Colombia’s far-left President Gustavo Petro designated a hat that once belonged to Carlos Pizarro — one of the founders of the Marxist M19 terrorist guerrilla Petro was part of — for Colombia’s “cultural heritage” on Tuesday.
The designation adds the garment to the list of objects or assets under “special protection” by the Colombian state.
Petro presented Pizarro’s hat during a ceremony held in Colombia’s presidential palace on Tuesday. The far-left president described the hat as having been worn by Pizarro when M19 signed a peace deal with the Colombian government in 1990 that led to the group’s demobilization. Petro claimed that the hat is a “symbol of peace” that belongs to “the Colombian people.”
“He [Pizarro] kept it in the days he lived after the peace process, and he was even a presidential candidate with this hat before he was assassinated,” Petro said.
“This hat is a symbol of peace. Undoubtedly. And it must remain here. It will be an inheritance,” he continued. “This is an inheritance of love. So it is given to the Colombian people, who are its owners.”
Petro claimed that Pizarro passed down the hat to one of his bodyguards during the 1990 peace deal ceremony, who “perhaps by intuition, kept it,” eventually reaching the hands of a group of former M19 members currently living in Sweden. Those individuals gave the hat to Petro during his recent visit to Stockholm last week.
Pizarro was one of the co-founders of M19, a Marxist guerrilla terrorist organization that operated in Colombia between 1974 and 1990, and served as its top leader between 1986 and 1990. Petro, who took office in August and became Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, has proudly boasted of being a member of M19 in his youth on repeated occasions, having joined the group when he was 18 years old.
M19 committed several terrorist attacks against Colombia throughout the roughly 16 years that it was active. Among the most heinous actions committed by the Marxist terrorists was the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, when roughly 35 M19 members attacked the seat of Colombia’s judiciary, holding hundreds of civilians hostage. Nearly 100 civilians were killed during the siege, including 11 Colombian Supreme Court justices.
The attack on Bogotá’s Palace of Justice is considered one of the worst terrorist attacks in Colombia’s history. Additionally, M19 was responsible for the 1980 siege of the Dominican Republic Embassy in Bogotá, in which members of the Marxist guerrilla held nearly 60 people hostage for roughly two months, including 15 ambassadors. The siege on the Dominican embassy took place as the hostages were participating in an official gathering marking Dominican Independence Day.
Other crimes committed by M19 members include, but were not limited to, the abduction and murder of labor leader José Raquel Mercado in 1976, the hijacking of a Colombian airliner in 1982, several attacks on villages, and the theft of the swords that belonged to Venezuelan founding father Simón Bólivar from a museum in 1974.
Petro – whose continued condemnation of Israel, antisemitic remarks, and pro-Hamas stances have damaged the historically friendly relations between Colombia and Israel – has publicly claimed that M19 had some of its members train with pro-Palestinian terrorist groups in Libya, asserting that those groups had “the same root” as M19.
M19 demobilized in March 1990 after it signed a peace deal with the Colombian government in exchange for blanket amnesty for all actions committed. The Marxist group then became a small far-left political party that disbanded in 2000.
Carlos Pizarro, whose hat Petro designated as national patrimony, ran as a presidential candidate in Colombia’s May 1990 elections but was shot and killed on April 26, 1990, on a flight towards the city of Barranquilla that had departed from Bogotá‘s El Dorado International Airport.
Petro explained in Tuesday’s ceremony that hats similar to the one worn by Pizarro were a “measure” adopted by M19 members to attend marches and other events, but that they had become a “symbol” after the Marxist terrorist group signed the peace deal.
“In these days that I went [to Stockholm], they, the ex-combatants, who are several, they wanted – even some are very good businessmen in Sweden. They kept this hat that, like [Simón] Bolivar’s sword, keeps some facts, some of war and others of peace, days and nights of war burden,” Petro said.
Colombian Senator María José Pizarro Rodríguez, daughter of Carlos Pizarro, celebrated the designation of her father’s hat as “Cultural Heritage,” claiming that she has spent “more than two decades recovering his memory, fighting against impunity and reclaiming his figure as a symbol of peace for Colombia.”
“We will never betray his lineage, his legacy is in our DNA and in our memory,” Pizarro Rodríguez asserted.
Former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana condemned Petro and his designation of Pizarro’s hat as an “object of national worship,” calling the move an “unprecedented insult” to M19’s victims who were “kidnapped, tortured, murdered, to their families, and to the memory of our Army and Police heroes who died defending democracy from the infamous attacks of that group of criminals.”
Colombian conservative Senator María Fernanda Cabal also condemned the designation, urging her fellow lawmakers to work on a bill that prohibits the “honoring and apology of criminals or terrorists.”
“Will they also make the filthy [FARC leader Manuel Marulanda] ‘Tiro Fijo’ rag a national monument? When will they convert any plane that belonged to M19 drug trafficker partner Pablo Escobar into cultural heritage?” Cabal’s message read.
Colombian academician Helena Urán Bidegain, daughter of Carlos Horacio Urán — an auxiliary magistrate killed during M19’s siege of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice — criticized Petro’s designation of the hat as cultural heritage, stressing that M19’s values “are not the values of a whole country.”
“We need a broad debate on symbols and the culture of violence. What is cultural heritage for a country? Is culture imposed? What symbols embrace peace and war? How to build symbols for a democratic culture? The values of the M-19 are not the values of a whole country!” Urán Bidegain said through social media.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.