Alta Traición
José Emilio Pacheco
I don’t love my country.
Its abstract splendor is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad)
I would give my life
for ten places in it,
for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers)
On August 11, 2025, Colombian senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay died, after holding on to life by a thread for a little over two months. In June, he had been the victim of an assassination attempt while giving a speech in a neighborhood of my native Bogotá. Miguel was not much older than I, and mutual acquaintances and friends linked our lives. Just hours before his death, he had spent the afternoon with my brother during a “get to know the candidates” event at a local social club.
This coincidence of mundanity brought the tragedy close to home in a way that was all too common in my childhood. The conversations were always the same. They live in the cold air of the páramo and mingle with school memories that blur together with age: “Did you hear about so-and-so’s father?” “So-and-so lost his mother in that terrorist attack back in the ’90s.” “Your school trip is cancelled (again); we cannot guarantee anyone’s safety outside the city limits.”
It was a strange time to grow up. My generation was conceived in the horrendous heights of the violence brought on by Pablo Escobar and his crew in the late 1980s, and grew up during the darkest moments of the country’s war against terrorist Marxist guerrillas.
In the few years before my birth, the Medellín Cartel had murdered nearly every major candidate in the 1990 election: Jaime Pardo Leal, Jaime Bateman, Francisco Pizarro, and the presidential frontrunner, Luis Carlos Galán. They had also killed the Minister of Justice (Rodrigo Lara Bonilla), prominent journalists, countless judges, and a dizzying number of young policemen. Terrorism was a daily occurrence. Car bombs like the one planted for the DAS building (Colombia’s FBI) killed 57 people and instantly injured 2,248.
We were essentially born into a country where the state had long since lost its ability to guarantee public safety. The government faced an enemy with more resources than itself. The citizenry watched as every attempt to end the relentless flagellation by the narco-cartels was instantly dashed by a cabal of psychopathic cocaine empresarios—endlessly fueled by the dollars being charmingly spent at New York’s Studio 54 and on Wall Street, as well as by the despondent addicts in the inner cities of America and Europe.
It is hard to understand how so many young Colombian couples found the strength to imagine a future for their unborn children amidst the death and chaos of a failing state. In that act of love and hope, there is a message of resilience and commitment to a country that had already failed them, as it had failed their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
I was conceived during this time, as was Miguel Uribe. We were destined to be baptized by violence, as our parents had been, and their parents before them. I was still in the comfort of my mother’s womb when a four-year-old Miguel received this unwelcome “christening.” His mother, Diana Turbay—daughter of former President Julio César Turbay Ayala and a well-known journalist—was kidnapped on August 30, 1990, after being lured to what she believed would be an interview with the Spanish priest Manuel Pérez Martínez, also known as El Cura Pérez (“The Priest Pérez”) of the Marxist guerrilla ELN (National Liberation Army).
The interview was a ruse orchestrated by Pablo Escobar. The supposed ELN members were, in fact, members of Los Priscos, a criminal gang working for Escobar. His objective was to kidnap prominent figures, including politicians and journalists, to pressure the Colombian government against approving an extradition treaty with the United States. Turbay and her cameraman, Richard Becerra, were held captive in Copacabana, Antioquia. She was tragically killed during a botched rescue operation on January 25, 1991. Miguel’s life would forever be altered.
Every Colombian has had a more personal or distant baptism, but the pain is always deep. This baptism is our awakening to our unfortunate surroundings. Within my lifetime, many events could have served as my awakening, had I not been too young to comprehend them. I was already alive when Diana Turbay perished. I was roughly 3 years old when a huge car bomb planted by Pablo Escobar exploded at the Centro 93 mall, leaving 8 dead and 242 injured. I still frequent this mall, and the event had a particular effect on my mother, who still remembers it with horror.
Memory is strange and charming in our early years. I have many memories from when I was three or four. I remember a yellow sweater I wore often. I remember when McDonald’s opened in Bogotá in 1995. But I have no concrete memories of violence from that time. I was five when Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, a prominent Colombian politician and journalist, was assassinated on November 2, 1995, in Bogotá, as he left Sergio Arboleda University. He had been one of Colombia’s finest politicians and brightest minds. Despite his friendship with my grandfather, my only recollection is the image of his bullet-riddled navy Mercedes E-Class on the front page of the newspaper. The event lacked the necessary shock for the awakening into violence that would constitute a baptism.
The conditions for my baptism were the product of a long chain of political circumstances. Pablo Escobar had been killed in 1993, the Medellín Cartel dismantled, and the Cali Cartel was on the back foot as the state re-established its dominance. At the same time, the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991, ending decades of Soviet meddling in South America. The convergence of these events created a vacuum that the Marxist guerrillas—ELN and FARC—were quick to fill, inheriting the drug trade to replace both their lost Soviet patronage and the power once held by Escobar. They soon discovered, as he had before them, that the cocaine trade was far more lucrative than polishing the Komintern’s boot while reciting a poorly digested Das Kapital. With their newly found cocaine wealth, they soon had amassed an impressive arsenal and become proper armies for the first time in their dishonorable histories.
By 1996, I had started “big boy” school and got my first fountain pen. It was red. I remember the political campaign leading up to the 1998 elections. My parents supported the conservative Andrés Pastrana, who promised to battle the ever-strengthening guerrillas—who, fueled by drug money, were for the first time convinced they could seize power over the country. Colombia is indeed the land of magical realism. At a time when the world celebrated the end of Soviet communism, and even the most pedantic fellow travelers at Le Monde were briefly forced to confront the horrors revealed by the brief opening of the Soviet archives, our banana republic’s aging Marxists only redoubled their conviction in a failed and barbarous communist system.
Pastrana won. As war and terrorism intensified, I began to sense my impending baptism by violence. A baptism is not the same as the mere remembrance of a shocking event. This would be the tragedy of a normal country. Colombians are baptized by violence, and suddenly wake up to the horrible realization of the normality of perpetual violence in their country. They will never be able to return to the time before their knowledge.
Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum. (Now you are like God, knowing good and evil.)
And so, my baptism came through the most mundane of traditions: Halloween. I always enjoyed Halloween, especially because my mother went out of her way to ensure we had unique costumes. I was never dressed as a superhero or a cowboy; that would have been far too commonplace for her. She always aimed for something unique and timeless. Our costumes were fantastic and custom-made, and probably sparked my lifelong love of custom hats and jackets. I remember my red military jacket when I was a toy soldier in kindergarten, and the custom bowler hat my mother had made for my Charlie Chaplin costume. For 1998, I oddly enough do not remember my costume, but I do remember my brother’s.
He dressed as Heriberto de la Calle, a satirical fictional character created and portrayed by the Colombian humorist and journalist, Jaime Garzón. Heriberto de la Calle was a humble shoe-shine boy ("embolador") representing the lower working class in Colombia. Despite his seemingly simple occupation, he possessed a sharp intellect and an irreverent manner. Every night, he interviewed prominent figures while polishing their shoes, including politicians, models, actors, and other personalities. Through his interviews, Heriberto used humor and pointed questions to criticize Colombian politics, social issues, and corruption. He was a symbol of political satire and journalistic bravery in Colombia, particularly as Garzón himself was actively involved in promoting peace efforts in a time of political turmoil. He made a lot of enemies.
Perhaps this costume stuck in my mind because it was particularly unusual. I doubt many of you saw 11-year-olds dressed as David Letterman in American high schools in 1998, but that year, my mother helped my brother oil his hair, dirty up his face, color out his front teeth, and even had a shoe-polishing box built to complete the costume. My father knew the owner of CM&, the network where Jaime Garzón worked, and so secured him the same shirt Heriberto wore each night. I remember my parents letting my brother stay up to study Heriberto, coaching him on how to imitate him, and explaining to us why the show was funny and important. I also remember my brother sitting in my parents’ closet, learning how to polish shoes to complete the act. There was some genius in the scheme; my brother would go on to polish my parents’ shoes throughout our childhood to make a little money. As usual, my brother’s costume was a success. Score one more for my infinitely charming mother.
A few months later, during the summer of 1999, my baptism into violence finally arrived. It was a Saturday. I remember being at the club; the adults around me were somber, caught in conversations of disbelief, conversations they had repeated since their own baptisms. The kinds that only happen in a country where pain is the daily doom of its citizens. That morning, the newspaper had yet another car with its windows shattered by bullets. This time it wasn’t a Mercedes, but a Jeep Cherokee, crashed into a lamp post.
I remember asking why people were so upset. And I remember being told that the night before, Jaime Garzón had been assassinated. I asked who that was. My mother explained that he was the comedian who played Heriberto de la Calle.
Silence. “Him? The funny guy? Why?”
I’m not sure what the answer was. How does a mother explain to her child what her parents once had to explain to her, and so on, through generations? How do you explain the commonplace nature of violence to a child? Whatever her answer, the baptism was complete. One is awakened to the reality, and violence becomes mundane. This is something few people in the first world can truly comprehend, especially as the barbarity of the 20th century fades into history.
Jaime Garzón was a hero. I know we hear journalists in America refer to themselves as “dissidents.” But the stakes are too low in the safety of their countries for this to be anything more than masochistic wishful thinking. If Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, or John Stewart had been reporters and political satirists in Colombia, they would have lost their nerve before the camera started recording. People who can’t wrap their heads around a cancellation or a contract reduction would be unlikely to survive in Garzón’s shoes. He was a real dissident. The stakes were high, and his irreverent humor was uncomfortable to violent men. His journalism cost him more than his career; it cost him his life.
Colombia has experienced cycles of peace and violence, but the 20th and 21st centuries have been unrelenting. I can't know what awakened my great-grandparents. Could it have been the brutal ax murder of Liberal politician Rafael Uribe Uribe on the steps of the Capitol in 1914? My grandmother’s generation had their christening in April 1948, with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the populist leader who might have rewritten Colombia’s history. His death sparked El Bogotazo — a day of riots that left the capital smoldering and marked the beginning of La Violencia, a civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands over the next decade. My grandmother and the whole family fled temporarily to Panama. A contemporary of my grandparents would tell us how he ran from school and hid in the kitchen pantry of the Jockey Club during the Bogotazo. The club and its illustrious members somehow survived the destruction by simply turning off the lights inside the gilded halls of the exclusive, members-only club. Had that been his baptism?
And what about my parents? Perhaps it was an event in the aftermath of the general violence after 1948. Or perhaps their baptism came late, in the smoke and gunfire of November 1985. The M-19 guerrilla group stormed the Supreme Court, holding the country’s highest judges hostage, and demanding that the President, Belisario Betancur, come to the court and be judged for a vague collection of perceived crimes. What followed was a military response that ended with the building engulfed in flames, over a hundred dead, and eleven Supreme Court justices among the victims. The Palace of Justice siege was not just a headline; it was a nightmare seared into their memories. The videos are haunting and unbelievable to us now.
Within the next decade, my parents would witness the country’s descent into the abyss—death after death—as each year brought more Colombians their own unfortunate baptisms. They had already lived through Escobar’s reign of terror and stupidity, and now they were raising children while the government rapidly lost control. Leaving the city became a risky adventure, one that could end with being kidnapped for ransom.
We were just kids, and in many ways, we had great childhoods, but violence and atrocity were simply part of life. Every year brought news of someone within one or two degrees of separation being kidnapped, murdered, or threatened. Certain events transcended the personal, engulfing the entire nation in mourning and nihilism.
The FARC’s many creative methods of building bombs were particularly grotesque. Many will remember the newspaper coverage of the 1996 Chalán attack, where FARC used a donkey bomb—50 kilograms of explosives disguised with bananas—that killed 11 police officers and the donkey. And who could forget the images of Elvia Cortés in 2000, the victim of a particularly sadistic act: a collar bomb placed around her neck by the FARC. It exploded, killing her and the bomb disposal technician who tried to save her.
All of this unfolded while the cynical leaders of the FARC toyed with the government, standing them up at countless peace summits. Andrés Pastrana, then president of Colombia, had gone so far as to establish a demilitarized zone (Zona de Distensión) in Caguán in 1998 as a precondition for peace talks with the FARC. The area was larger than Switzerland, effectively granting the terrorist group its own state. But after numerous incidents—including escalating violence, a surge in kidnappings, and the hijacking of a plane by the FARC—Pastrana broke off the talks in February 2002. On the very day he ordered the re-occupation of the demilitarized zone, I remember seeing two tanks stationed at the entrance to my school, where the President’s children were students.
A year later, on February 7, 2003, I was at home watching TV. It was a Friday. A loud bang. It’s not fireworks; the sound was too deep, the air too eerie. Moments later, the wail of ambulances. Then the phone rang. Our fears were confirmed: it was the unmistakable sound of a car bomb.
The target? The El Nogal Club, a social and business club frequented by politicians, business executives, and foreign diplomats. It’s only a few blocks away. Many close friends were members, and I had attended my first teenage parties there not long before. Were any of them taking a swimming lesson, playing squash, or bowling that night? Too early to tell.
The journalists arrived. The first images on TV were of a huge column of fire shooting upward from the parking garage as people scrambled to escape the inferno, while firefighters battled to contain the flames. The bomb, roughly 200 kilograms (450 pounds) of ammonium nitrate, fuel oil, and TNT, was hidden in a red Renault Mégane and detonated in the third-floor parking garage. The blast killed 36 people, including six children, and wounded more than 160. It was Colombia’s deadliest terrorist attack in over a decade. The following Monday at school, we learned that people we knew had been orphaned, injured, or lost forever.
After that, people went out less. Parents wanted their teenagers at home. Simply living became a risk. Many emigrated. But then something unexpected happened. Andrés Pastrana’s successor, a little-known politician named Álvaro Uribe Vélez, had assumed the presidency a few months before the El Nogal Bomb with a pledge to combat the guerrillas and turn the tide after nearly a century of violence. His plan began to succeed, and from 2004 to 2020, the country’s new children became far less likely to be baptized by violence.
It’s almost unbelievable to remember the hope I felt around 2015, when it was reported that the intensive care units at the Military Hospital in Bogotá were empty for the first time in its history. For the first time, this medical center was busy processing chemotherapy orders rather than amputations. Just six or seven years earlier, I had visited the hospital with my school to see soldiers who had been wounded and mutilated by the inhuman anti-personnel mines, the guerrillas’ weapon of choice for terrorism.
Sixteen years of reprieve might seem brief to some, but it was long enough for an entire generation to grow up without enduring their baptisms. In fact, the math is even more generous: anyone born during that period—and now older than six or so—would likely see the horrors I’ve described as little more than curiosities of history…at least for those living in the cities. They were mistaken. We were all mistaken.
Our great Nobel laureate in literature, Gabriel García Márquez, wrote a book in 1996 that told, in heartbreaking detail, the story of the kidnapping of Miguel Uribe Turbay’s mother: News of a Kidnapping. At the end of the book’s introduction, Gabo tells us the following:
To all the protagonists and collaborators goes my eternal gratitude for having made it possible that this brutal drama not be forgotten, a drama which, unfortunately, is only one episode in the biblical holocaust in which Colombia has been consumed for more than twenty years. I dedicate it to all of them, and with them to all Colombians—innocent and guilty alike—with the hope that this book will never happen to us again.
That book has happened to us again in a way that one wishes were only a myth from Gabo’s fantastic tales. The book has not only happened again to Colombians—it has happened to the very same family. In 1991, when Miguel Uribe Turbay was just four years old, his mother was killed at the hands of Pablo Escobar. On August 11, 2025, his own four-year-old son was orphaned in a hauntingly similar fashion. The images from the cemetery, where Miguel Uribe Turbay’s wife, Claudia Tarazona, carries her orphaned son as the coffin descends into its eternal resting place, are heartbreaking. Equally moving are the images of his father, Miguel Uribe Londoño, burying his only son in the same way he buried his wife in 1991, while another four-year-old child —this time his grandson— tried to understand what was happening. What a macabre image of a multigenerational family tragedy the violent have left us.
In this moment of national grief, those of us born into Colombia’s era of violence mourn a double loss: first, for a promising politician taken too soon, before his political potential could fully unfold; and second, for the end of a fragile peace. The baptisms have returned, claiming the generations that once benefited from a brief reprieve. For those now aged six to twenty-four, this is their first realization that they were born into a country where violence and death are not extraordinary—they are the norm. And for those who had their baptisms long ago, we are now also awoken from a slumber, a brief dream in which we dared to believe that normalcy was possible.
We are once again awake, realizing that Colombia’s “baptisms” are not one-time events but an inheritance. As 2025 unfolds, Colombia seems poised for yet another cycle of blood and fear. The faces and names may have changed. The guerrillas have splintered, the cartels fractured, the politicians reshuffled. But the underlying currents of violence, impunity, and despair remain unchanged. Compared to the baptisms of my childhood, today’s horrors will arrive faster, sharper, and often broadcast for all to witness, yet the trauma is no less searing. The next generation will inherit this same crucible, shaped and hardened by it, as I was, and as Miguel was. History marches on, indifferent to hope or memory, and the realization settles like a weight: we are, it seems, doomed to repeat the pattern. And so we live, baptized once again, in the knowledge of good and evil, heirs to a country that repeats its tragedies without pause.
With nothing left to say, and much to mourn, all that is left to say is Rest in Peace Miguel Uribe Turbay, may your memory be a blessing.