Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as president of Colombia on 7 August 2026, with less than a one-point lead over his rival, and a host city, Cali, that replaced the Plaza de Bolívar with a university gymnasium because Bogotá had refused him the military garrison he had requested for his inauguration. Even before taking office, he had announced the elimination of the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace and the transfer of the Agreement Implementation Unit’s functions to a new National Security Commissioner. Two weeks after being sworn in, his government appointed D’mar Córdoba Salamanca director of the National Centre for Historical Memory, the body that for more than fifteen years has gathered testimonies, judicial archives and academic research on the Colombian armed conflict. Córdoba denies that this conflict deserves that name. On 21 August, seven signatories of the Peace Agreement led by Rodrigo Londoño filed a petition demanding the government explain, with technical studies and timelines, what remains of the peace apparatus. The answer, so far, has not come. But art has answered.
A mechanism that has already worked once
The National Centre for Historical Memory is not just any museum. Created by Law 1448 of 2011, known as the Victims and Land Restitution Law, to document the armed conflict, its directorship has since functioned as an exact thermometer of who holds power. In 2019, Iván Duque placed at its head Darío Acevedo, a historian who argued the armed conflict could not become the state’s official truth, a stance that flatly contradicted the very law that employed him. Acevedo spent four years attacking, in opinion columns, Father Francisco de Roux, then president of the Truth Commission, and commissioner Alfredo Molano. He altered, according to documented complaints and a constitutional injunction filed against him, the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Memory built together with the victims, and reduced the figures attributed to paramilitary crimes that exhibition displayed.
It was the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, not a citizen protest nor an internal resolution of the Centre, that stopped him.
In July 2022, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace opened non-compliance proceedings against Darío Acevedo, then director of the National Centre for Historical Memory, over an alleged breach of the precautionary measures protecting the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Memory. Acevedo resigned on 7 July of that same month.
That jurisdiction still exists. Its president, magistrate Alejandro Ramelli, answered De la Espriella’s announcements with a precision that reads as a warning, the president’s regulatory power does not extend to abolishing an institution resting on two legislative acts and two Constitutional Court rulings, and any genuine attempt would require a process involving all three branches of the state. Ramelli said he remained open to dialogue with the incoming government, but insisted the matter cannot be read solely through a bureaucratic or budgetary lens. The sentence, moderate in form, is also a notice, and it knows exactly what kind of administrative reorganisation is coming.
Existing is not the same as being able to intervene. On 21 August, seven members of the former FARC secretariat, among them Rodrigo Londoño, Pastor Alape, Julián Gallo, Pablo Catatumbo and Rodrigo Granda, filed with De la Espriella a sixteen-page document demanding technical, legal and fiscal studies justifying the elimination of the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace and the abolition of two hundred and twenty-nine presidential posts. They also ask what will happen to the decrees supporting ex-combatants that expire on 31 December, and what timeline minister Iván Cancino envisages for a JEP whose extension is not contemplated. They invoke a Constitutional Court ruling requiring compliance with the agreement across three full presidential terms, until 2030. The tribunal that in 2022 stopped a denier inside the Centre arrives this time weakened, challenged from the executive, and occupied defending its own institutional survival before it can watch over anyone else’s.
Twenty years of radio and a lawyer who does not believe in the war
D’mar Córdoba Salamanca is a lawyer, a graduate of the Universidad Católica, where he also earned a specialisation and a master’s degree in constitutional and administrative law. He taught at the Católica, at La Gran Colombia and at the Sergio Arboleda. For more than twenty years he took part in La Hora de la Verdad, the radio programme of former uribista minister Fernando Londoño Hoyos, and worked in the legislative offices of senators Paola Holguín, now minister of Culture, and Thania Vega. He is, in other words, the product of twenty years spent in power’s antechamber before inheriting one of its most sensitive posts.
His position does not deny the violence of the armed conflict. It denies its legal classification. On 9 March 2025, he wrote that the narrative of the armed conflict had served to present the guerrillas as belligerent forces, when in reality they operated as criminal groups with an ideological agenda. The distinction sounds technical, it is not, it determines the legal status of thousands of victims, the framework under which they were recognised, compensated and heard by the Colombian state since 2011. Calling common crime what the law calls conflict does not change what happened on the ground. It changes who has the right to demand reparation.
After the Truth Commission’s final report in 2022, Córdoba launched a Civil Commission for the Clarification of Truth, centred on the testimonies of military victims, on the argument that the official commission had left that story untold. The initiative never reached the institutional standing of its official model, it remained a parallel gesture, almost private. He now directs the body that does hold that standing.
What the centre once honoured, and what the centre now threatens
Mónica Savdié began working on the subject in 2007, weary of hearing the same phrase from acquaintances and strangers alike, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to know. From that came Examen de visión 20/20, an adaptation of the Snellen eye chart turned into an artistic device, where the initial letter E gives way to testimonies the viewer can no longer dodge. From then on she documented paramilitarism in 2008-2009, anti-personnel landmines in 2010, extrajudicial killings dressed as combat deaths in 2011, sexual violence against women within the armed conflict in 2014, the rights of the LGBTI population, the peace process in Havana, the killings of social and environmental leaders in 2017, forced displacement, drug trafficking, corruption and the country’s recent history. Each chapter demanded months of fieldwork, interviews with survivors willing to speak and others not yet ready, and a constant negotiation between the documentary accuracy the archive required and a form able to carry it without betraying it or turning it into spectacle.
According to figures Savdié herself supplied to AcidReport, her archive gathers 211 documented testimonies from thirteen years of fieldwork on the Colombian armed conflict, between 2007 and 2020.
Savdié answered AcidReport’s questions in writing. “I was born with my eyes open,” she says, “the extreme inequality of this country pains me, and I feel indignation at what has happened in Colombia since its founding.” At some point in the process she coined a phrase that ended up accompanying every intervention across the country, “this is the horror we did not want to see, that we could not avoid, that we must never repeat.” Holding that gaze, she admits, was no easy task, what kept her from breaking was interspersing materials that breathed differently, a report on the possibility of peace in 2016 and a poem by Schiller at the project’s close in 2020.
That work did not remain apart from the institutions now changing hands. In 2014, the very same National Centre for Historical Memory that Córdoba now directs distinguished the series on sexual violence with an honourable mention, recognising then what a decade later is left to the discretion of a director who denies the legal classification of the conflict that series documents. The distance between those two institutional moments, barely twelve years, measures with precision what is at stake when the person deciding what memory the state preserves changes.
“I feel the work as a whole must remain alive and current as a document of the country’s recent history,” Savdié answers. “Its testimonies will keep seeking visibility in academic spaces and memory centres as far as possible, because nobody can erase the true history.”
From 2 July 2026 until 3 October, the National Centre for Historical Memory is exhibiting Hilo Conductor at the General Archive of the Nation, Savdié’s exhibition unfolding across three moments, a literary immersion introducing the visitor to the language proper to testimony, red graphic strips mapping the conflict onto the national territory, and a closing performance titled Ríos de sangre, conceived to be experienced in person before leaving the room. The exhibition remains open today, under the same institutional roof that will, in a few weeks, answer to Córdoba.
“Not only at the end, but from the very beginning, it is an immersion in the channels of memory through blood, which is the thread running through the works on display,” explains Savdié, who claims a subtle connection to Gabriel García Márquez, being herself an expert on One Hundred Years of Solitude. On the timing of the exhibition she does not hide the irony, she was invited by the CNMH in March 2026, when nobody anticipated the electoral outcome. “What has happened has shaken us, since the work is on display during the transition between two diametrically opposed governments,” she says.
The Acevedo precedent offers a concrete hypothesis for what could happen to Hilo Conductor, a museum altered from within between 2019 and 2022, never closed nor formally stripped of a single work, until an injunction and proceedings before the JEP halted the process. Hilo Conductor has, for now, no equivalent precautionary measure, and its schedule depends, from 3 October onward, entirely on the new director.
Savdié confirms she has received, to date, no communication from the institution about the exhibition’s future. “For now Hilo Conductor remains on display until the contract ends, on 3 October. From there we will be patient, because this twenty-year body of work cannot be ignored, forgotten or burned. It will come back into the light again and again, without fear, to keep spreading, through art, the history lesson that has been stripped from the country’s classrooms.”
An exhibition with a closing date, and an institution with no guarantees
Nobody at the CNMH or at the General Archive of the Nation has publicly explained what will happen to Hilo Conductor in the five weeks it still has on display, nor what criteria will guide the museum’s future programming under the new leadership. Nor is there, to date, any statement from the Truth Commission or from victims’ organisations naming Córdoba directly. The petition filed on 21 August remains, as of this publication, without a government response. The institutional silence surrounding an appointment as documented as it is contentious is, in itself, a fact this investigation cannot fully explain.
What it can establish is the repetition. A right-wing government takes power, places a denier at the head of the official archive of violence, and the archive begins to shake. The first time, in 2022, a tribunal stopped it. This time, that same tribunal is fighting for its own institutional survival, while the man who challenges it already decides, without even needing to abolish it, who writes memory, and nothing in his appointment suggests the script will differ from that of 2019, except, perhaps, a weaker tribunal to interrupt it…
G.S.
Sources
- Written interview with AcidReport, Mónica Savdié, August 2026 (original interview, no link)
- El Espectador, perfil de D’mar Córdoba
- Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, inauguración de Hilo Conductor
- El Tiempo, diez años de la obra de Mónica Savdié
- Rutas del Conflicto, renuncia de Darío Acevedo
- CNN en Español, investidura de De la Espriella
- AcidReport, « Sin el cuartel que pidió, sin la plaza abierta y sin el secretario de Estado, así jura De la Espriella », 06/08/2026
- El Tiempo, declaraciones del presidente de la JEP Alejandro Ramelli
- Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, comunicado oficial del presidente Alejandro Ramelli
- El Espectador, antiguo secretariado de las FARC exige claridad sobre el Acuerdo de Paz
- La Silla Vacía, carta del presidente de la JEP pidiendo reunión con De la Espriella
