Necropolitics: Anti-Black Violence in Pre-Electoral Times in Colombia

A recent wave of violence is shaking southwestern Colombia, making Afrodescendant territories its primary target. During the morning of June 10th, 14 violent incidents occurred across 4 municipalities in Valle and 8 in Cauca, including 5 explosions at police stations and public squares. These events reflect a criminal pattern: the intimidation by political elites toward people who refuse to remain subjected to the normative scheme of white domination.

For this reason, it's no coincidence that the idea of "social chaos" promoted by right-wing parties in their race to regain state control focuses on places that have committed to building new governance structures and political autonomies to overcome the warmongering politics that preceded the country's first and current progressive government.

In this context, the concept of Necropolitics coined by Achille Mbembe exposes the institutional forms through which conditions of death are produced and administered in marginalized sectors. Spaces like Eastern Cali (the second-largest urban Afrodescendant enclave in Latin America, where 4 of the attacks occurred) have become military experimentation laboratories for 'democratic security' based on the annihilation of racialized and impoverished bodies. Even attacking police stations responds to the fact that many uniformed officers come from these same areas, so they can be sacrificed in the name of 'good people,'. Based on these actions, we can assume that whiteness inhabits privileged sectors and, in full exercise of their citizenship, reinforces the racial division of cities.

In this new struggle for power in Colombia, Black lives once again become the most exposed to targeting, patrolling, and elimination. Partisan violence is sponsored by a profoundly anti-Black institutionality that is willing to deploy all types of coercive measures to halt the political self-determination that has been developing the Colombian Pacific and Caribbean regions to promote racial, gender, and environmental justice.

The Colombian right seeks alignment with the global conservative advance in the 2026

elections, sowing fear in civil society to dismantle a government that has prioritized social welfare over corporate interests. Therefore, the desolation that June 10th left in Cali, Buenaventura, Corinto, and El Bordo can be taken as the collection of an electoral debt that determined the victory of Gustavo Petro Urrego and Francia Márquez Mina in the 2022 elections.

The attack against Miguel Uribe Turbay, presidential pre-candidate for the far-right "Democratic Center" party, seeks the continuity of a government that never committed to Peace. On the contrary, it makes war its main mechanism to exterminate every social justice project developed from the grassroots. In these moments when the return to power of Uribismo is being paved, it becomes imperative to remember the 2,070 victims of "false positives" under Álvaro Uribe Vélez's presidency, mostly young Black Afrodescendants, indigenous people, and peasants. While moving his party's pieces for the 2026 elections and even demanding government protection against a possible attack against him, Senator Uribe Vélez continues evading the law for crimes of bribery, procedural fraud, and ties to paramilitaries.

The public order so demanded by President Petro's opponents in their political aspirations can well be contrasted with their indolence toward the 313 massacres and 1,218 assassinations of social leaders and Peace Agreement signatories during former President Iván Duque Márquez's mandate. Therefore, what happened on June 10th confirms that democratic security is a policy forged in the normalization of suffering, criminalization, and death of Black people.

Faced with the uncertainty this may cause in civil society, what's clear is that a return of the right to power will be a new postponement for social justice and a reinforcement in the marginalization of citizenship for the Afrodescendant population. Now, more than ever, we must strengthen the radicality of care, horizontal dialogue, and solidarity within our organizations and community networks as the most forceful response to that democratic security that exists to steal our hope, freedom, and dignity.