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Tell the truth

2021-08-01T22:14:23.256Z


Colombia has witnessed several attempts to disguise the past of the war that it lived through, something very significant because the lies and unanswered questions are also part of the legacy of the conflict.


Arribas Tape

A year ago, Colombians attended - with fascination and also with disgust - various attempts to disguise the past of our war.

While the new incarnation of the FARC denied one of its most obscene practices, the recruitment of minors, the most powerful political right downplayed the army's crimes, the so-called false positives, blaming some bad apples for what little would be revealed. later as a systematic practice and it would throw in our faces the atrocious figure of 6,402 victims.

There was nothing new about it, of course.

In October 2008, faced with the still fresh revelations of those murders, the government of President Uribe shook off the dead youth with an infamous insinuation: "They would not be picking coffee."

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Why does this matter? The persistence of lies and the proliferation of unanswered questions are as much a part of the legacy of war as the crimes themselves, and often represent a psychological wound capable of causing untold suffering. Anyone who has come into contact with the testimonies of the victims knows the restorative effect that the simple act of counting the wounds has, seeing their account collected by a legitimate institution and feeling that, thanks to the account collected, their pain receives the recognition of the community. Post-conflict societies always have to face various contradictions, but one of the most difficult is undoubtedly this: remembering the past, and doing it accurately and without censorship, is the only effective way to begin forgetting. It is one of the paradoxes of violence:To forget the damage, our first task is to remember it correctly.

But this is even more difficult than it sounds. Evasions and denial, obfuscation or outright concealment, and above all deliberate forgetfulness —that is, all the mechanisms by which a society, by anyone's mouth, ignores the suffering of a human being— rob who has suffered an important part of what you need to begin a possible healing. And, since a civil conflict is also the confrontation of various ways of telling the world, establishing a truth in which everyone can recognize each other becomes an indispensable requirement of any promise of compromise, however imperfect it may be. It is here where the investigative commissions that have arisen frequently after conflicts such as the Colombian one gain importance.so old and degraded that all violence seems to be the answer to a previous violence.

Our peace agreements, of course, have produced one of those institutions: the Truth Commission. It is headed by Father Francisco de Roux: a Jesuit philosopher and priest who, like so many of the most valuable people in my country, is frequently slandered and attacked by the most radical members of the ruling party. The Commission has had an arduous mission since 2016 to find out, as far as our limited capacity to scrutinize the past, the truth about the war, and it will soon have the thankless task of telling Colombians the results of its inquiries. I say that their task is thankless because the story they produce, predictably, will not leave anyone happy. But that is precisely why we will know that they have done their job well. Like no peace agreement, no war story satisfies everyone;if it did, it would be a bad story of the war, a bad peace agreement. According to a 1998 survey in South Africa, two-thirds of South Africans believed that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had made race relations worse. Nor do I think it possible that the Colombian commission, acting in the midst of polarization and discord, faced with powerful smear campaigns that are not far from moral murder, provoke anything similar to unanimity. In Colombian political life, the old mantra of pessimism is more true than ever: no good deed goes unpunished.Nor do I think it possible that the Colombian commission, acting in the midst of polarization and discord, faced with powerful smear campaigns that are not far from moral murder, provoke anything similar to unanimity. In Colombian political life, the old mantra of pessimism is more true than ever: no good deed goes unpunished.Nor do I think it possible that the Colombian commission, acting in the midst of polarization and discord, faced with powerful smear campaigns that are not far from moral murder, provoke anything similar to unanimity. In Colombian political life, the old mantra of pessimism is more true than ever: no good deed goes unpunished.

A few weeks ago I spoke with Lucía González, one of the members of the Truth Commission. I wanted to know what she had discovered in these four years of research in the collective story of a country as broken as ours. The first thing Lucía did was tell me about our difficult relationship with memory. "It is a very important task," he told me. “And I am not referring to the memory efforts made by public institutions, the organizations that we have created for that purpose; I mean what has happened in the neighborhoods and in the communities. Now, five years after the agreements were signed, it is very rare to find a community that has not done a memory exercise. The problem is that higher up, among decision-makers, there is nothing like it. There are no attempts to acknowledge history among those who govern us.The difficulty of dialogue that we have now also comes from that: it is very difficult to dialogue with those who do not know the story ”.

Meanwhile, the Commission has become a space where other dialogues are possible, where important revelations come to light, and where uncomfortable truths become part of our collective knowledge. Only the most cynical - although a certain cynicism, an old defense mechanism against extreme pain, has always seemed understandable to me - today deny the value that it has for a torn society to see the perpetrators ask for forgiveness, and the victims, grant or deny it or even take refuge in sovereign silence. The leaders of the former guerrilla, who for years justified the unjustifiable crime of kidnapping, have passed through the Commission to acknowledge the horror and ask for forgiveness; the paramilitaries have gone through the Commission to acknowledge their responsibility in obscure murders and confront the families of the victims."All that adds up," Lucía González told me.

I think he's right. In the absence of the more satisfactory reparations that will follow, the least that the victims of violence have the right to expect is the shame of the perpetrators; And that only becomes possible when the crimes are visible to all, when they are made public and become part of the story that we all accept. That's what it's about, finally. In an old essay on transitional justice, Wole Soyinka said, speaking (again) of the South African conflict, that the formulas adopted to achieve the pacification of a territory can never destroy that pillar of social life that is responsibility; He also said that the mitigation of revenge has only one reason for being: to encourage the actors to tell the truth. Will this be possible in the Colombian case? I do not know.But I think I know this: everyone who tries to make it that way deserves our support.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

is a writer. His latest novel is titled Back the View (Alfaguara).

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-01

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