In a small plaza in Medellín, the teenage poets threw the canon of Colombian literature on the bonfire. Their leader, a thin 27-year-old named Gonzalo Arango, stepped forward to read out the group’s manifesto. It was written on a roll of toilet paper.

It was 1958 and the nadaístas – Colombia’s equivalent of the beatniks – were on the verge of notoriety both for their iconoclastic verse and the bohemian lifestyles that antagonised prudish Medellín society. “The Nadaistas invaded the city like a plague,” opens Arango’s most famous poem of the time.

Today, however, a metro train running a few blocks from the plaza is emblazoned with portraits of the poets and choice lines of their verse; an act of belated recognition from the city that once scorned them.

And with Colombian politics at its most polarized in decades the Nadaistas’ attacks on establishment politics and social moralizing are particularly resonant.

“Sixty years ago the mayor of Medellín persecuted us for being blasphemers, potheads and ‘verbal terrorists’. Now they’re paying us homage,” says Jotamario Arbeláez, one of three surviving members of the original Nadaistas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jaime Jaramillo Escobar y Jotamario in 1970. Photograph: Courtesy the Biblioteca Piloto

Originally comprising 13 precocious poets with no common theme or style, the movement lacked definition but not enemies. When a young disciple was reprimanded by the school vice-rector, his definition was gleefully adopted: “I don’t know what nadaísmo is – only that it’s abomination.”

The Nadaistas sought to escape the straitjacket of parochial Colombian life, says Eduardo Escobar, still sprightly at 74. “Ours was a reaction against a society that suffocated us, which impeded our thinking, our reading – even our love.”

At 14 Escobar was briefly imprisoned for sleeping with his teenage girlfriend, whom he was subsequently banned from seeing. The pettiness of the charges still rankles as he recalls it today.

The movement was also a reaction against the bitter political bloodletting that had consumed much of rural Colombia following the 1948 assassination of the socialist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have died in the period known simply as “La Violencia”.

“We were witness to the wars between the Conservatives and Liberals and saw how many people died because of this idiocy,” says Jaime Jaramillo, 86, who wrote under the pseudonym X-504. “We were against archaic ideas of thinking and acting, we were young and ignorant, we wanted to change society!”

Colombia’s first counterculture movement would go on to win fans including the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, but their influence was also felt on the political level.

The opening lines of Arbeláez’s After the War are now displayed on the wall of the metro. First written in a letter to Jaramillo in 1964 – the year in which the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebels took up arms – the poem became an emblematic anti-war verse.

After the War by Jotamario Arbeláez

a day

after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

I will hold you in my arms a day after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

if after the war I have arms

and I will make love to you with love

a day after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

if after the war there is love

and if there is what it takes to make love

Translated by Nicolás Suescún

Five decades later, it was a second generation Nadaista, Humberto de la Calle, who successfully negotiated the end of the conflict with the Farc as the government’s chief negotiator in peace talks in Cuba.

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De la Calle credits the group with his political development. “Nadaísmo taught me never to swallow anything whole, to avoid dogmas and to listen to others,” he says. “That sense of irony and pessimism helped me in Havana … and I think it would be useful right now as our society becomes increasingly hateful.”

De la Calle ran for president in 2018, but received just 2% of first-round votes as his centrist platform lost out before an increasingly polarized electorate.

“I suffered one of the most thunderous defeats in Colombian electoral history,” says De la Calle with a laugh. He sees President Iván Duque’s proposals to renegotiate aspects of the peace deal as having the potential to deepen political divisions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jotamario Arbeláez on the Medellín metro, where he and his fellow Nadaistas are commemorated. Photograph: Mat Youkee/The Guardian

“We’re returning to the sort of polarization we saw in the 1940s and 50s,” says Arbeláez. “Gonzalo [Arango] understood the need to create an alternative to violent partisan politics. I think nadaísmo helped many Colombians exit that particular cave, but apparently a lot of people were left inside.”

The remaining Nadaistas continue their 60-year struggle. Jaramillo is one of the country’s leading historians and teaches poetry workshops in a Medellín library. Arbeláez continues to appear at book fairs around the world. Escobar spent 2018 rereading Latin American Marxist texts in preparation for a new book and last year was reunited with his teenage girlfriend. They plan to marry.

Belated recognition hasn’t dampened the underlying contrarianism, however. “We’ll continue to disagree with the world – even when the world has acknowledged we were right all along,” says Arbeláez.