Protests Hit Bogotá as Colombia's National Museum Strips 30-Plus Objects

Colombian police turned water cannons on protesters outside the National Museum of Colombia in Bogotá over the weekend, after the government removed more than 30 objects tied to LGBTQ+, feminist and left-wing history from the museum's galleries.

The removals were announced last Friday by the government of Abelardo De La Espriella, according to the digital news outlet Colombia One. By Saturday and Sunday, the museum's surroundings had become, in the outlet's words, "a site of public demonstrations against what protesters describe as 'an attempt to impose an ideological view of the country's history.'"

The purge is part of De La Espriella's right-wing campaign against what he calls wokismo. Protesters answered with anti-censorship slogans and political theater. Clashes followed, and riot-control units moved in.

What exactly was removed?

The affected materials, as Colombia One reported, included:

• objects and documents related to feminist and LGBTQ+ causes
• items documenting the history of Colombia's political left
• materials connected to the 2016 peace agreement with the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)

Protesters didn't just march. Some placed reproductions of the removed works outside the museum, according to the outlet, "bringing them back into the public space and denouncing their disappearance from the exhibitions as an attempt to silence the stories they represented."

That detail matters. It turns a curatorial decision into a visible civic argument. You can clear a vitrine overnight, but you can't easily stop people from rebuilding the show on the sidewalk.

What does this change for the museum?

So far, the National Museum has said nothing publicly about the protests. Its website and social media accounts carry no mention of the weekend's events.

The institution's most recent public statement points elsewhere entirely: an October 6 notice about damage to Fernando Botero's bronze sculpture The Dove of Peace. A visitor leaning against the pedestal for a photograph knocked the work over. The museum's conservation department found abrasions, paint loss and, in its words, "dents in the metal, resulting from the impact on different points of the sculpture, especially the beak."

The silence on the removals, set against that detailed damage report, tells its own story. One incident involving a sculpture gets an official communiqué. More than 30 removed objects get nothing.

Whether the museum breaks that silence — or whether the reproductions on the street become the de facto exhibition — will shape how this standoff plays out in the coming weeks.