Medellín, Colombia – Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez prompted outrage last week after “censoring” a new book on M-19 guerrilla history at a public library.
Gutiérrez cancelled a talk of the book on April 21, saying that it glorifies terrorism and has no place in a public library.
The cancellation has drawn widespread criticism, with many observers citing the hypocrisy of the move one month after UNESCO designated Medellín as its 2027 World Book Capital.
Shortly before an event for the book at a public library on April 21, Gutiérrez announced on X: “This event will be cancelled. In Medellin, there will never be room for the glorification of terrorism. The M-19 was not a ‘romantic tale’: it was a terrorist armed group that left victims, pain, and death in Colombia.”
Attendants at the packed auditorium were visibly opposed to the measure, according to newspaper El País. Although staff removed microphones and speakers and the police surrounded the building, spectators remained in their seats.
Image source: Federico Gutiérrez via X.
“Our city respects the memory of the victims; no to propaganda for those that wielded weapons. This event has an obviously political character, and no public entity can host it,” the mayor continued.
But the book’s author, sociology professor Jaime Rafael Nieto, insisted that the government should not be able to censor events like the one last week: “This is not a space for government officials, but for writers, artists and citizens,” he told Spanish newspaper El País via phone call.
The April 19th Movement (M-19) guerrilla was founded in the early 1970s and became a violent urban actor, perpetrating kidnappings and killings in cities as well as symbolic crimes including the theft of libertador Simon Bolívar’s sword from its resting place and the Palace of Justice siege which left over 100 dead.
Incumbent leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro – who has routinely publicly clashed with rightist Gutiérrez – was an M-19 militant, operating under the nome de guerre “Aureliano”.
He joined in the criticism of Gutiérrez’s move, writing on X: “The M-19 after making peace, was a legal movement with legal status. What you’re doing is censorship. Those who censor books end up burning them, and then they end up burning humans at stakes. Don’t censor; let minds and thoughts be free.”
Medellín’s history of books: a reformed city
Colombia’s second-largest city has seen a 542% rise in bookstores over the past seven decades, and is home to over 110 bookstores and 25 libraries – many of which were transformed from former prisons and police facilities, as per UNESCO.
“Medellín has become an international reference for urban and cultural transformation, where books and libraries play a crucial role in bringing positive social change. [Its] designation as World Book Capital 2027 is a powerful message on how culture can build peace and social cohesion,” noted Khaled El-Enany, UNESCO director-general.
The city’s literary turn is thus inseparable from its broader reinvention. Having been named the world’s “murder capital” in 1991, when 16 people were murdered daily on average, it has spent decades recasting itself through culture and education.
In 2004, then-mayor Sergio Fajardo – now a presidential candidate for the upcoming May 31, 2026 election – deployed a plan to combat structural violent patterns, investing in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Libraries, metrocables and cultural centers were planted in the hillside of comunas, once the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Americas.
Over a 15-year period, Medellin built 60 cultural facilities in areas with the highest poverty, historic violence and population densities, and by 2024, the city recorded 300 homicides per 100,000 people – the lowest since 1942.
The result is a city that has made literary culture central to its identity. Every September, the Fiesta del Libro y la Cultura (Celebration of Books and Culture) – backed by $9 billion Colombian pesos ($2.5 million USD) from the mayor’s office – draws hundreds of national and international guests to its botanical gardens, parks and cultural centers.
The city also hosts an annual edition of the Hay Festival, the prestigious Welsh literary gathering.
Banned in the city of books
Regardless of Mayor Gutiérrez’s disapproval, the event on April 21 continued, with organizers stressing they consulted with the attendees what they believed should be done.
“There were three options: cancelling the event, going someplace different, or reaffirming our condition of citizens which occupy the city’s public space,” they said. Meanwhile, Nieto confirmed that the launch had been scheduled a month prior, and that the decision to go ahead in spite of the mayor’s outrage was an “act of civil resistance.”
“[The book is about] interpreting how the M-19 emerged and what its characteristics were. It isn’t about justifying its actions, because then the investigation would take on a partisan bias, and that’s not the case,” the M-19: From War to Politics author added.
The M-19 has become a contentious subject in Colombian politics since the election of Petro in 2022 as the country’s first leftist president, although the group demobilized in 1990.
Petro joined the urban guerrilla at 17 years old, but not as a combatant. As per Colombian news outlet La silla vacía, he was arrested by armed forces in 1985, and spent 18 months in prison, where he directed the jail library.
One of Petro’s greatest feats as an M-19 militant, in fact, was promoting the peace process that saw the group’s turn to peace and legality from 1989 to 1990. Most recently, the head of state celebrated his birthday on the anniversary of the armed group’s founding.
Nieto believes that studying M-19 history is imperative to understanding Petro’s government, and his book’s thesis: the M-19 was the Colombian armed actor that best knew how to combine war with politics.
“Every act of war produced political effects. And that made it a political actor,” he told El País.
Featured image: Federico Gutiérrez via X.