When a head of state begins treating morgues as campaign sets, the descent into functional autocracy has already bypassed the warning stage. In September 2026, a Bogotá court ordered Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella to scrub his official social media accounts of graphic videos showing him pacing between rows of body bags after military operations. The administration had broadcast footage of the dead—purportedly dissidents and cartel members killed in state crackdowns—as trophies of war, complete with presidential monologues invoking divine authority over the slain.
The court's injunction, triggered by a petition from opposition lawmaker Santiago Osorio Marin, rested on a basic legal and civic principle: state-sanctioned media cannot transform human remains into digital spectacle without violating the rights of minors and basic public morality. Yet focusing solely on the judicial slap on the wrist misses the structural rot beneath the pixels. This was never just about poor taste or digital etiquette. It was a calculated display of necropolitics, a deliberate strategy where sovereign power asserts itself by deciding who may live and how grotesquely their deaths can be exploited for political branding.
The Mechanics of Performative Iron Fist Politics
To understand why an elected president would personally film himself navigating rows of body bags, one must examine the shifting playbook of Latin America's hard-right resurgence. De la Espriella ascended to power on a razor-thin margin, promising total annihilation of the country's entrenched armed groups and aligning closely with regional security doctrines like the United States-backed anti-cartel frameworks.
In a nation exhausted by decades of asymmetric conflict and drug-fueled violence, the demand for absolute security often supersedes institutional norms. But brute force alone does not satisfy an online electorate raised on algorithmic validation. It needs content. It needs velocity.
By standing over white plastic bags and broadcasting it to millions on Instagram, the administration attempted to collapse the distance between the battlefield and the smartphone screen. This is the digital age's version of the public scaffold. The objective is not deterrence through justice; it is submission through disgust. When the state adopts the aesthetic of terror to fight terror, the constitutional boundaries separating a democratic republic from a banana-republic junta begin to dissolve entirely.
The Collateral Damage of Institutional Machismo
The videos did more than offend human rights advocates. They exposed a lethal carelessness within the state's own security apparatus. Investigations into operations like the one featured in the disputed footage revealed uncomfortable truths: among the dead were minors caught in military bombardments, some victims of forced recruitment by the very groups the state was fighting.
When a government packages the casualties of war as unambiguous victories while ignoring the messy, tragic reality of underage combatants trapped in the crossfire, it engages in historical erasure. The state becomes both judge and executioner, discarding the presumption of innocence and due process in favor of body-count metrics designed for social media engagement.
Critics from across the political spectrum pointed out the dangerous symmetry between the tactics of the state and the cartels it claims to vanquish. As the director of Colombia's Ombudsman's Office noted during the initial outcry, the government should not be competing with armed factions over who can humiliate an adversary more effectively or turn mortality into an online flexing exercise.
The Limits of Judicial Rebuff
The court order forcing the removal of the footage marks a temporary victory for institutional checks and balances in Colombia. It proves that the judiciary still retains enough independence to check executive overreach, even under a populist administration eager to rewrite the rules of engagement.
However, forcing a video offline does not erase the mindset that produced it. Digital authoritarianism relies on the permanence of the impression, not the URL. Once the image of a president walking among the dead has been beamed into millions of feeds, the psychological objective has already been achieved. The followers have seen the strength; the opposition has been baited into outrage; the cycle of polarization has spun another rotation.
Colombia remains the world's largest exporter of cocaine and faces an increasingly complex mosaic of criminal syndicates, paramilitary remnants, and leftist guerrillas. Navigating this security crisis requires cold, professional statecraft, intelligence-led disruption, and absolute adherence to international humanitarian law. Transforming the morgue into a content creation studio offers cheap political adrenaline, but it hollows out the democratic institutions required to keep the nation from tearing itself apart from the inside.
The court has told the executive branch to hide the bodies. The deeper crisis is that the administration never understood why displaying them was indefensible in the first place.
