The Government of De la Espriella appoints a critic of the Peace Agreement and denier of the armed conflict to the Memory Center

The National Center for Historical Memory, the entity that investigates and preserves academic production on the armed conflict in Colombia, will be led in the Government of Abelardo de la Espriella by journalist and lawyer Dmar Córdoba Salamanca. The official has already submitted his conflict of interest declaration to assume the position, as confirmed by EL PAÍS. The lawyer and journalist has been part of the radio program La Hora de la Verdad by former minister Fernando Londoño Hoyos for two decades, a flagship space of the hardest right-wing line. The new director, who has been part of the legislative work team of the current Minister of Culture Paola Holguín, has been a fierce critic of the Peace Agreement with the FARC and a defender of the so-called cultural battle against the left.

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Córdoba Salamanca has training as a broadcaster and digital journalist, is a lawyer from the Catholic University of Colombia and holds a master’s degree in constitutional law from Sergio Arboleda University. He will replace María Gaitán at the Center for Memory, granddaughter of the assassinated liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who led the entity throughout Gustavo Petro’s government. The institution is responsible for research on more than six decades of armed conflict in Colombia, has issued dozens of reports that are a reference on the subject, and is in charge of the Museum of Memory of Colombia, pending to be launched after years of delays.

The new director of the Center for Memory has previously defended denialist positions regarding the Colombian armed conflict. In posts made on his X account, he has claimed that it is a narrative: “The narrative of the armed conflict served to present these guerrillas as belligerent forces,” he wrote in March last year. When the Truth Commission emanating from the Peace Agreement with the FARC presented its final report in 2022, Córdoba promoted a parallel commission focused on victims belonging to the military forces and other victims of crimes committed only by the FARC. He argued that he sought “to know the truth of what they called the armed conflict in Colombia.” He even said that state resources invested in the Truth Commission to investigate the conflict should instead go to fund hospitals and schools. He also defends that human rights violations committed by the military within the framework of the conflict are “a narrative.”

The National Center for Memory that he will now lead, however, was born precisely from the recognition that an armed conflict did occur in Colombia. It was created by the Victims Law of 2011, promoted by the Government of Juan Manuel Santos, the same one who later signed peace with the FARC.

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Dmar Córdoba has also been a loyal pawn in what he calls the “cultural battle” against the left. He belongs to the Fundación Escuela Libertad, which presents itself as an organization to “shake the minds of those indoctrinated and hypnotized by ‘leftopathy’.” There he has had the role of program director. It is an ultra-right entity linked to former Uribista senator María Fernanda Cabal and her husband, cattle leader José Félix Lafaurie, and which according to a journalistic investigation by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) reproduces false information about the left and aligns with the Spanish far-right party Vox.

In the last two decades, the director has remained linked to the program La Hora de la Verdad, which for many years was broadcast on radio and now airs on social media platforms. The format is directed by Fernando Londoño Hoyos, Minister of Interior and Justice in the Government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez and a victim of a FARC attack in 2012. During the peace negotiations, it was a platform for those opposed to that pact and campaigned for the ‘NO’ in the 2016 plebiscite on that agreement.

In the Government of Abelardo de la Espriella, he is close to the Minister of Culture, Paola Holguín, appointed to that position under the banner of the “cultural battle.” It is a dispute that the Government wants to carry out not only politically but also in education, family, spirituality, and now, with Dmar Córdoba at the National Center for Historical Memory, in the narrative about the Colombian armed conflict.

Already in the right-wing Government of Iván Duque (2018-2022), the Center for Memory was led by a critic of peace, with denialist positions about the armed conflict: Darío Acevedo. During his administration, that entity was expelled from at least three international memory networks that considered it was not fulfilling the memory purpose for which it had been created. Later, in the progressive Government of Gustavo Petro, the entity was readmitted to those networks, to which it currently belongs.

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