“Who Gave the Order?”: Art Censorship and Restorative Justice in Colombia

February 7, 2025

Credit: El Heraldo, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, available at https://www.elheraldo.co/colombia/corte-constitucional-declara-que-mural-de-quien-dio-la-orden-se-queda-864097

By Maria Chica Jimenez

Military officers stand among neon red skulls and digits: the number of civilian assassinations that occurred under their command. Quien Dio La Orden?, Spanish for “Who Gave the Order,” interrogates and points to the guilt of the men in the mural. Five thousand seven hundred sixty-three was the number on the original version of the mural, which was painted on October 18, 2019, in front of the General José María Córdova Military Academy in Bogotá. It depicted Juan Carlos Barrera, Adolfo León Hernández, Mario Montoya, Nicacio Martínez, and Marcos Pinto—all generals from the National Army.^[1] The mural was painted by a group of activists organized by the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE) and censored mere hours later by members of the Colombian army, who painted over the mural in white.

Decades of Violence: A History of the Colombian Conflict

The internal conflict in Colombia began in the 1960s upon the formation of the far-left Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group. It was a military wing of Colombia’s Communist Party and initially funded by the Soviet Union; but soon FARC turned to criminal activity for funding, including extortion, drug production, and trafficking. In response, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) emerged as a coalition of far-right paramilitary armies with links to the Colombian army, the Colombian government, and drug trafficking.^[2] The combined violence of the parties involved in this conflict has lasted over 50 years, causing incredible damage to Colombian society as the country has amassed one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world, nearing 7 million in 2024.^[3]

One of the darkest parts of this conflict’s history is that of False Positives, a series of extrajudicial killings carried out by the Colombian army between 2002 and 2008.^[4] It was not merely a few rogue soldiers committing these executions—it was a common practice throughout army brigades in Colombia to demonstrate “positive” or successful results by showcasing an increasing number of guerrilla member deaths. In pursuit of state legitimacy and a demonstration of the government’s power over destructive guerrilla forces, officers and soldiers lured innocent civilians to remote locations with false promises of job offers or other incentives, and instead murdered and framed them as guerrilla fighters in order to report a higher number of killings.^[5] The State was thereby taking advantage of a Colombian public that had been devastated by a decades-long war and was desperately seeking justice, resorting to deceitful ploys while benefiting from the facade of security and legitimacy this practice created.

The Chamber to Acknowledge Truth of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace arose from the 2016 Peace Agreement and was specifically designated as a transitional justice effort under the negotiation pillar of victims’ rights.^[6] In July 2018, the Jurisdiction opened case 003: “Illegitimate deaths presented as individuals in combat by state agents.” Through this process, the Jurisdiction declared the statistics of the False Positives tragedy: at least 6,402 individuals were illegally murdered and presented as having been killed in combat between 2002–2008.^[7] The Jurisdiction also confirmed that this occurred rampantly and without punishment for any responsible entities. However, the work before the MOVICE mural was merely statistical research; no one had yet been charged in relation to these crimes. The mural was therefore both timely in its investigation of the State’s guilt and radically forward-thinking in its demand for accountability.

Censorship and Legal Controversy

The issue of censorship with the MOVICE mural is extensive, beginning when the Colombian army’s 13th brigade painted over the mural mere hours after its creation. However, the mural was based on a digital version, which was shared on social media by activist collective Puro Veneno after the physical mural’s removal, thus making the circumstances of censorship more complex.^[8] Along with the hashtag #EjercitoCensuraMural, the images of the mural went viral and quickly circulated within the capital city of Bogota, getting reproduced into posters, face masks, and other merchandise. The mass circulation of the False Positives scandal stirred outrage from some of the commanders depicted, especially since the mural specifically showcased the faces, names, and murder counts under the military officers. Marcos Evangelista Pinto Lizarazo and Mario Montoya Uribe promptly filed tutelas, a mechanism where an individual can claim that a fundamental right is being violated. They claimed that the mural was damaging their reputation, and demanded the mural’s removal from any physical or online platforms.^[9] Despite the fact that the reason the public knew about the False Positive statistics was from the larger effort by the State’s peace process towards restorative justice and transparency, a local court ruled in favor of the military officers. The mural was ordered to be removed from both physical and online platforms, even though the mural had already been widely shared and entered a larger public consciousness. This ruling was additionally controversial given that MOVICE’s mural was an unexaggerated exaltation of the reality of False Positives as it had been communicated to the public. It had instead been marked as defamatory by officers who benefited from silence and distance from these events.

The controversy around this case would influence a consequent intervention in the case by various organizations, including Media Defence, which filed an amicus curiae before the Constitutional Court of Colombia. Not only was the artists’ freedom of expression again brought to the court’s attention, but the amicus curiae further explained that ruling in favor of the officers would devastatingly diminish rights to public interest information and, by extension, breach international human rights law.^[10] The Constitutional Court ultimately ruled that the mural was a legitimate form of expression, and given the impact of the False Positives scandal, that the mural and its information were also a matter of public interest. The protection of the officer’s reputation was therefore regarded as an invalid restriction upon the artists’ freedom of expression, and claims of defamation were found to be baseless. The MOVICE activists promptly repainted the mural in front of the Military Academy the December after the ruling, updating the statistics to include 6,402 victims and additional high-level commanders.^[11]

Restorative Justice and Public Memory

The mural’s censorship only emboldened its political urgency, as it proved to be a powerful public art piece charged with the intention of community healing. This healing is part of the larger concept of transitional justice that artwork is particularly able to address; through the memorialization of significant human rights events, especially when such events have an effect of inconceivable collective trauma upon a community, artwork pushes for visibility and remembrance. Legal scholar Martha Minow describes the importance of such visibility in her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness. Her insights are reminiscent of the deeply instilled tragedy that has stained Colombian morale for decades: both the tragedy of mass innocent murder and the tragedy of betrayal by a people’s own government. She writes:

No response can ever be adequate when your son has been killed by police ordered to shoot at a crowd of children . . . or when your brother who struggled against a repressive government has disappeared and left only a secret police file, bearing no due to his final resting place. Closure is not possible. Even if it were, any closure would insult those whose lives are forever ruptured. Even to speak, to grope for words to describe horrific events, is to pretend to negate their unspeakable qualities and effects. Yet silence is also an unacceptable offense, a shocking implication that the perpetrators in fact succeeded, a stunning indictment that the present audience is simply the current incarnation of the silent bystanders complicit with oppressive regimes.^[12]

The MOVICE mural is, on its own, insufficient at realizing closure or erasing the human rights violations that occurred, yet it nonetheless represents a step toward transparency necessary for any progress to be made. The mural becomes energized through the community it is in dialogue with, making the recurrent censorship of the work more than the repression of a single artist’s expression. Censorship, in this case, was an attempt at re-victimization—an ironic and demoralizing step back from the State’s efforts towards transparency and restoration.

Conclusion

The ultimate endurance of the mural and its reproductions is a testament to the persevering efforts towards healing by the larger Colombian public, acknowledging decades of senseless tragedy and corrupt state systems of power and pointing to the ways collective activist efforts can culminate in tangible visibility and justice. This was especially evident in the Constitutional Court’s ruling, which affirmed freedom of expression as essential to preserving public information and collective memory—making the case of the MOVICE mural a uniquely powerful victory against censorship.

The virality of the mural’s imagery continues to diffuse and intertwine it with a larger community, as both the wide reach of social media and the continuous updating of the statistics in the mural’s design were crucial to the artwork’s social impact. The collective effort behind this work ultimately highlights the necessity for timeliness and collaboration, especially with artwork meant to heal and validate the realities of difficult histories. After all, the mural presents a question that repeatedly demands to be answered, not something that stays still. Who Gave the Order? is a call that extends beyond the physical constraints of a mural, challenging the systems of power that continue to suppress and striving to exalt truth, healing, and memory.

Suggested Readings and Videos:

• Colombia: Events of 2022, Human Rights Watch.
• Mural de falsos positivos que fue borrado ha sido repetido y borrado en más lugares, Noticias Uno Colombia (2019).
• Alejandro Valderrama Herrera, Art and culture as processes of healing and memory in Colombia, International Catalan Institute for Peace.
• Christine Bell, Introductory Note to United Nations Security Council Resolution 2261, International Legal Materials, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2017).
• Vanessa Buschschluter, ‘False positives’: Colombian army apologises for killing civilians, BBC News (2023).

About the Author:

Maria Chica Jimenez is a second-year undergraduate at Stanford University studying Public Policy, Art History, and Human Rights. She focuses on the intersection of art, law, and social justice, drawing from her experience in museum education, community engagement, and human rights advocacy.

References:

1. MOVICE Murals Case, No. X, RFK Human Rights (Aug. 23, 2021), available at https://civicspace-casetracker.rfkhumanrights.org/cases/movice-murals-case/. ↑
2. Bilal Y. Saab & Alexandra W. Taylor, Criminality and Armed Groups: A Comparative Study of FARC and Paramilitary Groups in Colombia, 32 Stud. Conflict & Terrorism 455 (2009). ↑
3. Colombia Situation Overview, UNHCR – UN Refugee Agency (2024), available at https://reporting.unhcr.org/operational/situations/colombia-situation. ↑
4. El Rol de Los Altos Mandos en Falsos Positivos: Evidencias de Responsabilidad de Generales y Coroneles del Ejército Colombiano por Ejecuciones de Civiles, Human Rights Watch (2015). ↑
5. El Rol de Los Altos Mandos en Falsos Positivos: Evidencias de Responsabilidad de Generales y Coroneles del Ejército Colombiano por Ejecuciones de Civiles, Human Rights Watch (2015). ↑
6. Brian Harper & Holly Sonneland, Explainer: Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), AS/COA (2019), available at https://www.as-coa.org/articles/explainer-colombias-special-jurisdiction-peace-jep. ↑
7. “MOVICE.” 2021. PBI Colombia (English). December 28, 2021. https://pbicolombia.org/tag/movice/. ↑
8. Censorship of Street Art in Colombia: The MOVICE Mural and the ‘False Positives’ Scandal, Media Defence (Feb. 10, 2023), available at https://www.mediadefence.org/news/movice-mural/. ↑
9. Censorship of Street Art in Colombia: The MOVICE Mural and the ‘False Positives’ Scandal, Media Defence (Feb. 10, 2023), available at https://www.mediadefence.org/news/movice-mural/. ↑
10. Media Defence Amicus Curiae on MOVICE Mural, Media Defence (2023), available at https://www.mediadefence.org/news/movice-mural/. ↑
11. Censorship of Street Art in Colombia: The MOVICE Mural and the ‘False Positives’ Scandal, Media Defence (Feb. 10, 2023), available at https://www.mediadefence.org/news/movice-mural/. ↑
12. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Beacon Press 1998). ↑