Luis Carlos Galan

Luis Carlos Galan was the Colombian presidential candidate who promised to extradite the drug traffickers and was shot dead on a platform in front of his own crowd. He was a journalist and a minister at twenty-seven, and he founded New Liberalism as a movement inside the Liberal party against its traditional bosses, campaigning on clean politics and against the entry of cartel money into public life. He had personally expelled Pablo Escobar from the movement in 1982, when Escobar was seeking respectability and a seat, and he never stopped naming him afterwards. Extradition to the United States was the specific thing the traffickers feared - Escobar's slogan was that he preferred a grave in Colombia to a cell in the United States - and Galan was the candidate most likely to win and to sign. He was killed at a rally at Soacha outside Bogota on 18 August 1989, shot with a submachine gun as he stepped onto the stage, despite warnings and a bodyguard detail that was later found to have been deliberately weakened. His campaign passed to Cesar Gaviria, who won and who did extradite. The subsequent investigations implicated the cartel together with politicians and members of the security services, and a former intelligence chief was convicted for it in 2011. Two other presidential candidates were murdered in the same election cycle, Bernardo Jaramillo and Carlos Pizarro, which is the context in which Galan's killing is usually placed. His son Juan Manuel Galan became a senator and campaigned to reopen the case. The Colombian state formally acknowledged responsibility for failures around the assassination in 2021.

• Lived: 1943 CE – 1989 CE
• Nationality: Colombian
• Roles: politician