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Writing by Heart. Victims of the Colombian Armed Conflict Write their Testimonies

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Authors Bungard, Claudia

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WRITING BY HEART. VICTIMS OF THE COLOMBIAN ARMED CONFLICT WRITE THEIR TESTIMONIES

Claudia Bungard

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2018

Acknowledgements I want to start by thanking my family: Tucker, Azucena and Otto Bungard, who have been very patient and supportive during the time of this research. Thank you also to Kate Richter, my mother-in-law, for being so caring ever since I first thought about studying in the Master’s program in Latin American Studies. Thank you to all the people in Medellín, Colombia, who shared their memories with me. They were the organizers of the writing workshops: Patricia Nieto, Gabriel Bustamante, Jorge Mario Betancur, Luz Adriana Ruiz Marín, Victor Casas and Lina Martínez, and the victims who wrote their testimonies during these workshops: Maria Teresa Uribe, Fabiola Lalinde, Helly Johana Blandon, the Úsuga Brothers, Cristian Cardona, Iván Darío Arroyave, Jorge Iván López and Laura Guzmán. I want to thank my committee chair and adviser, Dr. Elizabeth Oglesby, for her critical reading and permanent support from the start and during the analytical period and writing process. Thank you to Professor Marcela Vásquez-León for helping me to better understand the Colombian history and for all the emotional and academic support. Thank you to Professor Antonio da Silva for taking the time to read this thesis and being always available to give advice and feedback. I am grateful to all of the institutions who have helped fund this research: University of Antioquia (Colombia), Tinker Foundation, and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. Writing this thesis could not be possible without the help I received from the Writing Skills Improvement Program. Thank you to Andrea Hernandez Holm, PhD, for all the teaching and moral support, and thank you to all my colleagues who supported me in the Women of Color Writing Group. I also thank my colleague María Inés Taracena, who translated the first chapter of this research, originally written in Spanish. Lastly, I want to thank my family in Colombia, my parents and two sisters who have always believed in my dreams and helped me to make them true. Thank you.

Dedication

A Tuck y a mis hijos Azucena y Otto

Table of Contents

Abstract / 6 Introduction / 7 Building memory in a fragmented society / 8 Victims in a fragmented country / 10 Methodology / 11 Overview / 12 Chapter 1: Victims in a Fragmented Country / 14 Colombia, a fragmented country / 15 A century of battles for territory / 18 The “happy” years (1900-1929) / 19 The effects of the Great Depression (1930-1948) / 20 La Violencia (1948-1957) / 22 The Bipartisan Pact of the National Front (1958-1974) / 23 The Armed Conflict (1958-2016) / 24 The Guerrillas / 25 The paramilitary groups / 27 The drug-trafficking mafias / 29 The Colombian state and the United States / 31 What war left behind / 33 The armed conflict in Antioquia and Medellín / 35 The negotiated peace and the construction of historical memory/ 36 Chapter 2 Key Discussions on Testimonies / 38 Testimonies in Latin America / 38 Testimonies in Colombia / 41 Key debates on testimonial production / 45 Givers and takers / 46 Trauma recovery / 46 Historical memory / 47 Social justice / 49 New scenarios for testimonial production in Colombia / 51 Chapter 3: A case of testimonial production in Colombia / 54 Research methods / 55 The complexity of victimhood in Colombia / 56 The healing effects of producing testimonies / 63 Narratives for a political transformation / 68 Conclusions / 73 Appendix / 75 Bibliography / 76

Abstract The half-century Colombian armed conflict has left an enormous human impact. Statistics say that between 1956 and 2018 more than eight million people have been victims of crimes perpetrated by guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and the national army. For decades, most of the victims have maintained a complete silence about their tragedies. However, in recent years, with the guidance of journalists and social workers, some victims have started to write their own memories of the war. Between 2006 and 2010, as a way to collect testimonies of the conflict in the region of Antioquia, Colombia, the local government of the city of Medellin supported “De su puño y letra”, a series of writing workshops in which victims wrote their own tragedies. In part, this thesis seeks to explore this new way to produce testimonies in Colombia and to show the impact of this grassroots memory project on participants. It also refers to its potential effects and legacy, in order to make recommendations for future such projects in times of transitional justice in Colombia.

Key Words: Testimonio, Colombian Armed Conflict, Victims, Writing, Memory, Trauma

Introduction

The production of testimonies is prominent in times of transitional justice in

Colombia. After more than sixty years of armed conflict, thousands of victims, survivors, and witnesses from diverse socio-economic backgrounds have been called to give their oral or written testimonies in regards to a particular situation of violence or injustice. This moment presents an opportunity to explore the politics and uses of testimonial production in

Colombia. It is especially important to look at the role that victims have been playing in recent years in the construction of historical memory.

In this thesis I investigate an innovative experience of collecting narratives of war in

Colombia that took place in the city of Medellín between 2006 and 2010. Starting with a look at the national history and the context in which violence has spread out during the last century, this study seeks to highlight a mechanism that the victims of the armed conflict have found to build and publicize their stories.

As a Colombian, the research interest arises from a personal concern about the way in which the war has been narrated in my country, an exercise done mostly by state agencies, media and academics. Starting with the premise that Colombia is a fragmented country–– which imposes challenges to the goal of building a national history and identity–, this study pays attention to the voices of victims. In a context of humanitarian crisis, for decades, thousands of people have kept completely silent. Until recently, testimonial projects were mediated by “experts” from diverse fields, including academics, journalists, and writers.

Victims’ voices were collected, edited, and published, but even when these were important avenues to publicize information about the conflict, victims did not really take ownership over how their own stories were told or used. However, as a way to include their voices in 8 the national history, in the last decade, groups of victims have begun to participate in memory projects and some of them have written their own stories.

In a broader context, scholars have mostly focused their studies in particular countries such as Argentina, Guatemala or Nicaragua. Several researches (Beverley 1993, Gugelberger

1996, Jelin 1994) stress specific testimonial production issues: defining testimony, its origins, benefits, limitations and/or expectations around matters like trauma relief or social justice.

By looking at the Colombian case and doing a follow-up on a particular memory project, I give relevance to grassroots testimonial narratives barely studied.

Building memory in a fragmented society

One day, Mrs. Elizabeth, 54, was talking on the porch of her house with some relatives and neighbors. Unexpectedly, from the corner of the street, they felt an explosion. She lost her son, forever. On another day, John Ferney, 14, was leaving his ranch with his whole family, escaping from the continuous battles between the guerrillas and the paramilitary groups. Trying to keep safe, he accidentally stepped in a landmine and lost one leg, forever.

And one other afternoon, Johana’s little cousin Laurita, 7, was walking with her mom to her grandma’s house in Medellin. It was a beautiful day, until Laurita was suddenly killed by a stray bullet. Johana lost her dear cousin, forever.

The human impact of the more than a half-century Colombian armed conflict is enormous. Tragedies like those mentioned above are just three out of more than eight million victims’ stories that happened between 1958 and 2018. The numbers are horrifying.

According to the most recent database made by the National Center for Historical Memory,

262,197 Colombians died, more than 7 million were internally displaced, 80,514 disappeared, and 37,094 were kidnapped. During this period, 17% of the population in 9

Colombia has been physically and/or physiologically affected by crimes such as assassinations, massacres, torture, disappearances, forced displacement, dispossession, sexual violence, illicit recruitment, landmines, sabotage, and terrorist attacks, among others.

The multiple layers of violence and the diversity of Colombian territories, make it difficult to generalize about the causes and effects of an armed conflict that is, at the same time, a combination of conflicts.

Some scholars argue that, from a social and geographical perspective, Colombia is a fragmented country (Safford and Palacios 2002). The elites that have been in power over the last two centuries have owned communication channels such as newspapers, editorial publishers, and mass media, and have imposed an idea of national identity that excludes alternative voices (López 2012, Ortiz 1998). However, in recent years, with the guidance of professionals such as psychologists, journalists, and social workers, some victims of the most recent armed conflict have started to use art and communication scenarios (writing, music, sewing or theater) to create their own ways to tell personal accounts of violence with the purpose of recognizing and reconstructing individual and collective memories and, in many cases, to demand justice. An important example of this commitment with history, memory, and justice is the work of La Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres, a feminist movement that, since

1996, among other actions, has created an oral archive with one thousand women’s voices talking about their experiences, victimization, and the ways they have responded to war: a feminist vision of pacifism, non-violence and civil resistance.

Building on this experience, recounting the armed conflict and specifically describing victimizations has become an imperative for hundreds of survivors who have participated in grassroots memory and social justice projects. The case studied in this research, for example, started in 2005, when the Colombian journalist and scholar Patricia Nieto decided to explore 10 other tools to narrate the Colombian war. The goals were to engage readers, call upon citizens to reflect and take action, and offer elements to make thorough decisions about the future of the nation. Nieto wanted to promote the production of testimonies written directly by those who had suffered any kind of victimization. Following a pilot plan and funded by the

Medellín City Hall, Nieto organized a group of journalism students, who traveled around their own city looking for people able to write in their natural way the story that made them victims of the armed conflict. The research team visited churches, centros comunitarios, prayer groups, schools, international agencies, non-governmental organizations, state offices, rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and more. They finally recruited a total of 126 people willing to write and, in the process of doing so, experience a therapeutic approach to their suffering or trauma.

Victims in a fragmented society

In an always-convulsive political setting, the elite that has governed the country for over two centuries has also promoted a peacebuilding scenario in which victims' reparation appears as a priority. In 2011, Law 1448––known as the Victims and Land Restitution Law– established measures to assist and repair the damages the conflict brought to people around the country. For the purposes of this Law, according to Article 3, victims are “those who individually or collectively have suffered an injury due to events that occurred as of January

1, 1985, as a consequence of infractions of International Humanitarian Law or of serious and manifest violations of international human rights standards, which occurred during the internal armed conflict.” The Law describes the concept more in detail to finally affirm that:

“Victim status is acquired regardless of whether the perpetrator is singled out, apprehended, prosecuted or convicted” (Congreso de la República, 2011, June 10). This Law also provided 11 for the creation of the Unit for the Victims Assistance and Reparation, and the National

Center for Historical Memory (NCHM), with the mission of contributing to the comprehensive reparation and to the right to the truth for the victims and society in general.

Through the testimony of those who have suffered and witnessed atrocities, professionals working on these governmental institutions have been producing testimonial accounts to reconstruct human rights violations that occurred during the conflict.

During 2018 ––as a result of a Peace Agreement between the Government and the guerrilla group FARC-EP signed in 2016– victims started to testify in front of the

Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-repetition. In this scenario, the victims’ personal need to give testimonies relates to what Eric Stover (2005) calls a

“moral duty”: to ensure that the truth about the death of family members, neighbors, and colleagues is duly recorded and acknowledged. Hence, oral and written testimonios are now at the center of Colombian public opinion.

Despite how the State defines victimhood, in this research I will show that victims also have their own perception of what victimhood means and why they agreed to participate in a workshop created explicitly for victims. They allow to see the impact of a victimizations in an individual, a family, and a community as a whole.

Methodology

During the summer of 2017, I traveled to my native city, Medellín, to contact primary sources for this research: campesinos, teachers, artists, accountants, journalists, social workers, among other people who participated in the series of writing workshops held in the city from 2006 to 2010. With the purpose of conducting semi-structured interviews, we met in their homes, at the University of Antioquia or in public places in their neighborhoods. In 12 total, I talked to eleven victims/authors and six organizers of the workshops. I recorded all interviews, transcribed them, and translated some of them. I also got access to the writing workshop’s archive, an incredible amount of documents, from first drafts to finalized versions of each testimony. These documents, along with the published stories, are also materials used in this research.

I analyzed the data using evidence-based interpretation (Rubin & Rubin 2005).

Techniques used after the fieldwork phase consisted on classifying, comparing, weighing, and combining material from the interviews and archival research. Concepts and themes were integrated and then coded using labels such as victimhood, trauma or forgiveness. With information transcribed and organized from interviews, and other additional data, it was possible to see what were the perceptions of the participants of this memory project, why they participated, and what did it mean for them to write their testimonies of the war.

Overview

This thesis begins with a historical recount of the Colombian socio-political landscape in the last 120 years. This sort of timeline aims to illuminate the causes of the violence, the role of the elites, and the development of contested ideas of power and State formation. This chapter reveals some of the socio political complexities that led to a prolonged armed conflict, a context that shows a divided society in which victims and perpetrators coexist.

This context helps to visualize the importance of local/regional initiatives of historical memory and testimonial production.

The second chapter presents some key debates that serve to situate testimonies in relation to issues such as the position of a testimony-taker, trauma relief, social justice, and historical memory. It also looks to what has been the testimonial literature in Colombia 13 during the 20th century, when dozens of victims’ and even victimizers’ stories and memories have been published in books or magazines.

Finally, the last chapter presents a case study that exemplifies the possibilities of collecting testimonios in grassroots scenarios where victims are protagonists. The chapter analyzes the State-supported writing workshops that took place in Medellín during 2006 and

2010: “De su puño y letra. Polifonía para la memoria. Las voces de las víctimas del conflicto armado en Medellín (By Their Own Hand: Polyphony for Memory, The Voices of the

Victims of the Armed Conflict in Medellin).” This public writing project produced three testimonial books with 59 non-fiction stories of the armed conflict, all of them written by victims/witnesses such as Doña Elizabeth, John Ferney and Johana, the victims whose stories were mentioned early in this introduction.

Testimonies, as I conclude, help to pluralize the narratives of war and allow to listen to the voices of generally silenced individuals who have suffered the effects of violence.

However, and I will argue this in the following chapters, it is important to be cautions about the multiple expectations that surround the production of testimonies. Collecting and preserving them is a way to include personal experiences in a shared Colombian story of horror and hope.

Chapter 1: Victims in a Fragmented Country 14

On August 24, 2016, a series of photographs was seen around the world. They showed

Cuban President Raúl Castro in the foreground, between two men who were giving each other an “official” sign of peace, while they each wielded a copy of the Final Agreement for the Termination of the Conflict and the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace. These two men represented two opposing and confronting sides during more than half a century of armed conflict in Colombia. On one end was President Juan Manuel Santos, representative of the elites who have led the country for more than 200 years, and on the other end was

Rodrigo Londoño, alias “Timochenko,” leader of the guerrilla organization Revolutionary

Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC-EP.

The signing of this agreement—which ended more than fifty years of declared war— is for many people the opportunity to write a new chapter in the history of Colombia; it is even “a message of global hope” (Pizarro 2017; Pardo 2015). The implementation of the agreement, however, represents a challenge of multiple dimensions, if one looks at the thesis that Colombia is “a fragmented country” (Palacios & Safford 2002) and the fact that “the

Colombian conflict is many conflicts” (INDH 2013).

What Colombians have to say about the armed conflict is affected by aspects such as geographic or economic backgrounds. People from the main cities have experienced the war in a different way than campesinos or indigenous communities in rural areas. Those who have been victimized by guerrilla groups have a different perception than those who have been victims of the national Army or paramilitary organizations. Hence, studying the production, collection, treatment and dissemination of memories and narratives in a regional/local scale, is key to understanding the social dimensions of a country embedded in a persistent violence. 15

Due to the complexities of the national history, it is important to make a historical recount in order to understand the possibilities of memory-building at a regional/local scale in the context of the post-agreement in Colombia. Hence, this research offers a context that explains, on the one hand, geographic, political and sociocultural fragmentation and, on the other, the conditions that led to the so-called Colombian armed conflict (1958-2016). To begin, this chapter recounts some of the key moments of the 20th century in Colombia: the vision and power of the elites; the peasant struggles for land; the violence of the first half of the century; the political pacts; the origin and actions of the guerrillas; the paramilitary groups and the drug trafficking mafias; the response of the Colombian State and its definition of the

“enemy;” as well as the relationship with the United States and its anti-drug policy.

To connect this with a broader idea of victimhood, the last section of this chapter summarizes what this war has left: in crude figures, more than eight million victims in fifty years, and the challenges of instances such as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, the Truth

Commission and the National Center of Historical Memory.

This historical recount highlights this geographic and sociopolitical fragmentation with a view to sustaining an argument around the contributions of testimonies in the construction of historical memory, and the politics and uses of individual “war-tales” accounts.

Colombia, a fragmented country

To say that Colombia is a fragmented country implies thinking about the territory not only from a spatial vision, that is, from its topography and geography, but from the social, economic, political and cultural divisions that have manifested since pre-Columbian times and the Conquest and have affected each region differently (Palacios & Safford, 2002). 16

In geographical terms, the Colombian territory is divided by three mountain ranges, with altitudes that reach more than 18,700 ft (5,700 m). This not only hinder transportation and communication, but have created marked regionalisms and hampered any sense of national unity. The country is divided politically into 32 decentralized departments and the capital District of Bogotá. Most of the population is in the center (Andean region) and north

(Caribbean region) of the country, while to the east and south (region of the Eastern Plains and Amazon, respectively, roughly 1/3 of the territory) are quite extensive areas without large populations and vast areas that are largely depopulated.

As several historians have explained (Melo 2017, Caballero 2017, Pardo Rueda

2015), since pre-Columbian times, rives and mountains have divided the cultures in these main areas. During the Conquest, the highlands provided the population with an environment conducive to escape heat and tropical diseases, as well as being optimal land for agriculture.

These divisions were encouraged during the Spanish colonization, when the conquerors ratified the fragmentation already suggested by the topography. They entered the country through different routes with the aspiration to dominate the regions they were occupying.

The elites (some liberals, from the point of view of free market, and other conservatives, represented by the large landowners, protectionists), settled in the Andean region and in the fertile valleys, creating from the beginning a population in the rest of the country that was disconnected from the centers of power, which would later mark an important part of the conflict in Colombia at a political and economic level. The Amazon region, for example, which represents a third of the country, does not have resources that are of interest to the elites, which has meant that the State has remained aloof. This region has been inhabited mainly by indigenous population and its development has been based on unstable economies that have attracted settlers for seasons. In the middle of the century, during the period of La 17

Violencia, a considerable peasant population was forced to settle in this region, forced by the violence exerted by the State to evict them from an area rich in agriculture. It is important to highlight this because the first guerrillas will emerge later from these regions. Likewise, the area of the Pacific and the Caribbean are inhabited by an important black population of slaves who escaped to an isolated region. They intended to live independently but paramilitary groups arrived later with the desire of taking the land for the production of African palm.

Since the origin of the nation, Eurocentric values, oriented towards the constitution of the republic in a modern sense, have come into conflict with the multiple conceptions of life of ethnic groups that coexist in Colombia. These divisions, also visible at the regional level, have represented enormous national challenges for social and economic integration.

The slow development of communication channels, for instance, allows us to see how certain symbolic and material practices have occurred in the construction of a State (Alvear 2009).

And it is precisely in the midst of this lack of nationalism in which various regional and social conflicts have been triggered, conflicts that ultimately have in common the desire of the

Colombian elite to control regions where there is wealth (Caballero 2017).

In social practice, these dynamics of power, rather than solving problems, have contributed to worsening social inequality gaps, given that the State is still absent in many regions, both in development and military terms. Scholars have stressed how throughout the centuries the Colombian State has not taken care of many populations in marginal regions.

On the contrary, in regions where there was wealth, the State has forcibly removed small producers, either to undertake agricultural projects, livestock, mining or extractivismo, and in this scenario, as it will be seen below, drug trafficking has come in. (Fals Borda 1975,

Caballero 2017). 18

If we carefully study the physical characteristics of the country and the primary cause of the multiple confrontations experienced over a little more than two centuries of history, it is difficult to think of a single idea of a nation or a single way of solving all conflicts. As described in the National Human Development Report in 2013:

Colombia is an intensely fragmented society. First, the creation of a geography that invites the formation of provinces and that for a long time kept them isolated. Second, the works of a historically weak state in fiscal terms, of regulatory capacity and forceful monopoly. Third, of a late, slow and insufficient extension of social citizenship or incorporation of popular majorities. Fourth, the creation of elites without a sufficient social foundation, fragmented and, therefore, without awareness that their role is to lead the nation (INDH 2013).

This report states that these factors connect and feed each other to produce a diversified, heterogeneous, and pluralistic society, but that is also prone to conflict, blockage and the inability to solve collective problems.

A century of battles for territory

The first point of the Final Peace Agreement is called: “Integral Rural Reform.” It stipulates that the inhabitants of the Colombian countryside be given land, be provided with the means to produce and survive from the land, and participate in the planning of their regions. These goals represent the historic agrarian conflicts in Colombia, a structural problem of the country, whose central cause is the concentration of land in the hands of a few.

The evolution of this problem can be witnessed through five historical blocks: 1) The

“happy” years (1900-1929); 2) The effects of the Great Depression (1930-1948); 3) The violence (1949-1957); 4) The national front (1958-1974), and 5) The armed conflict (1958-

2016).

The “happy” years (1900-1929) 19

The 20th century in Colombia began with a peace agreement. It was a pact signed in

1902, after a long conflict between liberals and conservatives1 known as “the War of a

Thousands Days.” The previous century had been quite convulsive: there were two coups d’état, fourteen regional civil wars, many local clashes, and nine general wars. The

Colombian State, which was under construction, was a succession of cycles of confrontations, followed by agreements between the elites, interrupted in turn by new conflicts.

With his arrival to the presidency in 1904, General Rafael Reyes promoted the economy by encouraging the expansion of the agricultural frontier and the production of primary goods. His government also drew a new regional map: it divided and created new departments (equivalent to states in the United States), which partly alleviated the tensions that decades earlier had led to civil wars.

After 1910, coffee exports increased, followed by international loans given as a

“compensation” after the U.S. financed Panama separation from Colombia in order to ensure control over the land. Later, the First World War generated a positive impact on the

Colombian economy, stimulating massive migration from the countryside to the main cities.

For example, tobacco and textile factories were founded in the city of Medellín, capital of

1 In Colombia, the Liberal and Conservative parties, or their various factions, have shared more than 90 per cent of the vote in national elections since time immemorial. However, while there are ideological and policy differences between Conservatives and Liberals, they are not substantial and have not been so for many years. Leaders of the two traditional parties are in fact frequently referred to by critics as comprising one oligarchy which was merely formalized by the National Front coalition arrangements and its subsequent permutations (Dix 1990). From the beginning, however, the ideology between them was quite contrasting. The Conservatives favored a centralist and Catholic state that belonged to a landowning class. In contrast, the Liberals advocated for a federal state and a strong separation between the Catholic Church and the state. The liberal elites were merchants and incipient industrialists. In economic terms, within liberalism emerged two currents: one protectionist and the other free trade. Conservatives favored protectionism. 20 the then-progressive department of Antioquia, and a state-owned utility company was born.

The population went from 54,946 inhabitants in 1905 to 120,044 in 1928.

It has been said that the seven years from 1922 to 1929 were the happiest in

Colombian history, at least for the emerging middle class and the elites. “The world had been two decades into the new century and was turning its eyes towards this vast and contradictory corner of South America to try to take advantage of its riches (Uribe Celis 2017).” The social climate, however, meant a permanent upheaval for the rise of the working class as a result of the nascent industrialization in certain urban centers and also linked to U.S. investment in oil and banana production (Pardo 2015).

During these years, the Communist Party was created in Colombia, the first unions were organized, and the first strikes and mobilizations of workers in textile companies, ports and railways were held throughout the country. The “happy” years ended on December 6,

1928, when, after almost a month of strikes in Ciénaga, Magdalena, the armed forces of

Colombia opened fire on an unknown number of demonstrators, workers of the United Fruit

Company in an episode known as “The Massacre of the Bananeras.”

The effects of the Great Depression (1930-1948)

Along with this confrontations, the economic growth of these years, which mainly benefited the elites (landowners, big merchants and the nascent industrial bourgeoisie), was subjected to the international market and collapsed in 1929 with the bankruptcy of the New

York Stock Exchange. From there on, the Great Depression produced a decrease in these economic processes and, in this context, the Colombian countryside became the scene of dispute of one of the main violent conflicts of the first half of the 20th century.

In principle, after more than fifty years without being in power, in 1930 a liberal president was elected. This event triggered local conflicts in several regions, such as violent 21 incidents between liberal mayors and conservative citizens (Pardo 2015). “When it was expected that the coexistence within the two parties and their collaboration for the benefit of the country would be consolidated more than ever, sectarian passion began to reappear, and hatred, which seemed to have been permanently extinguished, was reborn (Guzman et al

1963: 24).”

As for the peasants, they remained subordinated to the social and political authority of the large landowners. Their desire of becoming owners of the land was overshadowed by the exclusion of those landowners, the center of an agrarian problem that cuts across all of

Latin America. The peasant protests that sought to propose reforms, open debates, and reach consensus, on many occasions provoked the violent reaction of the elitist opposition. And with the arrival of leftist movements through the Communist Party, the National Union of the Revolutionary Left and the National Agrarian Party, the peasant struggles became politicized. Some settlers, who had been making their way into the country through vacant land occupations, organized to resist the eviction of the large landowners, but the mobilization was not successful, considering that some leaders adhered to the political parties, while other settlers decided to continue expanding agricultural horizons.

The tenants, finally, organized themselves into unions and put pressure on the governments of that time to recognize the right to unionization. This is how, in 1936, the government agreed to create the first Agrarian Law that established the social function of property. This Law, however, did not counteract the traditional domain of the landlords and ended up being buried by another new Law in 1944, paradoxically driven by landowners of the two parties, this time united against the government at the time.

La Violencia (1948-1957) 22

The electoral campaign of 1946 happened in the middle of a great labor agitation, because in that year there were more than 500 labor conflicts, and the influence of the

Communist Party was significant. Although upon taking office conservative President

Mariano Ospina Pérez called for national unity and invited all parties to abandon their hatred, violence in the regions intensified, even more so when in the next electoral campaign to

Congress, in 1947, the Liberal Party won. On the one hand, there were the conservatives in the presidency and, on the other, the liberals in the Senate and the House. The situation became so critical that in a memorial written to the President of the Republic, the head of liberalism, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, denounced the murder of liberals in twelve departments in the country, and demanded the immediate intervention of the government to put an end to this barbarism.

Barbarism, however, was just the beginning: in the country’s interior, conservative groups began to arm themselves, in order to assassinate and banish liberals from their communities. They exploded dynamite at newspapers, massacred opponents, and assassinated political leaders. On April 9, 1948, Gaitán himself, then presidential candidate, was assassinated, which began a period in Colombian history known as La Violencia, a conflict characterized by a lack of a formal declaration of war and clearly defined sides. This latest murder ignited outrage in Bogotá and other cities, and triggered peasant violence in the eastern plains and areas of Andean smallholding (INDH 2013).

Among the immediate consequences are two years of violence interrupted by two temporary truces. “The persecution against the liberals became systematic and covered most of the country’s departments. The Liberals and to a lesser extent the Communists formed guerrilla groups in many areas, mainly in Los Llanos, Tolima and Huila (Rueda 2015: 428).”

Disputes between the conservative assassins —made up of military groups, political 23 conservatives and the church—and the nascent liberal guerrillas and self-defense communists who were raised in arms, were all responsible for the further political, social and economic destabilization of the country. Similarly, the Violence manifested itself in a repressive wave against agrarian activists, workers and urban popular movements agglutinated around the ideals of Gaitanism (GMH 2013). It is estimated that during this period, some 200,000 people were killed as a result of partisan violence (Oquist 1978).

The Bipartisan Pact of the National Front (1958-1974)

On the evening of June 13, 1953, with the support of the Army, General Augusto

Rojas Pinilla seized power through a military coup that was later validated by the National

Assembly. After his arrival, he offered an amnesty law that sought to pacify the bellicose

Colombian political scene. Thousands of insurgents handed over their weapons to the government as part of a pact between the guerrillas of the Llano to put an end to hostilities and enable their reintegration into society. The peasant self-defense groups, on the other hand, rejected the pact and continue to organize themselves in independent communities outside the State. The response of the government: repression.

Four years later, in one of the elections with the greatest participation in the country’s history, Colombians supported the creation of the National Front, a six-year bipartisan pact, through which the traditional parties would begin to alternate power after the dictatorship of

General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. But what some saw as a return to democracy and an end to the Violence, others criticized it for its exclusionary and elitist character, because this

“oligarchic pact” only legitimized the monopoly of power in the hands of the elites and closed the political participation to all of those who did not identify with traditional parties.

This is how the greatest commander of the then-rising FARC-EP guerrilla, Manuel

Marulanda Vélez, described this era: “Fleeing from official repression, we settled in the 24

Marquetalia region (Tolima), where the State expropriated farms, cattle, pigs and poultry, extending this measure to the thousands of compatriots who did not share the bipartisan policy of the National Front.”2

This point in history is key to understanding the origin of the armed conflict since, as some reports point out, violence went from being “bipartisan” to being “subversive” (INDH,

2003, GMH, 2013). Even after the period of Rojas Pinillas, the liberal guerrillas and the conservative bands demobilized, they began a few years of transition from inter-party violence to a “social” violence, expressed and perpetuated in the peasant periphery. The fragmentation of the country is evidenced once again, when a political solution to violence

(National Front) fails to solve the basic problems: the agrarian problem that transcends an armed struggle in the countryside, also redefined as the vehicle of the socialist revolution, more alive those years in Latin America.

The Armed Conflict (1958-2016)

Discussing the origins, dynamics and growth of the contemporary armed conflict, the

“¡Basta Ya! Report of the National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia (2013)” begins by stating that it “has been heterogeneous over time as in the extension of the territory.

So have the actors, the victims and the violent repertoires (CNMH 2013: 111).”

The National Human Development Report (2003), for its part, highlights three historical hypotheses about the origin of the conflict: First: in areas of colonization

(considered “tierras valdías” opened to colonization), where there was no State presence, there was room for non-state armies. Second: the National Front put an end to the Violence

2 Excerpts from the message of Manuel Marulanda Vélez, maximum commander of the FARC-EP, read by Joaquín Gómez during the installation of the peace dialogue meeting in San Vicente del Caguán, January 7, 1999. Quoted by: INDH, 2003. 25 but left remnants of “social” guerrilla warfare in the countryside. Third: The Revolutionary

Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were born as a revolutionary project but marginal in geographical and political terms; other guerrillas, in spite of being more urban in their origin, also ended up in the periphery.

Prior to examining what the war left behind, the effects of half a century of armed conflict, it is pertinent to review who its actors were, and how and why they arose. It is important to look at this in detail because, as it will be seen in chapter three of this study, the perceptions of the authors of testimonies varies according to who is recounting a certain part of the story.

The Guerrillas

Due to the reduced possibility of political participation and the structural problems that the traditional political class was unable to solve, in the 1960s two of the most important guerrilla groups in the Colombian armed conflict were born, which transcended from the peasant self-defense groups to the revolutionary guerrillas. Claiming the right to land and the exercise of power, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (Farc-EP) emerged in 1964, caught in a Marxist-Leninist current and orthodox communism, and in

1965 the National Liberation Army (ELN), ideologically influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the Theology of Liberation.

Especially in its early years, these guerrilla movements had a very limited impact.

They were small groups, with great economic difficulties, weak military and with very limited support bases. However, they did not go unnoticed; on the contrary, from very early, the leaders of the National Front saw in them a threat to the system and tried to break them, almost always resorting to force. 26

Although, as we saw earlier, Colombia has had guerrillas since the 1950s, its configuration changed in the 1960s when, after the the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the revolutionary wars and the Marxist-Leninist character of this regime expanded throughout the entire continent. At the same time, this was seen by the United States, in the context of the Cold War and the Alliance for Progress, as part of the “international communist plot, which was supposed to be preceded by triumphant revolutions in China and Cuba (CNMH

2013: 117).” As seen earlier, in the words of the founder of the FARC, in his case, the emergence was due to the attacks of the Army against the so-called “independent republics,” in its objective of recovering the territory by force. It is worth mentioning that this guerrilla had an Agrarian Program (which the State did not pay attention to) that sought to give free land to the peasants who worked it or wanted to work it, and grant land titles to settlers, occupants, tenants, etc. In addition, it sought to protect indigenous communities, respecting their councils and forms of organization (Arenas 1985).

In the following decades, other groups also emerged, and, as I describe below, victimizations from the guerrilla groups cannot be studied under a global idea since those groups act differently according to their own interests. Some of them were the People’s

Liberation Army (EPL), of Maoist ideology; the Revolutionary People’s Army (ERP), of

Trotskyist ideals; the Revolutionary Guevarista Army (ERG), a branch of the ELN inspired by “Che” Guevara, and the April 19 Movement (M-19), with a nationalist and Bolivarian ideology. All these groups are embedded within the strong movements of the left throughout

Latin America, although founded on different ideologies, some inspired by the Cuban example, and others by the Chinese.

In general, during the 1970s, the guerrillas sought to strengthen their leadership and legitimize their presence in the social and political life of Colombia, seeking influence 27 through winning the sympathy of the peasant sectors of the country. It is important to mention that, in these years, the guerrillas were divided from within and also hostile to each other.

For example, confrontations between groups of different orientation, such as those of the

FARC and the EPL, and internal conflicts within the same group, became frequent. The guerrillas “were not properly a paradigm of democratic practices or ideals.” (CNMH: 126)

However, groups as the FARC had a clear “social” goal at the beginnings.

The incursion of drug trafficking, which became the main financial source of, for example, the FARC guerrillas, gave them a new political-military horizon and a new social base, since they were able to increase numerically and substantially increase their military capacity. Military operations then took place, with large units and having as objectives heavily defended military and official bases, very different from harassment, ambush or assault on small units, which had been its predominant operation in the previous three decades (Pardo Rueda 2013).

Presently, of all these guerrilla groups, only the ELN is active and conducting peace negotiations with the Colombian government (Pizarro 2017).

The paramilitary groups

Paramilitarism emerged in Colombia in the 1970s with the objective of fighting the armed groups of the extreme left and also to take land away from small producers and defend large business interests. These illegally armed groups, also called “self-defense groups,”3 spread through several regions of the country thanks to the support of wealthy landowners,

3 The concepts "autodefensa" and "paramilitar", although often used as synonyms, differ from each other. The first points to a spontaneous phenomenon of citizen self-protection in the absence of the State, while the second suggests a combat corps parallel to the Military Forces and to some degree in collusion with agents of the State. (INDH, 2003. p.29) 28 settlers, peasants, small industrialists and, to a large extent, state agents such as police, military, politicians, among other sectors of society.

With antecedents in the times of La Violencia and the National Front, in the 1980s these groups were organized like extensions of armies involved in illegal industries, such as drug trafficking and the trade of emeralds. In their permanent struggle to banish the guerrillas, these groups devastated populations and committed atrocious acts against the civilian population, such as massacres and the forced disappearance of thousands of Colombians.

During the presidency of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010)4, in July 2003 in the northern town of Santa Fe de Ralito, the government and the paramilitary organization

Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) reached an accord. This illegal ultra-right army that had perpetrated thousands of crimes in the country was now deposing its arms. Hence, the first national process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of paramilitaries groups took place in Medellín. Official data from that time5 informs that on

December 9, 2003, 868 former combatants delivered 467 weapons, and on August 1, 2005,

2,033 former combatants delivered 1,120 weapons; which should be understood as the end of Bloque Cacique Nutibara and Bloque Héroes de Granada. Years later, the ex- paramilitaries themselves confessed that in some cases these were “false demobilizations.”6

After this, several groups have emerged, also referred to as Bandas Emergentes

(Emerging Bands) or Bacrim (Criminal Bands) that have been formed as mafias and

4 With the arrival to power of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, took place the demobilization and disarmament of 34 blocks of the AUC. 5 Cifras usadas por Alonso, Manuel y Valencia, Germán. (2008). “Balance del proceso de Desmovilización, Desarme y Reinserción (DDR) de los bloques Cacique Nutibara y Héroes de Granada en la ciudad de Medellín”. Estudios Políticos, 33, Instituto de Estudios Políticos, Universidad de Antioquia, 11-34. 6 Free Versions of Justice and Peace in Colombia, available in: http://www.verdadabierta.com/justicia-y- paz/versiones 29 syndicates in the service of drug trafficking mafias, although it has been questioned whether they can still be classified as “paramilitaries.”

The drug-trafficking mafias

Growing coca leaves to produce narcotics started to happened in South America since

1975. Initially, Bolivia and Peru produced 90% of the coca leaf and coca paste and base. The groups of Colombian smugglers and traffickers saw a business opportunity with the coca and began to transport it in small planes to the jungles of Colombia, where they refined 90% of the world’s cocaine and then transported it through various means to the U.S. (Pardo 2013).

Due to a series of political and environmental factors, in the mid-1990s the bulk of the coca crops moved to southern Colombia. This changed not only the country’s role in the coca business, but also guerrilla warfare and peasant struggles for the right to land. New colonized lands became spaces for illicit crops. As far as the mafias, “there was a specialization of roles within the cartels, some dedicated to transportation, others to processing, others to political and judicial relations, others to the handling of money and others to the distribution in the cities of the United States (Pardo 2013: 638).”

Considering that the expansion area of coca in Colombia was the jungles of the south, where the most significant groups of the FARC settled, they quickly controlled this expansion, the processing of the coca base into refined cocaine and its shipment abroad; and the coca mafias began to depend, in turn, on these guerrilla groups. After the coca boom in the mid 1980s, “The guerrilla quickly realized that it was necessary to control the proliferation of crops to maintain the price of the ‘commodity’ and regulated the extension of the coca-growing zones (Molano 2017).”

This logic helped build a guerrilla organization and a prosperous campesinado tied to the land and illicit crops, as well as a dynamic that further activated the land conflict, where 30 weapons became an instrument of protection and expansion. And the paramilitary groups, on the other hand, were also financed and expanded thanks to their link with the drug trafficking mafias, which ended in a triangle of terror in which both guerrillas and paramilitaries served as agents to the mafias, which equally financed the armed structures of both contenders

(Pardo 2013).

In December 1981, the M-19 guerrillas made a dangerous provocation against the drug trafficking mafia by kidnapping Marta Nieves, the sister of the Ochoa Vásquez’s, members of the Medellín Cartel. In response to the kidnapping, the mafia organized itself and announced that 220 drug traffickers had formed an armed group dedicated to killing the kidnappers, the first paramilitary group linked to drug trafficking.

This event, which was in some way favorable to a State incapable of stopping the actions of the guerrillas, was simultaneously interwoven with a law that was enacted on

March 4, 1982, through which the Colombian State ratified the extradition treaty between

Colombia and the United States, a law that was opposed with blood and fire by drug traffickers.

Between 1984 and 1993, extradition became the central axis in the fight against the

Colombian cocaine and one of the main causes of a difficult period of violence and terror for

Colombians known as the “Narco war.” Sociologist Alfredo Molano describes this period:

“at the end of the eighties, the armed conflict, which until then had a purely agrarian character, became a national problem. Organized paramilitary groups were created and financed by drug traffickers, large cattle ranchers and sectors of the public force that, in exchange for favoring their businesses, sowed terror to defeat the guerrillas and to control entire regions politically and economically (Molano 2015).”

The Colombian State and the United States

According to the Índice Nacional de Desarrollo Humano (2013: 32), in this prolonged armed conflict, the State failed because it was unable to prevent the uprisings and was unable to resolve them in almost forty years. It failed because it did not address in an

“integral, concerted and sustained way… the gravity, complexity, depth and persistence that the problem demanded;” and failed, above all, for structural reasons rather than for individual actions or omissions of rules or influential people.

The State, however, reacted in various ways, especially in military terms. To a large extent, its main actions can be framed together with the support from several governments of the U.S. governments, which, in turn, acted on the basis of two internal policies: national security and anti-drug policy (Vásquez-León & Lindsay-Poland 2012). In this sense, several laws and cooperation agreements were signed and promoted, such as the Alliance for

Progress (1961), Law 135 on Agrarian Social Reform (1961), the Treaty on Extradition

(1979), and Plan Colombia (2000).

Both prior and during the Cold War, the main concern of the United States has been the political instability of the area, the fact that “the perception that its geographic proximity could affect the security of the United States in some way has been the key to such concern

(Pardo: 781).” This imperative was described by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 2000 as:

Violence in Colombia took a new direction in the 1960s due to a strong intervention by the government of John F. Kennedy, with missions of the U.S. Special Forces. This was part of Kennedy’s overall project to convert the armies of Latin America into security forces that controlled their own population through violence. It was about changing the strategy of the hemispheric defense of the Latin American armed forces, towards internal security, that is, towards war against its own population.

According to Chomsky, the U.S. Special Forces instructed the Colombians to form groups of paramilitaries that carried “paramilitary terror” against known communist opponents.

Hence, since the late eighties, this began to give a significant qualitative change in the composition of troops with the systematic recruitment of professional soldiers to form counter-guerrilla companies and then to integrate counter-guerrilla battalions in each brigade

(Pardo 2013).

In the early eighties, cocaine had become a serious problem in the United States, due to high consumption among adults and young people in the middle and upper classes. “What was once a sporadic and disorganized activity had become a powerful international crime organization, a real barracks, of immense proportions and ramifications in several countries

(Pardo: 639).” Faced with this phenomenon, the Colombian State was unable to contain, prosecute, and punish these traffickers.

The Anti-Narcotics Police, on the other hand, did not have the capacity to face the guerrillas that protected those areas, so the participation of the Army was required, for which in 2000 the Plan Colombia was designed in military cooperation with the United States

(Kintto 2000). This plan proposed to militarize the eradication of coca plantations, displacing police from its role; strengthen the Colombian judicial system to punish the sectors involved with coca; neutralize the finances of drug traffickers and guerrillas by confiscating assets, conducting joint operations and sharing intelligence data. To achieve these goals, the military forces created three counter-narcotics battalions, a military units strong enough and trained to take control of coca-growing zones and protect the police in their efforts to eradicate crops.

In this way, at the request of the United States, Colombia entered the war against drug trafficking. “The intensive fumigation of illegal crops—including poppy—failed to stop the drug trafficking, but instead, displaced the settlers and forced to change local traders. In 33 general, the illegal crops expanded the theaters of war and strengthened the parties involved in them” (Molano 2015).

What war left behind

It is impossible to encompass all the fronts of the war in the same story: “The

Colombian conflict is a lot of conflicts” (INDH 2003). For this reason, although media discourses have generalized the expression “the end of war” or post-conflict Colombia, the truth is that, beyond the Final Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC guerrilla, many of the “structural” problems, represented in permanent conflicts and cross- cutting to the entire society, are still present.

Today, what the war has left Colombia is a huge human impact. This year, the

Observatory of Memory and Conflict of the CNMH, delivered to the Integral System of

Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition, the most complete database on the armed conflict in Colombia, which documents events from 1958 to July 2018. According to this report, the great majority of fatal victims who left the war were members of the civilian population: 215,005 civilians against 48,813 combatants. The Observatory documented ten forms of violence, including kidnapping, disappearance, sexual violence, massacres, recruitment of minors and terrorist attacks. A total of 94,754 deaths are attributed to the paramilitaries, 35,683 to the guerrillas and 9,804 to agents of the State. The following table summarizes other relevant and terrifying statistics: (CNMH 2018)

Type of victimization Number of victims Selective murders 177.710 Kidnappings 37.165 Terrorist attacks 3.549 Massacres 23.937 Forced disappearance 80.472 Sexual violence 15.738 Forced displacement 5.712.506 34

Antipersonnel mines 4.528 Illicit recruitment 17.778

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Carolina Barco summarized the effects of the violence that was unleashed by the armed conflict, a social phenomenon that “has slowed down Colombian development, violated the rule of law and weakened democratic institutions” (INDH 2003: 11).

For its part, the National Agricultural Census of 2015, which is developed to know the state of rural fields in the national territory, shows that the armed conflict left a de- ruralized, urbanized country and where there is an evident accumulation of land. The most productive land is not in the hands of the peasants and farmers, but in the hands of the real estate sector: 70% of the lands with agricultural potential have not been used for production but for real estate speculation, such as fattening lots. According to DANE, the 44.7% of the countryside is in poverty, with medium and small farmers as the most affected. In terms of land use, the census confirms that the country allocates large areas to livestock and much less for agriculture. Of the total area, 80.4% is dedicated to pasture, while 19.1% to sowing.

Regarding illicit plant crops, there are currently more than 150,000 hectares of coca planted, the highest figure in the history of Colombia.7

However, the figures and data that make up the “official story” often leave out the individual accounts and memories of the war. This then opens a range of questions: What about the victims? What did they do, how did they organize themselves, when did they start raising their voices? What has been the role of human rights organizations, both local and international, and what is their impact on the policies of truth, justice and reparation? How

7 These number were taken from the article “La coca se dispara”. Revista Semana. March 4, 2017. 35 and when did the meaning of victims begin to be used and what does this social category mean?

The armed conflict in Antioquia and Medellín

Considering that this research highlights a particular experience of testimonial production in the city of Medellín, it is necessary to give an overview of how the armed conflict has impacted the state of Antioquia and its capital Medellin. Coming from a broader context of the war, paying attention to a specific region helps to visualize the complexities of building historical memory. As it was mention earlier, the fragmentation of the country means that each region, and each locality, has been affected by the conflict in a different way.

This research seeks to particularly study the way in which people who participated in victims writing workshops lived and documented their experiences.

Medellin is located in the northwest of Colombia and is the capital of the department of Antioquia. “With its 2,184,000 inhabitants, it is the second largest city in Colombia and was recognized, at least in the middle of the first decade of this century, as one of the most violent cities in the country and the world (CNMH 2017).”

During the narco war, the crudest years of its history, Medellín existed among bombs in public places, annihilation of leftist leaders and public defenders, kidnappings, assassinations, massacres, terrorist attacks and explosives, among many other crimes.

According to the report Medellín: Memories of an urban war (CNMH, 2017), official figures estimated that in Medellín, between 1980 and 2014, at least 132,529 people were recognized victims of the armed conflict. Forced displacement is, by far, the main form of victimization with 106,916 people affected. Followed by selective murder (19,832), forced disappearance

(2,784 victims), and the terrifying figure of 221 massacres (1,175 victims). 36

In addition, there were other forms of violence that are not lethal but that demonstrate the magnitude and degradation of the armed conflict: actions of war (784 victims), kidnapping (484), sexual violence (336), forced recruitment (136), terrorist attack (80) and damage to civil goods (12). This means that in a city with 2,184,000 inhabitants about 6 out of every 100 people have been direct victims of the armed conflict and its associated violence.

This also confirms one of the characteristics of the national armed conflict: its predominant impact on non-combatant civil society.

As it will be observed in the third chapter, each of these numbers contains one or more “tales of death” (Oglesby 2007), a “ritualized repetition of the traumatic and sinister story” (Jelin 1994). Scenarios such as a series of victims’ writing workshops or psycho-social and open writing initiatives hold in Museo Casa de la Memoria, are making possible the production of alternative narratives than contest the cold numbers of official history and knowledge and empathy for those who have suffered the war.

The negotiated peace and the construction of historical memory

The long history of negotiation processes that have taken place in the country are a reflection of the war dynamics that have shaped the political scene in Colombia, especially in the 20th century. Through that long trajectory in processes of peace and negotiation, several armed groups have been reincorporated into civil life. In 200 years of existence, Colombia has experienced up to 96 wars. Only in the 20th century, there were 57 peace processes, four of them with the FARC guerrilla, currently in the process of reincorporation (Pizarro 2017).

The Final Peace Agreement signed with the FARC exposed in the first three of the six points, the structural problems that gave rise to the permanent civil struggles: Rural

Reform; Political participation, and Solution to the problem of drugs. The fourth point is 37 related to the victims: truth, justice, reparation and guarantee of non-repetition; the fifth refers to the End of the conflict, and the sixth to the Implementation and verification.

After fifty years of a complex armed conflict in Colombia, on April 2017, a presidential decree officially created the Commission for the Clarification of Truth,

Coexistence and Non-Repetition. Founded under the 2016 peace deal between the government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels, this

“Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-repetition” is trying to provide a general explanation of the conflict as a whole, clarify major human rights violations that occurred during the armed conflict, and pursue justice for many of the country’s victims of war crimes.

However, the present moment of transitional justice in Colombia is different to other transitional processes in Latin America. Whereas the perpetrator of human rights violations in countries such Argentina or Chile was only the dictatorial regime––and it consisted in political transitions from dictatorships to democracies––in Colombia, in the context of the armed conflict, there were many perpetrators, happening particular cases where, for example, a victim is at the same time a victimizer. But, as it happened in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid in 1994, in the Colombian transitional justice system, collecting testimonies is one of the steps to the goal of recognizing the voice of the victims and facilitating reparations from perpetrators.

Beyond the paradox of whether or not the victims obtain justice after testifying in front of these courts, collecting and producing testimonies in grassroots scenarios is one of the recent social manifestations in Colombia that deserves further analysis. The use of testimonial narratives in the context of the armed conflict will be explored in the next chapters. 38

Chapter 2: Key Discussions on Testimonies

There is a vast literature in testimonies and a vigorous tradition of testimonial production in Latin America. In this chapter I address four key debates over testimonies that frame the results of this research presented in chapter three. The first one has to do with a classical way of collecting these narratives, where mostly an editor takes a testimony from a

“subaltern” subject. The second has to do the discussion around trauma recovery or the healing aspect of giving/writing a testimony. The third stresses the way in which historical memory has been understood in Latin America, a space to reconstruct individualized experiences of victims of human rights violations; and the fourth debate reflects on testimonies as a mechanism to achieve social justice or political transformation.

Before developing these ideas, it is necessary to take a brief look at the origins and evolution of what has been the evolution of this “genre” in Latin America, as well as a short recount of testimonial literature in Colombia during the 20th century, where dozens of victims and even victimizers’ stories and memories have been published in books or magazines. This chapter presents the theoretical discussion that frame this research and that well support the analysis of the memory case on chapter three.

Testimonies in Latin America

To start, academics and critics do not agree on a single meaning for the concept testimony. A variety of texts can fit under the label: oral history, memoir, autobiography, chronicle, confession, life story, novella-testimonio, nonfiction novel, etc. Its complexity grows even more when trying to categorize local and national testimonial accounts –such as the Colombian, Argentinean or Guatemalan cases– in a wider classification of regional or

“continental” narratives, like the “Latin American testimonial literature.” 39

Yet, for the purposes of this research, I bring a definition given by John Beverley in

Against Literature (1993: 70). For him, testimonio is

a novel o novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, graphemic as opposed to acoustic) form, told in first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. The unit of the narration is usually a “life” or a significant life experience”. To this definition, Beverley adds a technical description of its production which “often involves the tape recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is an intellectual, journalist, or writer.

In general, scholars affirm that testimonial literature emerged as part of a global reordering of the social and economic contexts of power/difference within which “literature” is produced and consumed (Gugelberger & Kearney 1991). “In contrast to conventional writing about the colonial situation –the authors said–, which is produced at the centers of global power and near the apices of class difference, testimonial literature is produced by subaltern peoples on the periphery or the margin of the colonial situation” (p. 4).

What has been known as the “euphoric moment” of testimonies in the region

(Gugelberger 1996) goes from the 1960s to the 1980s, when some intellectuals became the spokesman for citizens who have been historically marginalized: campesinos, afrodescendents, or indigenous people. Also, when a number of publications, mostly written by journalists, sociologists, and anthropologists, appeared with the purpose to give “a voice to the voiceless.”

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, certain Latin American intellectuals or latinoamericanistas noted that, although the decolonization of most of these countries had happened during the first third of the nineteen-century, most of the national systems maintained structures of segregation, causing large sectors of the population to remain isolated from the center of power. They also noticed that those who had become spokesmen of the marginalized groups, had used that situation to uphold their own projects 40 instead of supporting the oppressed. Willing to change that paradigm, in response, some intellectuals enrolled in revolutionary groups, while in the academic sector some writers and scholars questioned the function of the literature and decided to deconstruct the hegemonic narratives to present their own new projects (Maldonado 2008).

Since then and for over forty years, extensive studies and reviews have been taking into account testimonies’ contextual elements and political uses (Jelin 1994, Arias 2001,

Beverley 2004, Maldonado 2008). In the United States, scholars began to use the concept in the 1990s, when some academics looked toward subaltern studies and the accompanying theoretical analysis of testimonios, and founded a Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in 1993 (Henderson, 2001).

As the founding text from which other testimonies will be organized and projected in

Latin America, several critics and scholars (Gugelberger, 1996; Sklodowska, 1996; Ochando,

1998;) situate the “testimonial novel” Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) by the Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet. The work focuses on the life of Esteban Montejo, a 108-year- old black Cuban who “was born in slavery, fled to the mountains, participated in Cuba's war of independence and in the battle of Cienfuegos against the Americans.” (Barnet, 1966).

Although several critiques had confronted Barnet’s work and his interest behind the reconstruction of Montejo’s life story, Cuba has been recognized as the epicenter of a literary movement that has spread throughout the continent.8

8 Among some of the renowned testimonial works in the region are Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) and La noche de Tlatelolco (1970) by the Mexican journalist and writer Elena Poniatowska; Si me permiten hablar... by the Brazilian sociologist Moema Viezzer (1974), and the popular Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú́ , the testimonio of a 24-year-old Indian Woman and Guatemalan human right activist produced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and originally printed in English in 1982. 41

Testimonies in Colombia

It is interesting that in most of the studies about the origins of testimonial literature in

Latin America, Colombia is not mentioned (Gugelberger 1991, Nance 2006, Maldonado

2008). The reflections revolve around the evolution of the genre in specific national contexts such as Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, or Guatemala, countries that emerged from periods of conflict and repression, and faced processes of justice rooted in accountability and redress for victims (Hayner, 2011).

In Colombia, the production of testimonies differs to the regional context since, as seen on the previous chapter, the causes and effects of violence are not restrained to the State as a single author of victimizations or human right violations. In this country, the range of victims of the war includes not just “subaltern” subjects or people at the bottom of a social scale, but citizens from different socio economic backgrounds who have been victimized by diverse actors: guerrillas, paramilitary groups, national army, mafias.

In order to propose a new approach to the representation of the national reality, authors of testimonies in Colombia also come from several fields and have blurred the boundaries between literary, sociological, journalistic and historical discourse. Throughout more than fifty years, they have explored the possibilities of testimoniees in terms of temporalities, themes, and techniques (Suárez 2011). They have been journalists or writers who are direct or indirect protagonists of the war; or scholars or journalists that reproduce or adapt testimonies of victims or perpetrators; or the survivors/witnesses (and also the victimizers) themselves (Vélez 2001).9

9 Considering that one of the particularities of testimonies is its heterogeneity –which is also a characteristic of the Colombian violence–, some scholars analyze the national narratives of war on a classification of three groups of narratives: 1) experiential narrative, or stories written or told by the protagonists of the events; 2) partisanship, in which liberal and conservative citizens defend their positions and are mutually responsible for 42

There is also a temporal classification: the narratives written before the 1960s, and the narratives written from the 1960s to the 1990s (Ortiz 1994). In the first period, some of the testimonies published do not even tell the memory of victims, rather describe the life in the guerrillas.10 This was also the time in which social sciences were consolidated in the country, for instance, besides the work of writers and journalists, since the 1960s, sociologists and political scientists started to play an active role in telling and analyzing the current history.11 Then, an interesting mixture occurs: “the sociological discourse begins to influence the testimonial literature, ‘contaminating’ it with its language, techniques, themes and protagonists” (Suárez 2011: 287).

In the 1980s, profound sociopolitical changes affected the products of testimonies in

Colombia. Drug trafficking and the emergence of paramilitary groups, along with the intensification of violence by the guerrilla groups, led to the expansion of testimonial narratives. While a series of academic works were written to study La Violencia, several publications were released, such as biographies of the heads of the guerrilla group FARC-

EP, memories of Generals, stories of conservative killers, a series of testimonials collected by a journalist/sociologist, autobiographical narratives of young assassins (sicarios) hired by drug traffickers in Medellin, and other similar books related to violence associated to the

the confrontation presented particularly in the second half of the 20th century (period known as “La Violencia”); and 3) social scientist who, in interdisciplinary fields, offer a diverse analysis and make the phenomenon more complex by studying the violence beyond the political framework as the only source of explanation. (Vivas 2007). 10 Such as the works of ex-combatant Eduardo Franco Isaza, Las guerrillas del Llano (1976) that presents the position of the “rebellious” forces of the fifties before the actions of the conservative police and supported by the conservative government, and the book of the Army Colonel Gustavo Sierra Ochoa, Las guerrillas de los Llanos Orientales (1954), which describes what were the tactics implemented to quell the revolts and the conceptions that the military had about the guerrillas and the conservative government. 11 Scholars agree that the most notable attempt to address the violence in Colombia from the academic was La violencia en Colombia: Estudio de un proceso social (1962), by Guzmán, G; Fals, O, and Umaña, E. 43 drug trade.12 All of these works, considered “a very different genre, between journalism and literature, and in the borders with historiography” (Ortiz, 1994), could still be included in the wide spectrum of testimonial literature in the country.

In the 1980s and 1990s there is also a boom of what some scholars call “direct testimony” (Ortiz, 1997): one that is based on the experience of the person who is witnessing.13 It is interesting, then, how under “this context of multiple wars, assaults, kidnappings, murders, assaults, among others, [these] new social and textual grammars

[were] produced” (Figueroa, 2004).

There are, additionally, three important points from this period that some scholars highlight (Suárez 2011: 290). First, that many of the actors and victims of violence did not write their testimonies directly, but rather were narratives created with the help of mediators

–journalists, academics, writers– who meet this function with different levels of intervention.14 Second, that kidnapping went from being an exclusive crime of guerrillas to financing their project, to being a mechanism of political pressure used by paramilitary groups and drug traffickers.15 And third, that there is not possible to keep referring just to the political violence (conservatives vs liberals), since different forms and causes of “violence” began to overlap:16 violence of organized crime against citizens; violence of the guerrillas

12Some examples of books that develop this topic are: El pelaito que no duró nada (1991) by Víctor Gaviria; and No nacimos pa´ semilla. La cultura de las bandas juveniles de Medellín (1990) by Alonso Salazar. 13 Some examples of book of this type in Colombia are La bruja: coca, política y demonio (1994), by Germán Castro Caycedo; El pelaito que no duró nada (1991) by Víctor Gaviria; No nacimos pa' semilla (1990) by Alonso Salazar and Mujeres de fuego (1993). By Alfredo Molano: Relatos de guerras y de tierras (1989) and Trochas y fusiles (1994). And Rostros del secuestro (1994) by Sandra Afanador. 14 Some examples of novelas-testimonio are Noches de humo (1989), de Olga Behar; La bruja: coca, política y demonio (1994), by Germán Castro Caycedo; Noticia de un secuestro (1996) by Gabriel García Márquez; La Virgen de los sicarios (1994), by Fernando Vallejo; Cartas cruzadas (1995), by Darío Jaramillo, and Rosario Tijeras (1999) by Jorge Franco Ramos. 15 This is what Gabriel García Márquez describes in his report, Noticia de un secuestro, 1995. 16 These changes are analyzed in more detail in a study called Colombia, violencia y democracia (1987) written by a Commission of Studies about the Violence, created by the national government in 1987. The 44 against the State; violence of the armed groups against individuals; violence of State agencies in the exercise of public order or the defense of business’ interests when they exceed legal frameworks; and violence of unorganized individuals.

Due to the dimensions and complexities of the armed conflict and violence at the end of the 20th century, the popular sectors do not monopolize the condition of protagonist of violence. Several autobiographical texts labeled as testimonial works have been produced by journalists or politicians that have been also victims.17 These show that victims/survivors are not just humble citizens in the bottom of the social pyramid. Politicians, presidential candidates, members of the economic elite, are also victims whose stories of victimization are told, sometimes by themselves, other times with the orientation and help of journalists or academics.

During the 21st century, testimonial literature kept growing. As part of a global narrative known as “instant books,” in Colombia several books were produced and published very quickly to meet market demands: memories written by (or with the help of mediators) police officers, military and politicians, victims of kidnapping who, once freed or rescued, published books that became best sellers in Colombia and in the world.18

In Colombia these speeches do not necessarily contain an explicit political agenda as it has happened in the majority of the Central American testimonial texts. In Colombia, these testimonies appear as “modes of representation” that have been developed by writers,

commission’s purpose was to unravel the reasons and particularities of the violence, in times of transition to peace. 17 For example, El olvido que seremos (2007), by Héctor Abad Faciolince, where he tells his own family story, whom father is killed by paramilitary in Medellín, or No hay silencio que no termine (2010), by Ingrid Betancourt, where she recounts six years of captivity in the Colombian jungle by the guerrilla FARC-EP. 18 Just to cite some examples: Siete años secuestrado por las Farc (2008), by the senator Luis Eladio Pérez; Mi fuga hacia la libertad (2008) by the policeman John Pinchao; El mundo al revés (2010) by the ex- gubernator Alan Jara; Años en silencio (2009) by the politician Oscar Tulio Lizcano, and No hay silencio que no termine (2010) by the ex-presidential candidate Íngrid Betancourt. 45 journalists and sociologists together with people not necessarily “illiterate”, but with individuals from all social spheres. In other words, “the omnipresence of the ‘state of war’ gives a certain peculiarity to Colombian society and to the testimonial literature that narrates its misfortunes”. (Suárez 2011).

A final annotation should be made about testimonial literature: the prominence of female voices in both Colombia and Latin American testimonies, that is, a looking at these narratives with a gender perspective. In the regional context, the voices of recognized social leaders and human rights defenders such as Rigoberta Menchú (1984), Domitila Arias (1978) or Elvia Alvarado (1987) stand out. In Colombia, where it is argued that women have traditionally been excluded from the literary canon, some studies highlight the contributions of women to testimonial literature (López 2012, Ortiz 1997) and recognize or study certain voices.19

Key debates on testimonial production

Behind the production of testimonial accounts of a violent past there has been a prominent amount of studies focusing on particular perspectives such as trauma, historical memory or social justice. These discussions reveal the multiple expectations that surround the act to give or produce a testimony. The following issues will be also studied within the

19 For example, the authors underline women such as Vera Grabe, María Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo, Olga Behar and Mary Daza Orozco, whose texts respond to historical events at the end of the last century, (the beginning of a guerrilla movement (M-19) in the 1970s, a peace process between the government and the guerrilla groups in the 1980s, and the culmination of this process with a guerrilla takeover to the Palace of Justice in 1985, which ended caught on fire and caused the death of ninety-five people, as well as at least eleven disappeared. “All authors denounce the terrorism of a guilty state that does not protect its citizens, that has not advanced serious proposals for dialogue, and that has always opted for war and to protect the interests of a few. However, these feminine discourses are not articulated only on protest and denunciation, but demand that their voices be incorporated into history” (López: 164). There are also social initiatives that highlight the role of women victims of the armed conflict, such as Red de Mujeres Narrar para vivir, part of the Red Nacional de Iniciativas de Paz y contra la Guerra (REDEPAZ); the Instituto de Mujeres por la Paz (IMP) that have collected testimoniEs since 2005, or the Informes de la Mesa de Trabajo Mujer y Conflicto that has complemented the collection of testimonies of women with information produced by academic research since 2000. 46

Colombian context on the next chapter, where some victims/authors share their own vision around some of these debates.

Givers and takers

For the most part, testimonies in Latin America have been written, not by the

“subaltern subjects” themselves, but by external authors. This means that first-person accounts of social struggles are usually written as collaborative dialogues between testimony- givers (witnesses, survivors, victims) and testimony-takers (journalists, writers, academics)

(Yúdice 1991, Sommer 1991).

Collaboration does not mean that the givers play an active role in the production and publication of their testimonies. Instead, stories are built after a long questionnaire response or semi-structured interviews and later edited according to the taker’s interests. The story itself suffers a transformation when a first-person testimony is then written by a second person.

Scholars have developed this discussion by focusing on particular testimony products.

It has been said, for example, that Barnet’s testimonial project instead of being a respectful testimonio of the main character, is an elaboration that responds to the intellectual interest of the author (Maldonado 2008). There are also researches that question the popular Me llamo

Rigoberta Menchú́ , the testimony of a 24-year-old Indian Woman and Guatemalan human right activist produced by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and originally printed in English in 1982

(Arias 2001, Sommer 1991).

Trauma recovery

Some studies stress the frequently claimed idea that the victims/witnesses benefit from participating in war crimes trials; idea that goes along with the therapeutic effect of 47 telling/writing experiences of suffering (Henke 1998, Caruth 1996, Pennebaker 1990, De

Salvo 1999).

On one side, this judicial arena in which testimonies are shared and collected, a conflict arises between the needs of individual victims and the requirements of collective justice, and, as some scholars argue, “Recovery from trauma rarely results from a single cathartic experience” (Stover 2005: 33). On the other side, it is not possible to affirm that by writing a “tale of death,” the victim can recover from trauma. For many survivors, as I will show in the following chapter, there are not words that can express the horror of what has been lived (Caruth 1996).

This debate incorporates concepts such as re-traumatization, re-victimization, and psycho-social attention. This delicate topic will be expanded in chapter three, where some victims of the Colombian armed conflict describe their own experience of trauma-relief during or after writing their memories.

Historical memory

Some scholars highlight that current notions of historical memory are conflated to mean the individualized experiences of victims of human rights violations (Oglesby 2007,

Jelin 2002). They mention that there is a sort of discourse that emphasizes the fact that the war produces victims, which erases the fact that in many cases victims also have identities as social actors. In this sense, building historical memory in a society that have faced human right violations, has been frecuently reduce to the act of collecting traumatic memories or sinister stories. Linked to the rise of human rights movements that confronted authoritarian regimes in the 1980 and into the 1990s, the meaning of historical memory revolves on a polarity between human right violators on one side and victims on the other side. In

Colombia, this approach can be seen in the mission of the National Center for Historical 48

Memory (NCHM), which is contributing to the comprehensive reparation and to the right to the truth for the victims and society in general, goal that is, in theory, achieved through the practice of collecting testimonies of those who have suffered and witnessed atrocities.

Along with this problematic framework of historical memory, some scholars have pointed out the limits of “truth” and “realism” told on the testimonies, since there is a difference between the factual events that occurred and the ways in which they are remembered (Connerton, 1995; Bustos 2010). This links to a broader debate around the rigidity of history and the subjectivity of memory (Strejilevich 2006, Huyssen 2007, Beverley

2004).

According to the Argentinean writer Nora Strejilevich (2006) ––who survived state terror in her country in 1977 and found political asylum in Canada–– “Society favors systematizing testimony as a collection of facts whereas testimony after genocide does not abide by the rules established by the scientific/academic/legal apparatus. Rather, it voices the intimate, subjective, deep dimension of horror (p. 701).” For her, having witnessed the abyss of atrocity, survivors can no longer rely on knowledge or facts as the basis for thinking. It is mostly in the realm of literature where recounting becomes an elaboration of language so that it can invoke the true nature of the event (Strejilevich 2006). To Yúdice (1985), “Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or exorcising and setting a right official history” (quoted by Gugelberger: p. 9).

“Official history” refers to the prevailing, authoritative, fictional and guiding discourse that appeals to the ideas of order, freedom, justice, and progress since the founding of Latin American nations (López, 2012: 2). In this sense, going back to the idea that testimonies are linked to the voice of subaltern subjects in society, and that official history too often has been the history of ‘great’ individuals rather than the history of the people 49

(Gugelberger & Kearney 1991), “The testimony acquires the character of alternative history, unofficial, when through it the silenced or excluded from the official history try to access the memory and maintain an identity (Sotelo, 1999: 80).”20

In Latin America, conjoining the terms history and memory has meant privileging direct testimony by the victims of human right violations (Oglesby 2007). However, one of the pitfalls of relying on testimony to reconstruct history is that testimonies are highly subjective constructions.

Social justice

Another angle of studies shows that in the last three decades, collecting testimonies in Latin America have reached a pick in the context of transitional justice, peace building, and truth and reconciliation commissions (Grandin 2005). In this regard, vast literature had been produced to tell the experiences of countries like Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and El

Salvador, countries that emerged from periods of conflict and repression, and faced processes of justice rooted in accountability and redress for victims (Hayner 2011).

Some scholars have focused their studies on the multiple layers that underlie the politics of testimonio giving and receiving in the judicial arena or produced in court proceedings (Krog 2013; Stover 2005; Ross 2003; Grandin 2005). Through analysis of a selection of transcripts and interviews to people who had participated in such trials, scholars made arguments over the compelling need to share personal stories of war as a moral duty, to tell the truth about what happened to family and community members, and to set the record straight about the suffering they are holding (Dembour and Haslam, 2014; Stover, 2005).

20 This point can expand in a separate analysis of the concepts y relationship between history and memory. Some key authors are Halbwachs (2004), Le Goff (1991) and Trouillot (1995). 50

On his study of Bosnians, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats victims and witnesses who have testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Eric

Stover (2005) affirms that, for the witnesses he interviewed, “‘full justice’ encompassed much more than criminal trials and the pronouncements of foreign judges in The Hague. It meant the return of stolen property; locating and identifying the bodies of the missing; capturing and trying all war criminals from the garden-variety killers, the so-called small fry, in their communities all the way up to the nationalist ideologues who had poisoned their neighbors with ethnic hatred… (p. 143).” Justice, then, can be a subjective construction and its meaning can differ from one subject to another.

Testimonies can also be analyzed along with the socio-political purposes that underplay its production. It is not just circumstantial that the writing of testimonies has flourished in countries facing deep economic, social and political crises, especially where democracy has been replaced by military or ideological dictatorships that violate human rights. In Can Literature Promote Justice?, Kimberly A. Nance (2006) affirms: “Testimony is not only a text. It is a project of social justice in which text is an instrument (p. 19).” For her, its goal is not just to educate readers about injustice, but to persuade those readers to act and to make informed decisions about the future of their nations.

Besides the justice interest of producing testimonies, nurtured by anthropological, historical, and sociological studies of memory, scholars argue that testimonies are not just re- presentations of the past, or a cathartic narrative printed in ten or a hundred pages. Books – as networks through which memory narratives are negotiated (Keightley, 2010)––are also part of the media through which social memory is formed. When published, these materials carry the possibility of further analysis about what has been written (remembered) and its impact on society. 51

In The abuses of memory, the Bulgarian-French historian Tzvetan Todorov differentiates two types of memories: one that is literal and one exemplary. In his words:

The recovered event can be read literally or in an exemplary manner. On the one hand, this event [...] is preserved in its literalness (which does not mean its truth), remaining intransitive and not leading beyond itself [...]. Or it can be an exemplary memory: when the past becomes the principle of action for the present, it allows us to make use of lessons of injustice undergone in the past to fight injustices taking the course today, and to leave the self to approach the other (1999: 31).

The author also makes a distinction between the recovery of the past and its subsequent use. He believes that the necessity to recover the past, to remember it, does not tell us yet what will be the use to be made of it; each of both acts has its own characteristics and paradoxes.

New scenarios for testimonial production in Colombia

The international rise of the meaning and particularities of the concept of memory21

(Castillejo, 2013), led in Colombia to the creation of cultural products that turned to the past and revealed traumatic events in the history of the armed conflict. But, within this extensive production of testimonial literature and scholarly on the genre, an emergent body of scholarship is evolving to describe particular initiatives to approach victims’ stories and create testimonios, methods from the social sciences nurtured by dialogues between disciplines such as communication, memory studies, anthropology, sociology, among others

(Nieto 2012, Villa 2013, Arenas 2013, Rueda 2013). Scholars began to research problems that were not taken into account at first, like the lives of victims told from their own perspective.

21 To give a look on how the notion of memory has been applied in Colombia, Castillejo list fifteen different ways used in the public sphere: memoria, memoria histórica, memoria colectiva, memoria individual, memoria social, memoria cultural, memoria oral, memorias, memoria traumática, historia y memoria, archivo o memoria de la nación, documentos, construcción de memoria, reconstrucción de memoria, recuperación de la memoria, y verdad. Then, he asks: “What are we really referring when talking about memory?.” 52

What results attracting now is that throughout the country, even before a Peace

Agreement was signed between the national government and the guerrilla FARC-EP (2016), under the guidance and assistance of journalists and social scientists, victims are invited to participate in writing workshops where they can write themselves their testimonios. To add to the existent testimonial literature, short pieces of personal memories of war are being collected to enrich the construction of social historical memory. This is the case of De su puño y letra, the project studied in the third chapter of this research. Here, victims could participate in processes of recovery, construction and dissemination of historical memories.

These new scenarios present at the same time new challenges and question the traditional way of understanding testimony, in which the genre itself and the concept of subordinated tend to the homogenization of subjects and experiences. For that reason, academics such as López (2013) see “essential to rethink the theories taken for granted about testimonies, rescue them from the framework that has been imposed, expanding it to give space to other historical realities and other enunciating subjects that do not fit within the tight parameters of the subaltern (33)”.

In general, all these elements and discussions make it difficult to define or group the testimonies in rigid subcategories, since from its origins, this genre shows that it is heterogeneous and, therefore, any attempt to pigeonhole opens new discussions.

Nevertheless, scholars have found a “regional identity” in the Latin American testimonial literature, in issues such as the thematic orientations, the type of social subjects whose stories are selected to be narrated or the narrative treatments used. Testimonies are cohered around the purpose of being the memory and the written amplification of certain subaltern groups, historically isolated from the center of power and whose rights have been somehow affected

(Suárez 2011). 53

As it is true that the moment of revolutionary euphoria in Latin America has passed, and taking into account that the classic theories of testimony analyzed this narrative in this historical context, it is necessary to reevaluate the gender and question how it has reached the 21st century (Lopez: 30). It is clear that there are a lot of assumptions around the production of testimonies: it catharsis or healing effects, its contribution to collective memory or the goal of social justice and reconciliation. As I will show in the following chapter, studying a particular case of testimonial production in Colombia, I found out that although testimonios can help pluralized narratives of war, or give a cathartic feeling to people who participates, or even intends to achieve social justice goals, it is important, at the same time, to be really cautious and realistic about what testimonies really do.

Chapter 3: A case of testimonial production in Colombia

Among all testimonial literature that has been published in the context of the armed conflict, there is a memory project that allows to see the expectations, limitations, and possibilities of testimonial production in times of transitional justice in Colombia. In this chapter I highlight the perceptions of victims/participants and facilitators of a local memory project around three main issues: the meaning of victimhood, the healing effects of producing a testimony, and how, in relation to the idea of historical memory, these narratives can be considered mechanisms for sociopolitical transformation.

With the underlying premise that Colombian is a fragmented society, here I present a testimonial production project called “De su puño y letra. Polifonía para la memoria. Las voces de las víctimas del conflicto armado en Medellín” (“By Their Own Hand: Polyphony for Memory, The Voices of the Victims of the Armed Conflict in Medellin”). This project took place in the city of Medellin between 2006 and 2010 as one of the first memory initiatives promoted by scholars and journalists, but funded by the Colombian State. As a result, three books were published: Jamás olvidaré tu nombre (2006); El cielo no me abandona (2007), and Donde pisé aún crece la hierba (2010); a total of fifty-five short nonfiction stories of the war. These intense testimonial pieces were written by three groups of inhabitants of Medellín, Antioquia; all of them, victims of the armed conflict who came from very diverse socio-economic backgrounds. 55

Contrary to the assumption that certain subjects do not have tools to write and, therefore, intellectuals or mediators have to write for them instead, these public writing workshops demonstrate that it is possible to explore methodologies to transform that barrier into an opportunity. After helping dozens of victims to elaborate their stories, apart from the provenance of each author, organizers show that people who have suffered the war are indeed subjects able to write their testimonies by themselves. They claim the importance to collect first hand tales of the war written without the actively participation of a mediator.

Research Methods

On July 2017, thanks to a Tinker Foundation grant I travelled to my home city of

Medellín with the purpose of meeting with authors and facilitators of this memory project.

Upon my arrival, I contacted professor Patricia Nieto, who created and directed the three workshops here studied. She gave me access to the participants’ database and the workshops' archive, an incredible amount of documents ranging from first drafts to finalized versions of each testimonio. In addition to contacting the project's organizers, during the initial days I contacted women from the slums of the city who had lost relatives during the armed conflict, survivors of land mine detonations, widows. I spoke with people of different ages: from 22 to 65 years old, who came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds: campesinos, journalists, doctors, accountants, human right activists, among others. 56

In general, interviews were worthy but challenging for several reasons. Since those workshops took place six to ten years ago, there were two main difficulties in collecting information. First, databases were outdated and most of the participants’ contact information had changed, and second, even when people were willing to contribute to this study, since time has passed, for some of them it was hard to remember and share their memories of the workshops. Also, while conducting interviews, because of the sensitive theme (the act of writing about a traumatic or tragic experience), some interviewees needed to re-count the

“tragic” experience in order to reflect about what it meant to get together with other victims and write their own stories. During the interviews, some feelings emerged, such as crying, sadness, or even anger.

Back in the United States, with a plan for data analysis and evidence-based interpretation (Rubin & Rubin 2005), I classified, compared, weighed, and combined material from the interviews, archival research, and content of published testimonies.

Concepts and themes such as victimhood, family, community, trauma, and justice were used and then coded trough a labeled system that facilitated the data analysis. From here it was possible to find common perceptions of victims/participants and facilitators about the complex meaning of victimhood, the healing effects of producing a testimony, and the way in which these narratives could contribute to a Colombian sociopolitical transformation”

The complexity of victimhood in Colombia

In 2005, when Gabriel Bustamante22, age 52, started to work as the director of the

Programa de Atención a las Víctimas del Conflicto Armado,23 he and his team were not sure

22 Interview #13, Gabriel Bustamante was the first director of the Medellín Unit for Victims. He is currently a college teacher. The interview was conducted at the University of Antioquia, Medellin, August 2017. 23 During the period 2004-2007 the governor of Antioquia was Luis Pérez Gutiérrez; the mayor of Medellín, Sergio Fajardo and the secretary of Government, Alonso Salazar, who would later be elected mayor for the 57 about the meaning of “victimhood.” Right when the country adopted the Justice and Peace

Law (Law 975) as a legal framework to facilitate the demobilization of paramilitary groups, which also established that the victims have rights to truth, justice and integral reparation,

Bustamante’s office was taking action to offer victims psychosocial attention and reparation from crimes perpetrated in the state of Antioquia years before. Reemphasie this using different words: “he and his team were not sure about the meaning of “victimhood.”

As part of the first official initiative focused on victims’ reparation, Gabriel

Bustamante was hired as director of the Victims’ Unit in Medellín. According to him, the challenges for demobilization and opportunities for former combats had raised a question about the effects that this war had had on victims and survivors: people who had been affected by the actions of paramilitary groups in the region. “La pregunta era –says Bustamante–: ¿Y las víctimas qué?” This question motivated a group of Colombian scholars, human rights activists, and humanists to come together.24 As a result, the Program evolved to be an official office with three focus: juridical; psychotherapeutic; and memory building.

As this office opened in Medellin, Patricia Nieto, a journalist and scholar in the

Department of Communication at University of Antioquia, designed a memory project that aimed to collect written testimonios of the victims of the armed conflict.25 A pilot project

period 2008-2011. It is important to note that Salazar is a journalist and social researcher, author of No nacimos pa’ semilla, one of the first testimonial texts that collected the voices of young assassins in Medellín during the 90s. His support for carrying out the workshops was crucial because it involved the financing of three workshops over the course of three years. His prologues open two of the published books. 24 Some of the people involved in this dialogue were the political scientist and historian from the University of Antioquia, Maria Teresa Uribe; Horacio Arango from Programa por la Paz, and Juan Luis Mejía, president at Universidad Eafit, Medellin. 25 Some of the questions that lead the project of PhD Patricia Nieto were How to conceive narratives from the "inside" of the war that, over the war actions, privilege the subjects that have suffered it? What is the spatial and temporal territory to elaborate these narratives? Who can be the narrators that give an account of that hidden face of the Colombian conflict? What is the social and political relevance of a proposal in this regard? What are the most appropriate methodologies to ensure that these narrators can bring the anecdotes of suffering into writing? (Nieto, 2015) 58 received financial support, and a small group of journalism students started to visit some humble neighborhoods of the city in search for potential authors. During four months, they gathered 40 people willing to communicate their story through words and drawings (Betancur

& Nieto 2006: 9).

But, how to know who was a victim? Patricia Nieto affirms that during those years

(1990-2000), all the people who lived on the hillsides of the city were considered desplazados, which means that, even as they carried multiple victimizations (been removed from their land, having seen their parents killed, lost the panela (sugar cane) production, losing a child to forced conscription into the army), they were not seen as subjects of rights for having gone through such situations. However, as Nieto describes, during the workshops,

“little by little the participants began to recognize that they had been abused; that losing their home, a son, their land was not normal and should not be accepted. Then, by knowing that victimhood was a condition, they began to look at themselves in a different way.”26 This realization, Nieto believes, was their starting point to claim for recognition and reparation, both economic and symbolically. “At first there were people who said: ‘I do not want to call myself a victim,’ because the word victim is associated with an incapable, useless, inferior being. But suddenly, that condition was important for many participants, not only because it help them to accept that they had suffered (“I was robbed, they tortured me, they left me as an orphan”), but also to understand that someone else has done that to them.”

In the methodology implemented in the first experience, for example, the group included diverse participants, from 13-year-old students to old women who had lost their

26 Interview #1, Patricia Nieto was the creator and director of De su puño y letra. He is currently an associate professor and researcher at the Department of Communications, University of Antioquia. teacher. The interview was conducted at her house, Medellin, July 2017. 59 children years before. As a facilitator of this first workshop explained: “The idea was to be able to cross experiences, that the ladies who were always together knew that the children also had stories to tell, or that the people of the Villa Lillyam neighborhood could meet the people of La Sierra neighborhood. There was kind of tension because of that, but in the end they were able to build these stories together”.27

As a result of the pilot plan, 20 stories were published, including the story of John

Ferney, who lost his leg when he stepped on a landmine, or Johana’s memories of her cousin

Laurita, who died because of a stray bullet, or doña Elizabeth’s testimonio, who lost her son after an explosion at the corner of her street. Mostly, these were stories of women who lost children, parents, siblings, cousins; or stories of people displaced from the countryside and forced to adapt to a new life of violence in the city's upper neighborhoods.

With some variations in the profile of participants, the methodology and the process of producing testimonies, two more writing workshops were held, one in 2007 and the other in 2010, also funded by the Secretaría de Gobierno of the Medellin City Hall. At the beginning of each project, an explicit call was made: this workshops were open exclusively for victims.28 The way in which participants heard about them, enrolled, and participated are diverse: some were contacted through the Programa de Víctimas’ office or by the Fiscalía

(because they had open trials or investigations), some learned about it at their school, or because they were part of groups of victims, such as the Red Nacional de Víctimas de Minas

Antipersona or women associations.

27 Interview #9. Lina María Martínez was part of the organizers since the first workshop. The interview was conducted in the University of Antioquia in July 2017 28 The cited Law 1448 of 2011 has conceived that “Victims are also the spouse, partner or permanent companion, same-sex couples and family members in the first degree of consanguinity, first civilian of the direct victim, when she has been killed or disappeared (Congreso de la República, 2011, junio 10).” In the same way, says the Law, victims are also people who have suffered damage when intervening to assist the victim in danger or to prevent victimization. 60

The second project was open to inhabitants from a socio economic background radically different from those who wrote in the first workshop. They came from middle and upper class neighborhoods, in general professionals from diverse fields: doctors, journalists, secretaries. Some of the testimonies collected in the book El cielo no me abandona (2007) refer to victimizations in other contexts: the story of a priest killed in a humble community, the story of the State peace commissioner who was kidnapped and killed by the FARC-EP guerrilla in 2002, told by his wife, or the testimony of a doctor who traveled to a conflict zone and experienced an attack to the ambulance by guerrilla soldiers.

In contrast to the first and second experience, the third writing workshop was created to collect testimonies of people who had stepped in landmines, some of them with recent or still-open wounds. The decision of offering such a focalized experience obeyed to a political agenda that, at the moment, prioritized psychosocial attention to these survivors.29

To participants of all three experiences, I asked which were their perceptions about being called ‘victims’? Their responses vary according to the group they participated in, their victimization or their ability to remember the writing project.

In one of the interviews, a participant that lost her husband after being kidnapped by paramilitaries said30: “Antes se pensaba: secuestraron a fulano, ¿qué haría? Se pensaba que el culpable era uno. Nunca se hablaba de víctimas”. Even when there is not a solution for

29 In the book Donde pisé aún crece la hierba (2010) some authors described their “accidents”, but also reflected about living a new life with a fragmented body: “Estoy vivo gracias al secreto. Con la pierna toda herida me veía tirado en el piso, botando sangre a ríos, entonces, me apliqué el secreto de estancar la sangre. Sobreviví, porque no me desangré, aunque la vida que llevo ahora es otra (17);” “Después de caer, traté de pararme y como no pude, me miré mi pie y lo vi vuelto picadillo. Al mismo tiempo sentí pánico, tristeza y mucho dolor (57),” “Luego del accidente sentimos mucho miedo. Antes éramos muy libres. Nos manteníamos cazando gurres, guaguas, cusumbos y conejos de monte (…) Pero ya no (75).” 30 Interview #7, Maria Teresa Uribe, 53. Her husband and her son were kidnapped and, while one was killed in captivity, the other was released. After more than ten years of these victimizations, her son cannot recover from a sever Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The interview was conducted in a Mall in Medellin in August 2017. 61 what has been suffered, this women, age 54, highlights the fact that, after writing, her condition of victim has at least been public. In another case, however, a journalist who was targeted by paramilitaries and had to leave his work and home to keep safe affirmed: “I am not a victim. I was just affected by the conflict.”

Besides, in Colombia, one person’s testimony can be considered at the same time a family testimony. Some participants did not write only about their individual tragedies, rather they constructed narratives that tell their familiar stories. For example, Christian, a young guy who participated in the first workshop, explained it like this: “To write about the displacement situation, I had to say that my father had been a cocalero (grew coca leaves) and my mom was a distributor [of cocaine]. When I wrote, I asked things to my grandmother, who is a very good storyteller. There was a lot that I did not know about my mom and it was painful to know.”31 In this case, the family members were aware of this writing process and supported him to write in a sincere and compelling way.

In another case, Iván Darío Arroyave, age 47, who was one of the eight siblings of a priest killed by paramilitaries, mentioned how his family help him to write a more complete testimony by sharing memories of the tragic moment as well as parts of their brother’s life:

“We accountants are not good writers. But I had a very big help: my brother who is a doctor and has published several books. He helped me write. I also visited my sister to ask things so

I could improve the story. She gave me information and feedback.”32

In these books there are also collective testimonies of the same victimization. For

31 Interview #10. Cristian Yoleimar Cardona and his family were victims of displacement. Medellín, August 2017. 32 Interview #6 with Iván Darío Arroyave. His brother was a priest and died after killed by a paramilitary soldier. This interview was held at his house in Medellín in July 2017.

62 example, in the second book, the widow of a Peace Commissioner (who was kidnapped and assassinated by a guerrilla group) decided not just to write her version of the story, but to invite her children to write also. For instance, three children and one granddaughter of the commissioner also wrote about their shared suffering. On another case, in the third book, four young brothers who at the same time stepped in a landmine, years after it happened decided to reconstruct the past in independent writings about the traumatic event. In these testimonies, it is interesting to notice how different every person can reconstruct “the same” situation, but also, it is evident the editorial challenge that underlines the production of one singular testimony (“La esperanza de los hermanos Úsuga”) made out of four different testimonial versions.

Along with the familiar aspect, during the interviews victims manifested the benefit of what I call the community factor: the importance of creating scenarios where several victims get together to talk, listen, share their suffering and rebuild individual and collective memories. Here, some participants remembered the first impact when seeing themselves among other victims. In the moment of introducing each other in the second workshop, the participants realized that they had been affected by different actors: while some were victims of guerrilla factions, other were victims of paramilitary groups or the national army. One of the authors told me: “I faced a big conflict: my brother was killed by the guerrillas, and then a mother speaks and says: 'my son was killed by the army.' So the first thing I thought was:

Good! We have to kill the guerrillas. But later on I understood that I could not blame the mother for that, and it the end everyone in the group became friends and liked and understood each other”.33

33 Interview #6 with Iván Darío Arroyave. 63

What can be seen is that these testimonies open the spectrum of victimhood and contest the classical idea of testimonial production based on the “subaltern subject” selected by testimonialistas (Gugelberger 1990, Beverly 1991). In Colombia, as I demonstrate, the testimonio-giver or the author of testimonies is not necessarily a citizen in the bottom of the social pyramid. Victims have also been, for example, citizens that occupy prominent places in politics or academic fields.

As it can be seen, beyond the framework used by the State, in Colombia, the concept of victims has individual, familiar, and collective connotations. If we read carefully, each of the testimonies written in these workshops presents a particular vision of a complex concept that, in some cases, challenge the meaning imposed by the national law.

The healing effects of producing testimonies

In addition to the notion of victimhood, these narratives contain numerous and varied perceptions around the idea of a healing effect experienced during or after writing a testimony. Considering that the production of testimonies in Latin America has mostly follow a classic methodology in which the testimony-takes interacts only with the testimony-giver

(generally to extract the information in accordance with a particular logic), and taking into account that testimony givers are rarely embedded in dialogues with their counterparts, the methodology applied in these unique testimonial productions in Medellin reveals new approaches to a theme that has been widely discussed: coping with trauma. As described at the beginning of this chapter, the workshops were created as part of a psychosocial program that aimed to give victims emotional support to deal with their traumas or suffering.

More than writing, this project invited participants to feel and to experience a therapeutic approach to their trauma. As Nieto described: “At the beginning of the workshops, the victims did not write on paper, they wrote in memory. Participants 64 remembered, recreated, rebuilt their story five or ten or as many times as they needed, with words, toys, colors, photographs, papers and songs, until the memories became natural, known, so they felt that they could write about it freely (Nieto 2013).” Also, the organizers of the workshops designed both pedagogical and social strategies that helped the authors to engage in theirs and other participants’ testimonies. “The writers met to read their stories, to interrogate them, to complement them (…) There was crying, tears, hugs. Then the gathering led to scrutinize other corners of privacy that the readers had not read yet.” (Nieto 2006: 10).

These feeling describe how the trauma manifested in the body (Caruth 1996), looking at the same time for ways to express the suffering in a cathartic and/or therapeutic way.

In this regard, some participants manifested the positive impact of this collective memory session: “That is where you see that [this space] helps you heal. Because one believes that the problem is only mine, but there you see that there are people with much greater problems. (...) Later when the book came out, we saw that everyone’s stories were very different and very hard.”34 “Listening to those life stories seemed incredible to me because I knew they were situations that they lived. It leaves a lot of trace to relate with such different people and know that they suffered, but that they went ahead.” 35 “After hearing one is like 'Oops, these people have gone pretty badly. Nothing has happened to me.”36

Besides, in relation to the idea that the act of writing can heal the wounds of war

(Pennebaker 1990, De Salvo 1999), the perceptions of the participants varied. In some of the testimonies there are explicit mentions to the pain caused by the victimization that reveals in

34 Interview #6 with Iván Darío Arroyave. 35 Interview #4 Helly Johana Blandon Uribe. Her cousin was killed by a stray bullet near her house. The interview was conducted at the University of Antioquia in July 2017. 36 Interview #11 with Octavio Úsuga. He was one of the four brothers who stepped in a landmine. He did not have physical but psychological injuries. The interview was conducted at his house in Medellín, in August 2017. 65 the process of draw up, for example: “I am writing and also crying” (Nieto 2006: 37). As for the cathartic feeling, some author affirmed: “While writing, I felt sadness, then relief. Writing takes away the pain of the soul. If we had more opportunity to write, the world would not be like this”.37 “I breathe deeply. I know that the time has come to write this story, although depth inside, I want to hide my fears to not facing this mixture of feelings: sadness, hope, pain. Sometimes I try to escape in one or another activity. But this time it will not be easy. I will have to stop, dry my tears, and be strong.”38 “I would prefer not to write what I felt or what I am feeling. By the way, there are not words that tell what I felt. I am not interested on participating in a public catharsis.”39

In general, facilitators mentioned that at the end of the workshops some authors described a sort of “transformation” happened during and after the process of writing. Some clearly experienced that writing was a coping mechanism for trauma, and also induced forgiveness and reconciliation. “You see how the victim deals with his story –said one editor– but also how the family has helped him or not to cope with his pain. There are many feelings of guilt, anger or resentment, and there also a moment when the author finds sort of a light within.” 40

There is one case that deserves special mention: the experience of Mrs. Maria Teresa

Giraldo and her son Alejandro, participants in the second writing workshop. The victimization can be summarized like this: when Alejandro was 13 years old, he and his father were kidnapped by a paramilitary faction. For twenty days they were locked in a dark and

37 Interview #10. Mrs. Laura Guzmán was forced to leave her farm after receiving threats of kidnapping and harassment. The interview was conducted at her home in Medellín in August of 2017. 38 Interview #6 with Iván Darío Arroyave. 39 Extract of the testimony “Cuando era niño” by Felipe Hernando Restrepo Giraldo. He was a profesor of Art. His writing is only a page long. 40 Interview #8 with Luz Adriana Ruiz. 66 small room. At the end, the paramilitaries decided to free the son, but not the father, who was killed a few days later. As a result of the impact, since then the son did not speak again, suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and takes medicine daily to control schizophrenia attacks. When Mrs. Giraldo learned about the writing workshops she wanted to participate with her son. Even when it was not easy to convince him, she insisted so much that finally

Alejandro began to write. While she was writing her own version of the story, she developed an editorial sense to support his son: “I told him: Alejandro, tell me what happened on the first day [of kidnapping]. He has that memory too vividly so he started to talk. Then I asked him to write that and day by day I made him write. I did not know many details of the case, and I learned by reading his words. ‘How was it’? He asked me. ‘That’s your version,’ I told him. [After writing] my son told me that he felt lighter. He was carrying such a weight on his shoulders.” Although writing did not totally cure him (he is extremely reticent and asocial),

Mrs. Giraldo affirms that writing helped him heal: “He was very aggressive and displaced with everyone; from there he began to calm down.”41 Here is the last paragraph of

Alejandro’s testimony:

Del secuestro me quedaron recuerdos tristes y dolorosos. El hecho de dejar un padre que suplicaba que le dejaran a su hijo, y ver a unos muchachos que gritaban para que no los golpearan, me causó nerviosismo e inquietud. Lo que más deseo es que se sepa qué pasó con mi padre, que se haga justicia y que yo pueda ser una persona normal algún día. (Nieto 2006: 199)

There are conflicting discourses about whether writing or giving testimony helps to heal trauma or, on the contrary, may be a re-traumatizing action (Stover 2005). What these perceptions show is that we cannot take any of those positions for granted, since these affirmations work on a human, individual scale, and are affected by subjectivities. For some

41 Interview #7 with Maria Teresa Giraldo. 67

“The catharsis [achieved by writing] is part of elaborating the dualism, to say: this is part of the past.” For others like a 14-year-old participant, “the workshop was way too much. I was not prepared for that at that time. Instead of writing, I needed psychological support.”

Just as with the expectations that writing will enable participants to place the events in question into “the past,” as described in chapter two, there are also assumptions around a sense of relief after experiencing forgiveness or reconciliation. In this case, participants expressed two very dissimilar experiences. On one hand, a participant said: “I felt forgiveness while I was writing, not before. Before I was dying of anger. If I saw Ramón Isaza (a paramilitary) in the news, I wanted him to die because he was the only living member of the group that kidnapped my son. But then I thought: this man also has a family, he is also going to get old, we do not know the reason why he did it ... it is impossible to get into people’s hearts. So I realized, the best thing for me is to forgive. To heal my heart, I have to find forgiveness.”42 This feeling of forgiveness was also connected with the fact that time had passed from the victimization to the moment of writing the testimony.

On the other hand, in an interview with the brother of a priest who was killed in

Medellin, the participant/author affirmed: “This January (2017) I went to the appeal hearing for the guy who killed my brother. He killed 24 people, 24 who at least they know he killed.

It has been more than fifteen years. I went ahead and wrote about what happened, but I still hate him. I have not forgiven him nor am I going to forgive him. I will die like this.”43 Even when this participant affirmed he felt a sense of relief while writing, he admitted the impossibility to give pardon or to completely forget the perpetration of the crime.

Achieving these feeling is not black or white. For some participants, being with others

42 Interview #7 with Maria Teresa Giraldo. 43 Interview #6 with Iván Darío Arroyave. 68 victims helped in certain way to heal, forgive or achieve reconciliation, however, they agreed that, at the end of the day, each one has walking their own personal path and seeking healing within.”

Narratives for a political transformation

An average of five thousand books per workshop were printed and distributed among the authors, their families and donated to public libraries in the city. Although it is almost impossible to get a copy because the books were not commercial, digital versions of the three books are available on the internet, and anyone can also consult them in the Digital Archive of Human Rights of Colombia. In addition to the launching event of these works –where the victims felt recognized for actions other than victimization– some of the testimonies have been adapted into art and historical memory projects both in the country and abroad.44

This connects to another discussion that starts with a question: Remembering for what? Todorov (1998) brings a distinction between the recovery of the past and its subsequent use: “The demand to recover the past, to remember it, does not tell us yet what will be its use; each of both acts has its bring its own characteristics and paradoxes. (p. 17)”

As for this particular memory project, the first process –the recovery of memories from the past– has been described in this chapter. But there is a second process: the use of memory.

To build national memory it is not enough that the survivors want to give or write a testimony.

It is fundamental that compatriots are willing to listen (Nieto 2013).

The use of these materials represents a dialogue between those who have suffered and the rest of society. As it happened for example with Memory of Silence (the report made by

44 Some fragments of the books were included in exhibitions of Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín in 2015. Also, in 2012, six Colombian artists adapted some testimonies in a diverse art work that was exhibited in an art gallery in New York. 69 the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification in 1999), the existence of these books helps create space for a more public discussion of the war, which is important to the extent that Colombian society has yet to fully assimilate that experience.

These dialogue is crucial today in the context of transitional justice in Colombia. In the introduction to El cielo no me abandona (2007) the former mayor of Medellín, Sergio

Fajardo wrote:

The stories contained in this book are the effort of a handful of people, from different social sectors and different conditions. They wanted their loved ones not to get lost in the nebula of oblivion. These are loving and painful reconstructions of infamous events that happened not long ago. All the people who write here were marked forever by irrational experiences and limitations. This book is a sign of the horror to which thousands of Colombians have been subjected by the ignominy of the warriors (…) However, with the hope that their personal memories can contribute to the non- repetition of these atrocious events, they generously shared us part of their of a past that, although painful, call us to transform it in exemplary memory (Nieto 2006: 7)

In contrast to the immense expectations that exist around writing or giving a testimony, the impact of creating these narratives must be evaluated on different scales: individual, family, local and national. In the individual and familiar level, some of the participants affirmed: “When the book came out, my family felt good to know that other people will know our story. Even for us, re-counting the story out loud served to get to know us more each other.”45 “I have still my book at home. Sometimes I read the other people stories. It helps me feel not alone in my pain.”46 “I cannot believe my name is in a book. It is incredible that I could write my family story and that it is still there for other readers to know it.”47 When I met with the interviewees at their homes, it was special to see that some of them still conserve hard copies of their book with marks of readings.

45 Interview #4 with Helly Johana Blandón. 46 Interview #6 with Iván Darío Arroyave. 47 Interview #10 with Octavio Úsuga. 70

As seen in the first chapter, to talk about political transformation in the Colombian society, justice and reparation for victims is crucial. But justice is not only achieved in the judicial arena. For many survivors, writing about their loved ones was their own way of doing justice. One of the facilitators put it this way: “As the authors progressed in the writing process, they discovered a need to write well, they were worried about the words they were using or the story style. I believe some realized that writing not only helped them to deal with all those burdens and weights they have in their heads, but it was the opportunity to honor the memory of their children or relatives who have died. Their question was: how to tell the life of my loved one?”48

For other participants, however, justice had to encompass reparation and opportunities for those who have suffered the most. “It a principle of citizenship,” said project organizer Patricia Nieto, “to have the right to truth and justice, to know who did it, why it was done, and to have that aggressor punished.” In words of two of the authors: “There won’t be peace in Colombia as long as victims do not receive a just reparation: a house to live in, a job, real benefits to move forward.”49 “What will it matter to write if one has to get up every day, with this pain in my leg, and take the cart to go on the street [to sell sodas] looking for money. This leg hurts me every day of my life, and anyway I have to leave the house because if not, I won’t eat. And who helps?”50 Nevertheless, this need to speak-write-tell as a way to remember and not repeat that violence of the past is a leitmotiv. “History is problem when it is not remembered and worked through but is repeated and used to inflict further violence.

History may be a solution if we remember, witness, and mourn our traumatic past (Premo

48 Interview #9 with Lina María Martínez. 49 Interview #12 with Mrs. Laura Guzmán. 50 Interview #14 with Orlando de Jesús Marín Morales. 71

2000, p.12).” This urgency in the Colombian case makes clear the need to keep opening alternative scenarios to share these testimonies but, at the same time, to inscribing that suffering in the collective memory in order to give an opportunity to the future (Todorov

1999).

To conclude, as some of the participants manifested during the interviews, the

Colombian present is a perfect moment to promote testimonial writing among the victims.

“In these post-conflict times, if the country it really going build a historical recount and a construction of historical truth, we should write more. And the testimonies should be written by each one of those that have been affected.”51 “For me, it is good to see that this book is written only by people that had an accident with landmines because it reflects the bad that has happened and all the violence in the country. This makes people become aware and see that there can be other ways to live.”52 For one of the facilitators, these workshops should continue because “when you sit down and talk about what happened, you realize, first, that there are people who are dealing with harder stories or enemies than yours and that, after a transformative experience, are able to forgive or, at least, to talk about it in a calmer way.”53

This particular experience of collective testimonial writing, De su puño y letra, ended in 2010 with the publication of the last book written for landmine victims, Donde pisé aún crece la hierba. But, “When should a person finish a writing workshop?”, asks Gabriel

Bustamante, the former director of the Victim Assistance Program (2005-2010). For him, in general, there is a lack of follow up in this kind of initiatives, which means that after intense months of working (building trust, confidence, knowing and sharing intimate stories to each

51 Interview #6 with Jorge Iván López. 52 Interview #10 with Octavio Úsuga. 53 Interview #8 with Luz Adriana Ruiz. 72 other) there in an abrupt end that has also an impact on participants and organizers.

In addition to the administrative logistics of projects like this, he mentions the external conditions, such as times and bureaucratic decisions: “The political times, of the government, are very different from those of the academy. I think it's worth having more time to follow up, thinking of an accompanying strategy.” The work of this victim unit was transformed according to administrative decisions taken by the later mayors. However, as demonstrated in this chapter, there is a lot to be learned and analyzed from all the production stages. For example, this experience can be studied from its two components: the writing act itself (as an individual and family process), and the community factor that is, at the same time, a psychotherapeutic space in which an exercise ‘reasoned historical memory’ (Rueda 2013).54

Victims of the Colombian armed conflict, as I have tried to demonstrate, are not homogenous subjects. However, the experience of getting together to talk, write and share testimonial accounts of suffering gives a sense of belonging, the certainty that the pain is not just individualized. By analyzing grassroots memory processes, like this local-level writing project, its impact on participants, and its potential impact and legacy, it is possible to make recommendations for future such projects in Colombia.

54 According to Rueda, the “Reasoned Historical Memory” is a theoretical-methodological proposal that seeks the active participation of victims of internal armed conflict in the construction of Colombian history. “Es una propuesta conceptual, relevante no solo para la divulgación de los relatos de víctimas del conflicto armado interno sino para promover su participación activa. La idea es que conjuntamente víctimas e investigadores analicen los relatos y construyan memoria en aras de resistir a marginaciones, negacionismos, silencios y olvidos impuestos por centros de poder y la sociedad contemporánea” (p. 20) 73

Conclusions

To take a critical look at the Colombian history it is important to read and listen diverse voices, contrast them, ask for the meanings of these narratives and their vision of social issues such as equality, justice or reconciliation. In Colombia, each person has an idea of the armed conflict and this perspectives changes according to the specific point of view of people: as victimizer, victim, ruler, politician in action, passive witness or expert observer.

Even when it is important to collect narratives of war in times of transitional justice in Colombia, it is necessary to take into account that the production and transmission of testimonies cannot always fulfill expectations around justice, peacebuilding, or mental healing. However, getting people together to meet and talk about the national reality, listening their memories, offering them a space to elaborate their own narratives, give victims a sense of prominence that barely received before.

In general, the victims who participated in “De su puño y letra” agreed in some points: participating in writing workshops was a positive experience to relieve traumatic experiences. It was helpful being part of a group of victims and to learn from other people’s tragedies. During the workshop sessions, pain was a common feeling, but also there was a common need of being heard and supported by others.

This collective memory project questions the traditional way of conceiving literature as the piece of art of a professional writer, who gives us only the author's particular way of interpreting the world and his or her unique private experience of it (Sotelo: IX). Thus, it is relevant to promote spaces for grass-root memory projects focus on life story production.

Further analysis can be done on how victims’ narratives are inserted into the national narratives. 74

A young journalist who participated as a facilitator of this experience affirmed: “This workshop allowed many victims to tell their story, people who did not have the resources of the congressmen or soldiers that after being kidnapped and released found the way to publish a book. These are people from other fields of society who, if not for these workshops, might never have told their story.” The fragmentation of Colombian society can be perfectly seen in these stories: individuals carrying long-term traumas, families broken, lands abandoned.

However, these books do not completely reveal who these people are, rather highlights the victimizations that they have suffered, which is the main focus of constructing

“historical memory”. There is a clear need not just to spread out these narratives but to include the victims’ own perspectives of memory, justice, and peacebuilding.

In Colombia, opening up scenarios where the victims find support in the exercise of writing their testimony by themselves, is a way, barely just, to include their legitimate voices in the fragmented narrative of a national identity and history. As opposed to the discourses that emerge from the centers of power, that have been disseminated through their communication media, this grassroots memory project is a response to marginalization and the silence imposed on those who have suffered the war. Thus, in order to expand the dialog in a national perspective, this kind of workshops should be replicated in different regions or local contexts as an opportunity for victims to reach a place in the most recent Colombian history.

Appendix

Maps

Map 1: Map of Colombia divided by regions Map 2: Antioquia, Colombia

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