality, do you think we Colombians will be able to reconcile?
F. D. R.: We have to embrace each other while we admit our limitations, being conscious of our huge differences and suspicions and of all the insecurities that have pushed us to distrust. And then, from the understanding of what has happened to us, together try to build the country that we deserve.
CAMBIO: Do you think the Truth Commission’s Final Report should be required reading in order to see what has happened to us?
F. D. R.: When thousands of young people, school teachers, universities, the National Library, and the Libraries of the Bank of the Republic, social organizations and historians, intellectuals and opinion leaders here in Colombia and in the international community keep moving these texts forward, there will be progress.
CAMBIO: Why do you think there is so much resistance in some sectors?
F. D. R.: Here in Colombia, it’s common to hear politicians and business owners say that we have to stop looking back and think about going forward. They are forgetting that if we don’t incorporate human generosity, the injury that we carry, the wound, will be recycled again, and today and every day we will still be wounded, terrified, and bearing that uncertainty, instead of being able to obtain the cure and be able to have enthusiasm and certainty of our new possibilities.
CAMBIO: There are those who believe that the Commission was biased. Now, with some distance, how do you see that accusation?
F. D. R.: Yes. There are those who think that the Commission was created to attack one of the political sides in this country. That’s not true; all these truths are uncomfortable for all the sides: for the FARC and the ELN and for any guerrilla, for the paramilitaries and for those who financed them, for those who made false positives or kidnappings and disappearances; for those who were part of the government in any location, for the labor unions, for the Catholic church and the other confessions. Because our truth is uncomfortable, and it’s painful because of who we are.
CAMBIO: Father, there is a sensation of generalized mourning in Colombia about what happened. How can we deal with this mourning? How can we keep going?
F. D. R.: I’m convinced that now is the time for us to embrace, to cry for ourselves, accepting what we are and being committed to collective reconciliation. From there, we can build. And then abandon the tears that are born of hate, that spring forth because we’re still indignant because we haven’t finished off the other side. We’re trapped on every side by the same lie.