Colombia's president sits at a table, surrounded by military and police officials, presenting what he describes as proof of a successful operation. But the rows in front of him are not boxes of cocaine or seized weapons. They are corpses.
Wearing the same dark green as the military authorities accompanying him, Abelardo de la Espriella appears in a video published on Wednesday (2) on his X account walking next to white body bags that, according to him, contain the remains of rebels.
The video was a particularly blunt manifestation of a political tactic increasingly visible in the Americas: leaders who campaign with a discourse of law and order, using images of alleged criminals as a spectacle of state power.
Experts say these images reflect a regional tendency to treat people classified as terrorists as enemies who do not deserve the guarantees of due legal process. They pointed to the Donald Trump administration's decision to designate drug traffickers as terrorists and carry out military strikes in the Caribbean, which killed more than 200 people, as part of this change.
Trump has released videos of immigration operations, sometimes accompanied by popular music. El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, has made images of prisoners part of his security strategy, releasing videos of inmates having their heads shaved and being marched to prison.
“When the United States behaves this way, it makes it easier for everyone else to fall into this behavioral trap,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group. "It's not just 'he did something bad' but 'he's a bad person and therefore deserves whatever punishment we decide to impose'."
Adam Isacson, director of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institute, says: "It's an attempt to excite people not just with statistics about the homicide rate, but with these images themselves, in an almost cartoonish or professional wrestling-like way, to appeal to the audience's most primal instincts."
But this type of image has a special weight in Colombia. During decades of armed conflict, the military's practice of measuring success by the number of enemy casualties produced one of the country's darkest episodes of human rights violations: soldiers killed nearly 8,000 civilians and then presented them as guerrillas killed in combat to inflate the body count.
The legacy of this early 2000s scandal, known as the "false positives", remains deeply rooted in the memories of Colombians.
"Colombia has a long history of almost glorifying violence and the violent deaths of criminal leaders," says Dickinson. "There's a performative aspect to what's happening here. And it really marks a change and a return to the past."
For communities that have endured decades of violence from both armed groups and the state, the images convey two messages at once: that the government is capable of defeating criminals, but also that a new era of mass violence may be emerging.
Espriella, an ultra-right politician backed by Trump, called the operation a "lethal coup" against the group's territorial control and the most successful military operation in Colombia in the last 12 years.
"The time is over when you could move freely around Colombia, counting on safe conduct from a government that played tag with you," he said. "The determination to eradicate you, because you are a cancer, is absolute."
Espriella said 23 people were killed and six captured, including a leader of a dissident rebel group known by the code name "Tiger". He described him as third in the group's hierarchy.
The president said the group had recruited children and attacked members of the Army and Navy during this year's presidential elections. It also stated that a recruited child had been rescued and placed in the care of the country's child protection agency.
According to Colombian security experts, the photographs are intended to demonstrate the government's zero tolerance policy. "This is not just a law and order punishment, but a moral punishment," says Dickinson. "The celebratory nature of these deaths reinforces the narrative that this is an existential conflict between good and evil. It is difficult to overstate the power of these images."
In 2016, Colombia signed a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest rebel group, ending a 50-year conflict with the Marxist guerrillas. But dissident factions that rejected or later abandoned the agreement, as well as other groups, continue to operate in parts of the country.
At the height of the conflict, the government sometimes released photographs of the bodies of important guerrilla leaders, including images in which the dead were displayed alongside senior government officials.
But an image of the president himself alongside bodies represents something different, says Jorge Restrepo, director of the Resource Center for Conflict Analysis, a Colombian research group. “This seems like something new in this post-conflict period,” he says.
The identities of those killed have not been released, and the operation has not yet undergone the investigations required after military action that results in deaths. By displaying the bodies as defeated "terrorists," the government erased distinctions between combatants and civilians, adults and children, and legal and illegal uses of force, Restrepo said.
