Power stopped hiding in 2026.
This is not a nuance, it is a change of method. Before, it concealed what it did and we uncovered it, with archives, with sources, with months of verification. Now it publishes first, in an official statement, and leaves us only the task of counting. Writing in this context demands a different discipline, not the discipline of finding what is hidden, but of refusing to let what has been confessed become background noise. On the 7th of August, Abelardo de la Espriella is sworn in as president in Cali, not in Bogotá, the first time in Colombia’s history that the inauguration moves outside the capital. The date coincides with the anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá, the agenda includes military honours before the oath and a security council the following day. De la Espriella spent years defending paramilitary commanders before running for president, and the incoming government published that itinerary itself, without asking anyone to guess it. We have been writing from Geneva about that alliance between political power and paramilitary structures in Colombia for barely a year, and what happens in Cali confirms every line we have published so far.
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a confirmed right wing extremist party in May 2025. That was not a columnist’s opinion, it was a legal category issued by the German state itself.
Fifteen months later, that same AfD enters the 6 September elections in Saxony-Anhalt with double the votes it won in 2021, with a real chance of an absolute majority. Forty one per cent is not an electoral ceiling, it is simply where the last poll happened to stop. Marine Le Pen was convicted on appeal on the 7th of July 2026 for embezzling European funds, but the court this time declined to enforce the sentence immediately, leaving her eligible to run in 2027 while her appeal to the Supreme Court is pending, I am a candidate, she announced that same night on television. Jordan Bardella, her thirty year old protégé, celebrated in March, without qualification, the biggest breakthrough in the history of the Rassemblement National after winning Nice, Agde, Carcassonne, Carpentras and Orange, and also leads, alongside Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the Patriots for Europe bloc, the alliance of far right parties inside the European Parliament, which with eighty four seats is already the third largest force in that chamber. The same pattern repeats itself in Berlin and in Paris with different actors, and in neither case did it take an anonymous source to piece it together.
On another scale entirely, one that no longer allows comparison with anything before it, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel meets four of the five acts that the 1948 Convention defines as genocide, genocidal intent included, naming the officials who expressed it. The October 2025 ceasefire stopped nothing at its core, a June 2026 report from the same commission documents deliberate attacks on children after the agreement.
Seventy three thousand two hundred and forty six dead since October 2023. The commission has already given an official name to what is happening in Gaza, and that name changed nothing about what keeps happening.
Neither Washington nor Tehran still pretend there is an outcome coming in Iran. The ceasefire agreed in mid June lasted less than two weeks, Trump announced its end on the 8th of July, and by the end of the month the United States had carried out seven consecutive nights of bombing. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a decisive artery for the world’s oil, by official statement, not by leak, and shipping traffic fell from around a hundred vessels a day to fewer than ten over a single weekend. Iran’s foreign ministry said plainly that no negotiations were underway. Neither side claims, at any point, to believe it can win this, which says more about 2026 than any analysis we could add.
On the 3rd of January 2026, the United States bombed Caracas, captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and transferred them to New York to stand trial for narcoterrorism, months before the rest of this pattern finished playing out on other continents. The UN Secretary General himself called the operation a dangerous precedent. Washington announced it under a military operation’s name, live, with a date and a time, the way a success is announced rather than the way an uncomfortable decision is disguised.
That is not opacity.
It is something else, something that still has no proper name in the vocabulary we inherited from last century’s journalism, a vocabulary built on the idea that revealing was enough to correct. When the crime is documented before it happens and happens anyway, when the far right wins with its own record laid out in plain sight, when a war is fought without anyone promising to win it, the function of this trade shifts. It no longer consists of uncovering what power hides. It consists of refusing the anaesthesia produced by repeating what is already known until it stops hurting, until seventy three thousand dead or forty one per cent of voting intention turn into background figures, into the ambient noise of an era that decided documenting and punishing are two different things.
We did not found this paper to reveal secrets. Secrets, in 2026, are scarce.
We founded it to name what other outlets describe with euphemism, and that work does not disappear when power starts confessing on its own, it only changes shape. We have spent months repeating a phrase that is not a slogan but a method, dissolving lies, one truth at a time, and August 2026 does not make it easier to hold onto, it makes it more necessary.
We are not asking for a truce. August will not give us one anyway, and we would rather it didn’t…
G.S.
