Palace of Justice siege (Asalto al Palacio de Justicia)

An ordinary midday at the highest court — until the doors opened on violence

It was mid‑afternoon on November 6, 1985. The Supreme Court of Justice sat in session inside the Palace of Justice, the marble‑clad building that faced Plaza de Bolívar in the center of Bogotá. For decades the Palace had been a staging ground for the slow, procedural work of law—filing cabinets, docketed hearings, the hushed rustle of clerks and magistrates. On that day it was, by any ordinary measure, a functioning heart of the Colombian state.

At about 3:00 p.m., that ordinary rhythm broke. Men with weapons and black balaclavas moved through the courtyard and into the public spaces. They called themselves members of Movimiento 19 de Abril, M-19, an urban guerrilla organization that had carried out dramatic actions in previous years and, at times, negotiated with the government. Witnesses later described them as determined and organized. Their stated plan was theatrical as much as it was political: they demanded the right to hold a "trial" of President Belisario Betancur and to expose what they said were state crimes. More prosaically and more ominously, others later suggested they sought to destroy judicial files tied to drug trafficking and to obstruct imminent prosecutions.

Inside, magistrates, clerks, visitors and staff found themselves trapped between armed men and the high stone walls of the Palace. What began as a seizure of a building instantly became a hostage crisis with the eyes of the nation fixed on the plaza.

They said they would make a people's court — and the government closed the ring

The seizure was not the first time Colombia had seen M-19’s dramatic gestures. But the target—a functioning Supreme Court—made this assault unique in its implications for the rule of law. News spread fast. The military and police converged. The government, which had been pursuing peace talks with guerrilla groups under President Betancur, faced a public emergency that cut against its own reconciliation efforts.

Negotiations began intermittently. Shots were fired. Communications were erratic. The Palace complex was old and labyrinthine; the M-19 contingent, estimated in many contemporary accounts at a few dozen fighters (reports vary, roughly 30–40), took up positions in courtrooms, offices, and galleries. Hostages included justices and court staff; soon the televised headlines asked what could be done to free them without endangering lives.

Outside, the army established positions. The city felt boxed in. Inside, the temperature rose with fear and confusion. The lead-up to the assault had been a season of heightened tensions nationwide—factional violence, narcotics‑related pressure on institutions, and the fraught politics of peace and negotiation. Those tensions now compressed into one building and one terrible decision: the use of overwhelming military force to retake the Palace.

When the army moved in and the stone began to burn

Sometime during the night—into the early hours of November 7—the military launched a full operation to retake the Palace. Armored vehicles were brought to the plaza. Soldiers used heavy weapons and explosives; flames and smoke soon leapt from the windows. Accounts differ on tactical details and timing, but the visual aftermath is universally agreed upon: the Palace had been badly damaged by fire and by the violence of the assault.

The morning light revealed a building blackened and scarred. The Supreme Court chamber — a symbolic and literal center of the state’s judicial memory — had been gutted. Corridors were choked with debris; paper and records, some irreplaceable, had been burned or blown apart. Rescue teams and firefighters worked amid the rubble. Bodies were found in stairwells and offices. For survivors and families, every charred corridor suggested another unanswered question.

Controversy began immediately. Who had killed the hostages? Had insurgents executed prisoners as the military closed in, or had some hostages been killed by army fire? Were people carried out of the building alive and later disappeared? Those questions would not only be asked in the moment; they would echo for decades.

A courtroom turned graveyard: deaths, destruction, and disputed truths

The human toll was severe and remains contested. Among the most damning facts was the death of eleven magistrates of the Supreme Court—men and women who occupied the highest judicial seats in the land. Their loss was not only tragic; it was a blow to the institutional integrity of Colombian justice. Beyond them, widely cited tallies place the total dead at roughly a hundred people, a figure that varies by source and by whether disappeared persons are included in the count. Scores more were wounded; many survivors were left with lasting physical and psychological trauma.

The destruction of records compounded the human cost. Archives and case files, some of them central to prosecutions for drug trafficking and political crimes, were destroyed in the fires. The loss of judicial memory hampered investigations and complicated the hunt for truth about what had happened inside the Palace that night. For families searching for missing loved ones, the charred remains of file rooms were a cruel symbol: evidence itself had been transformed into ash.

Simultaneously, allegations of extrajudicial killings and disappearances emerged. Witnesses and human rights organizations reported that some people seen leaving the Palace alive—sometimes in military custody—were later unaccounted for. Those claims generated inquiries, legal battles, and a long, painful search for the missing.

The courtroom as crime scene — investigations that would last generations

In the days and months after the siege, the government led immediate rescue, recovery and initial investigations. But the thoroughness and impartiality of those inquiries were soon called into question. Human rights groups, victims’ families, and later international bodies pointed to evidence that the military’s use of heavy weapons inside a civilian building was reckless and that, at minimum, the state had failed to protect the lives of those inside.

Over years, the case moved through a winding legal trajectory: domestic criminal investigations, human rights complaints, forensic exhumations, and rulings by regional bodies like the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights. Some members of the military were investigated and, in a few instances, prosecuted. The Inter‑American system found state responsibility in aspects of the episode and ordered reparations and measures to clarify the truth. Yet many prosecutions were delayed, obstructed, or inconclusive; some chains of command and precise responsibility for specific deaths remained murky.

For forensic teams, the Palace presented a difficult and evolving crime scene. Fires, collapsed stairways and damaged corpses complicated identification and cause‑of‑death determinations. Over the following decades, new exhumations and DNA work produced identifications and reopened legal questions. Families of victims continued to press for full disclosures, reparations and public acknowledgment.

Shadows that never left: politics, memory, and the limits of closure

The Palace siege became a symbol of larger patterns in Colombia: the collision of armed insurgency, state force, and criminal interests tied to narcotrafficking. It also became a test of the state’s capacity for accountability. President Betancur’s government, which had pursued negotiated settlements with guerrilla groups, suffered a political wound; critics argued the response revealed deep weaknesses in command, oversight and respect for judicial autonomy.

Public debate fragmented into competing narratives. M-19 framed the assault as a political act intended to expose injustice. The state framed its response as a necessary action to recover a public building and free hostages. Families and investigators pressed a third narrative — that of rights violated and truths hidden — insisting on prosecutions and reparations. Over time, archival documents, witness statements and partial disclosures shifted some interpretations, but many core questions remained unresolved: who ordered particular actions; who fired the fatal shots that killed hostages; what happened to those who vanished after leaving the building.

Reparations, apologies and memorials were slow to come. Courts and international bodies recognized victims’ rights to truth and reparation in a series of rulings, and the state eventually paid compensation and carried out some searches for the disappeared. Yet for many families the sense of justice remained incomplete. The Palace itself, rebuilt and restored over years, stands as a bruise in stone — a place of civic function that cannot erase the loss embedded in its walls.

What the charred ledger still teaches us

More than thirty years on, the broad outline of November 6–7, 1985, is clear. M-19 seized the Palace; the military retook it in a violent operation that left the building gutted and eleven Supreme Court magistrates dead. The cascade of consequences — burned archives, contested casualties, missing persons, and decades of legal wrangling — has made the siege a touchstone in Colombia’s conversation about the rule of law in wartime, the limits of force, and the rights of victims.

The event forced institutional questions that still matter: How should a state protect civilians when confronting armed attackers who use civilian structures? What safeguards should limit military operations in judicial precincts? How can justice institutions preserve evidence and institutional memory during political violence? Those are not merely technical queries; they are moral demands from families who insist that state power must answer, not just act.

Investigations and forensic work have advanced understanding and returned names to some of the dead. Human rights rulings have affirmed responsibilities and produced reparations. Yet the siege’s unresolved elements — disputed sequences, incomplete chains of accountability, and the lingering unknown fates of some disappeared persons — ensure that November 6 remains an open wound in Colombia’s modern history.

A memorial that resists forgetting

The raw images of that week — smoke rising above Plaza de Bolívar, soldiers at the perimeter, the once‑polished wood of the courtroom blackened — are part of a national memory that refuses to smooth the edges. Commemorations, journalism, scholarly work and judicial rulings have kept the story alive, insisting that legal institutions learn from what happened.

The Palace of Justice siege is not a closed chapter. It is a ledger folded into Colombia’s broader attempts at truth and reconciliation: a reminder that state power can err catastrophically, that violence can erase records as easily as bodies, and that the search for truth after such brutality is as much a moral task as it is a legal one. Families continue to demand answers; a country continues to reckon. The stone scars on the Palace are reminders that institutions can be rebuilt, but memory — and the obligation to explain what happened inside those burned rooms — remains.