Colombia's far-right president Abelardo De La Espriella has sparked widespread condemnation after posting a video on social media showing him striding past rows of white body bags, which he said contained the remains of 23 "neutralised" guerrillas killed in a military operation in the Colombian Amazon. Dressed in military green and accompanied by armed forces officials, De La Espriella framed the footage — set to a stirring cinematic score — as proof that he was delivering on his campaign promise of "all-out war" against illegal armed groups. "I did not come to play nice with murderers, extortioners and child recruiters. I came to defeat them," he wrote, closing with the words "Long live Christ the king!"

The operation targeted a dissident rebel faction — one of several armed groups that have continued operating across parts of Colombia despite a 2016 peace agreement that ended a 50-year conflict between the government and the country's largest Marxist guerrilla organisation, the FARC. De La Espriella, who took office last month, described the strike as the most successful military operation in Colombia in 12 years, adding that 23 people were killed, six captured, and that a recruited child had been rescued. Critics noted that the identities of those killed had not been released and that the operation had not yet undergone the legally required post-action investigations.

The backlash was swift and came from multiple directions. Leftwing lawmaker Daniel Monroy accused the president of "necropolitics," calling the video "one of the most bizarre things we've seen." Former president Gustavo Petro wrote that the display amounted to "turning death into a trophy — something only soulless people can do." Human rights experts warned the footage erased legal distinctions between combatants and civilians and echoed one of the darkest chapters in Colombia's recent history: the so-called "false positives" scandal of the early 2000s, in which soldiers killed nearly 8,000 civilians and presented them as guerrilla fighters to inflate body counts. "This really marks a change and a return to the past," said Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group.

The video is also being read as part of a broader regional political trend. Leaders across the Americas — from El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, who has built a global brand around footage of his mega-prison, to Donald Trump, who has publicised military strikes on alleged drug boats — have increasingly used visceral imagery of state force as political performance. Analysts say De La Espriella, who is backed by Trump, is drawing from the same playbook. "It's an attempt to excite people not just with homicide rate statistics, but with the images themselves — in an almost cartoonish, wrestling-style way, to appeal to the most primitive instincts of the public," said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America. For communities in Colombia that have lived through decades of violence from both armed groups and the state, researchers say the images send a double message: that the government can defeat criminals, but also that a new era of mass violence may be beginning.