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A Colombian Mount Rushmore: liberal irreverence during the conservative hegemony at the Piedras del Tunjo Archeological Park in Facatativá, Colombia

At the Piedras del Tunjo Arqueological Park in Facatativá, Colombia, 24 miles west of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, there is a particular rock shelter colloquially known as “The Presidents’ Rock”, where visitors can find 12,000-year-old Rock art coexisting with five male portraits painted in oil and signed by a Luque R, probably a local artist from Facatativá (Figures 1 and 2). The men represented in these portraits participated in different spheres of public life between 1832 and 1899, a time in Colombian national history where the conceptual groundwork needed to build the modern nation were drawn and developed. The portraits were painted in 1915 and are currently protected as Assets of National Cultural Interest because they were painted prior to 1920 (Diario Oficial 2006). Two of these notables were Presidents and three of them were military generals that fought civil wars for the Liberal armies. These paintings make a strong impression on the visitor of the park because they seem out of place in the rocks where they are painted with indigenous symbols. This particular rock shelter lies at the end of the suggested trail around the park (Figures 3 and 4). The oil paintings were restored in 2013 and are now protected by fences to ensure their conservation. Unfortunately, not much research has been done on the oils specifically in order for tourists to understand the perplexity of them when they see them for the first time. The purpose of this article is to explain the dynamics of power that led the regional Liberals to commission these portraits at a time when the Conservatives were in government. These artworks, perfectly encompassed in the idea of a palimpsest, may be seen as an act of subtly overwriting on existing indigenous monuments and establishing a new and very complex relationship with them and with the surrounding landscape. An act of appropriation like this one must be studied critically, approaching the issue via the construction of cultural memory and the preservation of the past conceived in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Understanding the motives that possibly led to the creation of these portraits may shed some light on the nineteenth-century’s need to craft its national narrative using official academic portraiture, even if this involved “vandalizing” millenary indigenous representations in order to construct a historical tale that would annul the past with a version of a new Hispanic tradition. As noted by Benedict Anderson, “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (2006, 6). The political community of this rural area