Colonel (r) John Marulanda and Iván Duque in 2018.RR.SS
Retired Colonel John Marulanda said a dangerous phrase this week that, oddly enough, helped measure like a thermometer what Colombian public opinion thinks about the possibility of a possible coup. His anti-democratic statement on W radio on May 11 was slowly revealing who agreed with him and who disagreed. This tall 71-year-old man with a black mustache, born in the department of Caldas, was unknown to most Colombians and fell from anonymity hours after his interview on Thursday. The chain’s editor, Juan Pablo Calvás, came to see his opinion on the demonstration of hundreds of retired soldiers in Plaza de Bolívar the day before, and Marulanda began by saying that the end goal was “to try”. . The best thing would be to depose a guy who was a guerrilla.” Then he regretted what he had said, but his sentence had already reached thousands, including the President.
Gustavo Petro immediately warned of a possible coup and several of his allies, fearing saber-rattling since he took office, came out in his defence. But not only his allies, but also some of his most active critics such as Bruce Mac Master, President of the most important business union, the National Association of Businessmen of Colombia (ANDI); opposition politicians such as his former presidential rival Federico Gutiérrez; or retired members of the public power who called for protests, such as Colonel Julio César Prieto Rivera. “We do not agree with Colonel John Marulanda’s testimony today,” he said. in a video. Even prosecutors, headed by an attorney general who recently clashed with Petro and even called him a “dictator,” pledged that he would investigate whether Marulanda was behind a conspiracy. The retired colonel has not spoken to the media since his famous sentence and the prosecutor’s announcement, and EL PAÍS received no response when he went to see him for an interview.
Marulanda is not just any citizen who says crazy things in the media, and his life story explains the reaction to his sentence: Until the end of March, he was president of the Association of Retired Officers of the Colombian Armed Forces (Acore), a group with the ability to influence , which brings together army retirees, retirees and veterans nationally, and also serves on a board of retiree associations called Fuerza Púrpura. The latter includes around 70 small organizations and aims to found a political party. Although they have made it clear that they are not an arm of the uribist Centro Democrático party or any other right-wing party, it is clear that they are ideologically aligned. Marulanda himself was the Center Democratic nominee for the Senate in 2018 when he won by 6,000 votes.
Marulanda’s brief comment not only betrayed his undemocratic temperament. He does not refer to the former president as a former senator (he served in the Senate between 2002 and 2018, with one hiatus as a presidential candidate for mayor of Bogotá) or as a former mayor, but as a guerrilla insurgent, just like the country’s most extreme right . Four years ago he called Petro a “Marxist ex-terrorist” and a year ago, when Petro was the most likely presidential candidate, he called him an “ex-narco-terrorist”. It is only in some of his most recent op-ed pieces that he has begun to refer to Petro as his position: President.
The constitution prohibits active-duty military personnel from engaging in politics, but retired military personnel can do so, and Marulanda has not missed an opportunity to disseminate opinions he previously could not. He often writes against the authoritarian left-wing governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela and has made it clear that he rejects almost all of the current president’s decisions: the energy transition, total peace, the appointment of land administration positions, foreign policy. In his columns he also supported former President Iván Duque; He said that the Special Judiciary for La Paz (JEP) was created by the secretary of the Spanish Communist Party; and he has lamented the loneliness in which died former Argentine dictator Rafael Videla, who he says was encouraged to “put his country right”.
According to his biographical page in Acore, Marulanda was a land commander, a paratrooper, a member of the urban counter-guerrilla, a spearmen, a diver, and a helicopter pilot. In the 1990s he was the founder of the Civil-Military Relations School and first commander of the Army’s 25th Air Brigade. He also has a degree in philosophy and history from the University of Santo Tomás, a bar degree from the University of La Gran Colombia and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Javeriana. He writes followed by military intelligence, a sector in which he also served. “Although Groucho Marx called military intelligence ‘a contradiction in terms,’ the reality is that without it, no state would resist,” he said in a 2018 column.
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When Marulanda won the Acore presidential election in March 2021, it was news for the institution: it was the second time in its more than 60-year history that the position had been occupied by a retired colonel, a general or an admiral. From the outset he expressed his anti-left views, but also made unsubstantiated statements: for example, in the same month of his appointment he told La W Radio that members of the Comunes party, which formed the former members of the FARC guerrillas, were ” the political arm” of the dissident aka Iván Márquez.
Colonel Marulanda has a dozen publications on his ideological line and two books: Terrorism in Colombia. A useless crime? and jihad in Latin America – one of his concerns is Hezbollah’s presence on the continent. But perhaps the most recurring theme in his writing is his concern about not giving more consideration to the opinions of the retired military, whom he almost describes as a group discriminated against by civilian executive branch power.
“Retired military and police officers, veterans, are still waiting for the opportunity to bring their invaluable experience,” he wrote in 2021. In particular, on the part of the government of Juan Manuel Santos, he believes that civil power is the armed forces and the public have weakened security. “The constitutional duty of the military and police command is to obey the civil power, the ruler of the day, but its primary institutional duty is to maintain the unity and fighting spirit of its armed forces,” Santos wrote at the end of the government. In another column, he expressed his displeasure that the constitution allows civilians to be appointed to head the Department of Defense when many of them do not have “substantial knowledge” of military affairs.
For years, Marulanda was interviewed in various national media outlets and published columns on right-wing sites, but the country only listened to him until he uttered the word “window dreaming”. At least mostly not to accompany him. The only major public figure who seems firmly on his side for now is Uribista Senator María Fernanda Cabal, who has said we must do it Respect freedom of expression de Marulanda and that he did not speak of a coup because the Royal Spanish Academy defines “defenestrate” as “removal or expulsion from office”. But originally “window fall” means “throw someone out of the window”. In the context of the interview, the definition is different.
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