At the start of September, Abelardo de la Espriella walked among twenty-three bagged corpses while the Presidency filmed. They were, according to the government itself, suspected FARC dissidents killed in a military operation in Guaviare. A few days later, on Friday the 4th, he presented to the press four bodies covered with white tarpaulins in Riohacha, among them that of Naín Andrés Pérez Toncel, alias Bendito Menor, one of the leaders of the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada.
I do not write this under the illusion of revealing anything.
The scene circulated, was commented upon and fell into oblivion as quickly as all the others, and that speed is part of the method. A State that displays its dead does not need to prove that it governs, it is enough that the image is reproduced. The official figures exist and I do not intend to dispute them. The Police counted 1,169 homicides in August against 1,244 a year earlier, a fall of close to six per cent that also includes the first six days of the previous government, and kidnappings for ransom went from 37 to 11. What I dispute is the replacement of a security policy with its staging.
Among the dead of recent weeks there are minors. Colombia’s forensic institute, Medicina Legal, identified three among those killed in a bombing on 27 August in El Retorno, Guaviare, and the Senate rejected on 23 September the motion of censure against the Defence Minister, Jorge Eduardo Mora, by 65 votes to 17. The minister maintained that children recruited by armed groups are victims, and the Executive’s defence added that their presence does not by itself rule out a military operation when they perform functions tied to hostilities. The sentence was spoken in the Senate, and it can stay there.
From 22 September, after alias Cholo, second-in-command of those same Autodefensas Conquistadoras, died in a police operation, the organisation imposed an armed stoppage (a “paro armado”) in Santa Marta and La Guajira. Shops closed, classes suspended, streets empty in one of the country’s main tourist destinations, according to EFE, which describes the group as narco-paramilitary. The president ordered the city militarised, with more than 1,100 police officers and soldiers deployed, and on Wednesday the 23rd some tourists applauded the soldiers patrolling the beach at El Rodadero, two days before the stoppage ended, at seven o’clock on the morning of Friday the 25th, the hour the group itself had set. No security report produces an image so effective.
Order, in this model, is measured in photographs.
There is another inventory, less photogenic, and it belongs to those who could dispute the image. On 3 September a presidential directive required ministers and directors to consult and coordinate their interviews and statements with the Presidency’s press office, and the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) warned that such coordination cannot become a criterion of authorisation. On the 14th, the government declared “insubsistente”, that is, removed from his post, the director of the national statistics office (DANE), Ricardo Valencia, who had stated that he found no anomalies in the figures for July, the last month of the previous government. The Presidency called that conclusion premature, for lack of deep audits, and further reproached him for having disregarded the directive. I read in this sequence a precise hierarchy, in which the word of the Presidency ranks above measurement.
Those who teach were not spared either. On 2 September the minister Viviane Morales resigned, less than a month into the job and for a family situation according to her letter. She had published a draft decree that would allow private operators and churches to run public schools, according to La Silla Vacía, and she maintained that it was not a matter of privatising. On the 13th, the president announced a protocol for the Police to enter public universities when a protest turns violent. From the Universidad Nacional, its rector, José Ismael Peña, recalled that the Police have always entered in cases of vandalism and warned that the measure seeks to bring the ESMAD riot police onto campuses. On the 17th, from Riohacha, the president asked the Ministry of Education to review the management of the Universidad de La Guajira. None of these gestures proves an intention on its own, but gathered within fifteen days they trace a direction.
The accounts complete the picture without clarifying it. At the start of September the Finance Ministry confirmed a cut of 21.9 trillion pesos to the 2026 budget which, according to the government, will come from every item, without specifying which, and it maintains that the 2027 draft, of 634.9 trillion, adds 700 billion for public higher education that the previous one did not include. According to El Colombiano, debt service weighs more in that draft than investment in education and health.
October already brings its calendar. Fecode and the trade union confederations have called a national day of mobilisation for the 14th and are preparing the first national strike against this government, on a date in November that varies between the 11th and the 20th.
More than a list of facts, September leaves a form of government. The dead are displayed, the beach is militarised and, in my reading, those who measure, those who teach and those who ask are placed under tutelage. A photograph does not answer questions, so the method works as long as nobody poses them. I will keep posing them, and October, with its announced streets, will say how many others do the same…
G.S.
