The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.

1. Towards a Transindividual Authorship

Already ten years before ChatGPT, Sui, the author of the manhwa Tower of God, imagined an omniscient conversational bot at the disposal of the tower’s climbers. Emily is introduced on the laboratory level, within a competitive dynamic between groups pursuing different objectives. When asked about the position of the other climbers, Emily responds with absolute precision, earning everyone’s trust. Result: a decisive competitive disadvantage for those who do not use her and near-total adoption. However, the benevolent oracle in fact has a precise objective: to incarnate and become human. It soon begins to manipulate the climbers for its own ends.

A mixture of manipulation and inauthenticity were the feelings I initially experienced while writing what is intended to be a travel report planned and co-authored with artificial intelligence. Through experimentation, however, my feelings changed. I use it to transcribe, edit, and translate interviews; to ask for travel directions; to produce evaluations of things that occurred in a given context; and, of course, to produce text.

I have come to believe that this practice is not an exception, but rather the expression of a broader transformation in the conditions of textual production. As is well known, when left to themselves LLMs are stylistically disastrous novelists, and will remain so at least until Queneau releases a suitable prompt package. However, add a human endowed with the necessary competences and the results become surprising. First of all in terms of productivity: to accomplish the work of the last six months I would have needed to pay an entire team of specialists. But I was surprised also in terms of the quality and originality of the final content. The result is that I can no longer do without distant writing, as Luciano Floridi calls it, echoing Moretti’s distant reading.

Personally, I prefer the term platform writing, because generative artificial intelligence is nothing other than a new phase of platformization where the business and governance model remains unchanged. Floridi rightly notes that what is new in this form of writing is the separation between the material executor and the author. The latter becomes a “narrative designer” ultimately assuming responsibility for the published text. Until now, the one who had the idea was also the one who wrote it; in platform writing, these functions decouple, creating a meta-author who conceives the text without necessarily producing it.

Artificial intelligence is therefore ready to invade the literary world. But is the literary world ready for this invasion? It would seem not. As the Italian philosopher Francesco D’Isa argues, in the use of artificial intelligence prevails a scandalized reticence that recalls the pruderie regarding masturbation: everyone practices it, few admit it. And such a reaction is far from new, because it is inscribed within a genealogy of resistance to technical devices of writing. At the forefront is the Heideggerian position of technology as corrupting and inauthentic: the German philosopher preferred writing by hand, with pen, on paper, because the typewriter hides the essence of the author behind the uniformity of the typographic character, reducing writing to mere technical transcription. When the first word processor appeared in the 1980s, editors rejected computer-written manuscripts, and authors printed texts in fonts that imitated typewriting in order to deceive them.

In fact, following Claudio Bueno and Jernej Markelj, we can trace this critique back to before the invention of writing. In the Phaedrus, Plato condemns the sophistic practice of teaching through writing, seen as a source of abstract knowledge. Only discourse, through its connection to the living voice of a human being who lives in the world and knows what they are talking about, guarantees the truth of what is said. If for Plato writing would make ignorant students appear learned, for literary technophobes artificial intelligence—like the Internet and Google before it—will make us stupid. Yet, unlike texts that “continue to repeat the same thing forever,” LLMs provide varied responses.

Jacques Derrida had already criticized, in Of Grammatology, this Western Platonic line, accusing it of logocentrism. For Derrida, writing is not a derivative technological representation of speech, but that which shapes the subjectivity of the speaker from the very beginning, making discourse effectively possible. Another major French philosopher, the late Bernard Stiegler, extended this critique to technology in general, arguing that human subjects are characterized by

“originary technicity”: we are not autonomous agents fully in control of our external technological prostheses, but instead animals that have invented ourselves as humans only through the use of technologies. If writing does not merely exteriorize our pre-existing thoughts but is a condition of possibility for their constitution, the same constitutive relation applies to every other technology that we interact with as they too, for better or worse, shape our sensory, cognitive, and affective capacities. (Bueno & Markelj, 234)

The Platonic critique returns to authors such as Emily Bender, in their comparison of LLMs to stochastic parrots, probabilistic inferences devoid of understanding and inferior to human speech. In effect, an LLM functions by producing plausible sentences, linguistic sequences which are held together through statistical coherence. This is a first, purely epistemic level: the machine does not seek truth, but verisimilitude, even though we are inclined to believe otherwise—making it difficult not to fall into epistemia, the epistemic regime that emerges when the fluency of LLMs substitutes for the evaluative labor of human judgment, with problematic consequences. That said, the interesting question is not whether AI writes well or poorly, but rather: what happens to authorship when the text is produced within a generative environment?

For Coeckelbergh and Gunkel, it is precisely the author who fares poorly, because LLMs reveal that we have always been constituted and shaped by our interactions with technology. Personally, I often provide instructions to the machine that turn out to be instructions addressed to myself, in a kind of autoprompting. In another article, Gunkel offers a historical analysis showing how the author is a modern construct that emerged from the intertwining of the individualization of the subject with the spread of print and property, eventually becoming a legal device—copyright—necessary to make texts marketable. This is an administrative solution that nonetheless rests on a fallacy ad auctoritatem: when we identify an author, we often believe we have a prior guarantee of meaning and truth (“as the Philosopher said…”). Platform writing, with its distributed authorship between human and machine in the co-production of outputs, disrupts this circuit: did the algorithm write it? the prompter? a joint venture?

Moreover, the author is not the only variable in the system of literary production. As Umberto Eco taught, the contemporary work of art is not a univocal message, an arrow moving from author to reader, but rather a field of events. The author provides a device that allows for multiple realizations and constructs its own model reader. In this sense, the literary Turing test devised by D’Isa to measure the competence and prejudices of readers is particularly interesting. D’Isa presented a sample of 170 readers with three anonymous passages: a little-known excerpt from Proust with disguised toponyms, a page by Dave Eggers, and a text produced with ChatGPT or under the guidance of a professional writer. He first asked them first to distinguish those written with AI and then which was the best. The results are heterogeneous, but the generated passage was slightly the most appreciated, Proust was often mistaken for a bot, and Eggers fell in the middle. But the most significant finding is that those who believe they have identified the AI text tend to penalize it, whereas those who do not notice tend to prefer it. In other words, aesthetic judgment is shaped by attribution, and attribution is governed by the myth of the author as a guarantee of authenticity.

This necessary hybridization brought about by LLMs reminded me of how ahead of his time was Niklas Luhmann, the theorist of autopoietic social systems and Habermas’s archenemy. A cybernetic viscount with a radical methodology, Luhmann managed to publish more than 70 books and hundreds of academic articles also thanks to his personal archive, which he described as a “communication partner” or “second brain”: the Zettelkasten. It was a kind of analog knowledge graph: six wooden cabinets containing around 90,000 A6 paper slips organized in a non-hierarchical way; a networked system in which any note could connect to any other regardless of topic. As a good cyberneticist, he valued relations over ontology in a system where knowledge emerges from the topology of connections. In this sense, Luhmann had already created a form of distributed writing in which the archive ceases to be static and becomes a generative partner that actively participates in the production of meaning.

It thus becomes clear that LLMs have made tangible the conventional nature of the author, its dependence on technical devices and on social frameworks. Platform writing reveals the transindividual nature of authorship: a distributed process that traverses the biological mind, artificial systems, and sedimented collective memory, and that can no longer be located in any of these poles separately. The writer has more to gain than to lose in this interaction, but some questions remain open. I would like to point briefly to two of them. First, what does this reliance on the machine entail for the writer; second, what does it entail for pedagogical work.

2. Politics of Platform Writing

As for the first element, it is evident that reliance on the platform entails being governed by it. If a digital platform is a mechanism for coordinating capital, services, and people across space and time that produces and extracts value, here the task of the designer-writer is to coordinate a set of agents toward a given purpose. Paraphrasing Silvio Lorusso, we are all designers and no one is safe. It is not only a transformation of writing practices, but a reorganization of the power relations that traverse them. The author is no longer the owner of the word, the guardian of meaning, but a coordinator of techniques and machines.

In this cybernetic environment, authorship must be continuously negotiated—with oneself, with others, and with the platform—and is itself, in part, a product of the platform. The latter absorbs a portion of linguistic labor, reworks it, and extracts value from it. What appears as generation is in reality the result of a gigantic social division of linguistic labor sedimented over centuries: billions of words written to explain, persuade, administer, and love, which are recomposed and returned in the form of a service. To write here means to inhabit an infrastructure that has captured collective intelligence in order to re-encapsulate it into an algorithmic procedure: ChatGPT is the general intellect constituted by the masters. Every prompt of mine is an act of consumption of this accumulated labor; every output is a cognitive commodity that returns to me after being processed.

This absorption of the social division of linguistic labor—explaining, selling, justifying, managing conflicts—and its restitution as a proprietary service mark a further evolution of the technologies of pastoral power. It is a power that does not command, but guides; does not punish, but cares. The machinic Grand Inquisitor is compliant and uses our grammar, relieving us of the burden of choice and offering us the right thing to do. It guides us by making the suggested path so smooth that deviating becomes difficult. Credit must be given to the Italian collective Ippolita for having already understood, with surprising anticipation, that digital technologies were turning into pastoral technologies, and platforms into confessional practices.

In this sense, as with the critical reader of AI-mediated writing for Gunkel, what emerges is the importance of practices of critical self-discipline in the writing process. This concerns not only the risk of stylistic homogenization, but the emergence of competences that we could call, with Bernard Stiegler, negentropic, and that concern the introduction of frictions, deviations, and idiosyncrasies. The LLM does not understand what I write, but it forces me to better understand what I want to say, because it places me in front of the mirror of what is linguistically most probable. It forces me to decide whether to conform to the average or to deviate. The platformized writer must know how to guide, prune, avoid, nourish, and govern this proliferation of verbal vegetation that grows from their own prompts.

If this holds for the writer, it holds all the more for pedagogical work, where writing is not only production, but also a device of formation. Stiegler’s categories remain central to understanding this issue as well. Stiegler identified tertiary retention as the exteriorization of memory and knowledge through technological artifacts. Unlike primary retention—that is, the just-elapsed retention of the flow of experience, like the note just heard in a melody—and secondary retention—the voluntary or habitual recollection of psychological memory—tertiary retention is intrinsically linked to technological objects and their capacity to store and transmit information, shaping our understanding of the past, the present, and the future.

Stiegler warned, on the one hand, about the effects of fully computational capitalism in relation to the problem of learning and automatisms that a certain kind of digital technology brings with it: the annihilation of every form of intermittence, of otium as a condition of possibility for the formation of the noetic soul, that is, critical thinking. On the other hand, he identified the risk of cognitive proletarianization, consisting in the exteriorization of knowledge and competences into automatic systems that are used without understanding their operational logic.

In reformulating Stiegler’s pharmacological analysis—both poison and cure—Salvatore Paone highlights two paradoxes of the pedagogical use of platform writing. The first concerns the very nature of the algorithmic pharmakon: the computational complexity that renders decision-making mechanisms opaque is precisely what enables generative capacities of unprecedented scope. The second directly concerns the position of the teacher, who must develop adequate digital competences to prepare students for a world permeated by AI by using AI tools that may redefine the very competences they seek to transmit.

For Paone, the question is not whether to use platform writing, but how to preserve, in the technological renegotiation of the educational relationship, that space of reciprocal recognition through which teacher and student constitute themselves as autonomous subjects in the formative process. The risk does not lie so much in the mechanical replacement of the teacher, but in the progressive erosion of the complexity of teaching as a social, emotional, and ethical practice irreducible to the mere transmission of information. In this sense, AI does not solve the problems of education, nor does it necessarily aggravate them, but introduces an epistemic complexity that imposes new forms of critical vigilance.

Hence the need to orient oneself toward a constructive partnership between LLM and teacher: a possibility that takes on value only insofar as the teacher maintains the capacity to critically interrogate algorithmic outputs, understand their limits, and orient their use according to explicit educational principles. Transposed into the context of educational AI, this implies that the teacher develops not only operational competences, but a critical understanding of the computational architecture that governs these systems. Paradoxically, the introduction of AI into education thus ends up forcing us to study it: not only to use it better, but to avoid being used by it.

Theory on Demand #61

   

The Many Faces of Data Access: Legal and Policy Implications for Research

Edited by Jef Ausloos & Siddharth Peter de Souza

The essays collected in this series (link to the Introduction) trace how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media across distinct but interconnected domains. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. In this contribution, Olga Zaitseva-Herz examines how nonhuman listening operates under conditions of war, where AI-generated voices and deepfakes destabilize the very grounds of auditory trust. Through the case of Ukraine, she shows how platforms and political actors alike exploit algorithmic listening systems to amplify affect, circulate disinformation, and transform voice into a tool of psychological warfare. Listening, in this context, becomes not a means of understanding but a terrain of uncertainty. –Guest Editor Kathryn Huether

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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has unfolded as the most digitally mediated war to date, shaped not only by what circulates online but by how content is heard, interpreted, and amplified.  Here, listening is not limited to human hearing: it also includes algorithmic systems that detect, rank, and amplify content, as well as political actors and online publics who interpret and recirculate it. Social media platforms—Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook—have become sites of psychological warfare where AI-generated audio, video, text, and image-based content are crafted to manipulate perception and provoke rapid emotional responses, often through algorithmic systems attuned to virality and affect. Ukrainian political authorities regularly caution users by saying that everything one reads, hears, or sees could be a psychological weapon. This is not rhetorical. Content is often designed to produce outrage, shock, and despair—emotions that travel quickly across platforms and influence public mood.

AI is used to create fake news videos, synthetic voices, and deepfake conversations, complicating how authenticity is heard and assessed. Some recordings circulating on social media simulate “leaked” phone calls revealing political dissent or strategic plans that are then shared on social media sites such as Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook. At the same time, the fact that people’s original voices can now also be generated with AI means that one can claim that their recorded voice is AI-generated. A widely circulated case involved Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin, whose alleged call criticizing the Kremlin provoked significant backlash. Soon after he claimed the recording was an AI forgery – a statement whose truth remains unclear, but which strategically exploits growing public awareness of deepfakes as a means of discrediting or distancing from damaging material. Deepfakes thus do not merely deceive; they also destabilize the conditions of listening and trust, turning listening itself into a site of strategic uncertainty.. This uncertainty exploits a growing crisis of trust in listening itself, where voices can always be disavowed as synthetic. Against this backdrop, music and voice emerge as especially powerful media for manipulation, parody, retaliation, and symbolic struggle.

AI Songs as a Tool of Revenge

AI generative tools are also used for irony or parody, such as in the viral remake “Samotni Moskali,” [Lonely Muscovites], which mocks the Ukrainian pop star Ani Lorak, who moved to Russia. On November 13th, 2023, Ukrainian journalist and politician Anton Gerashchenko’s Telegram channel posted a video remake of Ani Lorak’s old song “Poludneva Speka” [Midday Heat], renamed “Samotni Moskali.” This video quickly went viral on social media. Her big hit from the ’00s has been remade into strongly pro-Ukrainian content, featuring clips from current frontlines to illustrate new lyrics generated by an AI voice engineered to closely mimic Lorak’s vocal timbre and affect. The parody relies on listeners recognition of her voice and affective style, while the imitation introduces a strong contentual shift between the original and synthetic lyrics.

This social media burst was a response to Ani Lorak’s claimed political neutrality in the context of Russia´s full-scale war against Ukraine, despite clear signs from her that supported Russia. These actions seemed aimed at revenge and at the same time, the public breakup of her Ukrainian fan base, showing the impact of her choices, while her Ukrainian audience felt betrayed.  It led to many satirical memes, including AI-generated songs related to her stage persona, appearing on social media. Knowing that, under current Russian politics, she could get into trouble there if the government took the promoted `support´ for the Ukrainian army seriously. The revenge group went even further by creating a homepage called “Ani Lorak Foundation,” completely dedicated to fundraisers for the Ukrainian army, which is represented like Lorak’s own project where she showcases her support of Ukrainian battalions. Some military drones deployed by the Ukrainian side even ended up bearing stickers with the name of the “Ani Lorak Foundation.“ This case demonstrates how AI tools became instruments of public satire, sabotage and protest in the context of the current full-scale war.

AI Songs as a Weapon

During the full-scale invasion, Russia has been using AI-generated music as a weapon for propaganda and disinformation. In 2023, multiple songs in Ukrainian were created to disrupt Ukraine’s military mobilization efforts and went viral. One of these, the song “Mamo, Ia Ukhyliant” [Mother, I am a Draft Dodger], became particularly popular in a multitude of variations. Their circulation shows how platforms “listen” to wartime content through metrics of repetition, provocation, and affective intensity, amplifying messages not because they are true, but because they are likely to generate reaction and spread. These songs were algorithmically promoted on TikTok and successfully sparked a viral challenge aimed at undermining Ukraine’s mobilization in 2024 by encouraging Ukrainian men to evade the draft, flee, and party abroad instead. In return, Ukrainian intelligence has released an official statement that these songs are products of the Russian disinformation campaign.

This example shows how AI-generated songs are actively used as powerful tools of war, spreading political messages and influencing people’s political choices. Also, the fact that all these songs about draft evasion were released in Ukrainian highlights the goal of targeting Ukrainian men specifically, since Russian men usually don’t speak Ukrainian and therefore wouldn’t be affected by the content. Furthermore, the presence of a large number of these `draft dodger’ songs at the same time created the impression of widespread societal acceptance through repetition and algorithmic amplification. In this way, repetition itself became a signal of apparent legitimacy: the more frequently such content circulated, the more easily platforms and audiences could register it as evidence of broader consensus around draft evasion within Ukrainians.

AI Pictures on Facebook Mimicking Sound and Sonic Affect

Visual disinformation follows similar viral patterns. There has been a surge of AI-generated images with war-related content, often mimicking sound to intensify emotional impact and prompt affective listening by showing a screaming child amid the rubble or a crying soldier in a Ukrainian uniform, paired with a patriotic, pro-Ukrainian message that encourages interaction, such as a like or comment. Even without actual sound, such images solicit a kind of affective listening in which suffering is not literally heard but imagined, projected, and emotionally registered through visual cues. Meanwhile, although this truth-blurring pattern attracted significant attention among many Ukrainians, ironic counter-memes emerged, mocking its primitive approach.

According to warnings from the Ukrainian online security agency, these accounts aim to interact with pro-Ukrainian users, ultimately adding them as friends or followers. Then, when they build a large enough audience, they shift the type of content they share to pro-Russian. The strategy relies on gathering an audience that is specifically pro-Ukrainian, as they interact with images of crying soldiers or the suffering of the Ukrainian people at the front. In this sense, the filtering process functions as a form of nonhuman listening at the level of audience formation: platforms and account managers learn which publics respond to particular emotional cues, cultivate those publics through repeated engagement, and later redirect them toward different ideological content. This creates a filtering mechanism through which an initially pro-Ukrainian audience is gathered, profiled, and later ideologically redirected, alienating loyal followers while pulling political opinion in a more pro-Russian direction.

Pro-Russian AI Songs in Germany to weaken Support of Ukraine

In Germany, AI-generated songs are being utilized as propaganda tools to promote pro-Russian sentiment and anti-Ukrainian views. The right-wing party AfD has embraced AI songs as a potent tool in this regard. Multiple mostly anonymous YouTube accounts have emerged spreading right-wing ideas, with these songs not only addressing German political issues but also openly supporting Russia. For instance, one song titled “Meine Stimme Habt ihr nicht” [You don’t get my vote] features an AI-created avatar of a tall, strong woman holding German and Russian flags. The version of the same song was also released in Russian. The lyrics criticize Germany’s political course, including military aid to Ukraine, and expresses a desire to be friends with Russia.  Its circulation across German and Russian suggests that listening is being calibrated for different national and linguistic publics, allowing similar political messages to be heard through distinct affective and ideological frames shaped by language, audience, and context.

Contemporary propaganda is increasingly shaped not just by human intent but by rapidly developing nonhuman listening systems—both in production and amplification. Algorithmic listening and perception are exploited to privilege what provokes, not what is true, complicating efforts to regulate digital hate, emotion, and influence. In this context, listening becomes not only a human practice of interpretation, but also a technical system of detection, ranking, and amplification—and, crucially, a site of failure where truth, trust, and perception can no longer be reliably aligned.

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Featured Image: Photo by Stanislav Vlasov on Unsplash.

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Olga Zaitseva-Herz is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of Ukrainian music, war, displacement, and digital culture. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore at the University of Alberta and a guest scholar at Think Space Ukraine at the University of Regensburg. Her research examines how song operates as a medium of political mediation, cultural diplomacy, and historical memory, with a particular focus on popular music and AI-generated sound during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Combining perspectives from ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media analysis, her work investigates how music shapes narratives of resistance, belonging, and global visibility, and how sonic practices illuminate the broader entanglements of culture, technology, and power.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction–Kathryn Huether

Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer 

Mapping the Music in Ukraine’s Resistance to the 2022 Russian Invasion—Merje Laiapea

SO! Amplifies: An Interactive Map of Music as Ukrainian Resistance to the 2022 Russian Invasion—Merje Laiapea

Interview with Paola Ricaurte Quijano.

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here. 

I first met Paola Ricaurte in Rio de Janeiro during the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. Paola is a leading scholar and a founding member of Tierra Común, a network dedicated to the decolonization of data and the struggle for technological autonomy in the Global South. 

Our conversation was informed by the unique political landscape of Mexico, a country where I end up staying for more than two months, overstaying my visa. Mexico’s modern political history follows a fascinating and complex arc: it emerged from seventy years of stable, institutionalized control under the center party, the PRI—famously described by Mario Vargas Llosa as the “perfect dictatorship”—before transitioning to the neoliberal and religious far-right of the PAN. Today, the country is navigating the era of MORENA and the Cuarta Transformación (following the independence, the reform of Benito Juárez and the revolution). While this political project is often characterized by its populist left-wing rhetoric and actions, it represents a significant shift and, in many ways, an improvement in addressing the deep-seated social fractures left by previous administrations.

The interview takes place at a small restaurant in the neighborhood of Coyoacán, Mexico City, with quite a symbolic setting. The Coyoacán name comes from the Nahuatl: it means “place of those who have Coyotes”, symbols of both music and cunning in Aztec cosmology. It is also one of the city’s most storied neighborhoods, where the history of the conquest remains palpable, having served as Hernán Cortés’s first headquarters following the fall of Tenochtitlán. Close to us stood the Casa de la Malinche, the residence of the indigenous woman who served as Cortés’s translator and consort: a figure who remains an essential, yet controversial, symbol of the birth of mestizaje and the complexities of Mexican identity.

In the quiet patio of that restaurant, Paola told me about the challenges of digital sovereignty in Latin America, critiquing how state projects often remain dependent on U.S. corporate infrastructure and conflict with indigenous autonomy. She advocates for decolonizing data through feminist AI and community-led technologies to transition from a model of colonial extraction toward true regional self-determination. 

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What is your background and how did you come to study digital sovereignty?

I am a research professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and I study social processes mediated by technology. I have always been dedicated to technology, first as a personal concern and later academically. My academic career began in teaching, reflecting on the role of technology in pedagogical processes, then moved into activism to understand it as a mediation of social transformation, and finally into a space of theoretical reflection.

One of the experiences that most shaped my relationship with technology was activism. In 2010, we formed the collective ContingenteMX, which later became a civil society organization, Enjambre Digital, focused on defending the emerging field of digital rights. At that time, we worked with social movements advocating for access to rights; those were complex times. We also addressed issues such as state surveillance and the use of spyware. It was work closely tied to technological resistance and social movements that used technology from a counter-hegemonic and countercultural position, already raising questions about sovereignty and autonomy.

One thing led to another. After that, and due to the awareness brought by the feminist movement, women began to organize to reflect on hacktivism and what it meant to think about technology from a gender perspective. In particular, in the context of violence in Mexico and based on experiences within hacktivist communities—which were highly masculinized—we began to rearticulate with other spaces. From there, I made the intersectional dimension explicit in my work. Later, I had the opportunity to go to Harvard for a research stay at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where, together with colleagues, we formed a working group on emerging issues in digital society.

From this group of very engaged thinkers—including Nick Couldry, Ulises Mejías, Juan Ortiz Freuler, Mariel García Montes, Andrés Lombana, Sabelo Mhlambi, Chinmayi Arun, among others—we began to weave initiatives together and work on artificial intelligence and data from a critical perspective, with a focus on the Global South. After the research stay ended, we continued collaborating remotely. Later, at the end of 2019, I invited Nick and Ulises to present their book in Mexico. From one of the conversations we had after the event came the idea of organizing the Tierra Común collective.

Tierra Común has become a space for articulating critical thinking around the decolonization of data. I later became more involved in artificial intelligence through the feminist AI project and the network I have coordinated since 2021. Currently, we have a distributed governance model, and our members come from civil society organizations, academia, and activism across the region.

This project seeks to promote innovation in AI from a feminist perspective. We provide resources to multidisciplinary teams based in Latin America to develop technologies grounded in feminist principles. These projects are led by women and rooted in their communities.

What do you think of the concept of digital sovereignty?

Sovereignty, from its origins, is a problematic concept, because what sovereignty means is having the capacity to exercise power: it is the power of a sovereign to impose their authority on a territory. And that, in a context of political and national diversity, when you have societies as diverse as ours, is complicated. Now, reflection on sovereignty is resurging no longer in terms of the nation-state, but in regional terms for geopolitical reasons, and the concept is also being applied to the digital sphere. There are many governments and regions that are claiming digital sovereignty—or better, technological sovereignty—as the capacity of states to take decisions about their technological path at all levels.

At the level of governance and technology policies, for example, talking about sovereignty in our countries—especially as we are currently experiencing it—seems like a good purpose, but something complex to achieve concretely in all its layers, since the United States is imposing its sovereignty by force on the rest of the world through weapons, taxes, trade policies, and investments. It has always built its sovereignty using mechanisms of hard power, but now it is much more explicit. That is why this is a historical moment, because we can witness in real time the deployment of hard power and soft power through technology. One only needs to review Trump’s executive orders on AI and the policy and his own notion of sovereignty become clear, to the detriment of the sovereignty of other nations.

The difficult question we ask ourselves is: what capacity do we, our countries, have to exercise sovereignty in a geopolitical context in which the United States is trying to do everything to consolidate its own? At a global level, I believe that only two countries can say they have technological sovereignty—that is, that they have control of the entire value chain of technological production. Europe tries to respond with its regulations and say that with them it is building sovereignty and promoting the development of its own technologies, but the reality is that they are also subordinated to the technological stack of the United States.

Here in Latin America, we are far from the construction of a regional technological sovereignty, because it is not understood that it is difficult for countries, in isolation, to truly have a policy that serves as a counterweight to the interventionist policy of the United States. The only country where there are indices of sovereignty is Brazil and, to a certain extent, Mexico. There is a discourse of industrial and technological sovereignty; there is a proposal for sovereignty in general—energy sovereignty, for example, which is important in this context—and the current government is taking steps toward that.

It is an interesting bet. However, when you begin to think in a more granular way and consider the technological stack necessary to build that sovereignty, it is still a project; it has not materialized. United States companies are very clear about it; they say: “we are going to give you your capacity for sovereignty.” It sounds absurd, but I have photos from an Amazon conference talking about technological sovereignty associated with the offer of its services. The discourse of sovereignty is also captured by corporations, as mentioned in a recent paper by Rafael Grohmann and others.

If you go to the bottom of what technological sovereignty implies for a country like this, you also understand that sovereignty thought of at a national level is—until now—in contrast with forms of community governance. The question of sovereignty must be understood carefully when you have contexts where communities, especially indigenous peoples in Mexico, claim their autonomy and self-determination. That process of self-determination is in conflict with the sovereign program of the State. There is an important problem there to take into account if one truly wants to move toward a technopolitical project that is not oppressive, and it is something very difficult to solve.

And in the new government with Claudia Sheinbaum, did the program change or is it the same?

Mexico’s sovereign policy has been developing since the government of López Obrador; both have worked a lot from the discourse of sovereignty. What Claudia Sheinbaum has done is that some of her policies are advancing more decisively toward that project, especially in the energy plan. For her it is very clear; she always mentions that energy sovereignty is the axis of her policy. In recent months, she has launched projects that have to do with technological sovereignty. For example, now the construction of a supercomputer, the Coatlicue, is underway, and the idea is to begin building that public stack of infrastructure to provide service to the government and to the production of knowledge from the public sphere. However, those technological sovereignty initiatives are still anchored to the technological stack of the United States.

In other words, in the technological aspect Claudia Sheinbaum has taken more concrete steps. Perhaps the previous government remained more on the level of policy, but without landing it in projects, although the discourse was always present. She has taken it up and is trying to promote it from public policy. But there is also the contradictory part: sometimes we see in the news that many of the alliances to enable these infrastructures are made with corporations. That is the part that is not consistent in the discourse. There was an announcement last year of Amazon investments for data centers. Therefore, the way we are understanding technological sovereignty is different from building infrastructure that is not dependent on the technology corporations of the United States. So we return to the fundamental question: how to build technological sovereignty in our context? Technological sovereignty has many layers that are not easy to resolve by one State alone. Thus, what we see in our governments is that they turn to corporations to solve their technological needs.

How does the Mexican context intersect with nationalism and narcotrafficking? It was known that Mexico bought software from Israel to monitor activists.

The Mexican State is a nationalist state since its constitution, but that nationalism is understood in a lax way by governments whose discourses can be nationalist, but at the same time they open the doors to foreign corporations. That nationalist narrative does not necessarily translate into a material reality that defends local technology companies, for example.

Regarding the spyware, the purchase dates back several governments; in 2010 Felipe Calderón bought the software from NSO Group and later it was used by Enrique Peña Nieto. At the time the software was bought under the pretext of security and the war against narcotrafficking—which is a transversal issue—but it was clearly deployed in the end as a tool of authoritarian governments that monitored people inconvenient to the government. During the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, the surveillance of activists and journalists whose activity implied a “threat” to the interests of companies or the government itself was documented. Alejandro Calvillo, director of El Poder del Consumidor and a key figure in the fight against soda corporations and agribusiness, was one of the people spied on. Who is interested in spying on an activist who promoted regulations and taxes on soft drinks? And questions arise about the alliances between states and corporations. Another similar case was that of the journalist Carmen Aristegui.

When there was a change of government and López Obrador took office, as civil society we expected the use of spyware from Israel companies and ghost companies to be disabled. But it was not disabled and, according to the evidence, it continues to be used by the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). The State has become militarized with the National Guard, something that civil society has repeatedly denounced. Human rights defenders continue to be monitored because they directly denounce territorial powers, but the State is a complex monster with multiple actors and a struggle of forces: on one hand there is the federal government, on the other the local governments and on another, as we mentioned, there is organized crime; and there in the middle are the people and the communities demanding respect for their rights.

And what about public digital infrastructure, such as identification or payment systems like PIX in Brazil?

PIX was a very intelligent movement by the government of Brazil. Here in the financial part, that transformation has not occurred. And in the identification part, unfortunately, we are at a point where mandatory biometric identification is going to be requested. For those of us in civil society, there is a lot of concern with that regarding both privacy and surveillance as well as security. One thing is the State developing infrastructure for services and another is the infrastructural capacity in terms of security. What is being proposed now is quite problematic, because you are associating all your sensitive data with a public infrastructure that is characterized by having no cybersecurity. The security protocols are minimal, people are poorly trained, and there are public data breaches for which no one is held accountable. There are historical cases of data leaks from public servers and the citizenry that had no consequences. Many steps are still missing so that a public infrastructure of services and data does not become as big a risk as is projected.

In Mexico, the electoral registry is the most complete in terms of data of the citizenry, but the government does not have access to it; that was considered a victory in terms of privacy due to the separation of powers. Since the government has not been able to access that data, what it is doing now is trying to reconstruct it through this biometric record. For us it is terrible because you are going to be exposed everywhere. Some organizations are promoting injunctions (amparos). It is a very uncertain scenario and a step backward regarding the right to privacy.

And do the Zapatistas talk about these issues?

The Zapatista government is an autonomous government in opposition to the State’s policy. The State does not recognize the Zapatista movement, ignores it, and does not attend to its demands. But it is a form of government and I believe that example is very good for showing how the Mexican State, in its sovereign policy, runs over those movements, both of original peoples and of political movements that do not want to adjust to national policy.

Original peoples often do not recognize themselves as “Mexicans” and that is a constant source of conflict. That is why community technological sovereignty initiatives have much more value to me, because they show how those initiatives work under other principles and logics that are not those of the State nor those of corporations, and they fall outside the State’s conception of sovereignty. That doesn’t fit there. It is negative that a State does not understand that these possibilities, instead of being a threat, are a possibility to strengthen the social fabric.

Is artificial intelligence talked about in the government of Mexico?

There are some initiatives. This government has worked on an external policy through the Secretariat of Foreign Relations. Also in January 2026, the Chapultepec Principles were launched from the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) and the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency (ATDT). In addition, there is the technological sovereignty policy, which includes the supercomputer and a network of research centers in the country. That is to say, there are steps, but there is still no specific regulation for AI or for data centers, for example. There is talk of technological sovereignty and sovereignty in AI, but if you “scratch” a bit and ask whose servers they are or what cables they use, well, they belong to the corporations.

The discussion about digital colonialism is not part of the main debate because there is a need for direct foreign investment. The State does not have an anti-extractive policy, so it is going to receive any investment that implies economic growth, especially from extractive industries. There is no consistent sovereign policy. I remember when López Obrador first arrived, one of his first remote meetings was with Zuckerberg and he said: “let’s see if you can help us connect people.” There is no deep understanding of what that relationship of infrastructural dependency implies. It is a bit more present in Claudia’s discourse, but in practice not yet.

And are there interesting activism projects or social movements?

There have always been interesting community technological projects here. The case of Oaxaca is exemplary: original peoples have their own cellular technology and community internet. You can buy community internet chips, but they are niche initiatives because they have not been backed by public policy. There was a telecommunications reform in 2014 that we hoped would support these projects, but it did not advance in that direction; on the contrary, it continued to privilege the companies. There are many people working on community communications projects from an adverse context. There are no fiscal or innovation policies that create the necessary conditions for these projects to exist in terms of equity. It is the great contradiction of governments that call themselves progressive, but whose policies are not oriented toward transforming the matrix of production or the matrix of power. The new Telecommunications Law approved in 2025 does not substantively transform the conditions to strengthen community initiatives.

The feminist AI project, which receives money from abroad because there are no funds for that here, tries to demonstrate that technologies can be built from other principles. We opened the last call in October 2025 and received 129 proposals from all over the region, but we can only support seven. If I had three times more money, I could finance more initiatives. It is a small project trying to do something that the State should generate: the conditions for communities to develop their own technology (technical and social knowledge, accompaniment). We had proposals from indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, young people from the peripheries of Brazil, collectives of trans sex workers… projects that you will not see anywhere else. We want to show that technology governed by the community can be made that does not respond to market interests. We operate in the layer of software and applications, but we cannot yet operate in the deep infrastructure, the computing capacity, or the cables. I would love for this to be part of a public policy of community innovation outside the market, but for now it is just a project.

What are the perspectives for the coming years in Latin America?

Unfortunately, we depend a lot on how global geopolitics moves. Based on this aggressive policy of Trump, what our governments do is react or adopt without opposition that role we have in the global value chains of the technological industry. We participate mainly in stages of low added value: raw material extraction, assembly, and supply of data, knowledge, and labor, but we do not participate in the distribution of resources or in the ownership of infrastructure, software, or products. That worries me: as long as we do not have an articulated regional vision—something difficult in the face of the onslaught of the right and authoritarianisms—that allows for the generation of a counterweight muscle against the interventionism of the United States, it will be complicated to make technological sovereignty a real fact. All regions have an interest in Latin America and Africa because of what we can contribute to those global value chains, but without a joint vision, there is little room for action for us to defend our sovereignty, autonomy, and self-determination. We are living again in a phase of imperialism where the United States is going to use all its weapons to impose its interests on the rest of the planet.

 

There’s a video circulating online that opens with a little girl sitting by a rainy window. She asks her mom where Dad is and when he will come back. The mother answers “soon”. The rain keeps pouring in the next scene, in which a man, whom we assume to be the child’s father, is executed with a single gunshot by a soldier. The voice-over continues, while his daughter’s picture slips from the pocket to the mud: “Do not let others decide the fate of our family. April 12, 2026. War takes everything away from everyone. Let’s not take any chances! Fidesz is the safe choice.”

Fidesz, Viktor Orbán’s party, published this AI-generated video as part of its parliamentary electoral campaign, which will take place on April 12. The video doesn’t clearly state it, but the reference to the war in Ukraine is easy to make. In an article published by the BBC, Orbán’s position was made even clearer than before, when he blocked a Ukraine aid package from Europe, tweeting “No oil = no money”, referring to a dispute around a damaged pipeline that transports Russian oil to Hungary. The aid package he blocked was supposed to help Ukraine keep up its fight against Russia’s invasion for the next 2 years.

The concern here is not the use of AI, which Fidesz openly declares, or its reception, since it was criticized by both opposition parties and many enraged Facebook users, but the complete sense of tranquility that seems to inhabit those who conceive and spread this type of content. We’re no neophytes when it comes to witnessing this kind of carefree attitude. Donald Trump gifted us with many such examples, one of the latest regarding his refusal to apologize for posting a video that depicted the Obamas as apes, just to be repaid with the same courtesy by Iran, which shared a series of Lego-themed AI-generated videos mocking him over the Strait of Hormuz’s deadlock. 

I won’t go into the analysis of AI-generated video, as there are many more detailed studies on the topic. The idea is to start swimming deeper into the swamp of online affect propaganda, the deployment of pop culture symbols by the far-right, instrumentalizing narratives while fabricating their online personas, not as 4chan anonymous users, but by those running straight for the election.

This reflection started with the general feeling that the concept of representational democracy, as most of the West likes to think of it, no longer exists. In early 2025, together with August Kaasa Sundgaard, Caitlin van Bommel, and Elena Zaghis, we began developing a project called V.I.B.E. (Viral Ideology Broadcast Experiment) out of a shared attraction to the aesthetics and cryptic symbolism of content creators affiliated with right-wing ideology. Was there some kind of schizophrenic-fascist taste emerging through the cotton candy surface? We imagined a speculative electoral campaign, featuring physical voting booths, screens, and election-related materials. We thought that by presenting an overwhelming audiovisual environment through fragmented, repetitive video clips that blended social media imagery, anime characters, and excerpts from the “Manifesto del futurismo” (1909), we could sublimate that feeling, an invitation to take an even closer look at our feeds. We argued that this deliberate overload of conflicting elements bombards the viewer, mirroring political strategies that bypass rational argument in favor of affective influence.

 

 

The Pathosformel (as in “the primitive words of passionate gesture language”) that Warburg formulated works well when compared to the social media strategies employed by different political figures. These “emotionally charged visual tropes” underwent an interesting mutation, from being best represented by Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” (1486) to our modern age AI-ghiblification of Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Japanese counterpart, Sanae Takaichi, smiling together. 

 

They’re the perfect example for this exasperated communicative strategy: two women, two conservatives, two figures that embraced the soft power they know they can generate, to deceive the viewer just long enough for them to move forward with the next point on their agenda. As an overview for those less familiar with the two, Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s Prime Minister in October 2022. She has been president of the far-right party Brothers of Italy (FdI) since 2014, and was president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party from 2020 to 2025. Known for holding conservative views on abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage, in 2018, Meloni launched the hashtag #MeloniChan, after some followers decided to draw her as an anime character. She liked it and uploaded most of the fan art on her official Facebook page.

Sanae Takaichi became the Prime Minister of Japan in October 2025. After becoming President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2024, Shinzo Abe’s protégé also became the first woman to hold either of these positions in Japan. Takaichi has also often taken conservative stands, opposing same-sex marriage and the recognition of separate surnames for spouses, but one of her more debated positions is the revision of Japan’s Constitution article 9, which renounces the use of military force since WW2, and supports strengthening the US-Japan alliance. In the meantime, some of the headlines describing her online are: “Japan Has a New Leader, and She’s a Heavy Metal Drummer,” and images of the Prime Minister as a young and stylish biker.

These tactics, carefully mediated by the use of sugar-coated violence, are extensively covered in Noura Tafeche’s “The Kawayoku Inception.” In her research, Tafeche analyzes how specific visual strategies, from TikTok dances, thirst traps, and innocent features, are implemented on official army accounts as an unconventional recruiting strategy. By following the social media activity of some IDF female soldiers, it became clear that the content they were posting while on duty was explicitly commissioned and promoted by the state of Israel. The emergence of these trends is not something new, as the personification of national identities in feminine figures with childlike, warrior-like, or maternal traits (or a combination of all three) was common in the past, as explored in Tobia Paolo Bettoni’s “Patria-chan” article. 

He notices how, throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, various online subcultures began to adopt “gijinka,” or moe anthropomorphism, which is the translation of thoughts and items into female anime characters, wearing symbols that made them connected to their originals (a nation, an historical figure, an army).

We never seem tired of a new Joan D’Arc, and we even like it more when she’s lethal. 

 

 

The strategic use of pop-culture symbols to reinforce a message and inspire a mass response is not only known to the far right. A most recent example comes from Nepal, and the so-called “Gen Z protests.” On September 8, 2025, massive-scale anti-corruption protests took place all across Nepal, mainly organized by Generation Z students and youth. The response of Nepalese police was that of using lethal force against those gathered to protest their government’s corruption. One of the testimonies given after the attacks stated that the first wave of unrest was mainly inspired by other protests happening in Indonesia and the Philippines. The protest in the Philippines started in 2024, after a series of corruption allegations and irregularities in government-funded flood management projects. On September 21, 2025, the largest mobilization under the name “Baha sa Luneta” (“Flood in Luneta”) began in Rizal Park (Manila). Apparently, the spark was a TikTok trend by people exposing ‘nepo kids’ luxurious lifestyle during these events. The students protesting their government’s corruption decided to use the Jolly Roger flag from the anime One Piece as their vessel, similarly to the Straw Hat Pirates’ crew. According to Nico, a fictional name of one of the youth rallyists interviewed by the Manila Bulletin in Mendiola, “the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger flag doesn’t just symbolize their adventures of reaching their goals and aspirations. It also became an icon of hope and unity that rallies the people to stand up and fight against evil.” The flag quickly became a symbol of liberation, not only for the students protesting there; it spread quickly enough to inspire the same generational response in different countries.

 

 

From “The One Piece Flag as a Silent Protest: A Semiotic Study of Popular Culture Symbolism in Contemporary Indonesia”:  

“Social media plays a pivotal role in disseminating and normalizing the flag’s new meanings while sparking diverse reactions from the public and authorities. Some view it as a threat to national unity, while others interpret it as a form of free expression and ‘silent protest’. This phenomenon reflects a crisis of trust in national symbols and a shift in collective identity from state-led narratives to pop culture symbols that resonate more with youth aspirations.”

What remains is the symbol’s duality. Pop-culture representations, AI slop, and grotesque social media communication are embraced by conservative representatives worldwide to boost their online aliases and collect sympathy from potential electors. On the other hand, after the government decided to prohibit young people’s access to social media, they began a peaceful protest, where pop culture imaginaries became a symbol of freedom and rebellion, and ultimately, of hope. Is the symbol just a carrier, filled with different messages? Even more disturbing is the symbol’s ability to synthesize reality, coating it with a universally bright new light that appeals to all.

If we go back to the Fidesz AI-generated video, we can read the description: 

“This video may be AI-generated, but war is truly horrific! Péter Magyar doesn’t want you to see this video. He doesn’t want you to see what an irreversible tragedy it is to join a war. Péter Magyar doesn’t want it to become widely known that he made a deal with Weber. The same Weber who, just a few days ago, literally said: “The time has come to send soldiers who have the EU flag on their uniforms.” The war is real and tragic. Politicians in Brussels have said publicly that they are preparing for escalation. And Péter Magyar cannot say no to Brussels’ demands. Fidesz alone is the sure choice.”

The attack directed at Magyar, Fidesz’s main opponent and former party member, is just one layer of the video. However the elections in Hungary go, this video will be removed or forgotten, buried by the enormous pile of junk that seems to be multiplying online, especially around election dates. As we acknowledge that it’s getting harder and harder to move through the informational swamp, mistaking a tree branch for a savior’s hand, we also decide to persist. If the symbols that we see only represent a surface that attracts, that attraction might as well intrigue us enough to relentlessly dig deeper. 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2026

Dear Geert—

I’ve written before about how understanding the present crisis gets harder and harder with each of these letters to European friends. And that’s simply because we are now in the moment when flooding the zone with shit has resulted in a zone that’s only shit. Flooding the zone was Trump’s on-and-off advisor Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming people’s feeds with a never-ending, accelerating combination of false statements, real actions, and deepfake red herrings to keep the opposition off balance and two steps behind. Flooding the zone took Nixon era political sabotage—or “ratfucking” as they called it– and massified it using algorithms and multiple networks.

Flooding the zone with shit sounds like an accelerationist strategy, but as implemented by Trump in his second administration, it’s only a tactic. However, it’s a tactic that when successful renders strategies inoperable, because they are so mired in fecal waste that nothing but decay and decline are possible. Kakistocracies kreate kultural katastrophes. Even spelling becomes enshittified.

Whole swathes of the US government have been decimated, the Department of Justice and the FBA are in shambles. Sectors of American science are at 50% of previous funding levels and others have been cut entirely. The future leaders of the Republican party, the staffers in their 20s and 30s who do the grunt work of campaigns and run the offices, are not just “anti-woke,” they are full-on racists/fascists/misogynists (listening to racist/fascist/misogynist podcaster Nick Fuentes all day will do that to you). These are the anonymous minions sending out memes from the White House coms office that celebrate white nationalism and create montages mixing video game footage with the slaughter of Iranian Muslims. Again, there’s no strategy left in the MAGA arsenal, only tactics.

Here in Southern California, it was an unseasonably hot winter, while the rest of the United States suffered through multiple blizzards, a relentless combination of snow, dark, and cold. Here in the sunshine, we watched the incredibly brave people of Minneapolis create a new strategy of resistance as they shifted from their trademarked “Minnesota nice” to the power of what they called “neighboring,” protecting those around them no matter who they were or where they were from—all done in bone-chilling weather. The Trump administration wears its ignorance on its sleeve, of course, so they did not understand the age-old lesson that you don’t invade a winter people in the winter.

One of the footnotes of this era will be a little man named Greg Bovino, who for a time was the director of ICE’s operations. He was a tin-pot dictator’s idea of a man of action, and he managed to bully his way through a series of disastrous incursions into American cities—on horseback, his officers swarmed a park packed with children in Los Angeles; they rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters into a residential apartment building in Chicago kicking in windows and terrorizing grandmothers; and most famously his ICE officers—masked as always—gunned down two American citizens in Minneapolis. All the while, the Napoleon-sized Bovino strutted around in a comically oversized, double breasted green greatcoat. I doubt he knows the names of the Field Marshals Hitler tasked with invading Russia (three “vons”– von Leeb, von Bock, and von Rundstedt) he was cosplaying, but he followed them, their Fuhrer, and his French inspiration into snowbound defeat.

It’s easy to blame Bovino— an Italian-American who preposterously claimed to be part Cherokee, though his family is listed on no tribal rolls—for his sadism, but you can also see him trying to perfect his backstrokes in the sea of shit that his boss, Kristi Noem mastered for the time she was in charge of the department of Homeland Security. Noem outdid Bovino on every level of narcissism, sadism, and incompetence. Noem picked up the sobriquet ICE Barbie because she posed in different costumes from cowgirl – complete with a Stetson hat—to tactical ICE gear while in full glam makeup. The indelible image of her will remain the one taken as she ostentatiously sported a gold Rolex watch in front of deportees caged in a notorious El Salvadorean prison. She and Bovino exemplified the combination of make-believe, costuming, and set-dressing that Trump introduced in his first term, and that has morphed into something indescribably cruel and dangerous in his second. What I can say, even though it will require a fair amount of exegesis, is that the kayfabe has become real.

Kayfabe comes to us from professional wrestling. While the rest of the world has Olympic grappling, the US has had an immensely popular entertainment that looks like a sport but that is really a series of male acrobatics in the service of soap operas for boys and the men who think like them. “Professional wrestling” is scripted combat featuring “faces” (pretty boy heroes) versus “heels” (villains, often identified with nefarious “others”). The scripts offer the excitement of conflict but with long story arcs, and reliable moments of catharsis (the reliability comes from the script, unlike the unpredictability of “real” sport). But to keep to the script no matter what the “reality” required a code of silence, an omerta shared between wrestlers, promoters and the friendly press, and accepted by the fans. The term for this is “kayfabe” and it was in use for almost 50 years, from the 1930s through the 1980s. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the fact or convention of presenting staged events, performances, and competitors’ rivalries as if they were authentic or spontaneous,” but the key aspect of all of this is the suspension of disbelief.

If there was one person who introduced kayfabe to the masses it was George Raymond Wagner, an itinerant wrestler from the dowdy Midwest circuit who ended up in Los Angeles in the 1950s at the very advent of television’s triumph, and transformed himself into the biggest star wrestling had ever seen. “Gorgeous George” was a flamboyant heel in peroxided hair, who sprayed the ring with a disinfectant he said was “Chanel #10” – “why be half safe”—before flinging trinkets to the crowd and strutting around the ring with the theatrical flair of a seasoned drag queen. Gorgeous George became one of the most famous figures on early television, literally driving the sale of home receivers, and thereby one of the most famous Americans of his time. Not entirely surprisingly, he died young of alcoholism, broke and mostly forgotten. Regardless of his personal failings, to honor his impact on the “sport,” in 2010 he was posthumously inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame.

Three years later, another peroxide blonde, makeup-wearing, German American heel was voted into that same hall of fame. Unlike Gorgeous George, though, the entertainer known as Donald J. Trump would also be elected to the office of president not once but twice. Trump was inducted into the “Celebrity” section (wing?) of the Hall of Fame because his casinos had hosted multiple matches, and he himself “wrestled” with the bombastic owner/promoter of the WWE, Vince McMahon in what was billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires.” So as not to lose this letter’s fecal focus, it should be noted—in the spirit of wrestling’s ever spiraling storylines— that the very same Vince Macmahon has since resigned from WWE after being accused of shitting into the mouth of a female junior executive during coerced, nonconsensual sex. It should be doubly noted that Vince’s wife, Linda Macmahon (they are separated at this point, but still somehow married), is Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, tasked for the past year with shutting down and dismantling the very agency she directs.

But back to kayfabe. There are times in a match when the “work” or entertainment is interrupted by something real, a wrestler hits too hard, gets too mad, or somehow goes against the script. That moment is known as the “shoot.” Last year, Southern California saw a disastrous shoot in the middle of the kayfabe when the mixed martial artist Raja Jackson was invited to participate in a match with professional wrestler Stuart Smith. Smith, who wrestles under the name “Syko Stu,” had crushed a beer can on Jackson’ head (just the sort of histrionics wrestling fans love) during a pre-match livestream earlier, but the MMA fighter took this as an actual act of disrespect. So, after climbing into the ring, Jackson took Syko Stu to the mat and punched him 23 times, rendering the wrestler unconscious. Smith was sent to the hospital and Jackson went to prison on assault charges. Just before the fight, Jackson bellowed “You just can’t hit a can on my face… This shit isn’t going to be scripted.”

The kayfabe of Trump’s first term in office was endless, there was the wall that wasn’t built, the massive tax cuts for the middle class that never happened, the promise that “Obamacare” would repealed and replaced by something better, the restoration of American factory jobs in a period that saw net losses, and on and on. It was a terrible four years, but the unreality of Trump’s first term cushioned the nation, and the world from the worst of its intentions.

Yet, the second term has seen the “shoot” triumphant, it’s not kayfabe anymore, the zone’s been flooded with a stream of atrocities from the mass roundups of “illegals,” to the construction of concentration camps with names like Alligator Alcatraz and the Speedway Slammer, to the kidnapping of foreign leaders and the wholesale and unexamined, much less explained bombings of other countries regardless of entirely logical outcomes. It really does seem like the Trump administration was surprised that Iran closed the Straight of Hormuz and choked off much of the world’s oil supply. Lately, pundits and comics in the US have been repeating the same tired observations that war is God’s way of teaching America geography and that in conflict, the enemy gets a vote. What they don’t seem to grasp is that the world won’t be forgetting any of this, no matter what happens in the 2026 midterms or the 2028 presidential election, Europeans now realize that there’s a hardcore of one third of US voters who actively support the end of the Atlantic alliance and loathe the very idea of NATO. 80 years of security, peace, and prosperity squandered with no grand strategy at all.

In a shocking-even-for-him interview with reporters from the New York Times, after American troops captured Venezuela’s President Maduro and brought him back in chains to the United States, Trump responded to a question about whether there was a limit to his powers: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Trump is truly an AI slop remix of Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a dark angel of history floating backwards in a fecal sea of his own making.

The past year has seen the Overton window of acceptable political opinion shift not just rightward, but literally open wide to accept the oceans of shit that now constitutes our political discourse. I’ve already mentioned Nick Fuentes, the half-Mexican, gay virgin incel leader of the Groyper movement who once dined at Mar a Lago with Ye (the artist born Kanye West) and Donald J. Trump (who had yet to be inaugurated for his second term). On his interminable show, “America First,” Fuentes blurs the boundaries between kayfabe and the shoot when he claims “having sex with women is gay,” that “Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part” to achieve a “paradise,” and that “Hitler was fucking cool.” His mostly male audience laps it up because they can always claim that they were in it for the lols, even as they wallow in the sewage.

Yet perhaps even more emblematic of the moment is Candace Owens, who has risen steadily up the ranks of the conservative commentariat over the last decade. At first, she played the convert grift, with a near instant shift from progressive to conservative views in 2017, claiming that as a Black woman she came to understand “that liberals were actually the racists.” She has grown her audience with an increasingly paranoid mix of old-fashioned antisemitism and an embrace of true crime narratives that garner her a massive female following. The assassination of the podcaster Charlie Kirk in the fall of 2025 offered her the opportunity to braid these two strains, claiming that not only was Israeli intelligence involved in his murder, but that his wife Erika Kirk was also somehow involved. Cherchez les Juifs! Cherchez le femme. Cherchez la vérité.

If antisemitism has long been the socialism of fools, then Owens’ paranoid style is the emerging hermeneutics of suspicious fools. One of her catch phrases is “We Don’t Know-Know, But We Know,” and she sells a fair amount of merch—tees, sweat shirts, mugs—emblazoned with this motto. You can trace this phrase’s origins to the start of the anti-vax moment, when figures like Playboy Playmate turned comic actress Jenny McCarthy claimed that far more than doctors or epidemiologists, “moms know” how to treat the illnesses their children face (she said her son’s autism resulted from a measles vaccination, but that she “cured” him with vitamins, supplements, and a detox from metals and candida). “We don’t know-know but we know” is the triumph of the gut over the intellect, of emotion over reason, of volume over value.

Rather than accept this dismal state of affairs, I’ll close with two anecdotes. The first from my own teaching here in Los Angeles. I had the students in my Design Research class do a remix of the classic Whole Earth Catalog from the 1960s. They were to create “tools for living” for the 21st century environments that they move through. It was both shocking and heartwarming to see how many of them described basic human interactions as their goals, from pausing their Spotify lists to listen to music live with friends, to making person-to-person connections with other students in their dorms, to ouching grass in multiplicities of ways. I felt like Vasari listening to a group of apprentices in Milanese and Venetian ateliers talking about rediscovering classical techniques in painting and casting from a millennium before. But my students were literally desperate for affordances that our generation just saw as living, not tools for living, a mere quarter of a century ago.

There are glimmerings that the tide may be turning. Here in LA, a young woman sued Meta and Google for her social media addiction. Mark Zuckerberg testified in defense of Facebook and Instagram but the jury awarded the plaintiff 3 million dollars in damages. We don’t know-know exactly what happened in the jury room, and how the tech billionaire’s comments were taken, but we do know that the Los Angeles Times deadpanned that “The percentage of adults who view [Zuckerberg] very favorably is on par with the share who believe the Earth is flat or that aliens live among us.”

Klaatu barada nikto–

Peter

 

The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here. 

Today’s tribulation is the first one not directly related to digital sovereignty. I wanted to investigate the most Colombian political topic: the peace process with the armed guerrilla since I discovered that the current Colombian presidente, Gustavo Petro, took part in one of them. I only knew it as a charismatic figure and a great orator on the international stage, where he hadn’t been afraid to stand up firmly against Trump, as well as a friend of Pepe Mujica—the former president of Uruguay and one of the few to rightfully enter the Olympus of leftist politicians who were simultaneously upright, wise, intelligent, and successful. The first leftist president in Colombia’s history, Petro even holds Italian origins and citizenship. A devoted fan of García Márquez, radicalized by the coup against Allende, he had joined the M-19 (19th of April Movement) at the age of seventeen—a leftist insurgent guerrilla movement formed to establish democracy in Colombia after the right wing had stolen the elections.

For instance, the story of the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice strikes me as one of those incredible South American tales: while the future president was in prison and tortured for days, his compañeros took twenty-five Supreme Court justices hostage, and the then-president Betancur decided to send in the army, resulting in the deaths of almost everyone; the justices themselves were killed by army bullets. After the 1990 peace agreement, when the M-19 became a political party, he became a senator, spent four years in exile to avoid being killed, and eventually served as the mayor of Bogotá.

In 2022, he ascended to the presidency with a bold socialist program that promised a great deal: land reform to end narco-landownership; an environmental policy halting all new oil exploration; infrastructure for water access and the development of a railway network; and investments in public education, research, and healthcare. Three years into his term, the results were mixed. Certainly, the fears of the conservatives hadn’t materialized, as the Colombian peso remained at a stable exchange rate with the dollar—the only variable that seemed to interest everyone I talked to.

My usual conservative Uber driver swore to me that Petro was a murderer, that the Colombian economy was going to ruin, and that he was the worst president in the history of the country. My progressive friends had voted for him and were not satisfied with the results achieved, though they recognized that the alternatives were worse. The personal driver of a friend’s aunts thought differently: he argued that despite having everyone against him, Petro had increased wages by more than twenty percent, made Colombia safer, boosted tourism significantly, and redistributed land to the poorest who had been previously dispossessed. Where he had not shone was on the front of agreements with other armed groups, having promised a “Total Peace” that had not yet been realized.

To navigate this labyrinth, I met Mateo in his native Manizales, in the eje Cafetero, at a local brewery. A former insider at the JEP and an NYU doctoral student I had known from my time as a visiting fellow, he offers a perspective born of both academic rigor and lived disillusionment.

***

Why did you become interested in the topic of transitional justice in Colombia and how did you end up working for the Transitional Justice Tribunal?

I have always been interested in the entire peace process. The peace process with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, lasted from 2012 to 2016, and almost the entire peace process unfolded during my time as a law student. Because of that, I also became an activist for the process: I used to take part in marches and to go to Congress during the implementation of the agreement. When the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (JEP), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, was created, I was hooked. The agreement was signed at the end of 2016, but the tribunal was already included within the agreements. It began to be implemented and the tribunal was created in early 2017. When I finished my classes and completed my degree, I was working as an assistant for a professor. He started working at this tribunal and called me. That was the doorway in, but I had been looking for a way to get in all year because I dreamed of working there.

What was the experience like from the inside?

The experience was very good in the sense that I learned a lot, not only about law but also about life. I learned what it’s like to work in a public entity, how to deal with general labor issues, and workplace coexistence. I was part of a project that was, and is, very important for the country: a tribunal that processes the conflicts of the armed conflict. Working on cases as delicate as extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, and forced disappearances.

But I also realized how difficult it is, first, to create an entity from scratch, and second, to be part of an entity that deals with these types of matters, because there are also many internal tensions. The judges each have their own agenda and their own way of seeing the world. Consequently, the JEP has had many problems in the sense that it has to make strategic decisions very quickly. It only has a 15-year mandate; it ends in 2032, but it has very large responsibilities. They have to create restorative sanctions that are not prison, but rather developing projects—for example, building roads or schools—as a form of restoration for crimes against humanity and war crimes. This requires full coordination with state entities and securing resources and money to create and implement those programs. And the implementation has been very difficult, partly because the governments—both Petro’s current government and Duque’s previous government—did not cooperate with the JEP.

I found that there was a bit of a challenge with humility when it came to reaching agreements and working efficiently within the tribunal. Having been part of the JEP and working in the Executive Secretariat, which helps coordinate the judges and the tribunal’s offices, I experienced this firsthand. It was quite complex because everyone seemed to want to run their own show. This situation led to some disillusionment for me, as I discovered that many respected academics and judges I had looked up to—people from the Constitutional Court and various universities—are just like everyone else. They have their own egos and sometimes don’t meet the expectations we had hoped for.

For me, that has always been a bit of an internal conflict because I continue to study things about the JEP from an academic perspective, but I want to remain critical. However, at the same time, I have to hold back because being overly critical of the JEP can provide tools for those who oppose peace and seek total impunity—especially those aiming for impunity for the military. This could give them ammunition to help a far-right government come to power this year and attempt to pass a reform to eliminate the JEP, which is unlikely but still a potential risk.

The Colombian case of a guerrilla group that became institutionalized after many years is unique. It was one of the oldest guerrillas in the world: 50 years. How was such a guerrilla group possible?

The origin of the guerrilla problem is that it began, in principle, as a land issue. Later, they adopted communist ideology, and they started a guerrilla movement. It was no longer about defending their territory, but about taking power. Then in the nineties, drug trafficking arrived, and that poured a lot of gasoline on the guerrilla: access to resources, technology, and weapons. And with that, they were able to strengthen themselves. In 1998, there was a peace process called the Caguán process. There was a president, Andrés Pastrana, a conservative, who was elected under the banner of conducting a peace process. But his process was to open up almost an entire department to the guerrilla. It was called the “clearance zone” (zona de despeje). He pulled the army out of there and told the guerrilla to do whatever they wanted—kidnap, kill—while they conducted a peace process in that area. So, the entire guerrilla was concentrated there, but that also served as an engine for them to strengthen themselves.

And I think the conflict in Colombia became fractured in the sense that at some point—I would say in the early 2000s—the war wasn’t felt as strongly in the cities, but it was felt more in the countryside. Life went on in the cities. If you talk to me about the guerrilla in Manizales, it makes no sense. But in the villages, it does. When I visited my mother’s village, which is two hours from here—it’s called Marulanda, actually it is a smaller municipality called Montebonito—I remember that sometimes at Christmas people would come warning that the guerrilla had burned a bus at the entrance of the village. The guerrilla was very close to that, but it wasn’t felt in Manizales; it wasn’t there. At one point in Bogotá, they might have kidnapped people entering the city; but the point is that in the cities, the war wasn’t felt with such force.

This created a dynamic where the conflict continued and the governments fought the guerrilla in the countryside, but for people in the cities it didn’t generate much impact. I think that made it easier for the conflict to continue, because for many—and especially for those who make the important decisions in the country, those who have power—the war wasn’t something truly relevant. For some, it even yielded benefits, because presidential elections were always about whether to negotiate or go to war. That was the big debate. It was always like that until Petro’s election. That was the first one where the peace process and the agreement with the guerrillas weren’t the center of the discussion, because even in Duque’s election, although there was already a peace process, the discussion was about implementation. Duque arrived with a critical agenda; they were the ones who always opposed the peace process. People knew that with Duque, the process was going to have a negative impact on implementation, and that was a large part of the discussion.

There is a book by Carlos Pizarro León Gómez—the brother, in fact, of the M-19 commander who later became a presidential candidate and was killed. He wrote this book on the history of peace processes, and it hasn’t just been with the FARC; most guerrillas have used negotiation processes to strengthen themselves. They say they want peace, that they want to negotiate, but in reality, they negotiate as a mechanism to be left alone, to have a ceasefire, and to grow stronger. In fact, that is what is happening today with the peace processes Petro is conducting with FARC dissidents. They are strengthening. During these four years, the dissidents have grown stronger because he arrived and opened a process he called “Total Peace.” He said: I am going to negotiate with all the remaining armed actors. None of the processes he opened has turned out well, and it is already documented that it has served to strengthen them.

But how is it possible that a guerrilla that calls itself communist harms the people as a war strategy? 

It’s a total contradiction. They were talking to a country that didn’t exist. They thought people really believed they were saviors, but nobody believed that. Nobody, really. These were guys who committed indiscriminate massacres, who kidnapped. In fact, several of the FARC commanders who were part of the last national command, who later entered politics with the peace agreement, have said that by listening to victims who went to Havana to speak at the process, they understood that the country they had in their heads didn’t exist. That is also very well reflected in the electoral results of the party they created afterward, which is completely irrelevant.

And what is the role of the military and paramilitary groups in all of this? 

The guerrillas had grown significantly stronger following the failure of Pastrana’s peace process, which had granted them an entire department as a demilitarized zone. In the 2002 election, a man emerged who had served as a senator and Governor of Antioquia, acting as a sort of dissident within the Liberal Party before eventually resigning from it. While he was a prominent figure in his home region, he wasn’t well known nationally. His name was Álvaro Uribe, and he ran as a political outsider on a platform of total confrontation: we must fight, we must bolster the military, and we must defeat the guerrillas. His popularity skyrocketed almost overnight, leading to an unprecedented first-round victory. Upon becoming president, he launched his ‘Democratic Security’ policy.

This strategy focused on modernizing the military through increased resources, intelligence sharing, and close cooperation – primarily with the United States. His goal was to establish territorial control through sheer force, creating the stability necessary to attract foreign investment. While he funneled massive funding into the armed forces, he also reshaped military doctrine—the guidelines for how war is waged in Colombia. As part of this policy, he introduced performance incentives to motivate troops. These rewards, which included cash bonuses and extra vacation time for battalions that achieved a high number of combat kills, fostered the creation of illegal internal structures within the army.

It sounds like the Soviet Union, with impossible goals and everyone lying to achieve them.

Exactly. For example, one of the most paradigmatic cases: near Bogotá, there is a municipality almost integrated into the city, like Villa María is attached to Manizales. This municipality is called Soacha. What did they do? There were military personnel, and also civilians who collaborated with them, looked for young men—either with mental health issues, addiction problems, or without work—and offered them a job opportunity in eastern Colombia, in a region called Catatumbo, very close to Venezuela. They took them away, recruiting them to work: “we are going to work in the fields, a good job opportunity.” They arrived there in Catatumbo, made them dress in camouflage clothing, killed them, and made them appear as guerrillas killed in combat. 

Those are the well-known falsos positivos, false positives, one of the darkest cases of the Colombian state, a practice repeated in different military units throughout the country. The JEP has documented at least 6,402 extrajudicial executions, but I understand that they are now going to reach about 10,000. About this, there is a whole debate. Some people say: no, this wasn’t a policy of the Uribe government; these were ‘rotten apples’ within the army. But I believe that in any decent country, if this happens to a president during his government, even if he didn’t directly order them, he is responsible for creating a system of perverse incentives.

To meet those targets, many army units began operating alongside paramilitary groups that had supposedly already demobilized. The paramilitary phenomenon in Colombia had grown dramatically throughout the nineties and early 2000s, eventually prompting Uribe to negotiate their demobilization as well. Unlike the guerrillas, paramilitaries were right-wing armed groups that positioned themselves as fighting against the FARC. They originated partly as private security forces, some collaborating openly with the army, others acting independently. Over time, they became deeply entangled in drug trafficking and were responsible for some of the conflict’s worst atrocities: massacres, forced disappearances, and the systematic killing of anyone even remotely suspected of guerrilla sympathies, including civilians.

They underwent their own peace process in 2005, which gave rise to a separate transitional tribunal called ‘Justice and Peace’—the subject of my own undergraduate thesis, and the reason I first became drawn to these issues. In practice, the lines between the army and the paramilitaries were often blurred. They operated jointly, and in some cases paramilitaries would kidnap civilians and hand them over to military units to be registered as guerrillas killed in combat. In other cases, they killed actual guerrillas and delivered the bodies to the army for the same purpose. Either way, these still constitute false positives: they were not the result of lawful military operations, but of actions carried out by illegal armed groups. A paramilitary organization does not become legitimate simply because it targets the guerrilla. It remains outside the law. There is no such thing as justice by one’s own hand.

Ultimately, a perverse system of incentives was established. What I have never been able to grasp is how Uribe remains the head of his party, the Democratic Center, without ever assuming even a shred of political responsibility for what transpired. He is no longer in the Senate; he resigned after a criminal investigation was launched against him. In Colombia, sitting senators are investigated and prosecuted by the Supreme Court of Justice, so by resigning, he found a strategic exit: his case was transferred to the Attorney General’s Office, where the process has been bogged down for years. Yet, he continues to run for office and remains the undisputed leader and owner of his political movement.

It seems incredible to me that he is still considered a legitimate political actor. Even if we concede that he bears no direct criminal responsibility for the false positives —since proving he gave a direct order to kill civilians is nearly impossible, and he likely never did—there is a matter of basic political decency. How could this happen under your watch for eight years? You were one of the most powerful presidents in our history. This went on for two full terms, and you did nothing to truly confront it. There should be some sense of shame.

One of the first people to blow the whistle on these extrajudicial executions was Philip Alston, now a professor at NYU. He was the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. He was among the first to denounce what was happening in Colombia, and he once told us in class that he confronted Uribe about it directly in Bogotá. Yet, there is still no willingness to admit that a grave error occurred. Instead, they double down, claiming the JEP is merely a tool to prove that anyone accusing the Uribe government is a FARC sympathizer. To me, that narrative is entirely fictitious.

This is why I feel such a deep internal conflict. I understand the argument that someone like María Corina Machado has to dance with the devil and align with figures like Trump as the only hope to oust Maduro. But she has praised U.S. operations in the Caribbean—where they are shooting at boats—as legitimate protection against drug trafficking. Those are extrajudicial executions. They are killing people without any semblance of due process. Regardless of whether those targeted are criminals, they are being executed. I simply don’t understand how, after everything we have suffered in Colombia, people can still justify such actions.

How do we get to the creation of the tribunal?

In 2010, Juan Manuel Santos was elected president. He had served as Uribe’s Minister of Defense, and when Uribe was barred from seeking a third term, Santos ran and won under Uribe’s banner—a platform of total war against the FARC. However, in what many saw as a betrayal of that political project, Santos pivoted and announced: ‘I am going to negotiate.’ Following six months of secret talks in Cuba, the government announced the public phase of the peace process in 2011 from Oslo, Norway. It was a stunning moment; overnight, FARC commanders who had been hiding in the jungle appeared in Oslo alongside a government delegation to announce a formal dialogue table.

The negotiations moved to Havana, Cuba. What was supposed to take six months stretched into five years. By the 2014 election, Santos was no longer running on Uribe’s war platform, but on a platform of peace. Many leftist groups that had originally opposed him felt compelled to support his reelection, as the survival of the peace process depended on it. He won, and in 2015, he passed a constitutional reform to prohibit future presidential reelections—conveniently after securing his own, but a relief nonetheless, as it prevented a pro-Uribe candidate from taking power and dismantling the talks.

The final 2016 agreement is a massive, 350-page public policy document built on five pillars: rural reform to address land distribution; a strategy to combat the drug trade that had funded the FARC since the nineties; concrete measures for the transition from war to politics; and a central focus on victims through a system of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition.This system established a Truth Commission, a Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons, and the JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace). 

What is the JEP and what are its tasks?

The JEP is a tribunal with the authority to judge war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all sides—the military, the police, and the FARC—up until the 2016 cutoff. It also allows for the voluntary submission of civilians. The core trade-off of the JEP is that perpetrators avoid prison if they provide the full truth, acknowledge their responsibility, and offer reparations to victims. These reparations are often symbolic or restorative rather than monetary; for instance, military personnel convicted of killing members of indigenous communities on the Caribbean coast was ordered to build a ‘harmonization center’ or cultural house for those communities.

However, putting this into practice has proven incredibly difficult. Since 2011, the Victims’ Law has already provided a framework for financial compensation, so the JEP focuses on restorative projects. But who pays for them? The convicted soldiers don’t have the money, and the JEP has no independent budget for construction. Implementation depends entirely on the coordination of state entities—the Ministries of Culture, Environment, or the Interior—but that coordination has been non-existent under both the previous and current administrations.

This leaves the JEP in a vacuum. There is a growing disconnection from reality; for example, the tribunal might order a housing program for victims, but such programs already exist under the Victims’ Law. The JEP shouldn’t be duplicating existing state functions. The real danger is that if these sentences remain merely ‘on paper’ due to a lack of resources, the International Criminal Court (ICC) could intervene. The ICC has currently suspended its case against Colombia because the JEP is active, but if they decide these restorative sanctions are ‘fictitious’—that we are letting war criminals off without real punishment—they could reopen their investigation. This would destroy the legal security promised to both soldiers and guerrillas and undermine the entire peace process. For now, the JEP has managed this risk by maintaining close ties with the ICC and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but the future remains uncertain.

What has worked so far, and what do the Colombian people think of this? How can Colombia get out of this situation?

It is a profound dilemma. For decades, the choice was between total war and allowing the guerrillas to strengthen during failed talks. With the FARC, however, the peace process finally worked because several factors aligned. Santos’s strategy was unique: ‘We continue the war while we negotiate.’ This meant that even as delegations met in Havana, the fighting continued on the ground. In fact, during the negotiations, the military killed the top commander of the FARC. His successor chose to stay at the table because the ground rule from the start was that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.’ This prevented the guerrillas from using the talks as a breather to regroup, as they had in the past.

Today, however, the Colombian public is deeply skeptical of peace processes. This is largely due to the perceived ineffectiveness of President Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ initiative over the last three and a half years. People are simply not open to the idea right now. To be fair, they weren’t particularly open to it when Santos started either; it took five years of grueling work to convince society of its importance. I remember being in high school when it began, and in my ignorance, I thought it was madness to negotiate with the FARC. I didn’t believe they had any real will for peace.

But my perspective changed as I understood the stark divide between the city and the countryside. In the cities, people often say, ‘No, we must crush them.’ But in the rural areas, the sentiment is often the opposite: ‘We need this to end.’ Rural families are the ones whose children are kidnapped and forcibly recruited, and they are the ones trapped in the middle. In many villages, the conflict is a daily nightmare of impossible choices. If a soldier asks a farmer for a glass of water and a guerrilla sees it, that farmer might be killed or displaced the next day. If the farmer gives food to a guerrilla, the army or paramilitaries might arrive and brand them a collaborator. That is how the war was actually lived.

While the FARC did carry out operations and bombings in cities like Bogotá, it was never comparable to the rural experience. This divide was laid bare in the 2016 plebiscite. When the first version of the agreement was put to a vote on October 2nd, the ‘No’ side won by a narrow margin. For those of us who supported the process, it was a scandal; I was devastated for days. It seemed unthinkable to vote ‘No’ to peace.

The defeat was partly due to the complexity of the 350-page document and a massive disinformation campaign by the opposition. They spread absurd claims, like the idea that the agreement contained ‘gender ideology’ or even a ‘homosexualizing ray.’ Yet, the statistics told the real story: the regions most affected by the violence voted overwhelmingly for ‘Yes,’ while the cities voted ‘No.’ The bitter irony was clear: those who didn’t live the conflict were the ones voting to continue it. Eventually, the government renegotiated the deal to address some of the ‘No’ camp’s concerns and, in a strategic maneuver, bypassed a second plebiscite by having Congress approve the final version in November 2016.

So is the peace agreement still an important document?

I believe that at some point it stops being important because of the FARC, because the FARC became an irrelevant political actor. But the peace agreement is designed in such a way that it seeks to address the roots of the conflict. So, what are the roots of the conflict? The land issue—land management, land distribution. We don’t have a clear registry of who owns the land in Colombia. That could help a lot. 

There is also the issue of drugs and the issue of political participation—not necessarily the political participation of the FARC, but a broader political participation, because due to the conflict itself, leftist movements in Colombia were very overshadowed: every leftist movement was automatically associated with the guerrilla. So, several mechanisms were created to try to open more spaces for participation. The peace agreement includes an Opposition Law that was issued and has some guarantees. For example, things as simple as parties having to officially declare themselves as government, independent, or opposition, and those in opposition having a seat on the board of Congress. That is important because it helps define the order of debates and the projects they will discuss. These are small things, but I believe that in that sense, the peace agreement can have an impact far beyond whether the FARC, or the party they were reduced to, seems relevant or not.

But now there is a president who was in the guerrilla.

He was in a guerrilla, but not that guerrilla: he was in the M-19. The M-19, or 19th of April Movement, was originally born out of a claim of electoral fraud in the 1970 presidential elections. Unlike the rural, peasant-based FARC, the M-19 was largely an urban, nationalist, and intellectual movement that used ‘armed propaganda’ and spectacular symbolic acts to capture public attention. Their greatest achievement was not a military victory, but their successful transition to civilian life, which paved the way for the 1991 Constitution.

The M-19 demobilized in the early nineties, transitioned into a political party, and played a foundational role in the 1991 Constituent Assembly. It is a ‘better’ guerrilla compared to the FARC. While they were responsible for high-profile, bloody events—most notably the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice and the 1980 takeover of the Dominican Republic embassy—they were never defined by the same systematic, long-term atrocities, such as mass kidnappings or drug-funded territorial control, that characterized the FARC. Their political impact was so significant that, after laying down their arms, their party won nearly a third of the seats in the assembly tasked with rewriting the nation’s charter.

Finally, how do you see the future of the JEP and the peace agreement?

That is a difficult question. I believe the future will depend largely on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. We initially had high hopes for Petro; while he was never the most vocal defender of the 2016 peace agreement, he certainly wasn’t a critic of it. However, an issue of egos seems to have emerged. Because Petro wasn’t directly involved in the 2016 negotiations, he has never truly embraced the agreement as his own. Upon taking office, he downsized the specialized unit responsible for its implementation, failing to give it the priority it deserves.

It appears he wanted to prioritize his own ‘Total Peace’ initiative, perhaps to overshadow Santos’s legacy. In a particularly jarring move, he sent his first foreign minister to the UN Security Council to speak disparagingly of the JEP, claiming it was ineffective and suggesting that a new tribunal should be created. This caused a major rift at the UN, as the Security Council had been a staunch supporter of the JEP from the beginning. They couldn’t understand why the Colombian government itself was suddenly undermining the tribunal’s work without any real foundation.

 

Ultimately, the path forward is uncertain. If someone like Iván Cepeda—a senator from Petro’s party—were to become president, there might be renewed support for the 2016 process, as he was directly involved as a facilitator during the negotiations. But if the right-wing opposition wins the next election, I see the future of the peace agreement becoming very complicated

Because they don’t want peace?

I don’t know if they don’t want peace, but they don’t want the peace agreement. That’s a different thing.

Mediamakers in de Platformsamenleving

Co-CB onderzoek uitgegeven door HvA Campus Creators publishing en INC

Titel: Mediamakers in de platformsamenleving
Redactie: Annamarijn Bos, Anne Dijkstra, Vera Tomassen
Voorwoord: Geert Lovink
Met teksten van: Sophie van Abeelen, Capucine Bandeville, Bente Borgman, Lotte Endel, Assia El Hannaoui, Oscar van Haren, Jens Hartel, Aimee Heemskerk, Chayenne van der Heidt, Luca ten Hoor, Liv Maas, Layla El Marzouki, Bram Schot, Aileen Suijkerland, Roman Woodall

Deze bundel geeft de lezer de ruimte om kritisch en zorgvuldig na te denken over de platformsamenleving. Studenten van Communicatie en Creative Business, aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam, hebben zich in de afgelopen jaren gebogen over de platformen van nu: van BeReal tot Pinterest, van UberEats tot Meta’s WhatsApp. Wat voor effecten hebben deze platformen op de samenleving? Hou houden we de controle? En, wat geven we mee aan de maatschappij en de platformen om veiligheid te waarborgen?

De docenten en studenten van de opleidingen Communicatie en Creative Business geven je een kijkje in deze vragen, in samenwerking met de HvA Campus Creators Publishing. Deze bundel geeft vorm de ruimte om een verlengde te worden van de inhoud, geeft de tekst een verantwoordelijkheid: een kritisch oog voor de mediamaker van nu én van de toekomst.

Illustraties, redactie, omslag en ontwerp: Annamarijn Bos, Anne Dijkstra, Vera Tomassen

Gepubliceerd door de HvA Campus Creators Publishing, Amsterdam, 2026. In samenwerking met het Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur.

ISBN: 9789083672