The Assassination of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado

The killing outside Sergio Arboleda University

Álvaro Gómez Hurtado was one of Colombia's most prominent conservative political figures. He had served in Congress, run for president three times and participated in the 1991 National Constituent Assembly. On November 2, 1995, gunmen attacked him as he left Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá, where he taught. José del Cristo Huertas, a lawyer and member of Gómez's security detail who had also assisted him at the university, was killed in the same attack.

The assassination immediately became one of Colombia's most consequential political murder investigations. Over the following decades, prosecutors, politicians, former combatants and the Gómez family advanced sharply different theories about who ordered the killing.

Decades without an ordinary-court resolution

Colombia's ordinary justice system investigated multiple lines of inquiry for years without producing a final judicial account that established the full chain of responsibility. That unresolved history is important: the existence of a public theory or a confession does not by itself equal a final conviction.

The victim's family has publicly challenged some of the later explanations and has argued for alternative hypotheses. Those claims are part of the historical record, but this archive does not present them as established fact.

The former FARC-EP leadership accepts responsibility

In September 2020, former members of the FARC-EP secretariat delivered a letter to Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace in which they offered to provide truth and assumed early responsibility for six high-profile killings, including Gómez Hurtado's. The JEP announced the disclosure publicly on October 3, 2020.

The JEP subsequently heard truth contributions from former guerrilla leaders. Julián Gallo Cubillos, known during the conflict as Carlos Antonio Lozada, gave evidence about several of the killings and acknowledged responsibility in connection with Gómez Hurtado's death. The tribunal stressed that its task was to verify the accounts, determine jurisdiction and contrast them against other evidence.

Why the case is still not closed

On July 8, 2025, the JEP formally incorporated the investigation of Gómez Hurtado's assassination and five other selective killings into Case 10. The tribunal stated that, except for one separate homicide in the group, the killings had not been clarified by ordinary justice over roughly three decades.

The JEP also emphasized that declaring jurisdiction did not extinguish the investigative authority of the Attorney General's Office or other competent bodies where competing hypotheses remained. In other words, the former FARC-EP acknowledgments are highly significant evidence and responsibility statements, but the transitional-justice process still has to establish a judicially supported account of the crime.

Timeline

Current status

The case remains Unsolved / Under Transitional-Justice Investigation. Former FARC-EP leaders have accepted responsibility and the JEP has taken jurisdiction to investigate the alleged FARC-EP role, but the tribunal itself has described the assassination as one of the killings not clarified by ordinary justice. Competing hypotheses remain part of the record and should not be converted into findings without a judicial basis.

Related Colombia case files