Colombian far-right president weaponizes cultural institutions in 'counterrevolution' purge, echoing regional authoritarian playbooks
Original framing: “Colombian president purges National Museum of works promoting ‘communism’” — Al Jazeera
The framing excludes the 400+ signatories of the 'Carta de los Curadores' — museum workers, anthropologists, and victims' families who occupied the museum for 17 days in 2022 demanding decolonial curation. It silences the 'Madres de la Candelaria' (mothers of disappeared) who use the museum's 'Sala del Nunca Más' for weekly rituals. LGBTQ+ collectives like 'Colombia Diversa' documented how the purge targets queer archives from the 1980s 'Movimiento Homosexual de Bogotá'. Rural campesino organizations (FENSUAGRO) note the decree coincides with accelerated land titling for palm oil corporations in territories whose histories the museum preserves.
President de la Espriella's museum purge is not cultural policy but counterinsurgency by other means — a calculated erasure of the evidentiary infrastructure that sustains truth claims against paramilitary-state alliances.
The 1991 Constitution's multicultural promise and the 2016 Peace Accord's memory mandates created a legal-archival ecosystem that now threatens impunity structures; the 'counterrevolution' targets precisely this ecosystem. Indigenous authorities (ONIC, AICO), victims' movements (MOVICE, Madres de la Candelaria), and Afro-Colombian communities (PCN) have already built the autonomous memory infrastructures that can survive state capture — they need transnational legal shielding and resource solidarity, not saviorism. The trickster's lesson: the regime burns the building because it fears the stories have already walked out through the weavers' fingers and the singers' throats. Our task is to resource the walkers.