BogotáRodriguez’s video links him to Active Club Bogotá.
Investigators matched tattoos to Javier Ruiz, the group’s named leader; Rodriguez ran for Colombia’s congress under Centro Democrático.
Rodriguez declined to answer and threatened legal action.
Sources: Bellingcat
THE NETWORK
Active Clubs are decentralized white-nationalist fitness cells founded around 2020 by Robert Rundo, a US extremist convicted for organizing political violence. The model fuses MMA training with neo-Nazi ideology — designed to recruit through gyms rather than rallies, making infiltration and prosecution harder than with formal chapters.
THE GEOGRAPHY
What began in California has metastasized across at least two dozen countries. Researchers have documented Active Club cells in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania — the Bogotá chapter is part of a Latin American expansion that includes Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.
WHY COLOMBIA
Colombia's far-right has historically organized around anti-FARC paramilitarism rather than racial ideology — the AUC and its successors targeted leftist guerrillas, not ethnic minorities. Active Club represents something different: an imported, racially-framed extremism grafted onto a country whose political violence had different roots.
THE TATTOO TRAIL
Bellingcat's identification relied on matching distinctive tattoos across photographs — a technique pioneered in tracing Russian GRU officers and Syrian war criminals. Tattoos are permanent, unique, and visible in countless casual photos uploaded to social media; they are the open-source investigator's fingerprint.
THE INFILTRATION PROBLEM
Democratic parties across the Americas and Europe face a recurring vetting failure: extremist movements deliberately encourage members to run under mainstream party banners. Centro Democrático, founded by Álvaro Uribe in 2013, is Colombia's principal right-wing party — being on its slate carries institutional legitimacy that an Active Club affiliation is designed to launder.