Colombia's president films amid body bags, sparking outrage and a court order

Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella, in office since early August, posted his first body bag video on September 2, standing in a room with 23 bags as he announced an operation against a dissident FARC faction had killed 23 fighters. It pulled in nearly half a million views. Two days later he published another, with four body bags in front of him, applauding the death of a leader of the paramilitary Conquering Self-Defence Forces of the Sierra Nevada (ACSN) and declaring that the peace his government believes in is the peace brought about by armed force. That one, pinned to his X profile, has racked up two million views.

He kept going. A video on September 21 followed an operation against the ACSN, and another on October 25 came after an operation against the ELN, one of Colombia's main guerrilla groups. The criticism came fast. People's Defender Iris Marin Ortiz, the country's ombudswoman, said on September 6 that armed actors have long used bodies, humiliation and fear to send messages of domination and terror, and that this language cannot become the language of the state. Juana Cabezas of the Colombian NGO Indepaz told France 24 that showing bodies off dehumanises people and legitimises the violence carried out against them.

On September 8, a Bogota tribunal ordered the videos temporarily taken down from the president's official Instagram account after Parliamentary Deputy Santiago Osorio Marin brought the case. De la Espriella is a lawyer and far-right politician who campaigned on an uncompromising line against armed groups, a break from the previous left-wing government's policy of dialogue, known as total peace.

Body bags are not the whole feed. On August 26 he posted a video of what he called 20 extremely dangerous criminals, heads shaved and wrists and ankles bound, apparently being moved to another detention facility. On October 30 he followed with footage out of La Picota prison in Bogota, captioned that extraditions from the prison show no sign of stopping. He also shares airstrike videos filmed from the sky and scores seizure and arrest clips with action-movie soundtracks, including an October 2 video about Operation Perla, aimed at extortion and kidnapping. The style echoes El Salvador's Nayib Bukele and the Trump administration's deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which began in September 2025 and have caused more than 240 deaths, according to the Washington Office on Latin America.

The killings themselves are under scrutiny too. Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace recorded 7,837 false positives, extrajudicial killings of civilians passed off as guerrillas killed in combat, between 1990 and 2016. On September 21, 18-year-old Ricardo Andrés Rodriguez Martinez died during the same ACSN operation the president praised while walking among body bags; his family says he was a day labourer, not a fighter. His mother, filmed in tears outside the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Barranquilla, told the president she condemns him for killing her son unjustly, a video viewed more than a million times. The People's Defender called on September 26 for a rigorous investigation and said she was assisting the family legally; the Ministry of Defence said two days earlier that it would leave the facts to prosecutors and forensic experts, and Colombian police gave France 24 a similar response.