The Yale Globalist - Colombian Victims Find Their Voice

Colombian Victims Find Their Voice

Monday, 11 May 2009 | Angela Ramírez

Colombian civilians protest against violence and paramilitary activities in their countries (Flickr).

“Jaime boldly interrupted his school’s Mother’s Day assembly to sing a self-composed piece for me. I was, he said, the only woman he loved.” Pausing often, but failing to repress her sobs, Maria Salazar described her son as a tall, thin, hard-working young man of sixteen with the most captivating brown eyes she had ever seen. On February of last year, however, Jaime disappeared. Seven months later, Maria had only to look once at a pale photo of a young man found dead in the north of country to realize it was Jaime.

Jaime is one of an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 people killed in the 45 year conflict between the Colombian government, paramilitary groups, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a communist guerrilla group that has been engaged in bitter fighting with the state since 1964. The FARC, considered a terrorist organization by Colombia, the United States, Canada, and the European Union, has launched brazen attacks on government officials and civilians alike, resorting regularly to kidnapping and cocaine trafficking to sustain itself financially.

This background of violence meant that, for months, Salazar could trust nobody. The story of her son would remain private, not something she could share publically. That is, until El Movice, a human rights movement dedicated to helping victims of the conflict, helped her break the silence.

Government Fighters

Since the early 1980s, when the FARC strengthened its organization and first entered the drug trade, the Colombian government has struggled to maintain control, seeing large swaths of rural territory fall into the guerrilla’s hands. Intent on defeating the FARC, the government has at times turned to desperate measures. In the early 1990s, current President Álvaro Uribe, then governor of the department of Antioquia, passed legislation to allow for the formation of local self-defense groups to combat the FARC. These groups would later make up the Auto-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC), the modern paramilitaries. While some groups immediately improved security and coordinated closely with the military, many descended into thuggery, intimidation, and power-grabbing. Meanwhile, the civilian population remained defenseless against the FARC and the paramilitaries alike, leaving them no safe haven from the atrocities committed by both sides.

In 2002, under the backdrop of multiple failed negotiations by his predecessor, Álvaro Uribe became president of Colombia and initiated a massive offensive against the guerrillas. As a result, between 2002 and 2005, the FARC saw its active membership drop from 20,000 to about 12,000. Violence, however, has been on the rise, with both sides acting with such impunity that few people in Colombia are willing to even talk about the conflict with anyone other than their closest friends. Many refused to speak to me for fear of having their names shown in any sort of publication, even after repeated promises of anonymity.

Still, as rising numbers of FARC deaths attest, the cartel has been weakened in recent years. In light of this success, the government passed the Justice and Peace Law in 2005, which provided for the demobilization of the AUC, trying to bring them back under the rule of law after almost four decades of hostility.

Under this law, AUC members who confessed their crimes and turned themselves in could get off with only five to eight-year prison sentences, even for the most serious crimes. According to the government, the small sentences were a regrettable but pragmatic way to balance the dual needs for peace and justice even as conflict continued to rage in much of the country. “The law will permit the advancement of peace processes in Colombia without ignoring the component of justice,” read the government announcement of the law. Critics, however, object to the short period of investigation into the paramilitaries’ confessed crimes and the requirement of only general confessions of organizational actions, not full, individual confessions. Terrorism, argue human rights organizations, should not be rewarded with amnesty, nor should victims be denied full reparation and justice.

El Movice

One such human rights organization is El Movice (the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes), a group dedicated to helping and connecting victims of alleged “state terrorism” in Colombia. A month after her son’s burial, Salazar became an active member. Victims like her are enraged by the amnesty program and feel that they cannot trust their own government to provide them with any sort of reparation. They turn, instead, to organizations like El Movice to tell their stories to the world, something they are afraid to do individually. As Iván Cepeda, El Movice’s director, explained, the group relies on “public action to inform society and construct an avenue of visibility to ensure justice and the remembrance of victims.” The cost of peace should not be the impunity of terrorist organizations, argues Cepeda.

El Movice is just one of more than 280 organizations that make up the movement against state crimes. The movement itself traces its beginnings to the first campaign against the perceived rampant impunity in the 1990s, when the loss of human life went largely unacknowledged by the government. Colombia Nunca Más (Colombia No More), an initiative by 17 nongovernmental human rights organizations, was designed to systemize and document paramilitary groups’ political violence, crimes which the mainstream media failed to notice. In the first stage of the program, from 1966 to 1998, 44,000 criminal cases were recorded in a massive database. “The recollection of cases proved the urgent need for a way for victims to find each other, for society to know of their plights,” recalled the operations director of the movement, Eliana María Leaño. After the project’s 2005 national summit of victims, El Movice was officially born.

An integral part of Movice’s work is its “Galleries of Memory Marches” where, on the first Friday of every month, family members of victims carry pictures, stories and other relics of their destroyed lives. Salazar, holding a large photo of her son, has participated in a total of three marches and plans to attend many more in the future.

Although the Galleries represent only a small portion of the thousands affected by the conflict, their appearance in public demonstrations, major court hearings, and discussions of laws in parliament are an attempt to represent the suffering of the entire population, suffering which has otherwise failed to garner public recognition.

“There is no space in the media for the victims’ stories. They are left without a voice,” lamented Leaño. “We understand governmental records are very different than real memories from victims. We think it is important that victims themselves are given the right to participate in the recording of historic memory through our database and marches.” Through its Galleries of Memory, El Movice sheds public light on the victims of crimes that, until now, have gone both forgotten and unpunished.

A Deserved Recognition

Thanks to the efforts of El Movice, Colombian politicians are beginning to listen to these victims’ concerns. “It’s a very slow process because of the fear that exists in Colombia. Since this movement was created, however … the change can be felt,” explained the spokesman of a local newspaper called El País, who asked to remain anonymous. Other organizations and individuals have created their own projects similar to the Galleries. As they participate in the process of restoring public memory of state-committed crimes, victims like Maria are finally beginning to find their voices. “The people at El Movice have become like my brothers and sisters. They have given me much psychological orientation. They are incredible human beings,” she said.

El Movice has become a valuable resource to its victims, but its job does not stop there: As an apolitical organization, El Movice has also created a Commission of Ethics composed of 20 foreigners and five local experts. Its work is to compile cases of human rights violations and eventually establish a legal strategy to bring the perpetrators to justice. Some of the Commission’s future work remains hazy — there are not yet conditions or stipulations as to how the Commission will function, given that nobody knows how the conflict will end.

But one thing remains certain: with El Movice’s 24 regional and international chapters promoting the visibility of the Colombian conflict domestically and abroad in countries like Spain, France, and Mexico, victims of this conflict may finally get the recognition they deserve.

Angela Ramirez is a freshman in Davenport College.

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