Colombian History Archives

More than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History

In July 2017, as part of my dissertation research, I had the opportunity to participate in an assembly of the Association of Victims of Granada (Asociación de Víctimas de Granada, ASOVIDA), in Colombia. This organization is composed of the survivors of the violence inflicted by guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the National Army during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. ASOVIDA was legally created in 2007 after three years of victims organizing, learning about their rights, and finding ways to prevent brutalities from happening again. Since the early 2000s, amidst the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia, the people of Granada began a process of awareness, prevention, and production of memories of the atrocities they experienced. To this day, the members of ASOVIDA gather on the first Saturday of each month to talk about their concerns as victims, to participate in community decisions, and to continue with their grieving and reparation process.

Gloria Ramírez, President of ASOVIDA introduces Jimena Perry to the crowd (Jimena Perry, 2017)

My dissertation is about the production of historical memories about the armed conflict in Colombia, including institutions like ASOVIDA and The Hall of Never Again, a space for remembering and honoring the victims of massacres, disappearances, targeted killings, bombings, and other forms of violence in Granada. Therefore, ASOVIDA´s president asked me to present my project before the assembly. She wanted me to tell the community why I am interested in ASOVIDA and the Hall, what I am going to do with the information gathered, and what benefits my work could bring to them. ASOVIDA´s president requested my presence at the assembly because some of my primary sources are the contents of so-called bitácoras, notebooks designed to make the victim´s grieving process easier. In these texts, one can read mothers talking to their children, husbands to their wives, brothers to sisters, children to their parents, and other family members remembering their departed loved ones. The bitácoras become both objects to be exhibited and historical sources for studying the violence endured by a particular person or family and how they survived. Bitácoras also provide an account of the story and character of the dead person, why he or she was important and help the public and visitors of the Hall to learn about local history and to link the survivors to community reconstruction processes. They are intimate accounts of the survivor’s feelings along with very personal stories, consequently, using them requires an ethical commitment and a deep respect towards their authors.

When requested to present my project before the assembly, my first reaction was surprise. Why should I do this? If the bitácoras are part of the Hall of Never Again´s exhibit they are already public records; they are meant to be read, but when I thought carefully about the request, I realized that the authors had reasonable suspicions. I am an outsider, a researcher who comes and goes; I have not suffered violence in the same way, and there I am using their cherished stories for an academic endeavor.

Assembly victims discussing about what forgiveness means to them (Jimena Perry, 2017)

It made even more sense when I saw the inhabitants of Granada at the assembly´s meeting. Regular people working to achieve peace in their town looked at me with curiosity. They wanted to know who was I and what was I doing there. Seeing all those people, interested in finding peace for themselves, their families, and town, I understood that academic research becomes secondary to dealing with people´s lives and feelings. I was willing to leave out of my dissertation the contents of the bitácoras if the community did not grant me permission to use them. The main purpose of my presence at the assembly was letting people know that I intend to use their stories in an academic endeavor, as an example of memory production ASOVIDA´s president introduced me and stated why I was there giving me the floor. I started by telling them about my own story. I mentioned my background, where I came from, and why I was so interested in the bitácoras. They listened carefully. I emphasized the academic purpose of my research and assured them that I would not use their names, that I was not going to sell their stories, and that when my research is over I would go back and show it to them. So far, I have traveled to Granada three times.

After my presentation, ASOVIDA´s president told the members of the assembly to think about my request to use their testimony. She asked them to consider why would they let me use their stories and to take their time. When the time for voting came, I was surprised and delighted with the results. The victims’ assembly approved my project and my use of the bitácoras by a vast majority. Then there were some questions and even suggestions. Granada´s victims want visibility, their voices heard, the world to know all the brutalities committed against them and their struggles for survival. Granada´s inhabitants believe that letting the world know what happened in their town can help prevent violent acts to happen again. With this in mind, they told me they granted their authorization to use their testimonies. I thanked them feeling grateful for their trust and an immense commitment to use my work to serve the people of Granada.

During this assembly the victims were asked to work in groups to think about what peace and reconciliation can be achieved in Granada (Jimena Perry, 2017)

This experience with Granada´s victims of violence changed my priorities regarding my work. I realized the enormous ethical commitment I had made in dealing with memories about a recent violent past that is still fresh, remembrances that still give people nightmares and fears. I also understood that more than the bitácoras, victims themselves are the ones who really matter. I knew this before, but seeing the people, talking to them, answering their questions raised different questions about academic research. How can one deal with intimate stories of pain without being disrespectful? How far must researcher go to achieve her or his goals? How to avoid being the kind of person that goes to a community, takes what is needed from the people, and never returns? How not to be another source of stress for the victims?

After speaking to the assembly and talking to the real protagonists of the Colombian armed conflict, I believe that analyzing the community coming to terms with its pain can encourage other social groups to do the same. In addition, I want to think that my work will inspire more victims to tell their stories and start a grieving process. I want to honor the trust Granada´s people gave me. I want my work to help them heal and I want to make the testimonies of the bitácoras known to as many audiences as possible. After attending the assembly, I feel that one of the priorities of my work should be writing a story in which the community of Granada can recognize itself. I want my dissertation to become a text in which the Granada inhabitants find their own voices. Memory production is an ongoing process that hopefully would continue until the victims feel their healing is complete, but meanwhile, their efforts for achieving peace in their town should be encouraged and acknowledged.

More by Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:

Too much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellín, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014

By Jimena Perry

During the summer of 2014 I had the chance to visit the Hall of Never Again (El Salón del Nunca Más) in the Department of Antioquia, in northwest Colombia. What started just as a tourist visit soon became a research interest. Growing up in a country overwhelmed by an ongoing armed conflict, the Hall made quite a huge impression on me due to the visual narrative it contained. Photographs of the faces of approximately180 victims of the violence are displayed on a wall to highlight a history in which the victim’s voices are privileged. It was quite different from the discourses shaped by state institutions such as the National Museum of Colombia that feature official histories about national identity and citizenship. These contrasting accounts of recent brutalities in Colombia made me want to explore the ways that individuals and communities remember their violent pasts. Grieving, as part of a remembrance process, has no handbook and no formulas; it is not a unilinear process. It is complex and ongoing. Grief and memories of violence are informed by history and culture and require to be understood as a social dynamic practice.

The Colombian violence of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the subject of my work, left many victims. It also left many survivors of atrocities who needed some kind of closure in order to continue with their lives. During these decades, civilians found themselves caught among four armed actors: the National Army, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and drug lords, who were fighting over the control of land and civilians. These groups committed brutalities such as kidnappings, disappearances, forced displacement, bombings, massacres, and targeted murders. In order to cope with and overcome the trauma caused by all this violence, diverse communities set up museums and displays. These acts of memory and reconciliation demonstrate that people and communities remember and represent the past differently. Some exhibitions portray violence, others focus on personal histories and others turn to the strength their cultural traditions give them. They contain different meanings and intentions, and take a variety of forms including traveling museums, murals, houses, kiosks, and even cemeteries devoted to remembering the ones who are gone. But they all work towards the same goal: never again.

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore. Courtesy of the author.

My interest in studying historical representations of violence was sparked when I realized that in Colombia, memories about the atrocities of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s are quite diverse and do not appear in state institutions. I also came to understand that although grieving has a place for the reconstruction of facts and a search for “truth,” these are not the most important aspects for individuals and communities. After talking with community leaders and reading the scholarship on memory and museums, I can say that instead of truth quests people want to feel that their absent loved ones are not forgotten, that their lives meant something.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia. Courtesy of the author.

Part of the attention that communities are devoting to the production of historical memories of violence is closely related to the diverse healing processes grounded in local cultures. The rural memory venues I am researching emphasize local traditions, beliefs, and patterns of behavior. Their displays illustrate how violence altered their way of life and how individuals and groups are coping with new realities, silences, and absences. Culture becomes a cohesive factor, the resource communities appeal to in order to heal and envision a future.

Therefore, my research has two major parts. First, it relies on ethnographic descriptions of the memory sites and the violent episodes they are representing. Second, these memories of violence help me analyze how contemporary citizenship is understood in Colombia, as rooted in these communities’ struggles with the violence past

And my research has a third component—public history. Writing and researching about memory venues in Colombia is my way of helping in the healing of local communities. My wish is that my work will help people feel that their histories are not forgotten and that they are an inspiration for generations to come.

I also want my writing about memory venues in Colombia to contribute to a new, more diverse, sense of national identity. I want the narratives portrayed in these venues to be incorporated into a national discourse. One of my hopes is that by reading about the testimonies and descriptions about recent Colombian violence in local memory projects, the general public can go beyond the gory details about violence and remember the victims as living family and community members, and as part of the Colombian community. My aspiration is that the diverse Colombian voices become part of the project of nation-state building. Everybody talks about the importance of respecting and understanding other ways of seeing the world, but when it comes down to concrete political actions, alterity is often ignored.

You may also like these articles by Jimena Perry on two museums that represent the Colombian violence since the 1960s: the Hall of Never Again, a community-led memory museum in Colombia, and The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig (2004)

By Jimena Perry

One of Colombia´s most important museums is the Gold Museum, located in Bogotá. It is part of the Bank of the Republic, a state-run central bank. The museum houses approximately 55,000 gold pieces, most of them belonging to Pre-Columbian cultures, and aims to preserve the country´s heritage. Perhaps the most intriguing object on display is the world famous Poporo Quimbaya, a device used by indigenous cultures to store the lime they mixed with coca leaves for chewing. This was the first object acquired by the museum’s directors and has been on display for more than 60 years.

Quimbaya gold poporo and pestle, at the Gold Museum, Bogotá. Via Wikipedia.

In 2003, anthropologist Michael Taussig, known for his unconventional ethnographic writing, published My Cocaine Musuem, a controversial analysis of the Gold Museum. The book was based on his conversations with the director and museum staff as well as analysis of the collection and its presentation. Taussig´s book uses the Gold Museum as a case study to reflect on what museums should do and raised significant criticisms regarding the practices he saw at the Gold Musuem. While the book upset the museum’s team, it is now considered an important reflection on how museums work.

One of Taussig’s major criticisms was the key omissions he noticed in the story told by the Gold Museum. Taussig drew on his own research into the black communities located in Timibiquí in the country’s southwest. These communities were formed by black former slaves who settled in Timbiquí and began extracting gold from mines and panning it from rivers there. Despite the strong connection these communities had to gold, the museum made no mention of them.

Taussig also criticised the museum for focusing too heavily on objects without providing the rich texture that brings understanding to different cultures. For example he highlights the relationship that some indigenous peoples have with objects such as poporos (not all of them are made of gold) and the lime they carry in them. He argues that these objects are revealing of a different life and culture that needs to be contextualized in order to be understood and respected. If, for example, there is a display of the object itself, without some kind of history behind it, the cultural meanings of the pieces might disappear entirely. Along these lines, continues Taussig, museums have become boring places that fixate on objects, they are “dead and even hostile places for bored bourgeoisie.” For instance, since poporos store lime for chewing with coca leaves, they have a green layer of dry spit in their upper part. Why wouldn’t a museum exhibit these poporos? Why is only an asceptic, clean, gold poporo appropriate to represent the cultural practice of coca chewing and why are the black people who extract gold totally absent from museums?

This old Muisca tradition became the origin of the El Dorado legend. This Balsa Muisca (Muisca raft) figure is on display in the Gold Museum, Bogotá, Colombia. Via Wikipedia.

In order to bridge these gaps, Taussig imagines a cocaine museum, not to exalt coke as a national Colombian identity marker, but as the object at the center of an issue that can be traced historically and that cannot be comprehended if it is only seen as an object. Taussig emphasizes the relationship among gold, coke, and cocaine. Along these lines, the author envisages a museum that does not separate nature from culture, where objects are not decontextualized and where the pieces tell stories that appeal to the people who use, elaborate, and see them. The scholar´s idea is that his cocaine museum portrays a story of things told by objects. For the anthropologist, My Cocaine Museum is a place where history and ethnography converge, contextualizing gold and its relationship with coke. It is even possible to say that he makes the following equation: gold is to slaves as coca to Indians and cocaine to the present.

Not all Taussig’s arguments are persuasive. Why should a historical museum, such as the Gold Museum, which aims to focus on the past, have the duty to also display the present? Should all msueums do the same thing? What are their purposes? How are they useful to society? Taussig´s book raises these question and will make readers think more closely about the nature, function, and role of museums.

My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig (The University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos

Seen through the eyes of Steven Murphy, the DEA agent whose voice-over narrates the new Netflix series Narcos, Colombia appears to viewers all over the world as a land of sicarios (hired young assassins), putas (whores), and malparidos (the fucked-up). In short, Colombia becomes the quintessential Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez. The Colombian Nobel prize winner is renowned for introducing magical realism as narrative technique: the journalistic description of reality, in which the supernatural and the strange are woven together into matter-of-fact accounts. Narcos introduces the viewer to one of Macondo’s sons: Pablo Escobar, a savvy entrepreneur who was to become one of the most powerful drug lords in the history of the world, the leader of the Medellin cartel. In the early 70s, Escobar went from smuggling cigarettes and TV-sets to exporting cocaine into Miami. By the early 80s, Escobar was transporting one ton of cocaine per day.

Narcos describes the transformation of both Colombia and Murphy. Before Escobar, Colombia was corrupt but poor. But with the arrival of Escobar’s billions, Colombia became a bustling, cosmopolitan hellhole. The narrative arc of Murphy’s metamorphosis is also cast in very simple terms. He was originally a naïve agent chasing after potheads in Miami. Once in Colombia, however, Murphy goes native. In the last episode, Murphy resolves the dispute over a mild car accident by shooting at the other driver, while his gringa wife and Colombian baby girl (who had been left orphaned in a murderous rampage by Escobar’s minions and who Murphy casually picked up to raise) witness in horror Murphy’s new penchant for blood and lawlessness. It is in the wake of this shooting that Murphy’s wife begs Murphy to take the baby and go back home (to the US). A nonchalant Murphy replies that home is now Colombia.

Viewers do not get to witness the effects of Colombia in the transformation of two other secondary characters working at the US Embassy in Bogota: the CIA chief agent and the marine representative of US Southern Army Command. These two gringos have already been “seasoned” and therefore understand that Colombians are moved only through the barrel of a gun. Narcos therefore explicitly suggests that there is a fundamental difference between an uncivilized Latino south and a peaceful Anglo north that is bridged when Anglos get to live for a long time among the savages. Narcos has the three representatives of the US government embracing every aspect of Colombian violence while proving incapable of learning a single word in Spanish over the course of ten episodes.

There is something, however, that Narcos gets right. The series shows the use of torture, terror, and electronic surveillance in the making of the modern US Empire. For three episodes, Escobar operates freely in the USA. Murphy documents the murder of some 3,000 black and Latino narcos in the streets of Miami in the late 70s and early 80s. This blood bath of expendables did not budge any US politicians into action. It was, however, a photo of Escobar moving crates on an airfield of Sandinista Nicaragua that persuaded Reagan to up the ante. It is only then that Murphy moves to Colombia as DEA agent and the CIA and the marines begin torturing Colombians as well pursuing the electronic surveillance of Escobar’s phone communications. The show documents with great accuracy how before Iraq, there was Colombia.

Colombian police and miltary forces storm the rooftop where Pablo Escobar was shot. Courtesy of AFP/Getty Images.

Narcos has Escobar’s minions pitted against a tiny elite of incorruptible bilinguals (politicos and army officers) in a violent struggle over control of the Colombian state. Every event in Colombian politics in the 80s and early 90s is made to revolve around the implementation (or lack thereof) of extradition of narcos to the USA: the assassinations of the Chief Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, the election of Cesar Gaviria as President of Colombia, the M19 attack on the Palace of Justice of 1985, and the constitution of 1991. The picture is so skewed as to become absurd.

On November 6, 1985, M19 stormed Bogota's Palace of Justice. — On November 6, 1985, M19 stormed Bogota’s Palace of Justice.

The M19, a social democratic guerilla movement that led the attack on the Palace of Justice and whose negotiated incorporation into the political process led to the Constitutional Assembly of 1991, is turned in a clownish club of dilettantes. In one episode, Narcos has a strangely taciturn, sad, and inept M19 leader (clearly not the historical leader of M19, Jaime Bateman, who was an exuberant Afro-Colombian who loved both life and politics) break into a museum with his voluptuous lover to steal Bolivar’s sword, a symbol of unfulfilled liberation, only to have the leader hand in the sword to Escobar in the next episode. The M19 was by far the most popular political movement of the 1980s, equipped with a regular army 2,000 strong engaged in a war of positions with the Colombian army in the Valley of Cauca. But in Narcos it is portrayed as a tiny urban cell doing all of Escobar’s dirty business. According to Narcos, the M19 attack on the Palace of Justice was financed by Escobar to have a cache of his papers, captured in a raid, burnt. This is nonsense. M19 seized the Palace to call attention to the systematic aerial bombardment of guerilla forces in the wake of a negotiated peace agreement with President Belisario Betancourt. The burning of the palace was the doing of the army, not the M19.

Photograph of the real-life Jaime Bateman Cayón (April 23, 1940 – April 28, 1983)

The great conflict of the 80s in Colombia was for sure messy. It did involve narcos, the state, urban guerrillas, and the USA. Yet the great protagonist of the 80s was the grass roots movement to transform the oligarchic Colombian regime into a viable constitutional social democracy. The movement partially culminated in the passage of the Constitution of 1991. Narcos completely distorts this process and by so doing overlooks the impulse behind the constitutional banning of extradition. The debate was not just over the threat of narco money corrupting politicos. It was far more ethically substantive: whose blood should be spilled in the global war on drugs and whose bodies incarcerated. This war is now being fought in Mexico and US ghettoes. The dead bodies of the war on drugs continue to be largely brown and the incarcerated ones black, while consumers in Palo Alto and Manhattan get to enjoy Netflix’s Narcos.

History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

By Jimena Perry

September 23, 2015, marked a historic day in Colombian history. President Juan Manuel Santos and Timoléon Jiménez, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People´s Army (FARC-EP), agreed to sign a peace treaty. Concluding negotiations that started in 2012, the two leaders will sign the treaty on March 23, 2016, ending sixty years of armed conflict. Questions will now be raised about the need to offer reparations to the victims of the violence and how the country can move forward after a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

President Raúl Castro of Cuba, center, with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, left, and Rodrigo Londoño, of FARC. Courtesy of Desmond Boylan/Associated Press

This healing process has already started in some parts of Colombia in the form of several grassroots movements and state-led initiatives. Since the early 2000s, different communities across the nation located in both urban and rural environments began to create spaces where they could grieve and mourn the loss of their loved ones. These memory sites allow different communities a space to represent their specific experiences of the violence and make sense of their collective trauma. They also offer the country as a whole a series of strategies to help heal, now that peace is on the horizon.

One example is The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation (Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación), founded in 2012. It was created as the result of discussions of Human Rights NGOs and peace organizations that started in 2008. The Center is an inclusive and participatory space, where survivors of violence can participate in constructing their public historical memories. The main structure of the Center is the Memorial for Life, which is a wall built for remembering casualties of the armed conflict. The architects promoted a participatory process where the survivors of atrocities could bring, as a symbolic gesture, a handful of soil dedicated to the victims. The soil symbolized the source of the armed conflict in struggles over landowning but also represented something that belongs to everybody. They wanted people to feel part of the initiative for peace that the Center promotes. Therefore, the wall represents the dead, memory, and the future.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia.

The Center´s intention is to promote commemoration that is meaningful to the local population, rather than to perpetuate an official state narrative. For example, the coordinators of the Center have organized exhibits related to the extermination of the political party, The Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica). The UP was the target of political violence from drug lords, paramilitaries, and agents of the security forces during the mid-1980s, leading to its disappearance. The Center also organized an important exhibit called “Exhibition of the Mothers of Soacha,” in which a group of mothers claimed justice for the assassination of their sons. In 2008, some members of the National Army killed civilians, claiming they were guerrilla fighters. During the last months of that year, approximately 19 corpses of young men appeared in Norte de Santander, a region bordering Venezuela in the north, but officials from Soacha, a city on the southern edge of Bogotá, were able to establish they had been recruited as workers and then appeared dead far away from their home. Since then, the so-called Mothers of Soacha have been threatened, harassed, and kept under surveillance due to their efforts to commemorate their sons.

Now, as Colombia seeks to achieve a lasting peace, these efforts of commemoration and memory in local communities, NGOs, cultural organizations, and the state need to come together to begin a project of national reflection that includes every individual effected by the violence.

Plaque describing the memorial. Courtesy of the author.

Plaque describing the memorial, which reads “This Memorial for Life is inhabited by handfuls of soil that citizens brought during three years. They are kept in 2012 glass tubes embedded in the walls of the building. They symbolize more than 40,000 records of victims of murders and disappearances and thousands of stories of violence. We recover voices, we make visible what has been hidden or silenced because memory resists death. We create the past so dreams can return.” Courtesy of the author.

Recent Posts