Colonel (r) John Marulanda and Iván Duque in 2018.RR.SS
Retired Colonel John Marulanda said this week a dangerous phrase that strangely ended up helping to measure, like a thermometer, what Colombian public opinion thinks of the possibility of a possible coup d'état. His anti-democratic statement on W Radio on May 11 gradually revealed who agreed with him, and who did not. The tall, 71-year-old man with a black mustache, born in the department of Caldas, was unknown to most Colombians, and went from anonymity to disrepute in a few hours after his interview on Thursday. The editor of the network, Juan Pablo Calvás, sought him out for his opinion on the demonstration of hundreds of retired soldiers in the Plaza de Bolívar the day before, and Marulanda began by saying that the ultimate goal was "to try to do the best to defenestrate a guy who was a guerrilla." He later regretted what he had said, but his phrase had already reached thousands, including the president.
Gustavo Petro immediately raised the alarm of a possible coup d'état and several of his allies, who fear saber-rattling since he won the presidency, came out to defend him. But not only his allies, but also several of his most active critics such as Bruce Mac Master, president of the main business guild, the National Association of Businessmen of Colombia (ANDI); opposition politicians, such as his former rival in the presidential campaign Federico Gutiérrez; or retired members of the security forces who called for the protest, such as Colonel Julio César Prieto Rivera. "We do not share the statements issued today by Colonel John Marulanda," the latter said in a video. Even the Attorney General's Office, headed by an attorney general who has clashed with Petro recently to the point of calling him a "dictator," said it would investigate whether Marulanda is behind any conspiracy. The retired colonel has not spoken to the media since his famous phrase and the announcement of the Prosecutor's Office, and EL PAÍS did not get a response when it sought him out for an interview.
Marulanda is not just any citizen saying crazy things in the media, and his life story explains the reaction to his phrase: until the end of March he was president of the Association of Retired Officers of the Military Forces of Colombia (Acore), a group with the capacity to influence that brings together retirees, pensioners and veterans of the Army on a national scale. and also a member of a board of retiree associations called the Purple Force. The latter brings together around 70 small organisations and aspires to become a political party. Although they have clarified that they are not an arm of the Uribista Democratic Center party, nor of any other right-wing party, it is clear that they are ideologically aligned. Marulanda himself was a Senate candidate for the Democratic Center in 2018, when he burned with 6,000 votes.
Marulanda's quick phrase did not reveal only his anti-democratic mood. It does not refer to the former president as a former senator (he was in the Senate between 2002 and 2018, with an interruption to be a presidential candidate for mayor of Bogotá) or a former mayor, but as a guerrilla insurgent, as does the most extreme right in the country. Four years ago he referred to Petro as a "former Marxist terrorist," and a year ago, when Petro was the most likely candidate for the presidency, he called him a "former narco-terrorist." Only in some of his most recent op-eds has he begun to call Petro for his position: president.
The constitution prohibits active military personnel from intervening in politics, but retired military officers can, and Marulanda has not missed the opportunity to spread opinions that he could not before. He writes often against the authoritarian leftist governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela, and has not hidden his opposition to almost all the decisions of the current president: the energy transition, total peace, appointments to land administration positions, foreign policy. He also supported former President Iván Duque in his columns; has said that the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) was created by the secretary of the Spanish Communist Party; and has lamented the loneliness in which former Argentine dictator Rafael Videla died, who, he says, was encouraged to "straighten out" his country.
According to his biographical page in Acore, Marulanda was a ground commander, paratrooper, member of the urban counterguerrilla, spearman, diver and helicopter pilot. In the nineties he was founder of the School of Civil-Military Relations and the first commander of the 25th Army aviation brigade. In addition, he has a degree in Philosophy and History from the Universidad Santo Tomás, and a lawyer from the Universidad La Gran Colombia, with a master's degree in political studies from the Universidad Javeriana. He writes followed by military intelligence, a sector in which he also worked. "Although Groucho Marx ruled that military intelligence was a 'contradiction of terms,' the reality is that without it no state would resist," he said in a 2018 column.
When Marulanda won the vote to be in the presidency in Acore, in March 2021, it was news of change for the institution: it was the second time in more than 60 years of history that the position was occupied by a retired colonel, instead of a general or admiral. From the beginning he shared his opinions against the left, but he also shared unfounded statements: for example, the same month of his appointment, he told La W Radio that members of the Comunes party, which formed the former members of the FARC guerrillas, were "the political arm" of the dissident alias Iván Márquez.
Colonel Marulanda has a dozen publications on his ideological line, and two books: Terrorism in Colombia. A useless crime? and Jihad in Latin America — one of its concerns is the presence of Hezbollah on the continent. But perhaps the most recurrent theme in his writings is his concern that the opinion of retired military officers not be taken into account, whom he describes almost as a group discriminated against by the civilian branch of the Executive.
"Military and retired police officers, veterans, are still waiting for the opportunity to contribute their invaluable experience," he wrote in 2021. Especially since the Government of Juan Manuel Santos considers that the civilian power has weakened the Military Forces and public security. "The constitutional obligation of the military and police command is to obey the civilian power, the ruler of the day, but its primary institutional duty is to maintain the unity and fighting spirit of its forces," he wrote at the end of the Santos government. In another column he explained his displeasure with the fact that the Constitution allows civilians to be appointed to head the Ministry of Defense when many of them do not have "greater knowledge of military affairs."
Marulanda has spent years being interviewed in different national media and publishing columns in right-wing pages, but only until he said the word "defenestrar" did the country hear him. Not to accompany him, at least mostly. The only major public figure who seems to be firmly on his side, for now, is Uribista Senator María Fernanda Cabal, who has said that Marulanda's freedom of expression must be respected and that he did not speak of a coup d'état because the Royal Spanish Academy defines "defenestrar" as "dismissing or expelling from office." But defenestrating means, originally, "throwing someone out of a window." In the context of the interview the definition is different.
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