When the Bullet Misses, the Narrative Doesn’t: How the Empire Spins an Assassination

On June 7, The Washington Post published a report by Samantha Schmidt covering the attempted assassination of Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay. According to the article, a gunman opened fire during a campaign event in Bogotá. The shot didn’t kill him, but the narrative sure tried to. Within a few lines, Uribe is cast as a symbol of Colombian “democracy,” his near-death experience likened to the country’s blood-soaked history of political violence, and his attackers implied to be stirred up by the “leftist rhetoric” of President Gustavo Petro. It’s a familiar tune: imperial propaganda set to a liberal melody, playing softly over the screams of the dispossessed.

Schmidt writes from Bogotá, but her compass points north. Her work isn’t intended for the barrio or the campo—it’s crafted for the editorial boardrooms of Washington and the intelligence briefings of Langley. She knows the imperial grammar well: violence from below is criminal, but violence from above is “stability.” Her writing is polished, but never neutral. It’s a velvet glove over an iron fist. She doesn’t investigate empire—she markets it.

The Washington Post itself is no impartial observer. It’s the house organ of U.S. liberal imperialism, owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest delivery boy and a Pentagon contractor. The Post consistently runs interference for empire, laundering coups as constitutional crises, austerity as responsible governance, and narco-states like Colombia as democracies under siege. Behind every moral headline is a budget line for bullets and boots.

The article wastes no time invoking imperial favorites. Marco Rubio, now U.S. Secretary of State, uses the moment to lash out at “leftist rhetoric”—as if words, not decades of militarized state repression, are what destabilize Colombia. Bogotá’s mayor, Carlos Fernando Galán, offers up a teary plea for unity, invoking the memory of his assassinated father to demand silence in the face of elite violence. Meanwhile, Defense Minister Pedro Arnulfo Sánchez promises swift action to “secure the nation”—which is code for more troops, more prisons, more repression.

And then there’s Miguel Uribe Turbay himself. Son of a journalist killed during a military raid. Grandson of a president who introduced Colombia’s infamous “Security Statute,” which gave legal cover for torture and mass arrests during the 1970s. None of this history is mentioned. Instead, Uribe is painted as a reformer, a moderate, a casualty of chaos. The Post mourns him like he’s Colombia’s last chance at democracy—while ignoring the thousands of murdered trade unionists, social leaders, and ex-combatants whose blood has soaked the soil.

You wouldn’t know from this article that Colombia has long been a war zone—for the poor. No mention of the decades long civil war. No mention of the long history of political assassinations in the country. Not a peep about the death squads backed by the oligarchs and the US governmnt. No talk about the lawfare and destabilization campaigns by the opposition aimed at paralyzing Petro’s government. In this story, history is a liability, and structural violence is just background noise.

Instead, the article leans hard on familiar tricks: moral equivalence (“both sides”), historical amnesia (no mention of U.S.-backed death squads), and elite empathy (the oligarch’s pain is personal, the peasant’s death is statistical). Schmidt deploys the soft language of reconciliation to obscure the hard reality of class war. Her prose doesn’t reveal—it disarms. That’s not journalism. That’s counterinsurgency with a byline.

So let’s call this what it is. This isn’t just coverage of a shooting. It’s an imperial eulogy for a system in crisis. The Washington Post isn’t mourning a senator—it’s mourning the slow unraveling of U.S. hegemony over a country that’s beginning to speak the language of multipolarity, land recovery, and popular sovereignty.

They say Uribe was nearly killed by violence. Maybe. But if you read closely, you’ll see something more insidious: a ruling class trying to resurrect itself through narrative—hoping we forget who actually pulls the trigger in Colombia, and who has been bleeding for decades without a single headline.

Beneath the Bullet: Empire, Paramilitaries, and the Machinery of Silence

The Washington Post gives us the smoke, but never the fire. It tells us about a bullet in Bogotá, but not the barrel it came from. In its telling, Colombia is a fragile democracy under siege. But in truth, Colombia is a laboratory of empire—a narco-terrorist state molded by oligarchy, maintained by death squads, and backed by billions in U.S. military aid. That violence didn’t start with the shooter on June 7. It started with Plan Colombia, with CIA-backed paramilitaries, with the fusion of counterinsurgency doctrine and capitalist expansion. And it continues to this day.

But we must make a critical distinction. While the Colombian state remains structurally captured by narco-paramilitary and comprador forces, the current administration under President Gustavo Petro represents a rupture—albeit a limited and reformist one. Petro was swept into power by popular mobilizations demanding peace, land reform, and sovereignty. His government does not control the full apparatus of the state; it governs within it, against it, and despite it. Much of Colombia’s military, police, judiciary, and regional bureaucracy remain loyal to the oligarchy—and hostile to Petro’s program. This contradiction is essential to understanding both the limits of reform and the intensifying backlash from empire and its local clients.

Let’s extract what the Post tells us and what it conveniently leaves out.

It reports that Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay was nearly assassinated in Bogotá, that he is a center-right figure, and that he hails from a “prominent Colombian family.” But it says nothing about what that family represents. Julio César Turbay—Uribe’s grandfather—was president from 1978 to 1982 and implemented the infamous Security Statute, which authorized mass arrests, torture, and repression against unionists, students, and suspected leftists. His administration laid the foundation for Colombia’s modern counterinsurgency state. His grandson inherits not just a name, but a class position forged in blood.

The article mentions President Petro’s call for unity, but it subtly places him in the crosshairs of responsibility, quoting U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio who blames the attack on “leftist rhetoric.” This is a propaganda sleight-of-hand—one that shifts blame from the armed agents of repression to the political figures who threaten their power. It implies that Petro’s words, not the entrenched interests of paramilitary capital, are what destabilize the nation. But what destabilizes Colombia is not a speech—it’s a state built to serve empire.

Since the signing of the 2016 peace accords with the FARC, over 1,400 social leaders—including unionists, Indigenous leaders, and land defenders—have been assassinated. According to data from Indepaz and the UN, these killings are rarely prosecuted and often carried out by paramilitary groups like the AGC (Clan del Golfo), which operate with the tacit consent of state actors. Entire communities are being displaced to make way for extractive projects. This isn’t collateral damage—it’s policy by other means.

The Post doesn’t mention that Colombia receives more U.S. military aid than any country in the hemisphere. Between 2000 and 2023, that aid has totaled over $13 billion. This money didn’t go to schools or clinics—it went to Black Hawk helicopters, assault rifles, intelligence systems, and military bases. According to Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle in their groundbreaking work, Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror, this militarization under the guise of drug interdiction has actually expanded the narcotics economy. The paramilitaries that traffic cocaine are the same forces used to crush peasant organizing.

The Post also ignores the deep political connections between paramilitary structures and elite governance. Villar and Cottle detail how Colombian paramilitarism functions as an arm of both capital accumulation and political enforcement. It is not rogue—it is systemic. And while Petro has taken steps to curb this apparatus, he governs under siege. Many of the judges, officers, and officials tasked with enforcing his reforms were trained under—and remain loyal to—the old regime.

The framing of the assassination attempt as an attack on “democracy” is especially galling when viewed in this context. Colombia’s so-called democracy has long been a facade—where elections are held under the shadow of the gun, and popular mandates are buried in mass graves. The real democratic threat isn’t violence—it’s the poor organizing for land, dignity, and autonomy.

What the article also leaves out is Colombia’s geopolitical realignment. Petro has openly challenged U.S. drug policy, supported regional integration with Venezuela, and raised the question of U.S. military bases on Colombian soil. These are red lines for Washington. As the empire recalibrates in the face of multipolar resistance, it seeks to discipline even mildly defiant regimes through economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and media warfare. This assassination attempt—and the narrative built around it—must be understood within this larger strategy of imperial containment.

In short, the facts extracted from the article are selectively chosen to preserve the legitimacy of U.S. policy and its Colombian proxies. They tell us Uribe was nearly killed—but not who benefits from framing him as a martyr. They tell us Petro must “unite the country”—but not who’s dividing it. They tell us violence stalks Colombian democracy—but not that Colombian democracy was founded on the repression of the colonized and the working poor.

This is not journalism. It’s imperial narrative management. And it must be confronted with the full force of historical and material truth.