Last month, my boyfriend and I went on a little getaway to celebrate our anniversary. On the way out of town we saw a large banner on the highway that grabbed our attention in very different ways.
The banner featured a picture of Álvaro Uribe Vélez—Colombia’s president from 2002 to 2010—alongside the phrase: “Si hay problemas, llamen al cucho” (If there is trouble, call the cucho). My boyfriend burst out laughing, because to him the message on the banner seemed to be a kind of crude reference to Uribe’s recent involvement in easing the harsh measures set for Colombia in Trump’s tariff wars. (In Colombia, cucho/a is a vernacular way of saying father/mother. The word has indigenous origins, but it’s now associated with lower class slang.)
I, on the other hand, froze for a moment, then grew serious, even angry at him for laughing, because it seemed to refer to something else that happened recently in Medellín: the confirmation of a mass grave dating back to the time of Uribe’s presidency, when the country was torn apart by civil conflict and the government’s heavy-handed security policy.
If you are in Colombia and google “La Escombrera”, you will quickly learn that it is a landfill located in Comuna 13, Medellín, long rumoured to also be a mass grave linked to the Uribe-era ‘war on terror’. But it took victims’ families more than twenty years to have their suspicions officially confirmed. Twenty years of asking. Twenty years of waiting.
In the early 2000s, Medellín was ravaged by urban guerrillas and paramilitary groups. Among the many crimes committed during this period, forced disappearances were one of the cruellest. They stole peace from whole families and communities, uncertain what had happened to their loved ones. Out of this pain grew a women’s movement—the Organización Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad—demanding the authorities investigate La Escombrera as the possible last resting place of their vanished family members. They turned to officials, filed complaints, reported the alleged removals. Year after year: no response.
Finally, on July 26, 2024, the Unit for the Search of Missing Persons officially began to look into the site. On December 18, the first human remains were uncovered. As I write this, four bodies have been recovered and identified as victims from the early 2000s. Uribe is closely linked to this dark chapter in the city’s history through Operación Orión, a sweeping military intervention launched in Comuna 13 in 2002 to clear out illegal groups controlling the area. Evidence has surfaced suggesting the army colluded with paramilitary forces during the operation, with little regard for who got caught up in the crossfire.
After the discovery of the bodies, many urban artists began creating murals with a simple message: “Las cuchas tenían razón” (The cuchas were right), in reference to the women’s campaign of many years to get the place investigated. This phrase has resonated deeply, not only in Medellín but across the country and even abroad. Murals bearing these words have appeared in Barcelona, London and Berlin.
But back home, the murals have sparked another kind of conflict. Many have been erased, igniting a struggle over public walls and who gets to use them to tell history. The original mural was removed by the mayor’s office the day after it was painted. The artists returned and repainted it—only for it to be erased again. As I write this, a third version of the mural still stands.
One frequent element of these murals is Uribe’s face, accompanied by the phrase: “Yo di la orden” (I gave the order). This detail is central to understand what happened next—the emergence of flyers and banners across the country bearing the pro-Uribe phrase: “If there is trouble, call the cucho”. The design of these flyers and banners clearly borrows from graffiti aesthetics, both in the stylized image of Uribe’s face and in the typeface used. Not to mention the evident pun in the word cucho, mirroring the cuchas of the original mural.
The use of different mediums to get their message across is an apt metaphor for how Left and Right operate in Colombia. The Left’s means of expression tend to be anti-establishment, like urban art itself—large-scale and provocative. The right uses more seemingly ‘official’ (and certainly more expensive) ways of communicating.
Among my friends, the conversation has shifted to whether this visual clash is pulling attention away from what truly matters: the confirmation of the mass grave. Within the urban art community, discussions have veered towards the role of art in public space. While important, these aesthetic debates risk sidelining the event they were meant to highlight.
Then again, is it that simple? I learned about La Escombrera from my friend’s Instagram stories, documenting their work on the murals. My boyfriend learned about it through my reaction to what, for him, was just a funny political banner. My mom learned about it by tagging along as I photographed the pieces around the city. And honestly, I doubt the story would be half as compelling if it only recounted the findings in a suddenly multifaceted landfill.
Medellín is a city in northern Colombia midway between the Caribbean and the Pacific. It’s named after the Spanish birthplace of one of the conquistadors who arrived in what is now Colombia in the sixteenth century, destroying the pre-Columbian civilisations as they did. At different times since the city has been associated with gold, coffee, cocaine—now, amongst many other things, it’s textiles. Medellín the country’s second most populous city.
