Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella has ordered the removal of dozens of exhibits from the National Museum in Bogotá, targeting displays that addressed social movements, feminist and LGBTQ activism, and the country's history of political violence. He calls it a "counterrevolution" against "atheist social communism" in cultural institutions. The phrase is doing a lot of work — it collapses identity, history, and dissent into a single enemy category that conveniently justifies state curation of national memory. The mechanics are straightforward: the Culture Ministry is reviewing and redesigning exhibitions and curatorial practices across museums under its authority. The Foreign Ministry has already renamed a courtyard that honored an Indigenous leader, describing it as part of a campaign against "woke" ideology. These are not subtle interventions. They are executive-branch directives reshaping what a national institution presents as history. Protests have followed. Dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the museum as riot police guarded the entrance. History student Azul Riascos said the government was promoting a vision of Colombia as exclusively white, Catholic, and Spanish-speaking — erasing Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ communities from the national narrative. Anthropologist Arturo Sanabria called the approach a form of neocolonial intervention built on imported narratives about terrorism and "wokeness." The Trump parallels are explicit and acknowledged. Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli of the Washington Office on Latin America noted that allied Latin American governments are copying US political narratives and strategies. Trump himself has attacked the Smithsonian Institution, with the White House releasing a report branding museum leaders as radical activists and ordering corrective signage — signs that, nearly three months later, still haven't been installed. The Smithsonian's director told Congress the report did not fairly characterize the museum's work. What distinguishes the Colombian case is speed of execution. Where the Trump administration's museum interventions have stalled in bureaucratic friction, de la Espriella's government has already removed exhibits and renamed spaces. Colombia's Culture Minister Paola Holguin confirmed the government is extending the review to other museums. The infrastructure of national memory is being reshaped in real time, not debated in theory. Political scientist Estefania Cardozo offered the sharpest diagnosis: "The government is making serious efforts in a cultural battle that probably doesn't exist. It is inventing one to erase identities that cannot be erased because they already exist." The observation captures the core dynamic — state power deployed not to win an argument but to eliminate the evidence that an argument was ever necessary. The extraction pattern is clear: executive authority is being used to monopolize the national narrative, concentrating interpretive power in the presidency while dispersing costs across communities whose histories are being physically removed from public space. The beneficiaries are the incumbent political coalition; the cost-bearers are Indigenous, Black, LGBTQ, and labor communities whose existence in the national story is being administratively deleted.
