Welcome to the latest installment of ‘Humanity is a Garbage Fire,’ broadcast live from the scorched earth of Colombia. Our guest of honor today is Salvatore Mancuso, a former paramilitary leader who has spent his career proving that if you’re going to commit 117 crimes—including homicides, forced disappearances, and the wholesale displacement of Indigenous populations—you should really make sure you do it in a country that treats justice like a frequent flyer program. A Colombian court has handed down a forty-year sentence to this charming specimen of evolutionary backsliding, but because we live in a world where words like ‘reparation’ and ‘truth’ are used as legal get-out-of-jail-free cards, Mancuso might only serve eight. That’s right. For the low, low price of talking about the people you killed, you can get a seventy-five percent discount on your prison sentence. It’s the ultimate clearance sale on human misery.

Mancuso’s crimes in the province of La Guajira between 2002 and 2006 were not some accidental byproduct of a noble struggle. They were the calculated, systematic removal of Indigenous groups who had the audacity to exist on land that someone else wanted. Whether it’s the right-wing paramilitaries pretending they are protecting the state or the left-wing guerrillas pretending they are liberating the proletariat, the result is always the same: a pile of bodies and a lot of very expensive suits in Bogota discussing ‘transitional justice’ over espresso. The paramilitaries, under Mancuso’s delightful command, operated with the kind of ruthless efficiency that would make a corporate consultant weep with joy, provided that consultant’s KPI was ‘maximum trauma per hectare.’

But let’s talk about the real comedy here: the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. This is the bureaucratic theatre where the ‘truth’ is traded like a commodity. The court says Mancuso can walk free in eight years if he collaborates with truth and reparation activities. Think about the intellectual bankruptcy of that sentence for a moment. We are essentially saying that the truth has a specific market value, and that value is exactly thirty-two years of prison time. If Mancuso tells the court where the bodies are buried—literally—he gets to spend his golden years in a villa instead of a cage. It is a transactional view of morality that suggests justice isn’t about right or wrong, but about how much information a butcher is willing to sell back to the state he helped destabilize. It’s a protection racket where the currency is the grief of mothers who haven’t seen their children in twenty years.

The Indigenous groups of La Guajira are, as usual, nothing more than a backdrop for this performative display of legalistic posturing. They are the ‘beneficiaries’ of this reparation, a term that in any other context would imply something positive, but here simply means they get to watch the man who destroyed their lives get a slap on the wrist in exchange for a few depositions. The Left will hail this as a triumph of ‘restorative justice,’ a phrase that sounds lovely in a university seminar but smells like rot in the real world. They love the idea that we can talk our way out of bloodlust. Meanwhile, the Right will grumble about the ‘persecution’ of a man who was only doing what was necessary to stop the Red Menace, as if murdering an Indigenous farmer is a recognized tactic in geopolitical strategy. Both sides are equally nauseating, viewing the dead not as people, but as points on a scoreboard.

Historically, this is just more of the same. Humanity has a recursive habit of letting its most violent members write the footnotes of their own history. We see it everywhere: the warlord becomes the statesman, the rebel becomes the dictator, and the paramilitary leader becomes the ‘collaborator.’ Mancuso is simply following the script. He knows that the state is too incompetent to actually find the truth on its own, so it has to bribe him for it. It’s a pathetic admission of failure by the Colombian judicial system—a confession that they cannot achieve justice, so they’ll settle for a spreadsheet of confessed sins.

In eight years, when Mancuso is inevitably released to write a memoir or consult for some ‘security’ firm, the world will have moved on to a new atrocity. We are a species with the attention span of a goldfish and the moral consistency of a wet paper towel. We pretend that these sentences matter, that forty years is a ‘strong signal,’ while knowing full well that the fine print at the bottom of the page makes the whole thing a joke. La Guajira will still be impoverished, the Indigenous groups will still be marginalized, and the ‘truth’ will be tucked away in a dusty archive, bought and paid for with the blood of 117 crimes. But hey, at least the lawyers got their billable hours and the politicians got their headlines. In the grand circus of human civilization, that’s what we call a win-win. Pass the hemlock; I’m done with this story.