Colombia’s ‘J’accuse’: Rewriting a Conflict, One Sentence at a Time. Illustration: The City Paper/AI

The sentencing of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez to 12 years of house arrest has not only stunned the nation but reignited a familiar debate in world history: when does justice become a weapon of politics?

In Colombia, a country still haunted by decades of internal conflict, Uribe’s case is far more than a personal legal battle. Supporters view the sentence as an act of political retribution by President Gustavo Petro’s leftist government. Critics see it as long-overdue accountability for a figure they associate with authoritarianism and abuse of power. In either view, the verdict has become a national Rorschach test – much like the trial of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus more than a century ago.

In 1894, Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was wrongly convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. His case became a defining scandal of the French Third Republic, dividing society between Dreyfusards – who believed in his innocence – and anti-Dreyfusards – who saw him as a symbol of the disloyal “other.”

It was in this climate that writer Émile Zola published his incendiary open letter J’accuse…! in 1898, accusing the French military and judiciary of corruption, bias, and anti-Semitism. Zola’s letter was a cry for justice, but also a denunciation of a system that had allowed political interests to corrupt the truth.

Today, Colombia finds itself in a similarly polarized moment. Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, has promoted a “total peace” strategy that offers broad amnesties to dangerous criminals, including FARC dissidents and organized armed groups. Meanwhile, Uribe – a president who took the fight to guerrilla and restored state control over vast regions – has become the face of legal condemnation. The symbolism is potent: the man once praised for bringing order is now rebuked, while those he fought are embedded, and emboldened, within the country’s political fabric.

For many Colombians, particularly victims of FARC’s countless atrocities, the contrast is not just dizzying – but a betrayal of historical memory. To them, the sentencing of Uribe is a form of selective justice, part of a broader campaign by the Petro government to recast Colombia’s wartime narratives, elevating the guerrilla, including M-19, as social justice reformers, the same “reformers” who torched the Palace of Justice in 1985, killing 98 persons, including 11 magistrates.

The Uribe case also raises legitimate questions about impunity and the role of power in shielding elites from accountability. Just as Zola’s letter forced France to confront its institutional rot, Uribe’s trial forces Colombia to examine whether justice is truly impartial – or a new front in the country’s ideological “lawfare”.

But unlike the Age of Zola, today’s toga wars are waged not in print, but across social media platforms – spaces where public opinion can be manipulated by those who hold the digital capital to amplify and distort their version of events. In an age of populism and half-truths, narratives are no longer based on evidence, but on virality. With click farms, political influencers, and coordinated disinformation campaigns, the legitimacy of entire presidencies can be recast in real time.

Uribe, once hailed as the man who restored state control to a fractured country, has in recent years faced an aggressive smear campaign aimed at discrediting his legacy. To his defenders, the charges against him are the culmination of a long effort to rewrite Colombia’s internal conflict from the vantage point of the hard-left, one that flips the moral compass by casting ex-FARC as victims and Uribe, as the villain. The sentence, then, becomes not only a matter of legality, but of symbolic inversion: a former guerrilla president wielding the institutions of the state to judge the man who once fought to defend it.

As with Dreyfus, Uribe’s fate will likely be decided not just in court, but in the larger struggle over memory, truth, and reconciliation. And as Colombia marches toward a turbulent electoral year, it must reckon with a question as urgent today as it was in Zola’s time: is justice being served – or staged?