Behold the majestic machinery of the Colombian judicial system, a Rube Goldberg device fueled by cocaine-dusted pesos and the tears of the disenfranchised. Today’s performance features Salvatore Mancuso, the former paramilitary chieftain who has been sentenced to forty years in prison by a tribunal that apparently believes time is a linear concept rather than a flat circle where the same atrocities are committed by different men in different hats. This sentence, handed down by the Justice and Peace Chamber of the High Court of Barranquilla, covers more than a hundred crimes. One hundred. In a world with any sense of cosmic balance, a hundred such crimes would result in the perpetrator being launched into the sun, but in the sterile, air-conditioned vacuum of human law, we settle for four decades of taxpayer-funded room and board.

Mancuso, a man whose resume reads like a manual for the horsemen of the apocalypse, has been a central figure in the Colombian psychodrama for decades. The tribunal specifically highlighted his group's targeting of indigenous populations—because if there is one thing the global power structure loves more than exploitation, it is the performative condemnation of said exploitation after the blood has already dried and the land has been sufficiently cleared for development. The ruling isn't a victory for the victims; it is a clerical update to a ledger of human misery that has been in the red since the conquistadors first stepped off their boats and realized how much easier it is to steal than to trade.

Let us analyze the players in this tragicomedy. On the Right, we have the ideological descendants of the men who paved the way for Mancuso’s United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). To them, Mancuso was once a 'necessary evil,' a bulwark against the Marxist guerrillas who were supposedly going to turn Bogota into a Soviet theme park. They provided the winks, the nods, and the logistical grease that allowed the paramilitaries to flourish. Now, of course, they view him with the same disdain a homeowner views a cockroach that has outlived its usefulness—a messy reminder of the basement’s infestation. They talk of 'security' while standing on piles of bones, their moronic greed masked by a veneer of patriotic necessity.

On the Left, we have the current administrative circus, which thrives on the theater of 'Total Peace'—a brand name so Orwellian it would make a Big Brother casting director blush. They treat Mancuso’s sentencing as a moral triumph, a cleansing of the national soul. It is a cynical, performative dance. They need villains like Mancuso to justify their own existence, using his cadaverous reputation as a mirror to show how 'different' they are, all while the same systemic rot persists beneath the surface. They don't want justice; they want a mascot for their supposed moral superiority. The indigenous groups mentioned in the ruling are, to the Bogota elite, little more than set dressing for their high-minded speeches. They are the 'vulnerable' who are only noticed when their suffering can be quantified into a sentencing report.

The sentencing of Mancuso to forty years is a joke of purely mathematical proportions. The man has already spent years in U.S. custody for drug trafficking—because, naturally, the only thing the American empire cares about more than mass murder is the unauthorized sale of stimulants. His return to Colombia was heralded as a grand moment of accountability, but it is actually just a recycling program. We take a used warlord, put him through the judiciary’s rinse cycle, and hang him out to dry in a prison cell where he will eventually write a memoir or consult for a Netflix series.

What is truly exhausting is the intellectual dishonesty required to believe that this 'sentence' changes anything. The tribunal ruled on more than 100 crimes, including homicides, forced disappearances, and displacements. Think about that number. Each 'crime' represents a life extinguished or a family shattered, reduced now to a line item in a 40-year prison term. It is an insult to the very concept of human value. It suggests that if you kill enough people, your punishment eventually plateaus into a manageable bureaucratic outcome.

Humanity’s capacity for stupidity is only rivaled by its capacity for self-delusion. We pretend that this is progress. We pretend that the 'Peace and Justice' law is something other than a legal escape hatch for the violent and the venal. Mancuso is 59 years old. A forty-year sentence is, for all intents and purposes, a life sentence, yet the announcement is framed as if we’ve solved a puzzle. The puzzle is why we keep expecting a different result from the same broken machine. Colombia remains a country where the mountains are beautiful, the coffee is excellent, and the political class is a collection of parasitic grifters who wouldn't know integrity if it bit them on their offshore accounts. Mancuso is going to jail, and the world remains exactly as dark and hopeless as it was before the gavel fell. Congratulations to everyone involved; you’ve successfully accomplished nothing with a great deal of flair.