A Dystopian Climate for Transitional Justice

Political History Of The Conflict

The assassination of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 established a precedent for the elimination of a legitimate left wing from national politics. It also initiated a decade of vicious civil war, in which 200,000 people were killed, followed by more than half a century of political violence. In 1968, in reaction to the proliferation of armed left militias, ³ Congress passed legislation conferring on right-wing civil patrols the legal right to weapons that had previously been permissible exclusively for the armed forces (OAS, 1999). The historical outsourcing of the fight against the guerrillas to the civilian population created a discourse in which an extra-state armed civilian right wing was viewed as a necessary security measure rather than a terrorist infrastructure, despite the fact that human rights organizations have routinely attributed 70–80 percent of the casualties in the civil war to these same paramilitary forces (Laplante and Theidon, 2007: 56).

The Evolution of Violence In Medellín

María Victoria Uribe (2004: 80) describes terror in Colombia as a “contagious physical reality,” a germ that spreads throughout the citizen body, causing ripples of infected consequence throughout society. The bulk of this war has taken place in the countryside, propelling Colombian urbanization as civilians have sought an escape from manipulation, abuse, or massacre by one of the armed groups. In Medellín, many families have been displaced from elsewhere in the country during confrontations over control of territory between the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. “Even if you weren’t directly threatened, leaving your land was the only way of not getting caught in the crossfire of violence between the guerrillas and the paramilitaries” (Ana Isabel, interview, Medellín, March 20, 2012). Ironically, on arriving displaced from the countryside, families mostly settle along the city’s periphery, which has also been contested territory in recent decades. Here, neo-paramilitary groups fill a gap in infrastructural support that would normally be provided by a functional state. In contemporary Medellín invisible borders carve up comunas into barrios distributed among different armed groups that establish and enforce the rule of law within them. ⁴ These groups use the tactics of nation-states to maintain control over their territories— determining who has the right to live within a particular zone of control, mapping and violently patrolling their borders, taxing the local economy in exchange for protection, and sending residents into exile if they prove disloyal. As a result of this multitude of coexisting violent actors, the city has been one of the most guarded but most insecure cities in the world (Gutiérrez and Jaramillo, 2004: 19). The definitions of “civil war” and ordinary apolitical delinquency have long been blurred beyond recognition, with more people killed in what might be called nonwar violence than in what is technically defined as civil war (Cramer, 2006: 73).

The rise of violence in Medellín in the 1980s, which was largely between the police and drug cartels, was exacerbated by the infiltration of leftist militias into the city in the same period (Ceballos, 2000: 395). A decade later, a series of state-led “operations” (attacks) ⁵ were carried out in Medellín’s Comuna 13 with the goal of “pacifying” it. ⁶ The best-known of these operations were Orion and Mariscal, which resulted in mass disappearances, deaths, forced recruitments, and a general shredding of the social infrastructure of Comuna 13’s outermost barrios between 2001 and 2002. Ana Isabel’s 18-year-old brother was murdered, and her 16-year-old brother disappeared in 2002: “He leaned out the window of his bedroom and was shot by a man in uniform. Then, after I reported the murder, they came to my home and said, ‘What more do you want? We’ve taken care of your whole family. You have to go now’” (Ana Isabel, interview, Medellín, March 20, 2012).

Jo Beall (2009: 119) claims that in moments of conflict, when states are weak or unable to exercise legitimate force, urban planning and governance strategies become more and more geared toward separation and control rather than inclusivity and conviviality. In a trial during the 2008 Justicia y Paz commission the former commander of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia–AUC), ⁷ alias Don Berna, described this joint effort between the military and the paramilitaries as “politically motivated attempt(s) to eliminate the guerrillas in an effort to help the community and assist the state forces” (Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2011: 283). Attempts on behalf of the government to protect civilians from the armed left have taken several caustic forms: participating in and condoning acts of extreme violence against civilians ⁸ (so-called false-positive killings) in the name of establishing peace and blocking from view those individuals whose victimization calls into question the effectiveness of the dialogue of “peace building” employed on the national stage.

The policy known as Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration (DDR) was introduced in 1953 as a means to dismantle the armed left and has since been revived by multiple administrations. In 1984 the Uribe Contract allowed 700 combatants of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces—FARC) to disarm in exchange for the opportunity to construct a legitimate political party. However, shortly after the creation of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union—UP), 3,000 of the party’s members were executed by the paramilitaries (Laplante and Theidon, 2007: 60). The immediacy and immensity of this targeted massacre point to the severity with which a left-wing political identification has been cemented as a justifiable cause for murder. Despite this haunting scar in the country’s history, the same sequence of events has repeated itself in different forms throughout the manifold efforts to force a transition to “peace.” ⁹ The massacre and the failures of the disarmament process underline the dangers in implementing models for transitional justice that define and disarm only one side of the conflict. Jacques Rancière (2004) speaks to the effects of employing an “extreme logic of consensus” in which the aim is the dissolution of all political differences. I would argue that the repeated failure of Colombian transitional justice as a peace-building policy is attributable to an ongoing insistence on creating a politically homogeneous society, free of dissenting voices and therefore lacking space for comprehensive justice and memory across political lines.

As Saskia Sassen (2010) has argued, what may be good for the protection of the national state apparatus may come at a high price for cities and their people. At the turn of the century, former President Álvaro Uribe justified violent oppression of citizens in terms of pacification and protection. Recalling Rancière’s (2004: 7) definition of consensus, the Colombian attempt at enacting consensus actually serves to reduce politics to police enforcement, with the state authorizing police and paramilitary action against its own citizens. The Peace and Justice Law 975 of 2005 helped merge DDR and transitional justice into a single legal framework, which, according to Laplante and Theidon (2007: 76), signified a momentous break from previous conventional demobilization strategies. This law offers a single reduced sentence of five to eight years to paramilitaries who agree to turn in any goods obtained illicitly and participate in an extended public truth-telling process. As a result approximately 55,000 paramilitaries have participated in demobilization ceremonies, handing over weapons in exchange for pardons, while commanders have submitted to participation in the transitional justice process, gradually providing participating paramilitaries with the opportunity to disarm, stabilize, and be reintroduced into the fabric of society. The law stipulates that victims should receive reparations in the form of land and property restitution, rehabilitation, and guarantees against repeated victimization. This process was combined with the mass elimination of the guerrillas at the turn of the century, and the official stance ¹⁰ since 2003–2005 has been to classify any further violence in the city as apolitical.

Unfortunately, the aspect of the transitional justice program that forces former commanders to testify publicly frequently serves to highlight the failure of the process in remedying a national obsession with eliminating dissent. In court, while confessing to 129 cases of multiple homicides the former paramilitary commander Raúl Hazbún Mendoza was asked by a reporter “From where you sit now, can you still believe it was all worth it?” and responded, “Yes. In those days, given the situation the country was in, we had to fight. All the violence we are guilty of was for the good of the nation. We eliminated the threats to the nation’s development.” As a consequence of the long-standing validation and support the paramilitaries have experienced from the state, there remains a sense of pride among many of the demobilized commanders that goes unchecked by a program that claims to be rehabilitating these individuals for reintroduction into society. Seven years into the eight-year program, this paramilitary commander can proclaim, without a hint of doubt, that the violent dismembering of mothers of suspected leftists for which he is responsible constitutes a justifiable form of patriotism. These individuals are unapologetic for their murders because the lives they ended and destroyed have been structurally disqualified for more than half a century.

Naming Ongoing Violence

Displacement never stands alone. To be a victim of internal displacement is to be a victim of multiple crimes and hence to suffer multiple layers of victimization. [director of the Displacement Response Unit, interview, Comuna 13, Medellín, May 10, 2012]

In 2007 there were approximately 26 million internally displaced persons worldwide, with Colombia, Iraq, and Sudan making up 50 percent of them (IDMC, 2008). The Colombian government estimates the total as 3,875,987, while the Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Consultancy for Human Rights and Forced Displacement—CODHES) estimates it at 5,454,766 (IDMC, 2011). As the national conflict has evolved, patterns of displacement have twisted and turned, and cities are no longer solely sites of reception. In its early stages there was a lack of recognition, and most victims dealt with the consequences alone, often concealing the reasons for their forced migration (CODHES, 2006: 7). According to the annual human rights report produced by the Personería de Medellín (2011: 44), forced urban displacement in Medellín generates the greatest number of victims in the city, with 2,210 (involving 8,434 individuals) claims for assistance submitted in 2011. As internal displacement within the city has come to be the creator of the largest number of annual victims, showing an increase of 60 percent between 2010 and 2011, we must disentangle these stories to see the historical, social, bureaucratic, and political implications of this growing violence.

Because so much of the governance and citizenship of the past half century has been structured by violence and security, in contemporary Colombia it is frequently the case that those claiming their rights as citizens must first be recognizable as lives at risk (Zeiderman, 2013: 74). The forensic architect Eyal Weizman (2014) writes of an intentionally limited “threshold of detectability,” describing a state-designed infrastructure for governance that renders certain forms of violence or victimhood invisible. In devising a state response that does not incorporate the necessary machinery to trace the fingerprints at a crime scene, those in power may bend public truth and cage in what is permissible in collective history. In Colombia, not having the legal infrastructure to assert that one’s life is at risk may leave an individual without access to basic rights.

The place that individual victims of urban displacement have come to occupy in the city gives substance to the unfolding story of what is being systematically excluded from collective memory making in Medellín. The current framework for identifying and responding to victims is set in place at a national level by Law 1,448, the New Victims’ Law, which was passed on June 10, 2011, and took effect in 2012. It regulates the humanitarian aid, assistance, and reparations to victims and, most significant, defines who is included in this category.

In 2002 Ana Isabel left Comuna 13 and moved to another area of Medellín, returning only in 2007, when the AUC was officially declared demobilized and the transitional justice system was well under way. However, as did many previously displaced people returning to the comuna, she found herself still under threat. She started up a butcher’s business and lived comfortably for three years. Then, in 2010, she participated in a public project commemorating the victims of displacement in the community. The project involved a march that was broadcast on television, allowing a local neo-paramilitary group to identify her and again threaten her into leaving her home (interview, Medellín, March 30, 2012):

Two men wearing motorcycle helmets knocked on my door at 9 p.m. They threatened me, saying, “We’re here with orders to kill you, but we’ve already had to kill your whole family. Now we just want you to leave.” I asked them, “Why?”

“Because your family were from Oriente, and you’re always making trouble for us, filing charges and trying to involve the police. We can’t have this in our community. We’ve already murdered everyone else in your family. Now we need you to disappear.” So I had to leave, leaving behind my house and the little business I had started. Everything . . . again.

Ana Isabel’s most obvious wound is her isolation. Having lost every intimate relationship that she had in the comuna twice, she describes herself as incapable of establishing a social environment again. Repeated victimization, displacement, and the stigma that inevitably follows has stripped her of community both physically and socially (interview, Medellín, May 1, 2012):

I don’t give my home number to anyone anymore, not even to old friends. Sometimes I’ll run into an old friend on the metro and we might chat.

I went to a couple of these meetings for victims who have had a relative disappeared, but I became too paranoid to keep it up. I don’t tell anyone where I live anymore, and I haven’t made any new intimate relationships since the last displacement. No one knows my full story.

This continuation of social trauma is a pattern for many victims of urban displacement and is magnified when coupled with the structural violence of extreme socioeconomic inequality. Another woman I interviewed, Lucelly, told me that she and her family had only moved 15 minutes away after her daughter was murdered. Having stayed in the area, she has not completely lost her sense of community, but it has meant that she has been unable to extract her family entirely from a situation of ongoing violence. Speaking of her grandson, she explains, “As he gets older, he asks me more and more questions about what exactly happened to his mom. There are questions I don’t want to answer, and I don’t want him to hear the answer from others in the neighborhood. I don’t want him to grow up sucked into a cycle of violence” (interview, Medellín, April 5, 2012). The continuity of the various stories of displacement that I was confronted with in Medellín was revealing of the severe consequences of a negligent analysis of reality that encourages previously displaced individuals to return to the community from which they were expelled without ensuring that their victimizers have actually been disarmed and removed from power in the community: “This conflict isn’t over. The armed groups are all exactly the same as they were 10 years ago. They just call themselves by different names” (Ana Isabel, interview, Medellín, May 1, 2012).

Judith Butler (2004: 34) asks, “Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of de-realization.” As a consequence of long-standing social stigma and a desire to nurture and protect neoliberal development in Colombia, no line is drawn between having potentially socialist sympathies and taking up arms. In 2004 a 22-year-old woman was murdered on the street one afternoon as she went for a walk with a neighborhood friend. She was targeted directly with repeated shots to the head in broad daylight; neo-paramilitary groups had become suspicious of her lack of political allegiance and taken it as an indicator that she was a guerrilla sympathizer. In many environments the clearly plotted assassination of a young girl would be the cause for a lengthy investigation, but the place for a political left has been delegitimized to such an extent that it is considered “worthy of the same degree of persecution that the armed left has been served” (Padre Vasquez, interview, Medellín, April 15, 2012).

In practice, Law 1,448 serves to organize victims in such a way that most of them are not covered by it. In defining “victims” it focuses on the victimizers, creating a separation between “political actors” (paramilitaries and guerrillas) and active bandas criminales (BACRIM) or combos (organized criminals) based on the chronological logic of the implementation of transitional justice. This definition and the access victims get to reparations, guarantees of security, and, as a consequence, participation in collective memory making is based not on the type of crime they have suffered or their denial of basic rights of citizenship (shelter, property, security) but on the time frame in which the victimization took place and the labeling of their victimizers. Violence after 2005 is de facto viewed as apolitical, effectively bulldozing the particularities relevant to each case.

Grassroots Responses

We don’t know where the place for the possible lies within Colombia; we know with certainty that it does not lie within institutions, because within these there is only room for the fickle accumulation of power. [Sánchez, 2003: 76]

Vergara-Arias (2009: 142) argues that “the manifest contradiction arises between the imaginations of those who practice and live the reality of the city and those who possess the faculties to initiate imagined projects through the hegemonic order.” Despite this inherent disjuncture, Zeiderman’s (2013) analysis points to the hopeful fact that, while “governmental realities of bio-political security shape the terrain of urban politics, they do not fully determine how that terrain is traversed.” Despite the efforts of the state to whitewash the current spectrum of violence in the city, there are those from outside the state working to point to local inefficiency (and corruption) and protect an alternative telling of their own histories.

As Rancière (2004: 7) has pointed out, “In politics, subjects act to create a stage on which problems can be made visible—a scene with subjects and objects, in full view of a partner who does not see them.” In order for a transition to healthy politics to occur in Colombia, currently victimized populations need to be made visible. Johan Galtung (1969) differentiates between “negative peace” and “positive peace.” The former simply eliminates violence, while the latter seeks a constructive engagement with the conflict and addresses the conditions that led to the violence in question. In order to establish positive peace, structural inequalities and social stigmatization need to be interrogated, and new infrastructure must be built to fill the gap between lived histories of violence and the formal dialogue intended to confront it. Problems of violence in the city need to be visible, and the state needs to construct a system that is capable of seeing the multifarious communities to which it is responsible. Because at present the system is designed in such a way that it negates a growing portion of society, the only hope for positive peace in Medellín lies outside the formal infrastructure.

John Paul Lederach’s (2011) research in Colombia highlights resilience and coping mechanisms in urban collectives. He focuses on the ways in which unorthodox initiatives can become pro-actively engaged in purposeful ways, helping people recover a sense of place, at-home-ness, and voice. By constructing organizations that nurture a constructive sense of purpose in their participants, small-scale collectives are working with the people most likely to become victims or victimizers in Colombia’s ongoing conflict and encouraging the inclusion of personal histories that would otherwise go unheard. The provision of new outlets and tools for empowerment among the vulnerable and otherwise invisible is an indispensable element for reaching a structural shift in the society’s political and social landscape.

Civilian activists with the help of international organizations have succeeded in setting up and maintaining a regional victims’ forum in Antioquia. The forum operates on two levels. For individual victims it represents a community space for political education and immediate aid and a platform for sharing stories and rebuilding social capital after victimization. On another level it represents a unified platform for the articulation of united interests and demands of the state. Recognition of victims’ rights, guarantees of participation and support for the victims of the armed conflict, guarantees of the protection of the lives and emotional integrity of the victims, the creation of schools that incorporate political education, thorough investigations into charges of impunity in state institutions, the implementation of strategies for land and property restitution, symbolic reparations and support of memorial projects, and psychological support for victims are among the demands outlined on behalf of the forum.

Despite its many failings, Law 1,448 is conceptually sound in prescribing a greater degree of participation in the transitional justice process from within the victim communities, establishing victims’ forums at the municipal, departmental, and national levels. In this way the law creates concrete channels for the voices of victims within an institutional structure in which two representatives of yet-to-be-established regional victims’ forums ¹¹ will be included in the Directive Council of the Administrative Unit for Special Attention to Land Restitution (Article 107). Giving victims a formal stake in decision making about territorial control is reason for hope that this version of the peace-building process may bear fruit.

Unfortunately, the highly active and literate preexisting victims’ organizations in the city have been skeptical: “We’re being set up. They’re making a system that can’t possibly function, with functionaries that don’t know the role they’re meant to take on. We [the victims] know the law better than they do!” (leader of a victim community at a meeting of civil society organizations with a representative from the Personeria, Medellín, April 2012). At an interinstitutional gathering at the office of a Medellín-based NGO, an activist leader accused the official in charge of the transition toward a state-supported victims’ organization of sabotaging its formation by refusing to take into account the development of preexisting organizations. Demanding that he meet his obligation to set up a safe and functional forum for the different victims’ associations to gather, she charged him with negligence: “There are 150 victims’ organizations in Medellín. Many of the most recognized leaders in the city were not invited to the initiation of the new, legally obligatory victims’ forum for Antioquia. How many did you invite?” When he responded, “We invited those who presented themselves to us,” she went on: “Without ever consulting the already existing forum or the department of the Mayor’s Office that is currently most engaged with the victim community . . . how did you determine that these individuals were all actually legitimate representatives? The integrity of the forum, its effectiveness, and the safety of the participants depend on who those participants are.” The moment speaks to the tension between victim-led initiatives and those imposed by the state. While the law may establish a forum based on the model provided from the grassroots, there is unwillingness to involve victim-leaders as legitimate organizers.

The Revolución sin Muertos (Revolution without Dead) is another example of an autonomous approach to peace building, successful most of all in its willingness to serve as a constant reminder that extreme violence in the city is being ignored by the state. Based in Comuna 13, the participants are young people from different parts of the neighborhood working to establish a place in which they can attempt to understand their circumstances and build a sense of autonomy with regard to their own histories. Under a huge sheet reading “Peace Zone,” spoken word and rap workshops are held and young people are encouraged to create a collective identity that is not based on the gang (neo-paramilitary) infrastructure. Because the comuna is devoid of the kind of infrastructure one is used to having in cities boasting of urban planning, any possibility for constructing a more resilient peace process must be accompanied by projects that foster a new backbone of support and security within the neighborhood. For AKA, the young leader of the Revolución sin Muertos project, the point is to be a public voice that remembers the recent history of violence in the comuna and points to the fear that shapes the community. On his role in the lives of the young people he works with, he said, “I often get asked, ‘Do you steal youngsters from this city’s war?’ The answer, if you ever think to write that, is no. To do that, to prevent these young boys from being sucked into lives of violence, the changes here would have to be much bigger than what I can control from my garden, señorita” (interview, Medellín, April 20, 2015).

For the time being, Revolución sin Muertos protects public space and acts as a kind of archive for the oral history of the area. The workshops and events serve to make room for a narrative free from what Rancière (2004: 8) would call the “extreme logic of consensus,” which by imposing a linear and homogeneous telling of history renders many lived realities illegible. The project succeeds socially in confronting the recent history of violence within the comuna and pointing to the fractured social fabric of the community. Most important, it gives young people an opportunity to see their present situation and the freedom to imagine alternatives.

Conclusions

Insecurity in Medellín will not be resolved by discursive tricks that maintain rather than deconstruct patterns of violence. Renaming violent groups and calling Colombia a postconflict society has little positive impact against more than half a century of violence. The difficulties in Medellín’s transition from political conflict are exacerbated by the fractured socio-territorial dynamics that divide the city and a relationship between citizens and the state that is loaded with decades of mistrust. Further, the language used to define contemporary violence in Medellín represents a reduction of reality to a false consensus that has stripped segments of the population of their capacity to engage with their city and the state. An acknowledgment of the failings of the government-sanctioned systems and a move toward a model for peace building that seeks to empower rather than pacify the citizenry is essential.

The Colombian state is basing the legal taxonomy of contemporary armed actors in the city on the assumed success of its own DDR program. As a consequence of this flawed definition, armed groups that maintain the interests of the formerly recognized paramilitaries are labeled apolitical. In this way, victims of urban displacement in Medellín are eliminated from sight, since acknowledging their presence would serve to unravel the failures of the demobilization process. Physically, socially, and structurally these individuals represent one of the most marginalized noncommunities in the city. This marginalization of thousands of individuals is ongoing and systematically ignored. Despite the formal aim of Law 1,448 to create new avenues for victim participation, municipal governments have taken on the project of establishing victims’ forums sluggishly and inefficiently. So far the law has had no demonstrably constructive impact on victim participation, and it is clear that a close reading of it will actually serve to exclude many of the city’s victims. ¹²

Autonomous groups that speak to the realities of violence in the city are forcing their way into the dialogue, and it is only through their contributions that the structures for transitional justice may become functional forums.. There is no hope for reconciliation, justice, or sustainable peace in a societal structure that refuses to acknowledge incidents of violence that may be inconvenient or incriminating. In studying fragmented cities, it is necessary that we focus on situations in which marginalized citizens are in conflict with formal infrastructure. By pinpointing the points of rupture between individual experience and the narratives of the powerful we may come to more useful definitions of collective memory. Rather than seeking solutions that pacify and silence individuals at the periphery, we need methodologies that encourage dialogue between the state and dissident voices—methodologies that take into account the strength of community-based initiatives and mimic rather than ignore the resilience created within these channels.