States imposed on Colombia now returns to the campaign
By Juan Sebastián Lozano, REVISTA RAYA, May 19, 2026
Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN volunteer translator
The references by Abelardo De la Espriella and his ally, Paloma Valencia, to communism and “castrochavismo” don’t come from nowhere. They pick up on the doctrine of security pushed by the United States in the ‘70’s which in Colombia served to justify the persecution of leftist militants, labor leaders, social leaders, students, and human rights defenders. Its tracks run through paramilitarism, the genocide of the Patriotic Union Party, and the false positives.
For decades the policies and the activism of the left and their defense of human rights in Colombia have carried a stigma. In this current election, the campaigns of the right and the extreme right continue feeding it with their declarations in the news media and social networks.
The Historic Pact candidate, Iván Cepeda Castro, in an interview with Daniel Coronell on March 22 of this year, denounced the caricaturization that his rivals close to ex-President Álvaro Uribe Vélez were making of his campaign. Paloma Valencia and Abelardo De la Espriella are invoking once again the phantoms of communism and “castrochavismo” to scare the voters. The strategy permits them to gain support without any serious discussion of their proposals.
Abelardo De la Espriella is no Skooby Doo—the cartoon dog that chases after ghosts—he perceives himself as a ferocious tiger who is going to force Cepeda to submit to him. He represents Cepeda as a cartoon hyena in the campaign cartoons he shares with his allies and followers. In Revista Semana he said that Cepeda is a “symbol of communism at its extreme” and the “heir to the most dangerous of the radical left”. In December 2025, on Caracol Radio, he categorized it this way: “Cepeda is communism; I am respect, liberty, and democracy”. In the FM, he confirmed that he wanted to “eviscerate the left”, an expression that he later toned down. He has also referred to President Gustavo Petro as an ally of the drug traffickers.
Paloma Valencia told EL COLOMBIANO in February, “The path that Petro and Cepeda are proposing for us is the path to Cuba and Venezuela, destruction of institutions, destruction of the productive sector, and the expulsion of the citizens”. In celebration of her triumph in the consultation on March 8, she repeated a similar idea, and in a recent Congressional debate, she insisted that Cepeda is a communist. In 2021 she had already stated in SEMANA that Cuba is trying to “impost the socialist-communist model” in the region and using guerrillas.
Iván Cepeda, for his part, has been very clear about his ideological position: he defines himself as progressive and has said that the economic model he proposes is social capitalism adapted to the Colombian reality; he pledges to make it possible to reduce inequality. The data show the magnitude of that inequality: according to estimates by the World Inequality Database, in Colombia around 60% of total income is concentrated in 10% of the population, while the 50% with lower income receive only 7%. On the issue of land distribution, the concentration is even more extreme: according to IGAC[1] data, the Gini coefficient for rural property in Colombia has hovered around 0.89, one of the highest levels in the world.
The world of the left is broad and heterogeneous—it includes different currents, like European social democratic, Latin American progressivism, or Leninist Marxism—but in Colombia, the better part of the far right’s political propaganda reduces all its variables to authoritarianism socialism. That failure to recognize nuance is not casual. It’s the result of a policy pushed for decades by the United States that converted communism to a total threat and its alleged sympathizers into Enemies of the State. The doctrine has led to killings by the thousands of anyone who questioned, from different standpoints, the dominant political and economic systems.
THE BIRTH OF THE COLD WAR DOCTRINE
To understand why in Colombia calling a politician a “communist” is often the same as condemning them politically—and even physically—you have to go back to 1962, in the middle of the Cold War. In February of that year, in the last months of the liberal Alberto Lleras Camargo administration, the United States sent a military mission headed by General William P. Yarborough. He visited four Colombian Army Brigades to evaluate the country’s counterinsurgency capability. The Truth Commission has pointed to this mission as the cornerstone that clarified the bases of the counterinsurgency doctrine known on the continent as National Security. It was applied during the following decades with very serious consequences in the areas of human rights. Under that logic, the enemy was not only external: the danger might be within every country.
The researcher Magda Alicia Ahumada, in “The Internal Enemy in Colombia”, (Abya-Yala, 2007) explains how that doctrine consolidated the Armed Forces as the central actor in political and social life. The “enemy” was not just a foreign army, but included anybody who questioned the political, economic, or institutional order. Under that logic, the “enemy” was no longer only external. The danger might be inside every country.
The most disturbing point was set forth in the “Secret Supplement” to the report produced by the mission. It can now be found in the archives of the John F. Kennedy Library. The United States advisers recommended selecting civilian and military personnel to be trained, clandestinely if necessary, to carry out “paramilitary activities of sabotage and/or terrorism against known supporters of communism”. Various investigators from the Truth Commission itself consider that document to be one of the doctrinal antecedents of paramilitarism in Colombia.
THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS; ITS EXPANSION TO THE CONTINENT
The doctrine was not limited to written recommendations: it also required training. With this objective, the United States strengthened the School of the Americas that had been created in Panama in 1946, and in the ‘70’s—when they adopted the definitive name and reoriented their mission toward counterinsurgency—it was turned into the principal training center for Latin American officers. By 1999 more than 60,000 military in the continent had passed through its halls, trained in intelligence, counterinsurgency, and combat against movements they considered allied with communism.
As time went by, the School accumulated complaints about training associated with torture, disappearance, and political repression; in 1996 the Pentagon declassified training manuals that confirmed those practices. Human rights activists and organizations called it “the School of the Killers”. Among its graduates were dictators like Hugo Banzer of Bolivia and Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina; the records of the School themselves show that a third of the officers of DINA—Pinochet’s secret police—were trained there.
Colombia became a part of this strategy early on: by 1999 this country had sent 9,558 officers to the School, which in 1984 had transferred its operations from Panama to Fort Benning, Georgia. In 2002 it was closed and replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
WHO WAS THE “INTERNAL ENEMY”?
The breadth of this doctrine was one of its most devastating characteristics. The Jesuit priest and CINEP[2] researcher Javier Giraldo Moreno has for decades been documenting how the stigma reached not only members of armed groups but also labor leaders, campesino leaders, students, human rights defenders, priests connected to liberation theology, and journalists. In Ahumada’s words, communism was presented as a threat to the social order and to “free institutions” so that different kinds of social nonconformity could be interpreted as “subversive”.
The Truth Commission’s Final Report, published in 2022 after four years of work and nearly 30,000 testimonies, reached a conclusion that extreme right candidates either don’t recognize or disavow: the stigmatization that was conceived as a mechanism for the construction of an “enemy within” was fundamental for the persistence of the conflict in Colombia, as that was the way they justified the persecution of political opponents so as to exterminate them.
The Commission also documented that the intelligence agencies infiltrated different guerrilla groups at different times, but also political parties and opposition movements, labor organizations, and social, civic, and cultural organizations.
THE SECURITY STATUTE AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE PERSECUTION
The doctrine found one of its strongest legal expressions during the administration of Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978-1982). The National Security Statute (Decree 1923 of 1978) put militants, labor leaders, social leaders, university people, and intellectuals considered opponents on the spot—as documented in an article in the Regional History Directory and in the Frontiers of the Industrial University of Santander. CINEP and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights pointed out that the Statute bestowed extraordinary powers on the Armed Forces, including arrests without a judicial warrant, and trials of civilians.
According to the Truth Commission’s Final Report, using certificates by the Council of Ministers, 3,752 individuals had been ordered detained in military units; the Commission itself documented 1,322 victims of torture between 1978 and 1982. Amnesty International, after visiting this country in January 1980, documented torture in 35 detention centers—including at the Cavalry School at Usaquén and at the Pichincha Battalion in Cali—and called for lifting the state of siege and abolishing the Statute. The Supreme Court of Justice ended up overturning the main excesses of the Statute in November 1981. Turbay abolished it formally in 1982.
THE POLITICAL GENOCIDE OF THE PATRIOTIC UNION PARTY
We can’t talk about the “enemy within” doctrine without mentioning one of its most brutal consequences: the extermination of the Patriotic Union Party. The UP surged after the 1984 Uribe agreements between the Belisario Betancur administration and the FARC-EP, as an attempt to open space for democratic political participation. The Party ended up being a target for a systematic campaign of violence and persecution. The JEP and the Truth Commission have documented at least 8,924 victims between 1984 and 2016, including more than 700 people murdered or disappeared, including two presidential candidates—Jaime Pardo Leal and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa—Congress Members, Deputies, Council Members, and thousands of militants of the Party’s base. In 2022, the Inter-American Court for Human Rights placed the responsibility for the systematic extermination on the Colombian government.
The murder of Senator Manuel Cepeda Vargas, father of Iván Cepeda, occurred on August 9, 1994, as he was heading for the Capitol. He was a victim of the “Knockout Plan”, a strategy designed by high-ranking military officials and supported by paramilitary groups to eliminate the leaders of the UP. In 2010 the IDH Court convicted the Colombian government of that crime.
Three decades later, Uribe’s political and ideological heirs are continuing that stigmatization, now on social networks and in the election campaign. Uribe himself has called Cepeda “the candidate of terrorism” and “the candidate of narcoterrorism”, said “he grew up in the FARC”, and that “they’re behind the demonstrations” referring to the FARC, and connecting to Cepada some files seized from the guerrilla chieftain alias Raul Reyes—material that the Supreme Court of Justice in 2011 declared illegal for use as evidence because it had been obtained without authorization from local authorities in Ecuadoran territory and had irregularities in the chain of custody. Uribe’s children have prolonged the campaign on X: Tomás Uribe called him “heir of the FARC” and “father of the new Marquetalia” (May 2026); Jeronimo Uribe claimed that “Cepeda’s connections to the FARC have never been investigated” (July 2025). Cepeda has announced criminal complaints for defamation against those who connected him with the guerrillas; there are no pending legal actions against him for the connections he was accused of.
At the same time, Cepeda has reminded the Uribes that the conviction of Santiago Uribe Vélez for leading the paramilitary group The Twelve Apostles was affirmed in November 2025 by the Supreme Tribunal of Antioquia. The conviction has been appealed to the Supreme Court, which has not yet acted. In a key debate with Paloma Valencia in the Congress, Cepeda asked her: “The 12 Apostles; were there 12 or were there 13?” The verbal crossfire between the two politicians is continuing.
DEMOCRATIC SECURITY AND THE FALSE POSITIVES
Although the Cold War is over, the logic of the “enemy within” has survived. During the Álvaro Uribe Vélez administration, academic sectors and human rights organizations complained that that logic had persisted under the Democratic Security policy. The pressure to show military “results” created the context for the extrajudicial executions known as “false positives”. The JEP initially documented 6,402 possible victims between 2002 and 2008; in April 2026, after broadening the period being analyzed, it updated that figure to 7,837 victims between 1990 and 2016—a number that the JEP itself has warned may be provisional and subject to continued increase.
In November 2025, the JEP charged 30 members of the military, including three retired generals, with 209 killings and 65 forced disappearances committed in Meta Department between 2002 and 2007. In September of that same year, it issued its first sentences for false positives: 12 members of the military from the La Popa Batallion received restorative punishments of nearly eight years for 135 extrajudicial executions in northern Cesar Department and southern La Guajira Department.
The ESMAD (Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron), created in 1999, has also been accused by human rights organizations with continuing that focus. According to an analysis of the CINEP data bank by the League Opposed to Silence, between its creation and June of 2019, it had accumulated 986 cases of arbitrary detention, 86 cases of torture, 45 cases of forced disappearance.
THE PERSISTENT INHERITANCE
The allusions to communism and castrochavismo that are appearing now in the campaign did not come from nowhere. They are part of a tradition that was constructed during the decades in which broad sectors of the left were presented as existential threats to the country. The declarations by Paloma Valencia and Abelardo De la Espriella revive that narrative: the idea that a political opponent is not simply a democratic adversary, but rather an enemy that is placing the nation at risk.
Fr. Francisco De Roux, President of the Truth Commission, expressed this with precision when he undertook his term in November of 2018: “We don’t know what this country will be like without drug trafficking, without guerrillas, without paramilitaries, without a Security presence dedicated to looking for ‘the enemy within’.” That was the question that the Commission left open. Paloma Valencia and Abelardo De la Espriella are giving their answer in this campaign. They are still looking for that “enemy”.
The Commission also concluded that this conception had for decades been hindering opportunities for policy negotiation, had been limiting debates about agrarian reform, and was weakening democracy. The 2016 Peace Agreement, in Point 2 on political participation, tried to cut into that circle, hoping to avoid the stigmatization and persecution. It contemplated preparation of a statute guaranteeing safety for political parties and movements declaring their opposition. The Statute was approved by Congress in 2018 after more than 25 years of failed attempts. In the current presidential campaign, its provisions matter less and less in actual practice.
When the public debate is reduced to ideological phantoms and absolutist labels, the shades disappear, there’s no deep consideration of the subjects that deserve debate. The adversary ceases to be an opponent and is turned into a threat of destruction. And in a country marked for decades by political violence, the extermination won’t just be rhetorical.
[1] Agustín Codazzi Geographic Institute
[2] Center for Research and Popular Education