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| Remember: Families of those killed or 'disappeared' in the 1988-93 spate of violence known as the Trujillo Massacre gathered
last month to honor their loved ones. Christian Escobar Mora |
To go forward, Colombia looks back
Colombia's independent Historic Memory Group hopes that airing the country's grisly past can help end the decades-old war.
from the October 17, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 4
But Sánchez defends the effort. "Normally this type of effort marks the last step of a peace process to end a conflict," he says. "But maybe here it can be a starting point to a peace process, why not?"
More than a monument
In Trujillo, the first step toward seeking a personal peace was the construction of a terraced monument for victims' families to remember their loved ones. Beneath each name, relatives sculpted bas-relief images representing each person and what he or she did in life.
The monument is an effort by the families of the victims to keep the memory of their loved ones alive. But for survivors, remembering their own isn't enough.
"Constructing memory is about the desire to be recognized [as a victim] and understood by the people around you," says Louis Bickford, an expert on truth-seeking for the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, an organization that assists nations in accounting for atrocities. "It is also an attempt to assure the nonrepetition of the crimes."
It's something Colombia has never done before, even after the bloody partisan war known as "La Violencia, or "the Violence" from 1948 to 1958 that claimed an estimated 200,000 lives.
When La Violencia ended, Colombia turned the page and looked forward, leaving victims' families bitter and angry and demanding justice.
"This is a country that was accustomed to ending its conflicts with wide-sweeping amnesties and pardons," says Sánchez. "The idea of victims barely existed, the dead were dead and that was it."
That's now changing. The Historic Memory Group has tallied 2,505 massacres in which 14,000 victims died between 1982 and 2007. The government has registered more then 145,000 deaths and disappearances, as well as more than 3 million internal refugees.
Under the so-called 2005 Justice and Peace Law, hundreds of demobilized paramilitary fighters and rebel deserters are confessing to thousands of those crimes in exchange for reduced sentences. This, observers say, is working as a catalyst for victims who are reporting their version of events for the first time.
Even though the conflict staggers on, the law presents "new opportunities to break the cycle of impunity," says Juan Mendez, president of the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York.
But the way victims and victimizers remember history often differs greatly. Sometimes, because of the official setting of the confessions, the former fighters are given more credence than to those who survived their crimes. That makes for what Sánchez calls the "asymmetry of history."
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