Jesuit priest Francisco de Roux, president of the Colombian Truth Commission, on June 27, 2022, in Bogotá (Colombia). Carlos Ortega (EFE)
When Father Francisco de Roux, president of the Truth Commission in Colombia, addressed Colombians on Tuesday morning to present an extensive Final Report on the war, he included in his speech a series of questions that were difficult to answer.
“Why do we Colombians let this dismemberment of ourselves go by for years as if it weren't with us?
Why did we watch the massacres on television, day after day, as if it were a pulp novel?” he asked.
De Roux mentioned the FARC kidnappings, the paramilitary massacres, the extrajudicial executions by the army.
But the report points out that those who died in the 60 years of war were not, for the most part, the armed ones: 90% were civilians.
Those difficult questions were not addressed only to the armies but to all Colombians.
“What happened to society, to the state, to ourselves?” he said.
The Final Findings Report―a book of nearly 900 pages—is not just a historical document with figures, dates and almost 30,000 testimonies.
It is a document that tries to go further to dissect the emotions of Colombians and the culture of a society at war.
From the introduction, the report wonders if the violence does not stop in Colombia despite several peace processes, not only because of drug trafficking or the arms market, but also because of a lack of empathy.
"The lack of empathy with that pain is part of what Colombia needs to transform," says the text.
"In contexts of entrenched and prolonged collective violence like in Colombia, emotional detachment and desensitization are psychological consequences that affect us all."
Attempting to answer the difficult questions, the document then dedicated a special chapter to culture in war and in this there is a key concept for the commissioners: that of the internal enemy.
"A central finding of the Truth Commission that has great potential to explain the persistence of the conflict is stigmatization as a mechanism for building the enemy, as the basis for physical, social and political persecution and extermination," they write at the beginning of the chapter. .
"This mechanism has been installed in the culture as an extension of the multiple prejudices that exist in the country and that are anchored in the history of the construction of the nation."
Who has the internal enemy inside?
All, according to the report.
The FARC built the internal enemy in businessmen or elites, in addition to the military.
The military and the paramilitaries saw it in social movements or leftist parties, not just in the guerrillas.
And the Colombians who were not in arms inherited all those enemies, and there, little by little, distrust grew and empathy disappeared.
The concept of the enemy within has two histories, the commissioners explain, one more contemporary than the other.
“From the 1960s onwards, the doctrine of the enemy within has been inscribed in the culture,” the report says.
In the second half of the 20th century, the commissioners explain, the internal enemy of the Cold War was the left-wing militant, due to the influence of the United States to combat communism.
They point to the US recommendations adopted by the government of Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958-1962) in a series of decrees, but clarify that the doctrine was adopted "not only because of the influence of the United States, but also because it turned out to work for the interests of the sectors with political, economic and social power.
They rescue a
Manual of operations against irregular forces
from 1962 that already put citizens at risk.
"The close relationship between the civilian population and the irregular force may require the execution of drastic control measures," the military document said.
Another 1979 manual allowed the army to classify the civilian population into three groups: white lists (those who support the military), black lists (those who support subversive groups), and gray lists (the undecided).
In areas where the insurgent groups were, every civilian was suspected.
As an indigenous man told the Truth Commission, for the army, in his territory, "every Indian is a guerrilla."
The internal enemy, explains the Report, mutated at the same time that the war spread.
If the first was the communist, since the government of Richard Nixon and his declaration of war on drugs, the internal enemy became the drug trafficker -which ended up criminalizing not only someone like Pablo Escobar, but also hundreds of coca growers in the poorest areas of the country.
After the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, the internal enemy was the terrorist or the narco-terrorist.
The military discourse of the internal enemy gradually filtered into other social spheres, and the commissioners rescue an episode from 2003 when former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) responded to a critical book, from a group of NGOs, calling them all “politicians at the service of terrorism”.
Even the human rights activist group called the Middle Magdalena Development and Peace Program —founded and directed by the current president of the Commission, Father Francisco de Roux— was singled out by the security forces in 1998 as an internal enemy: a group suspected he was an ELN collaborator.
The internal enemy could be, in other words, anyone who did not support the army or the government.
And if he disappeared or was murdered, says the report, society suspected the victim with phrases such as "he would be involved in something", "surely he had something to do with what happened to him", and "what can you expect from those people" .
"This construction of the enemy transcended personal and intimate relationships," says the Report.
"To the institutions and the way of interpreting and applying the law, and especially to the political field, which is by definition the place of defense of the common good, seriously affecting democracy."
The media briefly add, while in some cases they investigated war crimes, in other cases they helped fuel the discourse of the enemy within.
“They have stimulated violence through stigmatization and the silencing of some issues.
All this affects the culture, the way we relate to each other”, says the Report on the Colombian media.
Event of the Truth Commission, delivery of the legacy to the victims, Bogotá, June 29, 2022.Juan Carlos Zapata
But the report also mentions a more distant response to the construction of the internal enemy.
"Our culture has inherited an exclusive vision of the other, of ethnic peoples, of the poor peasant, of the dissident, of the contrary," the commissioners write.
"Distrust of what is different did not arise during the armed conflict, but it became more acute during its development."
Here the authors of the Final Report return to a history of exclusion that comes from the Spanish colony, when not only a process of land concentration began, but also a system of racist, classist and sexist domination that needed an internal enemy.
Quoting historian Jorge Orlando Melo, the report explains that "this is how the first image of the 'enemy' emerged in the history of what is now Colombia, associated with the black or indigenous 'rebel', who did not abide by a violently imposed authority and, therefore, ends up being pointed out as the culprit of the very violence that was exerted on him”.
Perhaps the explanation sounds distant, but in some of the testimonies of the victims interviewed by the Truth Commission, the violence of the last sixty years does appear to echo a racist and colonial cultural system.
One of the testimonies in this cultural chapter is that of an Afro-Colombian woman from the Colombian Caribbean who was tortured by a group of paramilitaries when she was branded with a hot iron.
“I have that here, I have never been able to forget it,” she says.
“I think they did that to me because she was black, I think he marked me because she was black, and she marked me as if she were a slave.
In the era of slavery, black women marked me, just as the self-defense groups marked me.”
Slavery was abolished in Colombia in 1851, after independence, but not "the idea that bodies can be marked, outraged and violated."
The Truth Report is not a legal document that criminally condemns someone, not the armed men, not their allies, not even the apathetic Colombians.
It is rather a cultural object that tries, as if it were a mirror, to look at the narratives that for six decades, or more, defeated empathy.
A book that seeks a new way of narrating what was an internal enemy.
As communication professor Germán Rey said, efforts like the Commission's "have already begun to generate cultural ways of representing the truth."
The Truth Commission's call for empathy comes a day before President-elect Gustavo Petro met with his greatest political enemy, former President Álvaro Uribe.
For many close to Uribismo, Petro has always been a guerrilla.
For many close to Petrismo, Uribe has always been an ally of paramilitarism.
And although it is not yet clear what will come of that meeting between political rivals, seeing them sitting at the same table is perhaps one more step to begin to dilute that ghost of the internal enemy.
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