• Analysis
Colombian president body bag videos draw criticism from rights defenders and courts
Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella, in office since early August, has posted a series of videos showing himself among body bags after operations against armed groups. The videos have drawn criticism from the People's Defender, rights researchers and a Bogota tribunal order to remove them from Instagram.
Body bags as backdrop
On September 2, De la Espriella published a video showing him in a room filled with 23 body bags, discussing an operation against a dissident faction of the former FARC guerrilla group. In it, he said: "In total [...]: 23 terrorists killed. [...] Our determination to finish with you – you who are like cancer – is absolute!" That video has garnered nearly half a million views.
"I don't recall having seen a president walk amongst the dead and be proud of these deaths."
Two days later, he published another video with four body bags in front of him as he applauded the death of a leader of the paramilitary group Conquering Self-Defence Forces of the Sierra Nevada (ACSN), calling him "one of the country's most dangerous criminals". In that clip, he said "[Criminals] who don't submit will end up like this" and "The peace that this government believes in is the peace brought about by armed force." Pinned on his X profile, the video has received two million views.
The posts fit a wider pattern. On August 26, the president shared footage of what he called "20 extremely dangerous criminals", with faces uncovered, wrists and ankles bound and heads shaved, apparently being transferred.
Criticism and a court order
During his campaign, De la Espriella promised to be uncompromising with armed groups, breaking with the previous left-wing government's "total peace" policy of dialogue. The videos soon drew rebukes. On September 6, People's Defender Iris Marin Ortiz attacked the staging of the posts, arguing that it should not become ordinary for corpses to serve as the setting for an official statement, nor for death to be turned into a display of power.
Juana Cabezas of the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz) said: "When bodies are displayed like that, it dehumanises people. The bodies are being shown off."
On September 8, after the tribunal was seized by Parliamentary Deputy Santiago Osorio Marin, the Bogota tribunal ordered the videos temporarily removed from the president's official Instagram account. The posting did not stop, however:
- •A further body bag video appeared on September 21, after an operation against the ACSN.
- •Another was published on October 25, after an operation against the ELN guerrilla group.
A suspected 'false positive'
The September 21 ACSN operation is also at the centre of a more serious controversy. Eighteen-year-old Ricardo Andres Rodriguez Martinez was killed that day, in the very operation the president praised while walking among body bags. According to his family, he was not a guerrilla fighter but a day labourer.
"Abelardo, I condemn you! You killed my son unjustly!"
His mother, filmed in front of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Barranquilla, held a poster reading: "Truth and justice. My son [...] was a civilian [...]. They passed him off as a member of [ACSN], though he had nothing to do with this organisation." Her video had over a million views.
Her case echoes what Colombia knows as "false positives" - extrajudicial killings of civilians by security forces who claim the dead were guerrillas killed in combat. Between 1990 and 2016, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace recorded 7,837 such killings, most in the 2000s, when units sought body counts for advantages including extra paid time off.
The official response has been to defer. On September 24, the Ministry of Defence said it "would leave it to the Office of the General Prosecutor and forensic experts to uncover all the facts", and the Colombian police responded in kind. On September 26, the People's Defender called for a "rigorous investigation" and said she was assisting the family in pursuing the case legally. Cabezas said: "Considering the history of 'false positives' that we have in Colombia, this case merits a detailed investigation."
Two further suspected cases were reported in recent weeks: Luis Carlos Mojica Guzman, killed in September, and Yasmin Rodriguez, killed in October.
The videos continue
The president's feed mixes body bags with other formats. A video posted on October 30 was captioned: "Extraditions from La Picota [a prison in Bogota] don't show any sign of stopping!" The prisoner images are reminiscent of those shared by El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele during his "war" on gangs, which has drawn mass criticism from human rights groups.
He has also shared airstrikes filmed from the sky, similar in style to the Trump administration's videos of deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The US strikes started in September 2025 and have caused more than 240 deaths according to The Washington Office on Latin America. Videos about arms seizures and arrests, such as one shared on October 2 about Operation Perla, aimed at combating extortion and kidnapping, are set to action-movie music.
Cabezas said the music, rhetoric, images and his on-camera presence "allow him to create a narrative that he is an effective president, who produces results." She argued that military action without institutional responses in education, health and rights addresses only symptoms, and that militarised territories tend to go hand-in-hand with human rights violations - "even if there are results, they will remain ephemeral."
In mid-October, the United Nations criticised the government's repressive tactics, saying: "The 2027 budget prioritises security while reducing the money allocated to institutions that work on rural development, land distribution and the reintegration of former combatants."
The videos have not stopped: the president posted further body bag videos on September 21 and October 25, and the Office of the President of Colombia did not respond to the reporting team's questions.
