TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE, MEMORY, AND THE EMERGENCE OF LEGAL SUBJECTIVITIES IN COLOMBIA

Juan Pablo Vera Lugo

Modern and contemporary Colombian history has been shaped by internal conflict. The country has experienced different cycles of violence since the late 1940s: bipartisan violence during the 1950s, the rise of guerrillas in 1964 in the context of the Cold War, and the emergence of drug trafficking and paramilitary groups from the early 1980s until the present. Over the past three decades, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and the state security forces have been behind the disappearance of 27,000 civilians and have forcibly displaced more than 4.7 million Colombian peasants, members of the indigenous groups, and Afro-Colombian communities, who have lost approximately 16 million acres of land. In Colombia, most victims and targets of violence belong to the poorest strata, which comprise 49 percent of Colombia's population of 45 million; the various armies are made up of this large pool of individuals.

Many attempts have been made to achieve peace through amnesties and pardons with different armed groups that have rebelled against the state. However, a dramatic turn in this history took place between 2003 and 2005. Álvaro Uribe was the first Colombian president to initiate a peace process with paramilitary groups — an army born in the heart of the drug trafficking in the mid-1980s for the protection of illegal businesses and later used by landlords and regional political elites as private armies for their protection against guerrilla groups (Romero 2003; Ronderos 2014). Negotiations started in July 2003 and ended with the partial demobilization of the paramilitary forces in 2005. During the same year, Law 975, or the so-called Justice and Peace Law, was enacted, incorporating transitional justice mechanisms and emphasizing the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of combatants. At the same time, and continuing from 2005 to 2010, the Colombian government neglected to address the rights of the victims and decidedly stigmatized social movements and organizations. Although this changed in 2011 with the enactment of the Victims Law and Land Restitution Act, this chapter focuses on the unexpected consequences of the Justice and Peace Law from 2005 to 2010. Interestingly, during this time a number of social agents, organizations, and institutions appropriated and mobilized a narrative of transitional justice and interpretations of its meaning, thereby challenging the normative purpose of the law and making Colombian victims visible before the international community and to the broader community of victims themselves. Surprisingly, this visibility remains limited within Colombian society as a whole because the majority of the nation's population remain indifferent to the lives and fates of their fellow citizens and refuse to investigate these disappearances.

A key dimension of transitional justice is encouraging perpetrators to confess to crimes and human rights violations in exchange for light sentences, with the goal of achieving truth and reparation for victims of violence. Transitional justice attempts to establish or reestablish first-generation human rights — and sometimes, as has been debated in Colombia, second-generation human rights — emphasizing retributive rather than restorative justice (Uprimny et al. 2006). However, transitional justice goes beyond this legal frame and is linked to a set of practices related to truth commissions, institutional reforms, reparation programs, human rights archives, memorialization, public policy, museums, amnesties, pardons, and criminal prosecutions (Hinton 2010; Payne 2008; Wilson 2001). Colombia's case is somewhat different, given that the transitional justice approach has been implemented during the ongoing internal conflict as a means to achieve peace. Even given the plethora of studies about Colombian violence, state violence has received scant scholarly attention (Corradi, Fagen, and Garretón Merino 1992; Taussig 1992). No attempts have been made to understand the mechanisms through which the Colombian state has reactualized and masked itself in order to preserve its legitimacy and perpetuity (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Taussig 1992). In describing Colombian contemporary violence, Victoria Sanford (2004) has argued that in the context of paramilitary violence in the late 1980s and the 1990s, what initially appears to be simply a privatization of state violence is revealed in practice as state violence by proxy (Sanford 2004) — that is, state forces' support for and involvement with the creation and actions of the paramilitary groups.

And yet, Colombian institutions have remained legitimate for the majority of Colombian society despite the state's use of force against the civilian population. Accordingly, rather than considering Colombia as a failed state, this chapter argues that the Colombian state has been fairly successful in imposing its power and legitimacy. How did this happen? The answer is that transitional justice has worked as a renewed legal ideology for the state and has granted the state legitimacy as it implemented paramilitary demobilization using the framework of transitional justice. This idea calls attention to a cyclical and dynamic conception of legitimacy-making, where both state and nonstate actors appropriate and invest legal capital in asserting their own particular causes.

Traditionally, lawyers, policy makers, and social science scholars have been interested in exploring the application of international standards and the efficacy of transitional justice rulings. However, from an ethnographic point of view, this chapter highlights how both expert and nonexpert groups appropriate this particular juridical language (Merry 2006) and explores how it is socially transformed and contested. By exploring the work of one governmental institution and one non-governmental organization, we will see how discourses about the rights of the victims of political violence work as a site of appropriation of legal narratives to mediate specific social and political struggles. From 2008 to 2010, the members of the Grupo de Memoria Histórica (Historical...