staging of a ceremony of State public apology due to the acts of paramilitary violence in Colombia

21 Pages·2017·1.06 MB·English

AIBR Three times at the square: staging of a ceremony
Revista de Antropología
Iberoamericana of State public apology due to the acts of paramilitary
www.aibr.org
violence in Colombia
Volume 12
Number 1
January - April 2017
Gabriel Ruiz Romero
Pp. 9 - 29
Universidad de Medellín
Madrid: Antropólogos
Iberoamericanos en Red. Received: 09.12.2016
ISSN: 1695-9752 Accepted: 01.24.2017 Translation:
E-ISSN: 1578-9705 Natalie R. Stark
DOI: 10.11156/aibr.120102e  (The State University of New York at Potsdam)
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THREE TIMES AT THE SQUARE
ABSTRACT
The acts of armed violence can pour a new sense over the spaces where a community build
its social identity. In Nueva Venecia, a small pile-dwelling village in the province of Magda-
lena (Colombia), three different armed actors (the guerrilla, the right-wing paramilitaries
and the Public Force) gathered the local people, on three different occasions, in the same
social space: the main square. In the first meeting, people were warned by the first one of
the three groups about the possibility of a massacre that could happen there. In the second
occasion, locals were both victim and witness of the way the second group executed it. At
the last occurrence, the third group offered excuses for what had happened. This article
analyses the way in which these three acts determined three marks of a continuum of vio-
lence over the local nodal space of memory. The article is a narrative organized around the
last act, when National Army and Police representatives planned a ceremony asking for
public forgiveness in relation of the paramilitary massacre. The study of the ceremony reveals
it as becoming a stage of confrontation of memories by different agents trying to achieve
social legitimacy rather than a true act of symbolic reparation.
KEY WORDS
Memory, slaughter, public apologies, reparations, Colombia.
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GABRIEL RUIZ ROMERO
1. Introduction
On the 29th of April of 2012 I was in the city of Barranquilla (on the
Colombian Caribbean coast) packing my belongings, as I had just finished
the fieldwork phase of my doctoral research and had to take a flight the
following day to leave the region. That afternoon I received a call from A.,
who was my primary collaborator during the months I had been working
in Nueva Venecia (Magdalena), a small pile-dwelling village in the middle
of the The Large Marsh of Santa Marta (in Spanish, Ciénaga Grande de
Santa Marta), the largest lagoon in Colombia. I had been there investigat-
ing the ways in which the settlers had adjusted to their condition of forced
displacement, after nearly a decade of being considered as such by the
Colombian government. I had said goodbye to A. the day before and I felt
as if there was nothing left for us to talk about. That was not the case. He
told me very hastily (the telephone signal from Nueva Valencia is intermit-
tent and you have to take advantage of it when there is signal) that he had
just learned that the following day a State commission would go to Nueva
Venecia (headed by a minister, he said) to publicly apologize for the pas-
sivity of the Armed Forces and the National Police during the paramilitary
massacre carried on the year 2000. That massacre had been the detonating
force on the trail I would been working on.
A. could not give me more details; he just repeated that I should be
there… and he was right. The massacre, perpetuated in 2000 by 60 ex-
treme right-wing paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia (in Spanish, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC), left 37
people assassinated. The paramilitary soldiers were in the town for near-
ly eight hours without any State authority being present. The Public Force,
despite having been informed directly by the population through tele-
phone calls, appeared nine hours after the armed group had left. Some
families had to take care of the removal of the corpses themselves without
any judicial presence so that they could leave the place with them.
The person who sent the armed groups to carry out the massacre, the
paramilitary commander with the alias «Jorge 40», has accepted his re-
sponsibility at a public hearing, as part of the paramilitary demobilization
process that took place in the year 2006. But he said that it was an «act
of war» against «guerrilla collaborators» linked with the Army of
National Liberation (in Spanish, Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN),
which had had presence in the region since the 90s. During the two years
in which I worked in the area, I saw many demonstrations of indignation
for this statement as well as for the absence of the authorities on the day of
the massacre. The fact that the State representatives now made a presence,
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THREE TIMES AT THE SQUARE
in an attempt to recognize some responsibility, presented the opportunity
to begin to alleviate that indignation.
This text is the product of what I observed that day in Nuena Venecia:
The day in which the Colombian State, forced by a judicial sentence of
the Administrative Court of Magdalena, apologized publicly to the local
citizens for its impassivity during the paramilitary massacre back in the
year 2000. This is part of a broader fieldwork conducted between 2011
and 2012 in which the ethnographic work was made based on participant
observation in the daily activities of the community, especially those re-
lated to its official status of forced displaced people: Meetings with state
and NGO officials, participation in projects promoted by the State for this
population, etc.
Although the article is organized around the public ceremony of ex-
cuses, it also incorporates elements from the extensive fieldwork to show
how the act is the third link in a continuum of armed violence over this
population. In the first section, it offers contextual elements about the
region and the ways in which the Colombian war was present there. Then
the text explores the three moments in which different armed group rede-
fined the significance of the main square as the stage of construction for
violence. Lastly, it examines the characteristics of the public apology cer-
emony to determine if it really served as a closure to the local cycle of
armed violence.
2. Description of the zone and local presence of armed conflict
The Large Marsh of Santa Marta is a lagoon complex located in the
Colombian Caribbean coast. It encompasses an area of approximately
3,800 square kilometers, of which about 19% is directly aquatic. It is in
the jurisdiction of 11 municipalities of the Province of Magdalena, if we
take into account all the adjacent territory with which the lagoon complex
acts in ecological and social terms (Vilardy, González and Montes, 2011).
The region contains one of the primary ecological reserves of
Colombia, although today it faces a process of environmental deteriora-
tion (Corpamag, 2013). Likewise, it has had a great economic importance
in the country, since, considered in its totality, it has traditionally been a
great extraction zone for fishery and has enormous extensions of banana
crops. Recently, the increase in the cultivation of African palm (used for
the manufacture of biofuels) has made this one of the main sources of
income for the regional economy.
There are then two main economic activities: fishery and agriculture.
While large farmers represent, in general terms, a dominant social class of
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GABRIEL RUIZ ROMERO
landowners with political influence (not only at a regional level but also
at the national one), the fisherman live mostly in conditions of poverty.
The last general census prepared by the National Administrative
Department of Statistics (In Spanish, Departamento Administrativo
Nacional de Estadística, DANE) in 2005, shows that 72.63% of the re-
gional rural population has at least one unsatisfied basic need (Aguilera,
2011: 28).1 The fishermen, moreover, have no relevant political presence
in Magdalena or even in the country.
The Large Marsh of Santa Marta area, otherwise, has been the epi-
center of a territorial dispute between different armed actors within the
Colombian armed conflict. This has happened mainly because of its stra-
tegic location as an exit corridor to the Caribbean Sea for the drug pro-
duced in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta. This is a mountainous coast-
al area that historically has had a large number of coca crops and
laboratories for the processing of cocaine.
The communist guerrilla from the ELN, in particular the Domingo
Barrios front, had a strong armed presence in the region until the 90s,
when the extreme right-wing paramilitaries started its violent incursion
there. They took over the region with bloodshed and fire. The regional
figures of violence show the cruelty of such a territorial dispute: according
to the Human Rights Observatory of the Presidency of Colombia, between
1993 and 2009, 58 massacres were perpetrated in the Province of
Magdalena. 322 people were killed during these acts of terror. Data from
the National Fund for the Defense of Personal Liberty shows that between
1996 and 2009 there were a total of 3,001 kidnappings there; the guer-
rilla being the main perpetrator of this crime. The Department for Social
Prosperity (in Spanish, Departamento para la Prosperidad Social, DPS),
points out that between 2000 and 2009, a total of 380,858 Colombians
were displaced by means of violence in Magdalena, which represents near-
ly 10% of the total displaced persons in the country.2
Both the guerrilla and paramilitaries war strategy also have included
the selective assassination of regional leaders who, in one way or another,
have opposed their expansion and military project. Paramilitaries have
murdered trade unionists, journalists, Human Rights defenders, academ-
ics (such as the University of Magdalena’s dean of the School of
1. Unsatisfied Basic Needs are an indicator for measuring the poverty level of a population.
This indicator seeks to know if the basic needs that are required for a decent life are covered.
Among the indicators that are taken into account are the access to potable water, the pres-
ence of an adequate waste disposal system, and the critical overcrowding they can present,
the economic precariousness of the household, school-age children who do not attend school.
All of these indicators are low in Nueva Venecia.
2. All these figures can be found on the websites of these institutions.
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Education), and even officials of the Technical Investigation Department
of the Attorney General’s Office (in Spanish, Cuerpo Técnico de
Investigación de la Fiscalía General de la Nación). For its part, the guer-
rilla has assassinated executives and employees of companies in the area,
and even a former Minister of Culture.
To this actions made by armed groups, it should be added that the
political body of the Province of Magdalena was one for the most involved
groups in the so-called «para-politics». This is the name with which the
Colombian press labeled the alliance of politicians to paramilitaries to
«reestablish the country» (using a textual expression from an agreement
clandestinely signed in 2001 and which has served as documentary evi-
dence to convict several politicians for their alliances with the paramili-
taries). This national reestablishment took place through the formation of
electoral districts in which the paramilitaries guaranteed the votes of their
candidates. About 400 politicians of Magdalena have been implicated in
this judicial plot, among which are councilors, mayors, deputies, gover-
nors, and congressmen from the region (López, 2010), thus conforming in
this province one of the largest cases of capture and co-opted State recon-
figuration (Garay, Salcedo-Albarán and León-Beltrán, 2008).
3. The guerrilla: first mark on the nodal space of memory
On Saturday of the 1998 carnival, the inhabitants of Nueva Venecia re-
ceived the order to attend a meeting that was not related to the festivities
that began that day. This came from the Domingo Barrios front of the
ELN, which had been present in the area since a few years prior. People
were conducted to the church square, the only place on the village main-
land that is not set on stilts in the swamp. This location served as a venue
for community meetings and as a playground for the school. Locals used
to congregate annually there on the day a priest came from outside to
baptize the local children, and it would be the arena for the carnival danc-
es over the course of the next four days. This would be the place chosen
by the ELN to formally inform the inhabitants on the transformation of
their territory into a stage of war dispute.
Actually, the presence of armed men was not new in the area: there
were plenty of fishermen who had seen them around while doing their
daily activities or some grocery stores owners that had been visited at
night by guerrillas looking to buy supplies. They were sporadic presences
that roamed the waters of the Ciénaga Grande. What was new the carni-
val Saturday was that these presences were concentrated in one of the
central local spaces of production of community sense.
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GABRIEL RUIZ ROMERO
The memory of a community does not unfold in the void but around
places that condense it. Local memory unfolds around nodal spaces that
have marked relevance in daily life and in which the community inscribes
its social identity. The meaning of these places is not given a priori; it is
built daily through the common practices developed in them. This sense,
acquired through social processes of appropriation of the community
space, can nevertheless be altered through acts that have sufficient power
to change the relation of a group to its place (Halbwachs, 2004). The
actions of indiscriminate violence have precisely this capacity of producing
a new meaning; the power to transform social spaces into places of terror
and fear (CNRR, 2009). The meeting organized by the guerrilla in the
town square would be the prelude to a violent act that two years later
would definitively transform the sense of social space of the Nueva Venecia
community and the very life of its inhabitants:
Right there […] came a guerrilla commander, and he had five points to discuss
about. Can you believe it? He told all of us at the meeting that he was going
to stop on the last one because it was the one that needed more attention. The
fifth point was on security. He said that there was a group from the Castaño
brothers who wanted to interfere in the area, right? We needed to prepare
ourselves. (Fisherman of Nueva Venecia, personal interview, February 7, 2011)3
Veena Das (2002) uses the concept of «poisoned knowledge» to refer
to the painful knowledge that victims have about what happened to them,
especially about the role of others in the violent events. Victims must keep
such a knowledge within themselves, without any possibility to external-
ize it in their social relations. The image of poison responds to the fact
that it is a knowledge that causes internal damage to a person who owns
it and does not contribute him to transform his condition of victim. The
information provided by the guerrilla (added to the place and the way in
which it was supplied) represents a variation of this poisoned knowledge.
It is, in this case, a knowledge poisoned a priori, that like the one studied
by Das, becomes a burden for those who possess it.
Indeed, the mere presence of the guerrilla in the village and the
exchanges that its fighters maintained with the population (the purchase
of food and fuel, for example), already exposed the latter to the danger
3. The Castaño brothers were the founders of the Self-Defense Peasant Forces of Córdoba
and Urabá (in Spanish, Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, ACCU), who would
later join other ultra right-wing paramilitaries factions to form the AUC, Colombia’s main
paramilitary organization. The group that carried out the massacre of Nueva Venecia was
part of the AUC.
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of assigned identities (us/them, friend/enemy, neutral/collaborator), typ-
ical of contexts of armed conflicts. In addition, the fact that the guerril-
las exchange information on the presence of their enemies with the pop-
ulation itself deployed a device of forced alignment of the villagers with
those men who, standing in front of them, referred to the presence of
another external agent as a common enemy.
Having this information and having received it directly from a guer-
rilla group (although the inhabitants had no option other than to attend
the meeting) is highly dangerous for the civilian population, due to the
exchange of perspectives between the groups confronted in an armed
conflict. The population that a group defines (instrumentally) as its base,
the opposite actor defines it as its adversary. Once this happens, the pos-
sibility of armed actions against civilians grows: «each side in a war de-
fines the status of civilians from a perspective taken from the rival side
and the mass murder of innocent rural dwellers completes this lethal
transaction» (Kwon, 2006: 19). The poisoned knowledge that was sup-
plied to the population on the carnival Saturday exposed local people to
possible retaliations of an enemy that had been assigned to them.
4. The massacre: second mark on the nodal space of memory
«He said that there was a block of the Castaño brothers who wanted to
interfere in the area, right? That we would prepare». But no one could be
prepared for what was to come twenty-three months after this meeting.
On January 11, 2000, several dozen armed men from the Northern Block
of the AUC entered the Ciénaga Grande of Santa Marta. The paramilitar-
ies killed eight men in the nearby stilt population of Trojas de Cataca.
Victims were accused by the paramilitaries of being accomplices of the
ELN, a group that in 1999 had carried out a mass kidnapping in a nearby
swamp.
The news of those killed spread quickly over the waters of the Large
Marsh, and the two remaining stilt populations, Buenavista and Nueva
Venecia, began to live with the growing fear of another possible armed
incursion. On November 22, 2000, these fears materialized when the in-
habitants of Nueva Venecia were awakened in the middle of the night by
the noise of boats, shots, and the call to a new meeting. Again, men in
camouflage were calling the population to meet in the main square.
Paddling towards it, escorted by about 60 armed men, the frightened
villagers associated the warning made by the guerrillas at the end of the
carnival Saturday meeting and the recent trial of the massacre of Trojas:
«Can you imagine it? One going there thinking about what may happen»
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GABRIEL RUIZ ROMERO
(Fisher of Nueva Venecia, personal interview, April 7, 2012). Their fears
would soon turn into terror: in the former space of social convergence,
the same one used by the ELN guerrillas for the meeting in which they
were given to poisoned knowledge about such an act, people would wit-
ness the performance of the excess of violence (Blair, 2004). Local inhab-
itants would become witnesses of a massacre that would leave 12 men
lying on the square and another 26 killed in the steams, the nearby
swamps or in their own homes.
The paramilitary chief of the Northern Block of the United Self-
Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), aka «Jorge 40», made his statement
about the massacre, before the Justice and Peace Prosecutors in the year
20074. On his hearing, he admitted to being the «indirect» instigator of
the massacre: «I have indirect responsibility, because this military opera-
tion was ordered by the “Castaño house”, which had almost an obsession
to get into the Caribbean zone, and it seems that this was one of the ways»
(El Tiempo Newspaper, 2007). He added that thanks to this armed incur-
sion, the AUC were able to counteract the actions of the ELN in the Sierra
Nevada of Santa Marta and the ports on the Magdalena river. In short,
he referred to the massacre as an «act of war» against militants and col-
laborators of the guerrilla (CNMH, 2014: 34). But in fact, the massacre
was part of the scorched earth strategy developed throughout the country
by the AUC. This war tactic was carried out to appropriate strategic ter-
ritories such as the Ciénaga Grange of Santa Marta, which constitutes an
exit to the Caribbean Sea from the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta.
Not all the inhabitants were gathered at the square the fatal night.
Some of them, who since heard about the Trojas of Cataca massacre had
lifted some planks from the floors of their houses to escape, went into the
water in silence to the mangrove swamps surrounding their homes. From
there, many made phone calls to their relatives on land and others direct-
ly called the Sitionuevo police, the battalion Córdoba of the city of Santa
Marta or the battalion Vergara and Velasco of the nearby municipality of
Malambo, to inform them of the paramilitary incursion that was being
carried out at that precise moment. It was one o’clock in the morning
when the first calls were made; the massacre would not take place until
about three hours later.
4. The government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) carried on a negotiation process with
the AUC. The legal frame for such a process was Law 975 of 2005, called «Justice and Peace
Law». Under this law, former fighters could obtain some judicial beneficies in exchange to
their colaboration with the reconstruction of truth and reparation to their victims. and
reparaion to their victims. n with the reconstruction of thrue
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Despite this early warning, no authorities came. Paramilitaries left
the village in the light of dawn without anyone resisting them. The Public
Force only arrived to Nueva Venecia at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, November
23 (about 9 hours after the massacre perpetrators had left), in a helicopter
that would take off five minutes later. The presence of the National Army
only became effective in the town five days later. They arrived at a town
almost abandoned, since the majority of its inhabitants fled the stilts soon
after the paramilitaries left the town.
Massacres are devastating events at the local level, but paradoxically
they do not transcend this level and do not count in national narratives
(Uribe, 2004: 15). The suffering of those living in distant spaces (geo-
graphically, racially, culturally), affects little or nothing to those in the
dominant center (Farmer, 2004). The forced displacement of the inhabi-
tants of Nueva Venecia began after the devastating realization that the
armed forces of the State did not respond to their calls for help; the dev-
astating realization of knowing that their lives not only did not matter for
their victimizers, nor did it seem to count for those responsible for watch-
ing over their citizen rights:
[…] That is what happened, that repression committed by illegal groups in
Colombia is for that; it is in order to destabilize the country. «They destabilize the
country», in quotes, but the country also shows them something. The Colombian
State also tells them: «Well, you are committing this for nothing. Those people do
not interest us». That is, they have been able to commit this massacre and anoth-
er ten more and the State would not have bother for that. They say: «No, the
action of the paramilitary groups, or the right or left groups, is a repression against
the Colombian State». But the State, at the same time, says, says the State itself,
without saying a single word, the State tells the criminals: «It is that to me that
shitty action does not interest me, you can arrive and kill the whole population».
They do not give a shit about that action. That is the message; there is no other
message (Fisherman of Nueva Venecia, personal interview, July 17, 2011).
5. Public excuses: third mark on the local space of memory
On the morning of April 30, 2012, dozens of men from the National
Army, Navy, and Police entered on motorboats to the town, wearing their
camouflage and carrying their weapons of support, to comply with the
stipulations made by the Court Administrative Office of Santa Marta. In
a ruling of October 12, 2011, this tribunal forced representatives of the