COLOMBIA+20, EL ESPECTADOR, July 28, 2022
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
This Thursday, the Truth Commission (CEV) launched a new volume of its Final Report, titled “Thou shalt not kill. A Historical Account of the Armed Conflict.” On the transmedia platform and in the document of 557 pages, the listeners will find narratives that go from the causes of the armed conflict and its escalation to the end of the negotiations in Havana and the subsequent construction of peace as a country.
Exactly one month ago, the CEV gave to the world its Final Report. In these four weeks, we have been witnesses to the historical accounts of the war, recommendations and findings by this extrajudicial body documented during its term, with reference to the sexual violence, war crimes and crimes against humanity, exile as a consequence of the conflict, among other items. These are connected to the legacy the Commission will leave to Colombia, so it can learn the truths of the decades of pain that this country suffered, and learn about what happened, and never repeat it ever again.
Now, it’s this volume’s turn: “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, is a collection of historical accounts of the conflict, the beginning of which dates to 1958, the year that the commencement of the National Front gave free rein to an escalation of the bipartisan violence that would infuse the following years with bloody counterinsurgent violence. This historical narrative was the responsibility of the journalist and Truth Commissioner, Marta Ruiz.
This volume’s key point is that it is not composed only of accounts by victims, but it also considered voices of power, whether ex-Presidents, Peace Commissioners, Members of Congress, and actors on all the fringes of the war.
Also, another observation is that the content does not just center on the forms of armed battles, nor on forms of violence, but on the manner in which this country has learned to build peace through multilateral negotiations (often failures) in complicated scenarios like the rising of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers, like those that ex-President Belisario Betancur had to face in the ‘80’s.
All of those years were irredeemably dominated by the extremes of homicide and other collective disruptions, which made many regions of Colombia into unlivable places. It‘s no accident that even before the list of chapters in the volume, the CEV marked this phrase: “Thou shalt not kill. The First Commandment of Colombian Democracy”. A seal of identity of this volume is that for nearly 60 years, this country traversed thousands of sequences of incitements, offenses, repressions, “internal enemy” thinking, dirty wars, displacements, and dehumanizations that made us think that as a whole we could be condemned to everlasting war.
The yearning for a robust democracy
The decade of the ‘90’s is remembered by many as an ambivalent time period in Colombia. As there were historic advances for the country, like the Constitution of 1991, or the demobilization of the former guerrillas of M-19 in March of 1990, we can’t forget the blood that didn’t stop flowing in the countryside.
More than one third of the total number of cases of exile caused by the war commenced in that decade; politics was permeated by different armed actors in those years, and the armed war centered on attacking the opponent with more verticality. That meant finishing off entire innocent populations. “It’s a decade that explains the network of drug trafficking and how it was financing politics. And how the dispute about the land was central in the war. For example, in the Pastrana peace process, the democratic opening was closed with violence,” the CEV emphasized.
The master, Alfredo Molano Bravo, was the person in the CEV who promoted the disclosure of this sort of thing. He was the Commissioner who put together the majority of the discussions centered on Colombia’s historical narrative, in order to figure out the political tensions between war and peace, between democratization and the closing off of political space, between social reform and exclusion, between humanization and degradation. In the volume “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, you see these central dialogs. It opens the discussion so that others that are relevant but have not been considered can be introduced. The text explicitly mentions the work of this Truth Commissioner who has died.
Along this line and going back to the decade of the ‘90’s, this volume of the CEV Report prioritized narratives of persons who were aware that in that decade, the communities “began to be plundered by the paramilitaries, who had already been constituted as a national project under the name United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC in Spanish), sponsored by the drug traffickers, by an important sector of the Armed Forces, and by political and economic élites. Meanwhile the FARC tried unsuccessfully to get into mobile warfare, also supported by the coca. The dispute started out to be for the control of the land and the population, arriving at the highest levels of violence in the history of the conflict.”
All of that together was answered in the country by a strong movement for peace, especially among women. Big social demonstrations were resumed in the country and there were experiences of resistance like the Indigenous Guards in Cauca, Peace Communities, like the one in San José de Apartadó, and there were programs for peace and development, in line with constitutional objectives.
From total war to signing the Peace Agreement
Starting at the millennium, the augmented struggle against the now-defunct FARC, the beginning of Democratic Security, the peace process for the paramilitaries, and the commencement of investigations of the “parapolitica”[1] and of massive military campaigns of extrajudicial executions took over the national agenda. The war in Colombia took a direction difficult to control because of the lack of confidence in institutions, and of the countless crimes committed by the armed groups in the rural areas.
There was a rupture among political élites regarding the peace negotiations, as is explained in the CEV’s final volume, and it ended up polarizing the country, without diminishing the violence. Even so, there were extremely important highlights leading to peace, like Statute 144 of 2011 (the Victims Law) through which the population became a more visible actor, a participant and transmitter of a message to the countries that the war needed to end with a situation of social justice.
The administration of Juan Manuel Santos, signer of the Peace Agreement with the FARC, faced dissimilar readings about the war and its end, a situation that led, among other factors, to the loss of the plebiscite for peace in October of 2016. Nevertheless, in spite of that setback, the social mobilization in Colombia and the massive desire to overcome so many years of pain exchanged the warlike narrative for communitarian, political, and national constructions of peace.
As the CEV documents in this part of its Final Report, “recognizing that the violence is responding to multiple factors and not to the nature of our society allows us to look at the past, examine ourselves, offer context, and act to face the future.”
As an epilogue, taking it as the commencement of the postconflict—after the signing in the Colón Theater on November 24, 2016, the Truth Commission mentioned a bitter reality: the peace is not complete, and the door is open to repetition. That, far from being a threat or a discouraging message, should be understood as a guide for the exploration of all of the alternatives to peace with the armed groups that now are acting outside the law, and a way of understanding how to look at the past with more respect, so that we don’t relapse into the same decisions that cost so many lives.
This volume, “Thou shalt not kill”, has as its center a view of life as a basic pillar. Killing each other as compatriots was the greatest atrocity we could have committed against society, and the value of these pages is the reflection on that, commencing with multiple opportunities to learn, to live, and to share in peace.
[1] “Parapolitica” was the expression for the connivance between politicians and the paramilitaries.