Colombia's Anti-Imperialists Import Cancel Culture

As the January 6 riot unfolded, journalist Jake Tapper told a CNN colleague reporting from Washington, D.C., that he felt as if he was "talking to a correspondent in Bogotá." Now that violent protests once again plague Bogotá and the rest of Colombia, however, the odd thing is that they closely resemble last summer's violent protests in Washington, D.C.

While Colombia certainly has a long history of riots, these seldom featured the toppling of statues. It was only after the 2020 twilight of the statued idols in America's capital and throughout the United States that a group of Guambianos, or Misak, an indigenous people from the southwestern department of Cauca, decided to topple the statue honoring Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the Spaniard who, allied with certain indigenous tribes, conquered much of central Colombia in the 16th century. The Guambianos tried to "cancel" Jiménez de Quesada last month in Bogotá's colonial center, only days after they had struck in the city of Cali, where they ousted the statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar, another conquistador.

Besides importing cancel culture from the United States, the professed anti-imperialists leading the current protests in Colombia have used roadblocks along major highways to prevent goods, medicine, fuel, and even ambulances from reaching large urban centers. In Cali, the third-largest city in Colombia with 2.2 million inhabitants, the local press reported shortages of rice, meat, chicken, eggs, vegetables, and gasoline on May 5, after several days of blockades and complacency by the local authorities. On May 9, when entrapped residents attempted to liberate the roads themselves, they exchanged fire with the indigenous groups carrying out the blockades. The latter even invaded gated communities and launched projectiles at a security drone as it filmed their onslaught.