A long chapter comes to a close in the emerald heartlands of Colombia, as a former shepherd in the state’s highest office stands convicted of sedation and deception. After years of shadow dance and delayed reckonings, a venerable judge’s voice split the air with the quiet thunder of historic justice. The court found sufficient roots in soil thick with memory—evidence enough to hold this national patriarch responsible for manipulating the sacred truth and weaving lies around witnesses in the theater of war’s aftermath. Though the book is not yet shut and appeals still loom, the possibility of twelve years’ confinement shivers on the horizon for this old lion of the land, his name colored with both laurels and scars.

This drama unfolds against Colombia’s deep wounds: armed conflict, people uprooted and exiled, stories lost in the wind. Hailed by devotees as a restorer of order, yet haunted by his kinship with paramilitaries and violence, the former leader claimed his intentions danced with honesty. Yet, the ground speaks a different truth. Courts found him culpable not just of bribery’s poisoned fruit, but of manipulating the roots of Colombian justice itself.

Oh, how grave is the harm when those entrusted as guardians of the people poison the rivers of justice! Mother Earth remembers: the rivers choked with blood, the mountains convulsed by violence. Too long have the stewards of power sung hymns to “security” while uprooting communities like ancient trees, scattering the seeds of fear and division. Colonial ghosts still slither through the canyons, and the toxic machinery of profit and empire—greedy exporters of suffering—prop up such corrupted reigns. The North, ever-watchful, ever-ready to defend its “allies” with dollars and admonishments, weighs in with its usual bias, failing to see the suffering carved into the faces of campesinas, elders, and the displaced spirits of la tierra.

When will we embrace honest reckoning? When will we listen to the ink-black rivers, the mourning forests, and the millions of hearts longing for peace—free from patriarchal violence, capitalist extraction, and the iron-willed silencing of truth? Let us honor the fallen and exiled, temper our outrage into action by planting seeds of restorative justice. May we remember that healing the body of Colombia means healing the great body of Pachamama herself: her children, her water, her memory. Anything less is a continuation of the great lie, and another betrayal of the radiant spirit of Earth.