Sandra Milena, Rios. Religion, Social Memory and Conflict. The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia

Religion, Social Memory and Conflict
Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict
Series editor:
Professor John D. Brewer
Institute for the Study of Conflict, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Series advisory board:

John Braithwaite, Australian National University, Hastings Donnan, Queen’s
University Belfast, UK, Brandon Hamber, University of Ulster, UK, Ian
McAlister, Australian National University, William Mishler, University of
Arizona, UK, Barbara Misztal, University of Leicester, UK, Orla Muldoon,
University of Limerick, Ireland, Clifford Shearing, University of Cape Town,
South Africa.
Titles include:
John D. Brewer, David Mitchell, Gerard Leavey

EX-COMBATANTS, RELIGION AND PEACE IN NORTHERN IRELAND
The Role of Religion in Transitional Justice
Denis Dragovic
RELIGION AND POST-CONFLICT STATEBUILDING
Roman Catholic and Sunni Islamic Perspectives
Sandra Milena Rios Oyola
RELIGION, SOCIAL MEMORY AND CONFLICT
The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia
Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict

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Religion, Social Memory
and Conflict
The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia
Sandra Milena Rios Oyola

Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM), Utrecht University, The Netherlands
© Sandra Milena Rios Oyola 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rios Oyola, Sandra Milena, 1985–
Religion, social memory, and conflict : the massacre of Bojayá in Colombia /
Sandra Milena Rios Oyola.
pages cm. — (Palgrave studies in compromise after conflict)
Summary: “The field of transitional justice and reconciliation considers social
memory to be an important mechanism for acknowledging the violation of
victims’ rights and a step toward building peace. Societies in conflict, such
as Colombia, challenge our current understanding of using memory in the
construction of social peace processes, which in turn question the impossibility
of forgiving violence that is still to come. Drawing on original ethnographical
research, Rios analyses strategies of memorialization after the massacre of Bojayá,
Colombia, as an arena of political contention but also of grassroots resistance to
persistent and diverse forms of violence. The book focuses on the work of the local
grassroots Catholic Church and of the victims’ association ten years after the
massacre of Bojayá. It explores the role of religion in the management of victims’
emotions and in supporting claims of transitional justice from a grassroots
perspective in a context of thin political transition”—From publisher’s website.
1. Massacres—Colombia—Bellavista—History—21st century. 2. Collective
memory—Colombia—Bellavista. 3. Memory—Social aspects—Colombia—
Bellavista. 4. Peace-building—Colombia—Bellavista. 5. Reconciliation—
Political aspects—Colombia—Bellavista. 6. Social justice—Colombia—
Bellavista. 7. Church and social problems—Colombia—Bellavista—Catholic
Church. 8. Religion and politics—Colombia—Bellavista. 9. Bellavista
(Colombia)—Social conditions. 10. Bellavista (Colombia)—Religious life and
customs. I. Title.
F2291.B45R46 2015
303.3 720986151—dc23 2015002674
To Tijs and Victoria
Contents
List of Figures and Maps viii
Series Editor’s Introduction ix
Preface xii
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction 1
1 Social Memory in Post-Atrocity Contexts 10
2 Religion, Emotions and Memory after Atrocity 28
3 The Conflict in Colombia and Chocó 42
4 Religious Peacebuilding in Chocó 62
5 Multiple Memories of the Massacre of Bojayá 85
6 Religious Emotions and Social Memory after the Massacre 119
7 Funerary Rituals as Resistance and Memorialisation 137
8 Religious Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice from Below 152
Conclusion 172
Notes 180
References 184
Index 205
vii
Figures and Maps
Figures
I.1 The Broken Christ of Bojayá 3

4.1 Chapel of Memory at the Claretian’s convent, Quibdó
(2012) 77
5.1 Chapel of Memory at the Claretian’s convent, Quibdó
(2012) 114
5.2 Banner by the victims’ organisation ADOM. It says
‘Ethnocide Bojayá Tenth Anniversary. Regional Assembly
of Black and Indigenous Communities. Meeting with the
National Government. Bellavista, 29 April–3 May 2012,
Welcome, Bojayá in the path of dignity’ 115
5.3 Tenth commemoration of the anniversary of the Massacre
of Bojayá. San Pablo Apóstol Church, Old Bellavista 116
6.1 Quilt with the names of the Massacre of Bojayá’s victims,
elaborated by the group Guayacán 123
Maps
3.1 Location of Bojayá, Chocó, Colombia (Map by Jeff Levy,

University of Kentucky Gyula Pauer Center for
Cartography and GIS) 54
viii
Series Editor’s Introduction
‘Compromise’ is a much used but little understood term. There is a sense

in which it describes a set of feelings (the so-called spirit of compromise)
that involve reciprocity, representing the agreement to make mutual
concessions towards each other from now on: no matter what we did
to each other in the past, we will act towards each other in the future
differently as set out in the agreement between us. The compromise set-
tlement can be a spit and a handshake, much beloved in folklore, or a
legally binding statute with hundreds of clauses.
As such, it is clear that compromise enters into conflict transforma-
tion at two distinct phases. The first is during the conflict resolution
process itself, where compromise represents a willingness among parties
to negotiate a peace agreement that represents a second-best preference
in which they give up their first preference (victory) in order to cut a
deal. A great deal of literature has been produced in peace studies and
international relations on the dynamics of the negotiation process and
the institutional and governance structures necessary to consolidate the
agreement afterwards. Just as important, however, is compromise in the
second phase, when compromise is part of post-conflict reconstruction,
in which protagonists come to learn to live together despite their former
enmity and in face of the atrocities perpetrated during the conflict itself.
In the first phase, compromise describes reciprocal agreements
between parties to the negotiations in order to make political con-
cessions sufficient to end conflict; in the second phase, compromise
involves victims and perpetrators developing ways of living together
in which concessions are made as part of shared social life. The first is
about compromises between political groups and the state in the process
of statebuilding (or re-building) after the political upheavals of commu-
nal conflict; the second is about compromises between individuals and
communities in the process of social healing after the cultural trauma
provoked by the conflict.
This book series primarily concerns itself with the second process, the
often messy and difficult job of reconciliation, restoration and repair
in social and cultural relations following communal conflict. Commu-
nal conflicts and civil wars tend to suffer from the narcissism of minor
differences, to coin Freud’s phrase, leaving little to be split halfway
and compromise on, and thus are usually especially bitter. The series
ix
x Series Editor’s Introduction
therefore addresses itself to the meaning, manufacture and manage-

ment of compromise in one of its most difficult settings. The book
series is cross-national and cross-disciplinary, with attention paid to
inter-personal reconciliation at the level of everyday life, as well as
culturally between social groups, and the many sorts of institutional,
inter-personal, psychological, sociological, anthropological and cultural
factors that assist and inhibit societal healing in all post-conflict soci-
eties, historically and in the present. It focuses on what compromise
means when people have to come to terms with past enmity and the
memories of the conflict itself and relate to former protagonists in ways
that consolidate the wider political agreement.
This sort of focus has special resonance, and significance for peace
agreements is usually very fragile. Societies emerging out of conflict
are subject to ongoing violence from spoiler groups who are reluctant
to give up on first preferences, constant threats from the outbreak of
renewed violence, institutional instability, weakened economies and a
wealth of problems around transitional justice, memory, truth recovery
and victimhood, among others. Not surprisingly therefore, reconcilia-
tion and healing in social and cultural relations are difficult to achieve,
not least because inter-personal compromise between erstwhile enemies
is difficult.
Lay discourse picks up on the ambivalent nature of compromise after
conflict. It is talked about in common sense in one of two ways, in
which compromise is either a virtue or a vice, taking its place among
the angels or in Hades. One form of lay discourse likens concessions
to former protagonists with the idea of restoration of broken relation-
ships and societal and cultural reconciliation, in which there is a sense of
becoming (or returning) to wholeness and completeness. The other form
of lay discourse invokes ideas of appeasement, of being compromised by
the concessions, which constitute a form of surrender and reproduce
(or disguise) continued brokenness and division. People feel they con-
tinue to be beaten by the sticks which the concessions have allowed
others to keep; with restoration, however, weapons are turned truly into
ploughshares. Lay discourse suggests, therefore, that there are issues that
the Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict series must begin to prob-
lematise, so that the process of societal healing is better understood and
can be assisted and facilitated by public policy and intervention.
In this book in the series, the author addresses one of the key
dimensions of compromise after conflict – of the role of transitional
justice in societal healing. The author looks at transitional justice from
below, from the grassroots, rather than imposed from the top down,
Series Editor’s Introduction xi
and in so doing, she also contributes to our understanding both of

religious peacebuilding and of the importance of memorialisation to
communities affected by atrocity. The book therefore works at many
levels.
By exploring the role of the local Catholic Church in Bojayá,
Colombia, after the 2002 massacre, the book provides an analysis of
how a local community has been assisted in dealing with its atrocious
past by faith-based religious actors, among others, by using innovative
and imaginative forms of social memorialisation. Bojayá is an Afro-
Colombian diocese and is one of the poorest regions of Colombia,
and this work has occurred while the conflict remains ongoing. Most
of the literature on transitional justice considers the construction of
social memory as an important tool for peacebuilding once violence has
stopped. These practices of social memorialisation have been led by the
local Catholic Church, which has retained its commitment to liberation
theology. The book therefore confronts the strengths and weaknesses
of religion and religious emotion to peacebuilding in the middle of
enduring conflict.
Based on original ethnography, and utilising in-depth interviews with
social and religious leaders and with the victims of the atrocity, the
book contributes as much to the analysis of religious peacebuilding
as it does to transitional justice, memory and to our understanding of
the Colombian conflict. The Editor warmly welcomes this book to the
Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict series.
John D. Brewer
Belfast, December 2014
Preface
This book involves the challenging project of bringing together the cat-
egories of religion, memory and conflict. The study of the massacre
of Bojayá in Colombia provides a promising case study for analysing
the central role of religion in activities of social memorialisation and
peacebuilding.
This book studies how religious grassroots actors lead initiatives of
social memorialisation amid conflict and contribute to transforming
and managing victims’ emotions, such as optimism, humiliation and
dignity. Finally, it argues that the grassroots local strategies of memori-
alisation analysed here present innovative paths for understanding and
implementing religious peacebuilding and transitional justice strategies.
The cover of this book illustrates one of this strategies, the play ‘Among
Ruins’ performed by young survivor/actors at the tenth year anniversary
of the massacre; they use the ruins of the abandoned town as their stage.
The construction of social memory is a process carried by different
groups with competing interests and follows different directions. This
book also constitutes an object of memory in itself. However, it should
not be considered to be an alternative narrative of historical memory of
the massacre of Bojayá. Instead, it can be read as an attempt to provide a
measured and critical analysis of the role of social memory and religious
peacebuilding in overcoming past and present violence.
xii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants of this research, who opened the
door to the intimacy of their everyday lives. In order to respect their
anonymity, I will restrain myself from mentioning their names, but
I express my gratitude to the communities of Bellavista, Napipí, Vigía
del Fuerte, Buchadó and Quibdó. I hope they find this book true to their
teachings about how to resist different forms of violence and to continue
living in hope.
I am very grateful to the Diocese of Quibdó, which not only welcomed
me among them but challenged many of my views and prejudices. I am
thankful to the valiant members from COVIJUPA, COCOMACIA, FISCH,
AJODEMIU, Choibá, Comité Dos de Mayo and ADOM, who shared with
me their expertise and precious time. It would not have been possible
for me to write this book without the help and support of many people
during fieldwork, and to only some it has been possible to give particular
mention here. I would like to thank Jesus Florez, Father Sterlin Londoño,
Father Gonzalo de la Torre, Ursula Holzapfel, Sister Auria Saavedra, Sister
Elsa Rueda, Sister Carmen Garzón, Aurora Bailón, Leyner Palacios, Father
Napoleon García, Father Ulrich Kollowitz, Father Antun Ramos, Father
Ritmel Renteria, Father Nicolas Espinosa and Father Gregorio Eich for
their help, guidance and company. I would like to thank Father Edwin
Mendoza for the long conversations and his warm hospitality while in
Bellavista. I would also like to thank Heidy Palacios for sharing her home
with me in Quibdó.
I would like to acknowledge the financial, ethical and academic
support of the Leverhulme Programme Compromise after Conflict.
My participation in the team helped me to think thoroughly about the
implications that research in sensitive places can have on those who are
most affected by violence. I am indebted to John Brewer, whose passion
for understanding the place of sociology in peace processes has been
truly inspirational. I am also thankful to Cristina Flesher Fominaya for
her comments and the fruitful conversations.
I am thankful to Andrew McKinnon and Andrew Hoskins for their
insightful comments and revisions, which improved this research and
took it to more stimulating directions. I am indebted to Thania
Acarón for her friendship and insight; our co-authorship of a paper
on “Embodied Space and Afro-Colombian Funerary Ritual” presented
xiii
xiv Acknowledgements
at the Workshop on The Arts of Peacebuilding organized by the Centre

for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Edinburgh improved
my chapter on Funerary Rituals. For this book, I have been fortunate
to receive good counsel from many scholars: thanks to Bernie Hayes,
David Lehmann, Roddy Brett and Jeffrey Murer. I am indebted to Silvia
Posocco, Martin Fotta and Frank Smith for their critiques of some of
my arguments on the relationship between emotions and politics. I am
grateful to the organisations that helped me to discuss my research in
international academic scenarios: the International Sociological Associ-
ation, which awarded me a grant to participate in its PhD Laboratory
at the University of Sydney; the Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius
Antwerpen, which awarded me a grant to participate in their summer
seminars in 2011 and in 2014; and the Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Violence programme. In the same way, I am thankful to the Centre
for the Study of Religion and Politics and Mario I. Aguilar, for his
insights on liberation theology; to the Working Group on Violence and
Peacebuilding in Colombia at the University of St Andrews; to Luis
Carlos Castro and the study group on Afro religious-therapeutic systems
in Colombia; to Merteens Institute; and to the Ritual in Society group
at Tilburg University that invited me to discuss the last version of the
chapter on religion, emotions and memory. Finally, I am thankful to the
Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at Utrecht University. The
ideas that originated this book were substantially improved, thanks to
the conversations and revisions of many dear friends and colleagues,
among them Natascha Mueller-Hirth, Clare Magill, Natalia Quiceno,
Eliana Lombo, Duncan Scott, Rachel Anderson and Isabel Ensass. I also
acknowledge Ana Maria Bidegain, for her comments on the chapter on
religious peacebuilding in Chocó; her life will always be an inspiration
to my career. I thank Tijs and Victoria, to whom this book is dedicated.
Last but not least, I thank my family in Colombia and Ton and Thea for
their warm support and company while writing this book in Slabroek,
the Netherlands.
Abbreviations
ACIA Atrato Integral Peasant Association (Asociación

( de
Campesinos Integral del Atrato)
ADOM Dos de Mayo Association ((Asociación Dos de Mayo)
AUC United Self-Defence Groups of Colombia
((Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia)
CEB Base Ecclesial Community (Comunidad Eclesial de
Base)
CINEP Jesuit Centre for Investigation and Popular
Education (Centro de Investigación y Educación
Popular)
CNRR National Commission of Reparation and
Reconciliation (Comisión Nacional de Reparación y
Reconciliación)
COCOMACIA Main Council of the Integral Peasant Association of
the Atrato (Consejo Mayor de la Asociación Campesina
Integral del Atrato)
CODHES Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement
(Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el
Desplazamiento)
COVIJUPA Commission of Peace and Justice of the Diocese of
Quibdó (Comisión Vida, Justicia y Paz de la Diócesis
de Quibdó)
ELN National Liberation Army (Ejército
( de Liberacíon
Nacional)
FARC-EP The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia –
People’s Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia Ejército del Pueblo)
FISCH Inter-ethnic Solidarity Chocó Forum ((Foro
Interétnico Solidaridad Chocó)
GAPD Post-demobilisation Armed Groups (Grupos
Armados Post-desmobilización)
GMH Historical Memory Group (Grupo de Memoria
Histórica)
GS Gaudium et Spes
xv
xvi List of Abbreviations
ILO International Labour Organisation

REMHI Recovery of Historical Memory Project (Proyecto
( de
la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica)
UNHCHR United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights
UP Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica)
WOLA Washington Office on Latin America
Introduction
There has been increasing attention paid to the role of social mem-
ory in societies in conflict, post-conflict and transition in academic and
policy-making circles. Social memories of past atrocities contribute to
the identification of perpetrators and the recognition of victims; they
create notions of accountability, forgiveness and reconciliation; and
they can elevate or lower the moral bridge between victims, perpetra-
tors and bystanders. Some of these shared versions of the past become
pillars for the recognition of victims’ rights and in that sense promote
peace and reconciliation. However, some versions and mechanisms of
social memorialisation can be used to vilify adversaries, feed resentment
or deny opponents’ rights, which can contribute to the continuation of
war. Consequently, the mere act of publicly remembering past atrocities
does not necessarily constitute a step towards peace.
At the same time, the role of religion in peacebuilding and transitional
justice has also received increasing attention, particularly with regard
to its relevance for inter-faith dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation
(Philpott, 2006; 2007). These last two aspects are intimately related to
the way people remember and manage emotions associated with the
wrongs they suffered. It has been argued that the intrinsic attributes of
religion make it suitable for bringing interests and values that were tra-
ditionally considered private, such as hope, forgiveness and loyalty, to
the public arena of transitional justice (Brewer, 2010; Brewer et al.,
2013; Bush, 2007; Gopin, 2000; Hertog, 2010; Omer, 2012). However,
critics have justifiably raised caution because religion also has a daunt-
ing record of condoning and instigating abuse, violence and division.
This ambivalence explains why the presence of religion alone is not
enough to guarantee that a civil process can be conducive to peace and
reconciliation (Appleby, 2000).
1
2 Religion, Social Memory and Conflict
This book aims to explore the complex role of religion in the con-
struction of social memory in (post)atrocity contexts, using theoretical
and analytical tools from the social sciences to inform this enriching
and interdisciplinary debate. The book analyses the Colombian case,
a socio-political conflict with complex economic, social and ethnic
dimensions that has persisted for over 50 years. It focuses on a mas-
sacre that occurred in 2002 in the municipality of Bojayá in the Pacific
region, when members of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia – People’s Army; Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia
Ejército del Pueblo) guerrillas and the AUC (United Self-Defence Groups
of Colombia; Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) paramilitary army, with
complicity of some members of the National Army, engaged in armed
confrontation in the middle of a rural village. During the combat, mem-
bers of the FARC launched an improvised homemade mortar assembled
with gas cylinder parts (known as pipeta in Spanish) towards the paramil-
itary, who were allegedly using the San Pablo Apostol Church as a
shield. The pipeta missed its target and reached the church instead,
where civilians – mainly women, children and elderly people – had
found refuge. In the explosion, 79 people were killed; 48 of them were
children.1
The case of the massacre of Bojayá in Colombia and its aftermath
presents evidence of projects of social memorialisation led by grassroots
religious peacebuilders that can be conducive to peace, even in the mid-
dle of a vicious conflict. According to Cejka and Bamat (2003, p. 12),
a particularity of grassroots peacebuilding initiatives is that they ‘tend
to have an immediacy, a specific scale, and an everyday character that
can be lost if simply subsumed under general “dimensions” like the
management or control of conflict or its resolution’. This book anal-
yses grassroots mechanisms of social memorialisation developed after
the massacre, such as quilting workshops, songs, rituals and system-
atisations of human rights abuses against civilian population. These
mechanisms contribute to transforming victims’ negative emotions
associated with their experience of violence. For instance, the ‘Bro-
ken Christ of Bojayá’ (Figure 1.1) has become an icon not only of the
despair and spiritual mutilation that the community suffered but also
of resistance. Part of the praying devoted to its image goes as follows:
Oh, Santo Cristo de Bojayá . . . Help us to awake our conscious-

ness to the Chocoan reality full of exploitation and marginalisa-
tion; enlighten our minds and make them critical to injustice and
corruption; and strengthen us, in order to have our heart committed
to projects of justice in favour of your most vulnerable people.
Introduction 3
Figure I.1 The Broken Christ of Bojayá
This book analyses these initiatives of social memorialisation as part of a

social peace process (Brewer, 2010) that intends to restore broken social
relationships and achieve social and personal healing. Brewer (2010)
argues that these types of strategies are usually implemented only once
the violence has stopped, and therefore ‘pre-agreement social peace pro-
cesses constitute valiant efforts of peace groups amidst violence’ (Brewer,
2010, p. 201). In that sense, an important contribution of this book is
that it highlights the work of religious actors (including lay missionaries
and believers) who use mechanisms of social memorialisation as tools
for peacebuilding and transitional justice from below while the conflict
is still ongoing.
This book contributes to the literature on transitional justice, which
in the last decade has expanded from a view on legal and institu-
tional mechanisms that deal with criminal pasts, such as human rights
laws, amnesty for ex-combatants and reparation for victims, among
others, to include broader questions on alternative forms of remember-
ing, reconciling and dealing with transition and new forms of conflict
(Brewer and Hayes, 2011a; Riaño-Alcalá and Baines, 2012). This book
follows an approach to transitional justice from below, which means
that rather than privileging an analysis of official truth and memory
policies, it observes how people integrate their everyday cultural and
social resources, which strengthen their claims for truth, justice and
reparation at a local level, into these policies (McEvoy and McGregor,
2008; Van der Merwe et al., 2009; Riaño-Alcalá and Baines, 2012). This
type of approach is influenced by an actor-oriented perspective that con-
siders it to be necessary to acknowledge ‘the reality of power differences
and hierarchical relationships in society’ and ‘to look beyond abstract
formal equality principles to the effect of those principles in entrench-
ing or challenging hierarchy from the perspective of the subordinated’
(Nyamu-Musembi, 2002, p. 2).
The unit of analysis
This book is based on qualitative research that was conducted ten years
after the massacre, and it focuses on the strategies of social memorial-
isation built at a local level, the relationship between social memory,
reparation, peacebuilding and the management of victims’ emotions.
The research focuses on the Diocese of Quibdó, both as the institution
that encompasses and directs the work of the missionaries in the region
of the middle Atrato and as a geographical region (see Map 3.1). The
region is located in Antioquia and Chocó. It has 250,000 inhabitants;
80% of them are Afro-Colombian, 14% Mestizo and 6% indigenous
population.2 The municipality of Bojayá has 10,000 inhabitants, and
Bellavista is the seat of its municipal government and the place where
the massacre took place; it has 1200 inhabitants.
The missionary teams of the Diocese of Quibdó have had a strong
presence in the region, particularly since the 1970s, supporting the eth-
nic organisational process and the defence of human, territorial and
cultural rights, as is explained in Chapter 4. There are more than a
dozen religious communities and around 50 diocesan priests in the dio-
cese. The attention on the work of the Diocese of Quibdó has demanded
that the religious component is taken into account seriously not only as
a backstage curtain of motivations and beliefs but as a strategic influ-
ence on its social practices. I agree with Gerstbauer (2010), who argues
that religion (including religious values, beliefs, rituals and networks of
cooperation) is a defining variable of the methodology and decision-
making of peacebuilding religious organisations, which sets them apart
from non-religious organisations working for peace. This research stud-
ies the religious components of the diocese, particularly with regard to
its work of acompañamiento (accompaniment); this is their spiritual and
social support to victims at the margins. It also presents a sociologi-
cal study of the historical, economic and social conditions that have
given the Diocese of Quibdó a favourable position in the construction
of positive peace.
Introduction 5
The structure of the book
The book aims to contribute to the debate on the uses of memory

in transitional justice, particularly with regard to its role in managing
victims’ emotions and in supporting claims of transformative repara-
tion. Chapter 1 is dedicated to discussing the conceptualisation of social
memory and underlines the concepts and methods that are relevant
for the study of this case; it also explains why this book emphasises
studying social memory as a multidirectional enterprise built with differ-
ent pieces of information, styles and metaphors that come from similar
sources. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between religion, memory
and emotions. It is influenced by interdisciplinary research on memory
as a mechanism of emotion regulation and management. It argues that
ordinary resources from culture and language are limited for dealing
with suffering as a product of an atrocity, which is one of the reasons
why it has a traumatic impact on victims. Religion, nevertheless, has
the symbolical resources for helping to cope and manage the emotions
associated with this kind of experience.
Although this book is based on a case study, it also provides an
examination of the larger context of the conflict and of the recent imple-
mentation of official mechanisms of transitional justice in Colombia
and in the Chocó region, which are studied in Chapter 3. A reflection
on the ambivalence of religion for peacebuilding in Latin America intro-
duces Chapter 4, which focuses on the work of acompañamiento of the
Diocese of Quibdó and the local missionary teams to local communi-
ties in Chocó. This chapter aims to broaden the concept of religious
peacebuilding by including the case of Bojayá, which similarly to other
Latin American contexts promotes the transformation of conditions of
exploitation, social injustice and marginalisation that affect victims at
the margins and that caused the initial violence.
Chapter 5 is focused not only on the religious aspects of memory but
on the different interpretations that have been constructed around the
massacre of Bojayá. It questions whether the broad attention that this
case has received in the country has contributed to a moral identifica-
tion or closeness between the victims and the larger audience. It explains
how the search for meaning of atrocities in Colombia has become an
arduous and exhausting task, not only for victims, but for other actors
interested in defining the conflict, transition and peace in Colombia as
well. It also explains how up until today the massacre of Bojayá has
become a rhetorical pawn in the national debates on war and transition
in Colombia.
The role of religion in coping with traumatic events has often been
directed to its competency for explaining evil and suffering. However,
not only religious narratives are important for the management of emo-
tions. Solidarity, rituals, transcendence and spiritual resources are also
relevant. These aspects are explored in Chapter 6 through the analysis
of local workshops with victims, such as quilting and bakery groups, and
their role in building trust and the feeling that life is progressing nor-
mally in the middle of extreme situations such as violent conflict and
forced displacement. In addition, a commentary on an ethnographic
account of the re-enactment of a traditional Afro-Colombian funeral for
children is presented in Chapter 7, which explores the role of these reli-
gious forms of memorialisation in resisting cultural annihilation and
creatively responding to La Mala Muerte and other memory afflictions,
as they are defined by Theidon (2013).
Finally, this book concludes with a chapter on religious peacebuilding
and transitional justice from below. Following Brewer, Mitchell and
Leavy (2013, p. 161), transitional justice is understood here as a complex
process that goes beyond the law and encompasses debates on human
rights, truth recovery, victimhood, forgiveness, hope and other emo-
tions. In that sense, this book focuses on the intervention of religion for
truth recovery/social memorialisation and for public accountability, and
particularly it explains how religious notions, such as acompañamiento
and social sin, contribute or not to understanding conflict from the
perspective of victims’ experiences.
About this research
This book is based on the research conducted for my doctoral disserta-

tion in the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, UK,
and it was part of the Leverhulme Programme ‘Compromise after Con-
flict’. This is a qualitative research based on the case-study method (Yin,
1984). One of the benefits of using a case study as a research strategy is
that it allows the use of multiple methods for describing and explaining
‘a contemporary phenomenon within its real –life context’ (Yin, 1984,
p. 23). This methodological perspective is compatible with the analyti-
cal perspective of transitional justice from below, which requires a close
empirical approach to a local community.
In this sense, the sensitive nature of the information favours a qual-
itative approach (Brewer, 1993) through the use of multiple methods:
ethnography, key informant interviews, observations, journal notes,
archive research and secondary data, including documentaries and
Introduction 7
reports by regional, national and international organisations, such as

the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (Consultoría para
los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento – CODHES), ABColombia,
the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Historical
Memory Group/Centre (GMH). The various types of information were
grouped into categories that were formulated as ‘trees’ of related ideas,
which followed the main research question on the role of religion
in the construction of social memory in the case of the massacre of
Bojayá. The analysis of the interrelation and identification of informa-
tion into nodes was assisted by NVivo 10, a qualitative data analysis
software. The system of categories was distributed in groups according
to two main themes: transitional justice from below and emotions asso-
ciated to religious beliefs and rituals. Some of the categories on these
themes overlapped and created patterns which were analysed in their
own context.
In 2012, I conducted fieldwork in the region of Chocó, where
I participated in a dozen meetings with the following organisations:
COVIJUPA (Commission of Peace and Justice of the Diocese of Quibdó;
Comisión Vida, Justicia y Paz de la Diócesis de Quibdó); ADOM (Dos de
Mayo Association; Asociación Dos de Mayo), which is based in Quibdó
and is comprised of displaced people from Bellavista; Dos de Mayo
Committee, which is comprised of victims who remained in Bellavista;
the mayor of Bellavista and his advisory council; COCOMACIA (Main
Council of the Integral Peasant Association of Atrato; Consejo Mayor de
la Asociación Campesina Integral del Atrato); and FISCH (Inter-ethnic Sol-
idarity Chocó Forum; Foro Interétnico Solidaridad Chocó). These meetings
were held in Bellavista and in Quibdó. The conversation with members
of different groups from local and regional communities and organi-
sations provided a broad view on the problems of the region in the
analysis.
I also participated in the preparation and tenth-year commemoration
of the massacre of Bojayá. People from all the neighbouring river-
side villages of Bojayá, media, NGOs, missionaries, the Social Pastoral
Office, the army and a few members of the government were present in
Bellavista for three days. There were near 400 people visiting the town.
The first part of my fieldwork was eventful and people were interested
in discussing different issues related to the policies of reparation imple-
mented by the government. At the same time, some people from the
community felt suspicious and disappointed by the presence of media,
politicians, organisation members and researchers, who visit their town
only during the annual commemoration of the massacre.
In June 2012 the government had visited Bellavista in order to develop

agreements that were not achieved in May. The second part of the
fieldwork was during July and August 2012 and it lasted five weeks.
It included conversations with people from Bellavista after the events;
they manifested their evaluations, perceptions and expectations. I addi-
tionally interviewed members of organisations of displaced people from
Bojayá and its neighbouring areas: Choibá (a group of displaced hand-
crafter women supported by the diocese) and the Displaced Youth
Association ((Asociación de Jóvenes Desplazados). Finally, I also attended
the VI Assembly of COCOMACIA, which takes place every three years
and gathers leaders of 124 communities.
In addition to the conversations with members of the associations
and some of the rural villages and displaced people in Quibdó, I con-
ducted 11 interviews with lay members of social ethnic organisations,
18 interviews with religious actors who are working or have worked in
the last 30 years in the Diocese of Quibdó and seven interviews with vic-
tim leaders. In addition, I interviewed experts in Bogotá, such as public
defenders and those in charge of the Historical Memory Office at the
Colombian Religious Conference in Bogotá.
Interviews with victim leaders and victims who participate in the
groups organised by the diocese were semi-structured and they took
into consideration issues of research fatigue and sensitive subjects. Thus,
the focus of the interviews was not on the past experiences, as previ-
ous researchers had done, but on their present and expectations for the
future. Similarly, conversations with victims paid particular attention
to accounts of actions and decisions that people took during the crisis,
how they reacted and coped, what they thought to do and how they
survived in the displacement, among other questions that emphasised
their symbolical or direct agency, rather than accounts of past suffering,
unless it was a topic brought by the person to whom I was talking.
This decision was based on the idea that it was not necessary to go
through victims’ painful emotions of the massacre, an event that has
been widely documented. I agree with Castillejo (2005, p. 162), who
claims ‘the necessity of avoiding dwelling in the relatives’ painful mem-
ories’ when researching on the experiences of victims of atrocities. The
report of painful experiences by interviewees was determined by them
and not by my questions. Another positive outcome of this approach
to the interviewing process was that answers about suffering were not
limited to the experience of the massacre, but they included experi-
ences of displacement, discrimination, sexual harassment, corruption
and perceptions of impunity. In conversations held at Old Bellavista
Introduction 9
with victims, accounts of the massacre were more intense. In order to

ensure the anonymity of the participants, the names that appear with
an asterisk (∗ ) are pseudonyms.
Interviews with religious peacebuilders and social ethnic organisation
leaders were semi-structured and the questions aimed to explore their
definitions of the situation in Chocó and in the particular areas where
they work, as well as their expectations for the future and their evalua-
tion of official mechanisms of reparation. They explained and described
their work and the adjustments in their strategies due to the transfor-
mation of the conflict. These interviews explored the relation between
their motivations, mandates and their peacebuilding strategies. In total,
I conducted 38 semi-structured interviews through purposive and snow-
ball sampling. This means that enrolled research participants helped me
to recruit additional research participants. It is a goal of this book to
respect the confidentiality of the participants as well as to avoid any
form of re-victimisation in the presentation of their testimonies and
experiences.
1
Social Memory in Post-Atrocity
Contexts
Introduction
The construction of social memories that are fair to the past and that
can also contribute to peaceful futures is a challenge for societies in the
aftermath of conflict; they must dismantle silences that occult complic-
ities and culpabilities, while crafting a balanced account that avoids the
perpetuation of violence. The 20th century witnessed a series of atroci-
ties that were covered by repression and denial, which can be evidenced
in the systematic use of paramilitary squads and in the disappearance of
corpses across many Latin American countries. One of the testimonies
of a local leader in the region of Chocó describes this situation:
In 1997, the paramilitary arrived, and well, we already know the

methods that they used in that period. They killed and threatened
people; they dismembered, tortured, and disappeared them. We did
not know where they were; we do not know where they really were
buried; they threw their bodies to the river, we do not know. They are
completely disappeared.
(Interview, April 2012)
The recent so-called memory boom – the rise of interest in memory in

academia and other sectors of civil society and among policymakers –
manifests a desire to resist the silence promoted by perpetrators of atroc-
ities and the intention of supporting victims’ rights. At the everyday
level, these initiatives might rise in order to obtain information on loved
ones who had disappeared, to leave their memory as a permanent testi-
mony of the violence that they suffered or serve as a warning and a plea
that this kind of atrocity should never happen again. These initiatives
10
Social Memory in Post-Atrocity Contexts 11
are based on the assumption that uncovering truths about past atrocities
and giving a public voice to victims can strengthen democratic processes
that are necessary to promote a transition from authoritarian regimes to
nonviolent societies.
Transitional and post-conflict societies have developed different types
of politics of memory in order to answer to the challenge of remember-
ing past atrocities (de Brito et al., 2001; Hayner, 2010). These mech-
anisms have been led ‘from above’ as a result of official politics of
memory and ‘from below’ as initiatives of the civilians at the grassroots
(McEvoy and McGregor, 2008). Official and non-official mechanisms of
social memorialisation as part of the transitional justice process have
been the subject of rich debates in the field of memory and transitional
studies (Aguilar, 2002; Cairns and Roe, 2003; Chapman, 2009; de Brito
et al., 2001; Hamber and Wilson, 2002; Hayner, 2010; Van der Merwe
et al., 2009, among others). This literature often argues that a conflict
needs to reach some kind of closure before a process of social memo-
rialisation as a means for building peace can take place. These societies
are called post-traumatic, post-conflict or post-violent because they have
reached an agreement in order to stop the conflict, even though violence
may still be present (Brewer, 2010).
Contrary to this scenario, Colombia is a country in conflict with a
weak political transition (Laplante and Theidon, 2006; Prieto, 2012;
Saffon and Uprimny, 2009) but where debates about how to memorialise
the conflict have flourished. On the one hand, the recovery of historical
memory has been officially supported as a result of the enactment of
transitional justice laws. On the other hand, there have been thousands
of local initiatives of memorialisation led by grassroots victims’ associ-
ations across the country, which were almost a spontaneous reaction
to the violence suffered by the local civil society. Clearly, the study of
the Colombian case can contribute to informing the debate on the uses
of social memorialisation in transitional justice and in peacebuilding
amidst ongoing conflict.
Recent or ongoing conflicts are a contested terrain for the construc-
tion of social memory, where multiple versions of the past confront
each other under the pressure of different compelling political agen-
das. Politicians often argue that they fear the consequences of social
memory for unstable reconciliation processes, such as in the case of
post-genocide Rwanda, where the government removed formal modern
national history from all school curricula until at least 2005 (Hodgkin,
2006). Despite the risks of social memorialisation igniting the ashes of
violence in post-conflict societies, there is evidence that mechanisms of
social memorialisation can become tools for peacebuilding, even when

the conflict is still occurring, thanks particularly to its potential for
denouncing human rights abuses and supporting the defence of victims’
rights.
This chapter explores social memory as a mechanism of transitional
justice. It draws on the literature on memory studies and transitional
justice, and especially it analyses the relationship between social mem-
ory and victimhood. The relationship between memory and emotions
such as humiliation, fear and hope will be considered more fully later
in this and the following chapters. The main examples are taken from
societies that have experienced conflict, such as Argentina, Rwanda and
Uganda. The first section presents a brief analysis of the literature on
memory studies in general and the theoretical approach to this book
in particular. The concept of social memory is analysed in comparison
with the concepts of collective and cultural memory. The second section
reflects upon the topics of forgiving and reconciliation, which are also
studied in Chapter 2.
Defining social memory
The study of social memory is the study of a diverse range of objects,

phenomena and processes that have attracted the interest of schol-
ars in different disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology,
neuroscience and literary studies. One of the main interests in these dis-
ciplines is to try to decipher how and why some events are remembered
and some others are left behind in oblivion. Material culture provides
artefacts that help to keep our memories alive; other cultural forms, such
as storytelling, rituals, songs and dances, maintain tradition alive while
new pieces of information are added and others are discarded through
generations. Memory is also a process that happens in the brain, and
there are psychological mechanisms that repress or trigger our memories
in the unconscious. There are different elements at play in the process
of remembering, because not only our brains remember, but our bodies
are also involved in mnemonic practices (Connerton, 1989). From the
perspective of social sciences, society is considered to be the locus of the
explanation of memory.
It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to describe the multiple ways
in which memory has been studied (see Olick et al., 2011); instead, this
chapter establishes a common conceptual ground in order to discuss
the role of memory in transitional justice and in the construction of
victimhood. The field of memory studies is born as a multidisciplinary
field that has observed some inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration

(Vosu et al., 2008). It has been led by a ‘problem or topic, rather than by
singular method or tradition’ (Hoskins et al., 2008, p. 5). No single the-
ory is able to encompass all the different aspects of memory; as a result,
some of them have opted for emphasising different aspects of mem-
ory, which is reflected in the use of concepts such as cultural memory,
collective memory and social memory (Olick and Robbins, 1998).
Halbwachs (1992 [1925], p. 53), perhaps the most relevant theorist of
collective memory, argues:
We can understand each memory as occurs in individual thought

only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding
group. We cannot properly understand their relative strength and
the ways in which they combine within individual thought unless
we connect the individual to the various groups of which he is
simultaneously a member.
Halbwachs considered that collective identity precedes collective mem-

ory, in the sense that a group develops a ‘shared image of the past’
that provides an illusion of timelessness and continuity, which could
help to ensure that ‘the group remains the same’ (Halbwachs, [1925]
1992, p. 86). This is not a trivial matter and is useful for explaining,
for instance, processes of production of national identity (Nora, 1989).
Nevertheless, the concept of collective memory has been criticised for
being more an ‘illusion of consensus’ than a description of how societies
actually remember.
Sontag (2003, p. 76) argues that ‘what is called collective memory is
not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is
the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in
our minds’. In that sense, the term ‘collective memory’ has been faulted
for being too artificial and external and not reflecting the more organic
processes that occur in the construction of memory in society (Elster,
2004, p. 11). According to Hoskins (2005, p. 3), ‘collective memory may
thus be an ideal and an aim of societies (and of “social frameworks”) but
social memory is their practice’.
This book considers it relevant to underline the malleability and
‘multidirectionality’ of memory in the analysis of the memorialisation
of contemporary atrocity and argues that social memory can be the con-
cept that best describes this process. Social memory relies on the inter-
ests and interpretations of different groups and can change over time
as a result of different negotiations, contestations and intersections.
Instead of describing this process as an action–reaction process, where

subaltern memories respond to dominant ones, social memory is under-
stood as the result of multiple narratives that simultaneously come from
multiple directions (Rothberg, 2009).
The way societies frame social memories influences what is relevant to
remember and what to forget. Even individual recollections about spe-
cific events are influenced by society; for instance, Loftus and Pickrell
(1995, p. 720) demonstrated how ‘misleading post-event information
can alter a person’s recollection in powerful ways, even leading to the
creation of false memories of objects that never in fact existed’. In her
theory of social remembering, Misztal (2003, p. 12) claims that one of
the reasons why memory is social is that ‘every memory exists through
its relation with what has been shared with others: language, symbols,
events, and social and cultural contexts’. She argues that society ‘ensures
what we remember and how and when we remember it’. For example,
Tankink (2007) claims that in the case of post-conflict Uganda, victims
in the Mbara district remained in silence about their memories of past
atrocity because there was no public space that facilitated the creation
of social memories, ‘no one wants to listen to traumatic narratives’. The
absence of a receptive audience and adequate arenas of representation is
detrimental for the creation of public narratives of social memory, even
though memories can exist on another level, often through cultural
representations.
The cultural aspects of memory have been emphasised in the term
‘cultural memory’. According to Erll (2009), cultural memory is an
umbrella term that comprises social, mental and material aspects of
memory. The term ‘cultural memory’ reflects two processes: the first
process occurs when individual memories are shaped by socio-cultural
contexts; and the second occurs when ‘a memory, which is represented
by media and institutions [that] must be actualised by individuals, mem-
bers of a community of remembrance’ (Erll, 2009, p. 13). Rodriguez
and Fortier (2007, p. 13) explain that ‘cultural mmory transmits an expe-
rience rooted in history that has reached a culturally definitive, potentially
transformative status’. In order to reach such status, cultural memory
needs to be firmly rooted in traditions that reach back into the past
(Assmann, 2006, p. 8). Cultural memory and social memory have differ-
ent temporal structures. Assman argues that once there are no witnesses
alive to tell their experience, ‘communicative’ memory (kommunika-
tives Gedächtnis) will transform itself into ‘cultural’ memory (kulturelles
Gedächtnis). According to this argument, social memory is different from
cultural memory because the first depends on carrier groups (witnesses,
authorities and other transmitters that preserve the memory) to endure

through time. Carrier groups create particular claims about social real-
ity and social memory (Alexander, 2004, p. 11). According to Assmann
(2006, p. 7), these types of ‘memories can be as short-lived as the
collective that makes use of them’.
In that sense, memory can have both a cultural and a social basis, and
they are not mutually exclusive. For example, in the Afro-Colombian
communities of Chocó, we find some ancestral African traditions that
have survived the slavery experience and forced relocation to the
Americas; these traditions can become cultural repertoires used in the
construction of social memory of contemporary events. It will be
explained in the following chapters how narratives of modern vio-
lence are connected to the experience of slavery and are performed
through rituals inspired by African traditions. However, the concept of
social memory has been used in this book in order to emphasise short-
term politicised uses of memory. The term ‘social memory’ reflects the
multiple intersections between official and non-official initiatives of col-
lective memorialisation and interpersonal memories, which are central
aspects of memorialisation in transitional justice. In addition, the term
‘social memory’, as is used in this book, underlines an affinity with the
sociological study of memory.
Social memory: Carrier groups and interpretative repertoires

The definition of social memory employed in this book is influenced by
Weber’s ([1922]1978) concept of carrier groups. Social memory is under-
stood as the social construction of multiple representations of the past
by different carrier groups in the present. In his sociology of religion,
Max Weber ([1922]1978, pp. 468–518) argued that social groups such
as warrior nobles, peasants or urban aristocrats could act as social carri-
ers for religious ideas. These social carriers had patterns of action with
some affinity to certain religious notions and ethical demands, while
other notions would appear reprehensible to their status feelings. I con-
sider that Weber’s explanation can be extended to ideas other than the
religious ones. These values and ideas ‘must become located in strong
carrier groups in order to become effective’ (Kalberg, 2002, p. liii). In that
sense, carrier groups’ needs of meaning stand in a relationship of elective
affinity to the narratives of social memory that they produce. Otherwise,
their narratives run the risk to be abandoned, silenced or forgotten. As a
result, some groups become social carriers of narratives about events that
have an affinity with their needs of meaning, life patterns, feelings and
interests.
However, not every group can carry any idea or value from the past
to the present. The construction of narratives about the past is lim-
ited by the interpretative repertoires that are accessible to those carrier
groups. According to Wetherell (1998, p. 22), ‘an interpretative reper-
toire is a culturally familiar and habitual line of argument comprised
from recognisable themes, common places and tropes’. Interpretative
repertoires could be seen as building blocks used for constructing ver-
sions of actions, cognitive processes and other phenomena (Potter and
Wetherell, 1987, p. 172). A particular repertoire is constructed out of
a restricted range of terms used in a specific stylistic and grammati-
cal fashion. Commonly, these terms are derived from one or more key
metaphors, and the presence of a repertoire will often be signalled by
certain tropes or figures of speech. In this sense, social memories are
built by common tropes and are influenced by both dominant and
subaltern interests and ideologies.
In sum, social carriers have common interests about how they should
remember particular events of the past; the narratives that they con-
struct reflect their values, ethical demands and status feelings. However,
their narratives are constricted to a limited amount of information,
metaphors and styles (which resemble building blocks). Different groups
use these blocks according to the political or social interests that they
have, constructing different versions of the past that are often sub-
tly dissimilar. In Chapter 5, the use of interpretative repertoires in
the construction of narratives about the massacre of Bojayá will be
analysed.
Social memory, representations and trauma
The horror produced by atrocity is unjustifiable and intolerable by def-

inition (Card, 2002, p. 9), and personal experiences of atrocity are
difficult to both forget and communicate. These memories are inti-
mate scars and can become holes in victims’ biographies that perhaps
will never be fully mastered and have belated effects on people’s lives
(Lacapra, 2001, p. 41). For those reasons, it can be counterintuitive
to think that something as personal as a trauma can indeed be called
‘social’.
However, some authors have considered that intimate experiences of
suffering have a social component and that there are common places
that connect the public and the private worlds of victims. Herman
(1997, p. 3) claims that there is an intimate connection between
different experiences of suffering:
Between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered

women and political prisoners, between the survivors of vast concen-
tration camps created by tyrants who rule nations and the survivors
of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule
their homes.
In addition, Kleinman et al. (1997) have argued that suffering is socially

produced as the result of devastating injuries that social forces inflict
on human experience. Other authors discuss social traumas; however,
it is important to understand that ‘a social trauma is not an individ-
ual trauma writ large’ (Robben, 2005, p. 346). According to Robben
(2005, p. 347), excessive and massive violence disrupts ‘social bonds,
destroys group identities, undermines people’s sense of community,
and entails cultural disorientation because taken for granted meanings
become obsolete. A massive trauma is thus a wound to the social body
and its cultural frame.’
Traumatic memories can be shared despite the fact that the nature
of traumatic events implies silences and absences (Jelin, 2003). Individ-
ual traumatic memories can also be part of the construction of social
traumas, but a social trauma is not only defined by the experience
of a group’s suffering. According to Jeffrey Alexander (2004a, p. 10),
the study of social trauma focuses instead on how ‘this acute discom-
fort’ enters ‘into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity’.
A social trauma does not only affect those who were direct victims of the
event. It occurs when a social group considers that a certain traumatic
event is part of their core identity as a group. Alexander emphasises
that ‘events are one thing, representations of these events quite another’
(2004a, p. 10). Influenced by Durkheim, Alexander locates trauma in the
field of social representations. In this sense, narratives of social memory
about traumatic experiences that are central for a group’s identity are
concerned with the way the past is represented and not only with the
factuality of the events.
The distinction between the factuality of past events and their repre-
sentation does not mean that representations are false or fake. Memory
is still a cognitive issue that claims for truth and faithfulness even
though it follows a different set of rules than history to prove its validity.
Ricoeur (2006, p. 55) argues that ‘the epistemic, veridical dimension of
memory is united with the practical dimension tied to the idea of exer-
cise of memory’. Poole (2009, p. 151) explains the difference between
the factuality of the events and their representation in terms of cogni-
tive and conative memory. The first is related to the information about
what happened in the past; the second to the knowledge that bears on
action. It is precisely the transformative potential of social memory that
is relevant for transitional justice in particular and the transformation
of societies in conflict in general.
Narratives of social memory can contribute to the transformation of
conflict and post-conflict societies because they can affect how violence
and conflict are portrayed and they can have legal and social con-
sequences. For instance, after the repression in Argentina, the labels
used to remember and describe what occurred mattered to current
transitional processes. Robben (2012) argues that the transformation of
the label ‘dirty war’ to ‘genocide’ reflects a change in the perception
of what happened and of how it should be addressed in the present.
According to him (Robben, 2012, p. 305), ‘The term genocide forced
Argentines to look with different eyes at the past, and raised uncomfort-
able questions about their role during the violent regime.’ In a similar
vein, Alexander (2012, p. 77) considers that to define an atrocity in
terms of ‘a crime against humanity’, a ‘holocaust’, can compel stronger
interventions than other types of labels: ‘It is impossible, in this sense,
to imagine a sacrifice that would be too great when humanity in itself is
at stake.’ Labels, metaphors and other descriptors of reality used in nar-
ratives of social memory are relevant for evoking particular community
feelings (Robben, 2012).
One of the most important dimensions of social memory resides in its
suitability for creating emotional landmarks for different social groups.
Stories about the past can be told in such a way that can reinforce the
feelings of humiliation or pride of a social group. In turn, these versions
can contribute to the creation of social meaning of atrocious events that
they have suffered. However, atrocities are by definition unjustifiable
and intolerable, which creates the following paradox: meaning is most
urgently demanded when it is the least possible to produce it.
This paradox helps us to understand how multiple versions of mem-
ory are demanded and produced after a traumatic event has occurred;
they overlap, contradict and are malleable. The internal coherence in
these narratives is related to ‘voices’ that correspond to a membership
in a social group. According to Wertsch (2002, p. 7), ‘memory is more
a matter of reorganising or reconstructing bits of information into a
general scheme than it is a matter of accurate recall of the isolated bits
themselves’. As Rothberg (2009, p. 313) explains, ‘memories are mobile;
histories are implicated in each other . . . understanding political conflict
entails understanding the interlacing of memories in the force field of
public space’. In this sense, overlaps and contradictions should not be
ignored when explaining the different ‘voices’ that create a social mem-
ory, as in the case of the massacre of Bojayá or any other atrocious event
for that matter, because they are important bricks for the building of
meaning.
Memory politics and transitional justice: Voices

from above and from below
In the history of transitional justice different mechanisms have been

used in order to incorporate the past into meaningful narratives that
support the transition to democratic societies, or to non-democratic but
constitutional regimes (Elster, 2004). The past can be remembered, for-
gotten or denied in order to achieve reconciliation, justice or national
unity. Often, truth and memory are embraced as empowering and heal-
ing for victims and are crucial to inter-group reconciliation processes.
There is ‘the ubiquity of the injunction, “Remember!” in contemporary
Western culture’ (Volf, 2006, p. 131) that would optimistically set the
ground for a pacific future.
In the context of past sufferings and injustice, collective remember-
ing has a crucial function in unveiling long silences and impunities,
and it has often been associated with the resistance to totalitarian
regimes (Kundera, 1996; Todorov, 2000). State violence is often accom-
panied by campaigns of denial that claim that life is progressing as
normal. Throughout undemocratic regimes, the violation of human
rights is kept in silence or covered with justifications for the use of
extreme violence. In that sense, documenting or re-telling the events
of past atrocities can serve to prevent the implementation of totali-
tarianism as politics in the usual manner. For instance, in the case
of post-authoritarian Argentina, ‘the military’s denial of torture and
disappearances motivated survivors to substantiate the repression, and
accumulate proof in support of the charge of state terrorism’ (Robben,
2012, p. 309). Non-governmental initiatives, official truth commissions
and other mechanisms of memory recovery ‘are premised on the idea
that by elucidating the truth concerning past human rights abuse and
atrocity, societies can build more just, stable, and democratic futures’
(Bickford, 2007, p. 1).
In this sense, social memory built from the perspective of groups of
resistance aims to destabilise the regime, while social memory3 built
from the perspective of perpetrators aims to legitimise the regime. The
processes of construction of social memory that include victims’ voices
can be perceived as a way of reparation to the victims and heirs of gross
violation and injustice (Walker, 2010), which can be understood as a

task that in itself brings justice to victims, because it means an official
recognition of the wrongs that they suffered. However, it would not be
sufficient knowing what happened, because this can be a truth known
too well by the victims, but it requires acknowledging that a severe injury
was perpetrated against them (Hayner, 2010, p. 21). This distinction is
important because social memory can contribute to the legitimisation
of authoritarian regimes even if they include victims’ testimonies, when
they do not acknowledge the moral narrative that recognises the moral
injustice in victims’ suffering.
Official politics of memory include memorials, museums, monu-
ments, reports, official and unofficial truth commissions, historical
commissions, extra-judiciary investigation commissions and history
books. Some of these instruments respond to concrete and official pol-
itics of memory enacted in the process of transition. The politics of
memory vary according to ‘the nature and legacies of repression and
authoritarian rule, as well as the nature of the transition process and
various political, institutional, and legal factors conditioning the post-
transitional period’ (de Brito, 2001, p. 158). The politics of memory try
to transform social memory through the recognition of multiple social,
political and cultural discourses about the past. This helps in ‘building
various social, political or collective identities, which shape the way dif-
ferent social groups view national politics and the goals they wish to
pursue in the future’ (de Brito, 2001, p. 160). In this sense, they are
linked to pursuing democratisation in societies in transition through the
creation of multiple interpretations that are presented in public debates
(Jelin, 2003).
In addition to top-down initiatives, such as truth commissions and
historical memory commissions, there are also bottom-up processes
of memorialisation led by civil society organisations at their own risk
during and after violent regimes (Jelin, 2003; Jelin and Przeworski,
1995).
The recovery of truth and historical memory as part of top-down offi-
cial mechanisms of transitional justice are traditionally understood as
investigative mechanisms with clear mandates, goals and limitations
that aim to factually report human rights violations committed in a
country (Hayner, 2010). Bottom-up processes of memorialisation can be
presented in artistic, cultural and religious forms, among other forms.
They aim to ‘reveal the truth about crimes committed in the past as a
component of a broader strategy of accountability and justice’ (Bickford,
2007, p. 1).
According to Hayner (2010, p. 33), the official and unofficial truth

commissions in Latin American countries, such as Brazil’s ‘Never Again’,
Uruguay’s ‘Peace and Justice Service’, Chile’s National Commission
for Truth and Reconciliation or ‘Rettig commission’ and Argentina’s
National Commission on the Disappeared (Comisión Nacional sobre
la Desaparición de Personas, CONADEP), ‘have contributed in impor-
tant ways to the stability that each of these states has achieved’.
Other examples are Zimbabwe’s ‘Breaking the Silence’, the Documen-
tation Centre of Cambodia and Guatemala’s ‘Recovery of Historical
Memory Project’, among others. However, some critics claim that
there has been an exaggeration about the social and political ben-
efits of truth commissions and historical memory commissions for
social peace and reconciliation processes. For instance, Hamber (2009,
p. 168) criticises this assumption, calling it the ‘magical power’ of truth
commissions:
There is an expectation that the emotional testimony of victims and

the uncovering of how past atrocities were committed and by whom
will prevent impunity, transform social relations and the meaning of
past violence, and affect how people will act in the future. This is at
best only partially true.
Some of the alleged benefits of truth commissions and historical mem-

ory recovery commissions are that they can go beyond the truth-finding
goal in order to also promote national unity and reconciliation, as in the
case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Also,
some scholars claim that truth-telling contributes to healing, symbolic
closure and justice (Hamber et al., 2010; Hamber and Wilson, 2002;
Mendeloff, 2004; Rotberg and Thompson, 2000). Nevertheless, truth
commissions and historical memory commissions often fall short in
the promotion of reconciliation due to an excessive emphasis on abuses
against human rights which excludes broader social truths such as eco-
nomic crimes and structural inequality that affect victims at the margins
(Chapman, 2009).
Additionally, critics claim that the alleged benefits of memorialisa-
tion in transitional justice processes can actually harm victims. For
instance, based on empirical psychological research in post-genocide
Rwanda, Brouneus (2008, p. 57) found that ‘traumatisation, ill-health,
isolation, and insecurity dominate the lives of testifying women in the
Gacaca courts’. Women re-experienced their traumas of genocide as if
they were happening again. These different criticisms point to the fact
that there is not a single formula about how the past should be recovered
and integrated into the national discourses of peace, and there is a
strong necessity for researching and measuring the impacts of memo-
rialisation projects in transitional justice processes (Barsalou and Baxter,
2007; Crocker, 2003).
Works of memorialisation have flourished despite their flaws in terms
of impunity, risks of retraumatisation, their instrumentalisation and
the explosion of contested memories (Camacho, 2008; Curry, 2007).
Some of these mechanisms have been criticised for a lack of retributive
agenda and a strong emphasis on restorative discourses. The restorative
approach claims that it is important ‘to remember in order to forget’,
which means that once the process of construction of memory and
recovery of truth has been done, it is necessary to let these memories
go in order to not hold resentment against perpetrators. According to
de Brito et al. (2001), such process, which is an important feature of
reconciliation and peacebuilding, is not dissuasive enough to press for
bringing truth and justice.
The assumption that memory equals justice has inspired toothless
laws that have resulted in impunity in many post-conflict settings.
Across Latin America, but particularly in cases such as Guatemala, El
Salvador and Peru, truth has been perceived as an uncontested proof
of impunity, since there have not been concrete transitional responses
following the unveiling of atrocities, such as the transformation of
the conditions that allowed violence and marginalisation to happen in
the first place. For those reasons, it is necessary to critically combine
in a reciprocal way truth and memory with other transitional justice
mechanisms. This requirement is weakly fulfilled when the politics of
memory are implemented before an agreement has been reached and
the atrocities are too recent.
In the Colombian case, there have been multiple local grassroots
initiatives of social memorialisation that have become more visible,
thanks to the work of the GMH (Grupo de Memoria Histórica), part of
the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation, and the
more recently created National Historical Memory Centre (Ruiz Romero,
2012). These initiatives follow a perspective ‘from below’ in terms of
transitional justice that helps to correct the deficit in terms of the civil
society’s needs of accountability, reparation and justice. In Colombia,
‘ “players from below” have deployed the discourse of truth, justice and
reparation to struggle against impunity’ (Diaz, 2007, p. 214). Further,
bottom-up memorialisation processes contribute to understanding the
regional complexities of the conflict and the territorial inequalities in

local communities, as will be examined in the next chapters.
Social memory and victimhood
Some authors have claimed that initiatives of social memorialisation can

contribute to healing, empowering and bringing justice to victims. How-
ever, it is also the case that memories of past violence can contribute
to new cycles of violence and other types of challenges for victims.
According to the United Nations (1985):
Victims of crime means persons who, individually or collectively,

have suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional
suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their funda-
mental rights, through acts or omissions that are in violation of
criminal laws operative within Member States, including those laws
proscribing criminal abuse of power . . . ‘Victims of abuse of power’
means persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm,
including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic
loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through
acts or omissions that do not yet constitute violations of national
criminal laws but of internationally recognised norms relating to
human rights.
The notion of victimhood is not only about the fact of being a victim; it
is related to how victim identity is socially represented and constructed.
This notion is relevant for the present analysis because it allows one
to explain how people who have suffered and survived a terrible atroc-
ity, such as the massacre of Bojayá, remember what occurred to them,
and how the atrocity defines who they are after the massacre. As was
explained above, collective identities strongly depend upon social mem-
ory; in Halbwachs’ ([1925] 1992) terms, a ‘shared image of the past’
ensures the continuity of the group, in this case the group of those who
identify themselves as victims. According to the UN definition, suffer-
ing is a central aspect of being a victim and it is assumed that victim
identity would be centred on shared images of collective suffering.
Representations of victims’ suffering have important consequences
for collective memories and national discourses about the past. On the
one hand, victims have been stereotypically represented as pure, inno-
cent and absolved of responsibility and lacking agency (Smyth, 2007).
On the other hand, there is the assumption that their authority and
status comes from their suffering under the belief that ‘great suffering
carries in its wake deep moral knowledge’ (Thomas, 1999). The com-
plexity of the issue of victimhood in transitional societies is explained
by Todorov (2000, p. 53), who argues:
What could be appealing in being a victim? To tell the truth, there

is nothing. Nobody wants to be a victim, but everybody wants to
have been one, without being one anymore; they aspire to the victim
status.
Todorov argues that in the aftermath of conflict, bystanders can expe-

rience feelings of shame, guilt or responsibility and as a result the
possibility of presenting oneself as a victim could be an opportunity
to escape these negative feelings because of the stereotypical represen-
tations of what a victim is supposed to be. It can also give room for a
competition over the quality and purity of the suffering, over who the
rightful victim is in the post-conflict scenario.
However, in reality, the category of victims is much more fluid. In the
first place, victims might not be completely innocent; they could have
been perpetrators at a certain moment, or they are not passive actors, or
they are too weak, too quick to forget or too full with resentment. Even
those who fought actively as armed actors and who are considered to
be perpetrators of atrocities might have a narrative of victimhood that
sustains and justifies their hate and violence.
The complexity of the notion of victim is often oversimplified in order
to make it fit to collective narratives of social memory about past atroc-
ities. In her text The Violence of Victimhood, Enns (2012, p. 24) critiques
the socio-cultural contexts that have allowed the creation of the image
of a victim ‘Other’, who is ‘bereft of historical responsibility and, at the
extreme, paralysed by the trauma of oppression’. Enns (2012, p. 28)
argues that the effects of such a view on victims are ‘a veneration of
the other, moral currency for the victim, and an insidious competition
for victimhood’.
Consequently, the empowerment of victims may lead to an ‘exalta-
tion of victimhood’ and the conflict may continue when every group
regards itself as the principal victim. In those cases, the idealisation
and collective victimisation through the use of the past can become
a pitfall for transitional societies (Cairns and Roe, 2003; Elshtain, 2003;
Enns, 2007). In his analysis of the Rwandan case, Kosicki (2007, p. 16)
explains that there is an increasing risk of renewed violence through the
uses of the victim-aggressor memory, since not only museums and lit-
erature are means for social memories; there are also ‘ethnic cleansing
and genocide: people kill in remembrance of earlier aggression’. Kosicki
(2007, p. 21) claims that ‘the rapid ideologisation of aggression, armies,
and murder in twentieth-century states has created a Manichean order
that stratifies society into aggressors and victims’. In a similar vein, Ray
(1999) explains how in the Kosovo conflict ‘deep cultural reservoirs of
affectively-charged un-expiated resentment against the national other
can be mobilized through the “recovery” of traumatic memories’.
Narratives of social memory acquire a stronger legitimacy when they
represent pure innocent victims, even though these categories are con-
tested in reality, particularly in an extended conflict where civilians and
armed actors have lived together for long periods of time, as in the
Colombian case. There are no ‘pure victims’, and they are not all morally
comparable. The boundaries between victim and perpetrator can fluctu-
ate over time. According to Enns, ‘Victims can become perpetrators, and
can in turn be re-victimised yet again, or victims can be perpetrators
simultaneously’ (2007, p. 11). Memories of past sufferings transmitted
through generations can contribute to the creation of social identities
rooted on victimhood, which can enhance new cycles of violence. This
is why for Enns (2007, p. 23) ‘the important question is who is a victim
today?’ She argues that
the most difficult challenge is to know at what point the victim must
let go of victimhood, sacrifice the tremendous need for recognition
and reparation, even when it is known that victimisation robs indi-
viduals and communities of something that will never be returned or
repaid, and never fully repaired.
As was explained before, a social trauma occurs when a social group

makes a narrative of atrocity a central part of their identity. In this sense,
overcoming the social trauma through civil repair and social peace pro-
cesses would mean a transformation of victim identity. This is a difficult
process, which is why some authors have suggested that forgetting and
forgiving could be a way to perhaps let go of the painful and possibly
violence-inducing aspects of victim identity.
Social forgetting and forgiveness
Social memory does not always provide a definitive positive answer for
peace in post-violent societies, and sometimes it can enhance violence
due to its disturbing potential for exalting victimhood. Some com-

menters consider that forgetting the past might be a better response
than social memorialisation for reaching reconciliation. Elshtain (2003,
p. 26), argues that the past can be a burden that requires a double pro-
cess of remembering in order to forget. The demand to forget as a social
process goes beyond the incapacity of memory to retain information.
It is not a failure of memory but forgetting as a result of explicit social
policies or of selective social processes that leads society to forget certain
events (Connerton, 2008). Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to forget
an event that is ever present like a wound or a trauma.
Forsberg (2003, pp. 70–71) proposes an alternative:
Many people seem to think that there is only one choice to be made:
either remember and punish, or forget and forgive. Yet the recent
debate on transitional justice has made it clear that we face in fact two
distinct choices: whether or not to remember past atrocities publicly
and whether or not to sanction the parties to the conflict.
Forsberg claims that forgetting and forgiving are not equivalent. Accord-
ing to Forsberg (2003, p. 72), forgiveness would be ‘a third alternative
between forgetting and punishment, and not simply as a way of for-
getting’. Forgiveness does not equal forgetting because ‘it requires
remembering what was done to one and who did it and requires con-
tinuing to condemn what was done’ (Wolterstorff, 2013, p. 421). The
theologian/philosopher Wolterstorff claims that there is a strong rela-
tionship between forgiving and memory, since remembering the offence
is a condition for forgiving the offender. This is a path that could lead
to keeping the duty to remember past atrocities in respect to victims’
dignity while trying to coexist with perpetrators and perhaps to forgive
them. The issue of forgiveness in post-atrocity settings and its relation
with religious norms are discussed in further detail in the next chapter.
Conclusion
The concept of social memory allows understanding the short-term and

politicised memories that are constructed after atrocity. The definition
of social memory used in this book privileges a focus on the groups
that are carriers of memory because they influence the process of trans-
mission, transformation or silencing narratives about past atrocities.
It is argued in this chapter that these narratives are based on common
interpretative repertoires that are represented in different voices and
arenas; they produce multidirectional, contradictory and overlapping

memories (Rothberg, 2009).
Memory politics as part of the mechanisms employed in transitional
justice can be developed both from above and from below. On the one
hand, official politics of memory can contribute to peace, reconcilia-
tion and solidarity; but they also have the risk of retraumatising victims
or becoming legitimising tools for thin transitions and rotten compro-
mises. Critics also comment that often official politics of memory are
ineffective when other mechanisms of transitional justice, such as repa-
ration, are not followed. On the other hand, grassroots initiatives of
social memorialisation have the advantage of allowing victims to recall
the stories of past aggressions in their own terms, but they also have
the risk of creating narratives of social memory that exalt victimhood,
which can result in new cycles of violence.
Finally, social forgetting and forgiveness have also been considered
to be legitimate mechanisms to move forward peaceful transitions by
some scholars. The following chapter provides a deeper account of the
relationship between religion, memory and atrocity, in which forgive-
ness is understood as one of the many possible emotional responses to
atrocity.
2
Religion, Emotions and Memory
after Atrocity
Introduction
There is a strong relationship between emotions and memory (Reisberg

and Hertel, 2003; Stein et al., 2009). Events are more vividly recalled
when they have an emotional component, which occurs for positive
and negative emotions; for public and private events; and for posi-
tive and traumatic memories (Christianson, 1992; Pillemer et al., 1988;
Porter and Birt, 2001; Reisberg and Hertel, 2003; Rubin and Kozin,
1984). The relationship between memory and emotions in the post-
atrocity context provides a venue of analysis for the study of emotions
that sustain or transform conflict. For instance, emotions are relevant
for understanding how people construct their victim identity by main-
taining the negative feelings associated with the experience of suffering
alive – how victims are enticed to forgive or resent past sufferings (Enns,
2012; Harkin, 2003). Emotions can have a concrete impact on societies
in transition, by strengthening negative or positive emotional climates,
which are central for processes of reconciliation (Bar-Tal et al., 2007).
There is an increasing and significant scholarship that emphasises
the importance of emotions for societies in transition (Bar-Tal et al.,
2007; Brewer, 2010; Elster, 2004; Fierke, 2014; Kraft, 2004, among oth-
ers). Schirch (2005) explores the relationship of ritual and symbols
in peacebuilding and the importance of engaging people’s emotions,
senses and passions for societies in transition. Elster (2003, p. 11)
highlights how processes of transitional justice are influenced by the
personal emotions of the individuals involved, ‘be they wrongdoers,
beneficiaries of wrongdoings, victims, resisters, accusers, or neutrals.
These emotions arise in direct confrontation among the individuals con-
cerned, and tend to fade as the memories fade.’ Yet, time is not always
the best medicine to heal emotions. There are ‘cases in which memories
28
Religion, Emotions and Memory after Atrocity 29
of injustice prove to be remarkably durable. Life in exile and strong

social norms may sustain memories or emotions that would otherwise
have been subject to spontaneous decay’ (Elster, 2003, p. 12). In the
same vein, other violent acts, such as the disappearance of corpses or
living with a permanent injury, can sustain memories and emotions of
grief.
Ostensibly, the most dangerous emotions for a peace process are
those that influence perpetrators in taking up arms or enforcing repres-
sion against other groups of people. This explains why scholarship has
emphasised understanding emotions of humiliation or religious emo-
tions that encourage perpetrators to commit violent acts or political
self-sacrifice (Fierke, 2014). However, the field of transitional justice and
reconciliation has progressively given attention to victims’ emotions,
creating emotional norms about how victims should feel about their
past and their present (Flam, 2013). This can probably be justified under
the fear that victims’ emotions can influence new cycles of violence, as
was explained in Chapter 1.
According to Brewer (2010, p. 105), victims’ emotions need to be
taken into consideration in a social peace process because victims have
had to learn to coexist with perpetrators whose crimes often have not
been sufficiently punished. However, considering that the reality of
victimhood is much more complex than its abstract notion, Brewer
and Hayes (2011b) warn us against defining victims as a ‘moral beacon’
in post-conflict society ‘against which other people measure their own
capacity for forgiveness or revenge’. Brewer (2010) argues that instead of
asking people to stop feeling negative emotions, such as anger, revenge
or resentment, victims should agree about ‘ritualized behaviour and talk’
in order to feel emotions that could be conducive to a peaceful future.
Victims have been labelled under the pathologised stereotype of being
‘in need of emotional expression or catharsis’, and the transitional jus-
tice and reconciliation field has constantly urged victims to ‘remember,
tell and forgive’ (Flam, 2013, p. 375), even though there is no evi-
dence that formal truth-telling, an usual transitional justice mechanism,
can be conducive to healing victims. Contrary to those claims, for-
mal truth-telling might produce new risks for victims, such as their
re-traumatisation (Flam, 2013). Mendeloff (2009, p. 592), based on his
empirical forensic and psychological research on prominent cases of
transitional justice, argues that ‘the notion that formal truth-telling
processes satisfy victims’ need for justice, ease their emotional and
psychological suffering, and dampen their desire for vengeance remains
highly dubious’.
In that sense, a closer examination of the social processes of manage-

ment of victims’ emotions is relevant when analysing not only official
mechanisms of memorialisation but also grassroots initiatives of social
memorialisation as mechanisms of transitional justice ‘from below’
(McEvoy and McGregor, 2008; Nyamu-Musembi, 2002). Grassroots ini-
tiatives of memorialisation that combine religious elements might pro-
vide particular advantages for processes of emotion regulation, as is
analysed in the next chapters.
Managing emotions in post-atrocity settings
Emotion regulation is understood as the conscious or unconscious

processes that aim to ‘increase, maintain or decrease one or more com-
ponents of an emotional response’. It is constituted by our efforts to alter
how we feel and how we express our emotions (Gross, 1999; 2001). This
is different from the notion of coping, which is a broader category that
includes non-emotional actions taken to achieve non-emotional goals
(Gross, 1999). However, regulation does not only occur at an individual
but in a social level.
Hochschild (1983), a pioneer in the study of sociology emotions,
explains the process of management of emotions as ‘emotion work’
in the context of organisational settings. Influenced by Stanislavski’s
method acting paradigm, Hochschild employs the concept of ‘surface’
and ‘deep acting’ in her analysis of social emotions. The first refers to
the modulation of the behavioural expression of an emotion, while the
second implies the management or control of emotions in order to con-
form to expected ‘feeling rules’ or ‘emotion norms’. She (1983, p. 47)
describes this process under the premise that ‘we must dwell on what it
is that we want to feel and on what we must do to induce that feeling’.
In the case of the aftermath of atrocity, victims go through personal
processes of emotion regulation, which can follow different paths and
achieve different outcomes; for instance, they may have deeply con-
templated their loss or they may have tried to suppress those feelings.
Pasupathi (2003) argues that memory may be an ideal tool for emotion
regulation; focusing on past glories or ruminating about past difficulties
can enhance positive or negative emotions in the present (Baumaister
and Newman, 1994; Wong and Watt, 1991). This is known as ‘cognitive
re-appraisal mechanism’, which happens when an individual’s reinter-
pretation or reframing of an emotional event influences a change in her
emotional reaction (Gross and Levenson, 1997; Lazarus, 1991; Snyder
et al., 2013).
Hochschild (1983) explicitly relates her theory of emotion work to

appraisal theories of emotion, particularly to Lazarus’ work (1966),
‘which are also foundational models of emotion regulation’ (von
Scheve, 2012). However, the transformation of emotions does not only
occur at a cognitive level, but the body plays an important role in it, and
rituals, for instance, can contribute to the management of emotions: ‘a
corporeal guide who can manipulate ritual practices and set parame-
ters for change in feelings and emotions’ (Koss-Chioino, 2005, p. 421).
The role of the body in the management of emotions is explained at
length in Chapter 6; for now I elaborate on the uses of narratives of
social memory for the management of emotions.
Narratives that alter our interpretation of the past can transform our
present and future emotional reactions to that event. In that sense, it
can be argued that the reinterpretation of past atrocities framed in a
peacebuilding agenda can contribute to the transformation of present
and future emotions of suffering. Nevertheless, there is no evidence
that such emotional benefits have occurred for victims after an offi-
cial process of truth or memory recovery, as was explained above.
One of the reasons for this is that the transformation of emotions
related to experiences of atrocity can retain complexities that other
emotional experiences lack. Unjust death and evil acts affect victims
in such an existential way that they require the entire reconstruc-
tion of their social order, which often cannot be achieved through
narratives alone. The types of emotions that are produced are of unbear-
able suffering that challenge the totality of their cultural norms (Card,
2002).
Humphrey (2014, p. 3), in his text Politics of atrocity and reconciliation,
explains:
While all violence threatens normative reality, atrocity – excessive

violence – shakes the very foundations of both self and social exis-
tence. Atrocity is a traumatising violence because it leaves an unas-
similable memory in the victim and exceeds cultural discourses of
law or morality which manage the circulation of everyday violence.
The problem of un-assimilating memories of atrocity, as is explained

by Humphrey, reflects two limitations. The first one is the limitation of
the language to give an account of the horrors that were suffered. The
second is the limitation of our cultural norms, which do not prepare
victims of atrocity on how to respond to unbearable suffering well. This
means that the re-appraisal of past traumatic events is impeded by the
inadequacy of ordinary linguistic and cultural resources. It is in the con-

text of these limitations that the potential of religion for re-appraisal
and other forms of emotion regulation is analysed.
The bond of religion to extraordinary and existential narratives pro-
vides symbolical and emotional resources for victims of traumatic
experience, which can contribute to overcome both the cultural and
linguistic limitations mentioned above. On the one hand, religious nar-
ratives and rituals contribute to rebuilding the social order; they can
use and influence different forms of social memorialisation such as
‘grassroots memorials’ or ‘spontaneous shrines’ (Margry and Sánchez
Carretero, 2011; Santino, 2006; Senie, 2006). On the other hand, vic-
tims of atrocity often find in religion the symbolical resources to work
through their emotions in order to cope with traumatic experiences
d and Wilson, 2007; Igreja, 2007; Tankink, 2007). In what fol-
(Droždek
lows, the relationship between memory and religion and its impact for
emotion regulation are analysed, and the potential benefit of such a
relationship for peacebuilding is discussed.
Religion and memory
Social remembering is constructed in the religious arena through dogma

(beliefs) and rituals oriented towards the perpetuation and recreation
of memories about revealed truths (Halbwachs, [1925] 1992). Hervieu-
Léger (2000, p. 125) in her book Religion as a chain of memory argues that
‘in the case of religious memory, the normativity of collective memory
is reinforced by the fact of the group’s defining itself, objectively and
subjectively, as a lineage of belief’. In that sense, for believers, every-
day events can be interpreted according to religious narratives, ‘which
gives meaning to the present and contains the future’ (Hervieu-Léger,
2000, p. 125). The emotional intensity and symbolic richness of the
chain provided by religion are made present and re-enacted through rit-
uals and are managed by authorised producers (such as priesthood) of
collective memory. Hervieu-Léger (2000, p. 126) claims that ‘the nor-
mative specific to religious memory with regard to every experience of
the present is inherent in the structure of the religious group’. Reli-
gious traditions are transmitted not only through authorised versions
and interpretations but also through continuous re-invention.
Religious symbols, rituals and discourses can help to preserve social
memories even if they are not part of a religious arena. The use
of religious narratives and rituals in the construction of memory of
non-religious events is particularly relevant in the case of atrocity
and ‘senseless violence’ (Stengs, 2012), such as massacres and terrorist

attacks. Davies (2005, p. 211) calls deaths in these conditions ‘offending
deaths’ because they occur in circumstances that offend public attitudes
and trigger mass protests. The memorialisation of traumatic death does
not always take a religious form, but its content is related to the human
existential condition; they ‘therefore provoke strong utterances of grief
and of social and political disaffection’ (Margry and Sánchez Carretero,
2011, p. 4). The social construction of memories of collective and
offending deaths is established in the liminal area between the secular
and the religious, mainly because in absence of secular explanations for
unjustifiable suffering, religion can provide other-worldly answers. For
instance, religion can give meaning to ‘senseless violence’ by connecting
contemporary suffering to the suffering of those martyrised and sacri-
ficed for the sake of truth and religion, which can help to explain why
the ‘ “senseless violence” label presumes that the victim was innocent,
and often implies a tinge of moral heroism’ (Stengs, 2012, p. 161).
The creation of meaning for atrocity is complicated by the limita-
tion of language. The limitation of language to verbalise the horror
of victims’ experiences after repeated exposure to traumatic events is
described by Harris (2009) and van der Kolk (1994) as ‘speechless ter-
ror’. Caruth (1995, p. 7) explains how, in the case of the Holocaust, the
representation and memorialisation of atrocity are related to ‘the inabil-
ity fully to witness the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the
event fully at the cost of witnessing oneself’. However, that which can-
not be expressed verbally can find other modalities of expression. In this
context, religion appears to be a spontaneous answer for many vic-
tims who try to make sense of atrocity and to transmit their memories,
often guarded by silence, through the use of rituals and interpretative
repertoires that belong to sacred narratives.
The symbolic resources of religion provide a path to transform the way
the past is interpreted by victims (Janzen et al., 2005; Lehtsaar and Noor,
2006; Stier and Landres, 2006; Tankink, 2007; Villa, 2007). For instance,
religion can help to manage negative feelings associated with the atro-
cious experience by letting the painful memories go. In his research on
post-conflict in Southwest Uganda, Tankink (2007, p. 210) interviewed
Grace, a born-again victim who claims:
When I was saved, I was able to forget what had happened before.
I don’t think anymore of all those terrible experiences during the
night and I am able to sleep. When you recognise that it is God who
gives and takes away, and when you don’t think about it, you can
forget those experiences. Of course, one can’t completely forget, but

if you think about it you can appeal to God and try to get his help to
make it all disappear again.
The process by which religion helps to the management of victims’ emo-

tions into positive emotions that are beneficial for victims has often
been understood in terms of forgiveness. However, this book argues that
forgiveness and forgetting are only two of the possible outcomes of the
religious management of victims’ emotions, as is explained in Chapter 6.
Another typical way in which religion can help for the re-appraisal of
the past is through the use of theodicies. Theodicy is understood as the
response to the question of ‘how is it that a power which is said to be at
once omnipotent and kind could have created such an irrational world
of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity’
(Weber, 1958, p. 122). Alexander (2004b, p. 15) considers that ‘if the
trauma process unfolds in the religious arena, its concern will be to link
trauma to theodicy’. In that sense, religion can be an arena for creating
representational processes of new master narratives of suffering. Narratives
of theodicy can help victims to make meaning of suffering; however,
I argue that narratives are not always sufficient for transforming victims’
emotions and other social and cultural aspects that influence the social
construction of emotions, and particularly of religious emotions, should
be observed.
Religion and emotions
The analysis of emotions produced in a religious context considers the

religious experience as a body–mind–self connection, in which the bio-
cultural nature of emotion is emphasised (Davies, 2011). Religion helps
to produce social and cultural frameworks in which both meaning and
feeling are created (Riis and Woodhead, 2010). The role of religion
in the transformation or management of emotions caused by experi-
ences of atrocity is one of the most relevant global aspects of religious
peacebuilding, but this aspect has been largely ignored by the literature
on sociology of emotions and religious peacebuilding.
In consequence, it is not only the study of theodicies but the con-
struction of social emotions that serves as an appropriate path to
understanding religious responses to suffering. Emotions are intimately
connected to the experience of the body and not only of meaning-
making in the mind. Suffering has occurred in the body and in the
mind and it has had consequences for individuals’ identity. Therefore,
it is necessary to analyse how religion helps to respond to suffering
not only through cognitive (analytical) but also through emotional

transformation in victims.
According to McGuire (1990, p. 287), religious responses to suffering
are not limited to the concept of theodicy because they are not ‘epiphe-
nomenal add-ons, something the mind was doing after the body was
suffering’. There is not a clear division between suffering experienced in
the body and suffering experienced in the mind/spirit; rather, suffering
is experienced by the whole person. This is true both for individual and
private suffering (for instance, an illness that is experienced alone), as
well as for collective and public traumatic suffering (for instance, people
who have collectively survived a massacre).
Emotions involve a form of evaluative judgement about exterior
events, people and situations that we do not control; in those cases,
our emotional reaction is important for our own survival and has a
rational component (Fattah and Fierke, 2009; Nussbaum, 2003). Emo-
tions are intimate experiences felt in the body, but they are also locally
shaped by tradition, culture and discourse (Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990;
Wulff, 2007). Different religious beliefs, norms and symbolism have a
strong influence on shaping social emotions in particular ways (Davies,
2011). In that sense, ‘religious traditions may be viewed as schools for
educating the emotions’ (Rue, 2005, p. 79).
For instance, in his study of emotions in Buddhism, Harvey (2013,
pp. 51–52) explains how, under certain conditions, Buddhism can teach
believers to manage the emotion of anger by learning to take more
responsibility for one’s emotions and ‘not to indulge in anger, but retain
one’s centre of balance’. One of the emotions that a Buddhist might try
to induce in herself in order to counter anger is kindness, by imagin-
ing the person that provoked her anger as a close relative or a friend
who was close in the past life. Harvey explains that Buddhism manages
emotions by making people feel that they are responsible for their own
feelings and that they should control them; he adds that Buddhist emo-
tional norms expect that people should not let themselves be filled with
anger or hate; they should be compassionate and put themselves in the
other’s place.
Hochschild (1983, p. 56) claims that societies establish ‘feeling rules’
that ‘guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or
obligation that governs emotional exchanges’. In that sense, religion is
one of the fields in society that produces particular emotional regimes
(Riis and Woodhead, 2010) or emotional norms that influence public
discourse, cultural products and educational materials.
Emotions have a moral component; according to Harkin (2003,
p. 265), emotions are ‘in part a reaction to, in part a commentary on
the social actions of others. This quality gives emotions their “moral”
dimension, as they are a means for censuring and perhaps controlling
others by referring to commonly held standards of behaviour.’ I agree
with Harkin in that emotions have a moral component, but I consider
that they are not necessarily moral themselves. For instance, Clanton
(2008) explains how jealousy, an emotion usually criticised as rooted in
our personal insecurities, is not necessarily a negative emotion because
it can be observed as a response to the breaking of taboos related to inti-
macy, which work in different ways in different societies. Clanton argues
that jealousy protects love, marriage and other valued relationships.
It can have positive or negative consequences in a relationship. Another
example is the emotion of empathy, which is traditionally considered
as a basic positive emotion that allows us to understand the value to
respect the Other; however, I argue that it can also be manipulated into
supporting the war against the Other. For example, when the US govern-
ment creates emotional identification with victims of terrorist attacks it
can use empathy as a tool for the justification of the War on Terror.
A wide spectrum of emotions ranging from the positive to the nega-
tive, such as anger, humiliation, honour or pity, can all be considered
religious emotions because a religious emotion does not need to have
a particular moral character; what makes religious emotions different
from other types of emotions is that they are normatively framed by
supernatural and transcendental motives. These motives are expressed
and constructed through ritual and dogma (beliefs) and are expressed in
a narrative. Religious narratives give a framework to emotions and they
are present in language (oral: speeches and conversations, and written),
in the use of rituals and symbols (Riis and Woodhead, 2010) and unar-
ticulated in silences, voice modulation and turn-taking in conversations
(Edwards, 1999).
Religion, forgiveness and peacebuilding
Religion has symbolical and cultural resources for transforming the way
people feel about themselves and about the Other; this is one of the
aspects in which religion can be a source for both peace and violence.
Appleby (2000) considers that religious feelings that inspire violence are
a result of unsuitable religious leadership:
Intense religious feelings, when exploited by ethnonationalist or other

extremist ideologues, routinely become violent. This outcome is
virtually assured in the absence of spiritual guides and religious
educators who are qualified to name such horrific acts as morally

wrong, as theologically and spiritually undisciplined – as misconstru-
als of the sacred.
(Appleby, 2000, p. 68; my emphasis in italics)
According to this argument, violent religious feelings can be transformed

by more appropriate theological and moral constructions, and teach-
ings informed by peaceful or reconciliatory theologies can help in
peacebuilding. For instance, there exists in Jewish tradition ‘the dialec-
tical interplay of justice and mercy; and the freedom of will that allows
sinners to turn from evil’ (Segal, 2001, p. 182). The peaceful teach-
ings in different theologies have been a concern widely shared in
religious peacebuilding literature (Carter and Smith, 2004; Gopin, 2000;
Johnston, 2004; Philpott, 2006, 2007; Smock, 2002). In this literature
we find an implicit claim for controlling religious feelings through the
valve of appropriate peaceful theologies. In this regard, Amstutz (2003)
claims that ‘religion, when used properly, [is] an instrument of healing
and reconciliation’ (my emphasis). This explains why much of the reli-
gious peacebuilding literature is concerned with finding seeds for peace
and reconciliation in different theological teachings but is strongly chal-
lenged to find ways to implement those teachings in practice (Carter and
Smith, 2004, p. 279).
Forgiveness and restorative justice

The role of religion in the aftermath of atrocity has often been asso-
ciated with issues of forgiveness and reconciliation. There is a prolific
body of literature in the field of religious peacebuilding that aims to
find theological resources in different religions, particularly Abrahamic
traditions, which support forgiveness as an ideal value. However, there
is a difference between forgiving in the context of ordinary offences
and in the context of extraordinary events of extreme cruelty such as
a massacre, genocide or torture. The reality of everyday suffering as a
product of marginalisation and poverty affects people’s physical and
psychological welfare, but atrocity has particular effects on people’s
lives, mainly because it represents extreme cases of violation of peo-
ple’s dignity (Kaufmann et al., 2010). Atrocity challenges our cultural
norms for dealing with unbearable suffering (Card, 2002), including
our emotional norms that create the social expectation about when we
should forgive.
The issue of forgiveness and reconciliation has been central in sev-
eral religious arguments that respond to atrocity. From a Christian
perspective, Volf (2006, p. 214) claims that once emotions are healed
we are ready to release our painful memories:
We will not forget so as to be able to rejoice; we will rejoice and

therefore let those memories slip out of our minds! The reason for
our non-remembrance of wrongs will be the same as its cause: Our
minds will be rapt in the goodness of God and in the goodness of
God’s new world and the memories of wrongs will wither away like
plants without water.
Philpott (2007) considers that reconciliation and restoration of a right

relationship are the central contributions of religion to transitional jus-
tice. According to Philpott (2007, p. 17), religion brings to the language
of transitional justice the importance of ‘the confession and repentance
of perpetrators, the forgiveness of the victims, the empathetic acknowl-
edgement of suffering on the part of other citizens, and the overcoming
of enmity’. From this perspective, the re-establishment of the right
relationship between antagonistic parties as the preferred path towards
peace is a threshold principle of restorative justice that would intimately
be connected to religious peacebuilding.
Similarly, a volume edited by Hadley (2001) on ‘the spiritual roots
of restorative justice’ explores some of the contributions of different
religious traditions to the creation and implementation of restorative
justice in criminal justice. In this compilation, Huculak (2001) analy-
ses her experience with Sentencing Circles in parts of Canada, where
aboriginal offenders could find alternatives to imprisonment. These Cir-
cles are grounded on mediation principles of aboriginal peacemaking;
they focus on healing and are dependent upon voluntary participa-
tion. Huculak (2001, p. 218) claims that the spiritual element in the
Circles is difficult to describe with words: ‘the tears, the gestures, facial
expressions, and body language are all integral aspects of the experience.
This ‘magical’ dimension is found in remorse, apology, forgiveness,
and reconciliation. It is the spirituality found in healing.’ The ele-
ments addressed by Huculak might be crucial for re-establishing broken
boundaries at a local level; however, their application at a national or
international level might be more complicated.
Nevertheless, Amstutz (2005) considers that at national level the prin-
ciple of forgiveness can still be pursued. Amstutz claims that collective
forgiveness in societies in transition can lead to the consecration of
both national unity and the consolidation of democratic institutions.
However, there have been multiple critics of the notion of forgiveness

in transitional societies. The criticisms raise clashes in perceptions of the
private and public, and the secular and the religious.
According to Duff (2009, p. 100), forgiveness is an important element
for transitional societies, but its religious aspects should be removed
and instead rooted in ‘a firmly secular view of the world’. Kiss (2000,
p. 87) claims that forgiveness should be limited ‘to the personal and
private sphere and is irrelevant to the political and public’. The right
to forgive or even the question about the possibility of forgiving mass
atrocities is formulated under the reflection on the danger of cheap for-
giveness: ‘To forgive too quickly’ under the pressure of third parties, as
has been criticised in the South African case (Brudholm and Cushman,
2009, p. 126; Murphy, 2004). Lin (2005, p. 43) finds controvertible that
restorative justice applies a jurisprudence of forgiveness and reconcil-
iation that ‘abstracts discrete, local events into universally applicable
themes’.
Forgetting and forgiving imply an uneasy discussion when it comes
to past atrocities, because forgiveness cannot be considered a privileged
emotional reaction to atrocities and social suffering. Victims can be re-
victimised when they feel compelled to express feelings of forgiveness
that they do not have. In this sense, forgiveness is just one of the many
emotional responses that can occur after experiencing violence and even
after processes of truth and memory recovery have been carried out.
Further, there are other emotions and other religious emotions that can
contribute to peacebuilding when it is too challenging to forgive atroc-
ities that still occurr, as the study of the case of the massacre of Bojayá
demonstrates.
Religious emotions in everyday life

The literature on religious peacebuilding and restorative and transitional
justice has overemphasised the impact of the emotion of forgiveness;
this is due to a gap between theology and practice that comes from anal-
yses that give too much credit to theology and too little to the practice
of religious actors in the ground. It also focuses on the elite that has
access to such theological reflections and gives too much power to reli-
gious elites to ‘guide’ people into ‘the right constructs of the sacred’.
This critique has been raised by Millar (2012, p. 133), who claims that
the religious discourses of the elite usually do not reflect the beliefs of
‘the people on the ground’. In this regard, Brewer, Higgins and Teeney
(2010, p. 1026) explain how ‘occasionally, forms of popular religion,
working outside more conservative religious hierarchies, are better at

occupying intellectual spaces’. For instance, in Nicaragua:
Popular religion was particularly powerful nonetheless because it

deployed Catholic symbolism that the official church found hard to
suppress or limit. For example, Virgin Mary cults did not emphasize
Mary’s purity and passivity, representing her instead as a powerful
decisive figure, able to intervene directly in the lives of poor peas-
ants. In this respect they were institutions in which devotees of Mary
could engage in public celebrations of popular religion that were, in
effect, political spaces that the conservative church could not control.
A way to correct the ‘institutional or elitist’ bias in religious

peacebuilding literature is to include the analysis ‘from below’, includ-
ing (religious and lay) people and victims at the grassroots, and
particularly at the margins of society, as in the case of Bojayá.
Conclusion
There are two kinds of emotions that are negative for a peacebuilding
process; those that could give continuation to violence, such as anger,
humiliation or revenge, and those that could inspire a sense of fatalism
in victims, such as numbness, pessimism or intense sadness. Now, these
emotions are not religious, neither have they been produced in a reli-
gious context or through religious symbols. However, they have often
been framed in a religious narrative. For instance, Millar (2012, p. 137)
reports that victims in Sierra Leone explain their lack of agency in reli-
gious terms: ‘ah lef ma case fo God’ (I have left my case for God). Millar
explains about post-war Sierra Leone:
The purer form of religious faith, the turn to a more fatalistic concep-
tion of religion that I observed in Makeni, moves man away from the
centre of action, limits his agency in his own reality, and demands
that we rethink processes of postwar reconciliation.
(Millar, 2012, p. 138)
In the case of Sierra Leone, some religious beliefs would contribute to

enhancing the fatalist emotions of victims. In contrast, in some cases
in Colombia the phrase ‘yo se lo dejo a Dios’ (I have left my case for
God) is also present, but it can also be used to express that victims could
still work for justice, even if they would not see justice in their life,
or neither their children nor their grandchildren (missionary woman,

interview 19 April 2012). Therefore, similar religious notions can inspire
different emotional reactions. I argue that one of the strongest outcomes
of religious peacebuilding is the transformation of victims’ emotions.
In the following chapters I focus on how religious Afro-Colombian
traditions and the local Catholic Church support the transformation
of victims’ emotions through mechanisms of social memorialisation of
past atrocity. In this sense, transformation of victims’ emotions from
negative to positive emotions focuses on healing not only as a trans-
formational process but as a process of mourning in which negative
emotions continue, but instead of increasing melancholia they serve
the purpose of helping actions of resistance. One of the purposes of
the study of religious emotions in the context of peacebuilding is to
open venues of analysis that have been dominated until now by debates
on forgiveness and reconciliation, which are insufficient to observe the
strong influence of religion and emotions on human behaviour and par-
ticularly on overcoming atrocity. However, before following this line of
analysis, it is necessary to consider the socio-political context of the
conflict at a national and regional level in Colombia and the particu-
lar characteristics of the type of religious peacebuilding that has taken
place in the region of Chocó.
3
The Conflict in Colombia
and Chocó
Introduction
This chapter provides a historical contextualisation of the conflict in

Colombia and particularly in the region of Chocó, where the massacre of
Bojayá took place in 2002. The first section provides a description of the
analysis of the violence that has affected the country in the last 60 years
and the transitional justice mechanisms that have been implemented
since 2005, after the alleged demobilisation of the paramilitary army.
The second section presents a description and analysis of the conflict in
the region of Chocó, where the massacre of Bojayá took place. It explains
how the violation of territorial and ethnic rights has influenced the con-
flict in the region. Understanding the social and political characteristics
of the Colombian conflict permits to explain the challenges to a political
and social transition in the country.
A history of violence(s)
Multiple situations of violence have often overlapped in the history of

Colombia, making the Colombian conflict the longest contemporary
conflict in the Western hemisphere. The history of violence in Colombia
started even before its birth as an independent state; during its existence
as a Spanish colony, the indigenous population was decimated and the
exploitation of African slaves was a strong component of the economy
of the colonisers. Violence continued throughout the wars of indepen-
dence; later, the young country experienced nine civil wars from 1832
to 1902; these wars contributed to the definition of a two-party system
consisting of the Liberal party and the Conservative party.
On the one hand, liberals considered that the Catholic Church obeyed
a foreign power that could threaten the supremacy of the secular state.
42
The Conflict in Colombia and Chocó 43
They also defended freedom of thought and aimed for reduction of the
temporal power and the influence of the church, which was considered
the main obstacle for the political, social and economic modernisa-
tion of the country (De Roux, 2004). On the other hand, conservatives
had the political support of the Catholic Church, since they saw in the
church a source of stability in society.
A climate of intolerance spurred the civil war known as ‘La Violencia’,
from 1946 to 1953. The murder of the liberal presidential candidate
Jorge Eliecer Gaitán created violent unrest in urban areas. The intense
confrontations between conservatives and liberals found a fecund ter-
rain in the rural villages, where political affiliation was bonded by
blood and place of birth. Additionally, it motivated the persecution of
Protestants, who were identified as supporters of the Liberal party, and
sometimes as communists (Abel, 2004). The agreement that brought an
end to ‘La Violencia’ is known as ‘the National Front’ ((El Frente Nacional)
(1958–1974), which demanded a sharing of power between the two par-
ties each term. This agreement meant the exclusion of parties that were
alternative to the oligarchic elite and the banning of the communist
party.
The emergence of guerrilla groups in the 1960s was motivated by feel-
ings of inequality, exclusion and the inadequate distribution of land,
which have been chronic problems in Colombia. At the end of the
decade, inspired by Marxist, Maoist and post-Cuban revolution ideals,
the following guerrillas were created: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia – FARC-EP, the National Liberation Army ((Ejército de Liberación
Nacional – ELN), the Popular Army of Liberation (el Ejército de Liberación
Popular – EPL), the 19 April Movement (el Movimiento 19 de Abril –
M-19), the Indigenous Guerrilla Armed Movement (el grupo guerrillero
indígena Movimiento Armado Quintín Lame), the Workers’ Self-defence (la
Autodefensa Obrera – ADO) and their dissident groups (Pizarro, 2006).
The rise of these subversive movements led to the official approval of the
creation of self-defence citizens’ groups in 1965. This decision opened
the gate for the birth of organised auto-defence forces, later formed
as paramilitaries: extremist right-wing illegal groups. These laws were
suspended in 1989.
The paramilitaries claimed to be a self-defence force supported by a
social base of local stockbreeders, farmers, local politicians and emerald
traders that decided to take justice on their own right with the support
of the official army (Baron and Gutierrez, 2006). These were a product of
the Doctrine of National Security that was adopted across Latin America,
which legitimised repression of the Left by any means necessary. Accord-

ing to the anthropologist Garrard-Burnett (2011, p. 29), who researched
the Guatemalan case, the fiction that paramilitary groups were consti-
tuted by private citizens tired of the attack of the guerrillas served the
purpose of creating an ‘imaginary moral distance between the govern-
ment and illegal assassinations’ and contributed to a ‘general climate of
uncertainty and distrust’.
In Colombia, the paramilitaries soon found a comfortable position
in the thriving drug trade industry of the 1980s that exacerbated vio-
lence through the confrontation of the multiple drug cartels during the
infamous Pablo Escobar era. The paramilitaries united under the aus-
pices of the AUC and expanded their structure considerably between
1997 and 2004. The paramilitary army perpetrated many assassinations
in different regions of Colombia, particularly in the rural areas, inflict-
ing terror in order to constrict the possible support of civilians for the
subversive guerrillas (Human Rights Watch, 2001). In the cities they
attacked politicians, trade union members, NGO workers, human rights
defenders, religious leaders, students, teachers and other public figures
that could be considered a threat to the system. Their method to gain
control of the territory was through executions, torture, sexual enslave-
ment, disappearances and massacres, but they also pursued the creation
of networks of power with elites that had economic and political inter-
ests in their territories (Romero, 2007). Research conducted by Lopez
(2008, p. 8) revealed that between 1998 and 2001 there was a corre-
lation between the regions in which paramilitaries had become strong
actors ‘and the subsequent atypical situation and change in the political
map that started to appear during the local elections of 2000, then in
the elections for Congress in 2002, and again in the local elections of
2003’. Some observers argue that this situation, which is known in the
country as the para-política phenomenon, persists.
Additionally, the war against drugs positioned the Colombian con-
flict in the international scene, particularly strengthening the already
robust relations with the United States. According to Rojas (2006), the
relationship between Colombia and the United States has modified
the definition of the Colombian conflict, which has been labelled as
‘a war against communist guerrillas’ during the Cold War era; ‘a war
against drugs’ during the 1990s; and ‘a war against terrorists’ after 9/11.
It is precisely in this last period that the separation of the two wars
(against drugs and against subversion) was overcome, when in 2002 a
superposition of anti-drug war and anti-subversive war was established,
thanks to the help provided by the United States through the Plan
Colombia.4
The Plan Colombia was oriented towards the war against terrorist
drug-trafficker guerrillas, now called narco-guerillas (Rojas, 2006, p. 52).
The Colombian government was pressured to face the paramilitary prob-
lem in terms of its association to drug traffic as well. It is presumed
that 48% of the annual income of the FARC ($300 million) and 70%
of the annual income of the paramilitaries ($200 million) came from
business related to drug trade, and that the ELN is the armed actor least
involved in drug trade business due to ideological/religious motivations
(Bejarano, 2010). The input given by the Plan Colombia helped the exac-
erbation of the conflict, but the continuation of the conflict has also
been determined by the criminal structure supporting it, an extreme
political polarisation and the marginalisation of some sectors of society,
such as ethnic minorities, from the political arena. In terms of ethnic
exclusion, the violence has been aggravated in zones of black majority
population, as explained in the following chapter (Restrepo and Rojas,
2004).
Peace agreement attempts and the outbreak of violence

The FARC’s funds are gained through drug traffic, kidnapping of civil-
ians and extortion. In addition, they have been responsible for the
recruitment of minors, and together with other smaller guerrillas such
as the ELN, they have used high-impact weapons such as anti-personnel
mines and gas cylinder bombs. In this context, a negotiated solution
would be crucial in order to deter a guerrilla that does not show signs of
reduction.
In the 1980s, the government conducted peace agreements and
amnesties that allowed the demobilisation of several guerrilla armed
groups, except two of the most powerful groups, the FARC and the
ELN. In 1984, an agreement with the FARC allowed the creation of
the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica – UP), a political organisation
that had been set as part of the FARC’s political transition. However,
the killing of more than 2000 political leaders of the UP determined
the failure of the agreement. The agents of the genocide were death
squads linked to drug lords and paramilitaries, some of them supported
by state agents (Gomez-Suarez, 2007). During Pastrana’s government
(1998–2002), another attempt dialogue with the FARC took place.
Pastrana implemented demilitarised zones in which the peace dialogues
occurred; nevertheless, with the subsequent failure of the process, the
FARC used the area for its concentration, recruiting and training.
According to Pizarro (2006), the failure of the dialogues was due to

the fragmentation of the guerrillas, which impeded a centralised capac-
ity for dialogue; the obliteration of any serious attempt to combat the
paramilitaries; and the army’s lack of will for supporting the peace
process. Additionally, there was a constant exclusion of civil society
during the dialogues in El Caguán: ‘No recognized civil society peace
leaders ever served as negotiators, nor were they consulted with any
frequency by the Pastrana government’s high commissioners for peace’
(Isacson and Rojas, 2009, p. 25). The failure of Pastrana’s peace process
reflects the tension between two main proclivities in the Colombian
elite. On the one hand, there has been an attempt to conciliate the war
through peace agreements; on the other, there has been a pursuit of the
privatisation of war through paramilitary groups.
After the failure of this peace agreement, a stronger FARC retreated to
areas that they had traditionally controlled, such as the Middle Atrato
region in Chocó, as will be explained later in this chapter. A frustrated
population chose the charismatic and polarising Alvaro Uribe as pres-
ident (2002–2010) under the promise of a military victory over the
guerrillas. Some military actions by the FARC in 2002 allowed the trans-
formation of their image from plausible interlocutors in a peace dialogue
to terrorist monsters that needed to be exterminated. The massacre of
Bojayá in 2002 was used as part of this rhetorical war, as is explained in
Chapter 5. The emphasis of Uribe’s administration on anti-terrorist leg-
islation reformed the political scenario towards a war against ‘terrorist
threats’ and ‘terrorist attacks’ (Gomez, 2010, p. 7).
Uribe’s administration implemented a Democratic Security Policy,
which besides strengthening the army created a network of more than
one million civilian collaborators and informants who were paid to
provide information about the insurgents; ruled the creation of a semi-
trained peasant militia force whose members operated in their own
home communities; and granted the military a range of police pow-
ers (International Crisis Group, 2003). The Democratic Security Policy
sponsored by the Plan Colombia had the side effect of weakening
democracy through the persecution of human rights defenders, NGOs,
trade unions, teachers, students and political dissidents. During Uribe’s
government, the humanitarian tragedy of forced displacement increased
and the policy of body counting exacerbated extrajudicial executions.
Transitional justice
The other side of Uribe’s approach to the military solution of the con-
flict was his support to a transitional justice process that provided legal
guarantees for the reintegration of paramilitary ex-combatants.5 The

782 Law of 2002 was the initial mechanism to provide exceptional
procedures for illegal armed groups, such as amnesty and cessation of
procedure. The 975 Law of 2005 is a juridical complement of the afore-
mentioned law; according to this law, those reintegrated paramilitary
members who had committed atrocious crimes may pay imprisonment
up to 8 years. This law also promotes the rights of the victims through
the inclusion of the requirements of truth, in the free versions per-
formed by the postulated paramilitaries (El Congreso de Colombia,
2005). Despite its initial controversial restorative emphasis on forget-
ting and forgiving, the influence of civil society and the international
community introduced the need for truth and historical memory and
recognised victims’ rights as part of a transitional process. These claims
took form in the creation of the National Commission of Reparation and
Reconciliation (Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación – CNRR).
The reintegration of paramilitary actors has emphasised a legalistic
view of the transition, with little emphasis on a political or social transi-
tion, which has raised some criticism. Some observers have claimed that
the dominant language and mechanisms of transitional justice have
been used in a manipulative way as ‘a rhetorical tool in order to hide
impunity by the government and paramilitary leaders, but is also implic-
itly supported by the majority of civil society’ (Saffon and Uprimny,
2009, p. 29). Nevertheless, victims and human rights advocates have
not been passive actors; they have learnt to speak the language of
transitional justice as a mechanism to pursue the defence of their own
rights and struggled against its manipulative use by the elites (Diaz,
2007; Diaz and Gallon, 2010; Laplante and Theidon, 2006). Hundreds
of local grassroots initiatives of transitional justice from below are ded-
icated to denouncing present and past violence and defending victims’
rights to truth, justice, reparation and restoration of the land that had
been forcefully taken from them (Bouvier, 2009).
The conflict is still alive after the demobilisation of the paramilitaries,
partly due to the fact that it was an imperfect and incomplete pro-
cess that ignored the pro-systemic character of its structure that has
had a long and close relationship with the government (Saffon and
Uprimny, 2009). The fake demobilisations of paramilitary units were
also ignored; in some cases the numbers were inflated and in others
the recruited child soldiers were not included (El Tiempo, 2011). As a
result, Post-demobilisation Armed Groups (GAPDs – Grupos Armados
Post-desmobilización) have risen, often utilising the same political and
trade networks of their predecessors (Human Rights Watch, 2010; Rey

and Pineda, 2013).
The GAPDs are known in the country as Criminal Bands (Bandas (
Criminales – BACRIM); some of them are Rastrojos, Aguilas Negras, los
Urabeños and Nueva Generación (Rey and Pineda, 2013). They not only
represent a threat in terms of their criminal activity and networks
but have kept the usual targets and modus operandi of the paramili-
tary gangs as well: ‘controlling territory through threats and extortion,
engaging in drug trafficking and other criminal activity, and committing
widespread abuses against civilians’ (Human Rights Watch, 2010, p. 10).
The GAPDs perpetrate horrific crimes, including massacres, killings,
rapes and forced displacement and selective killings of human rights
defenders, trade unionists and displaced persons, including Afro-
Colombian victims of the AUC, who seek to recover their land and to
have justice and reparation (Human Rights Watch, 2010, p. 6). Accord-
ing to Rey and Pineda (2013), ‘from the humanitarian perspective, these
GAPDs have continued to cause many of the mass displacements in
recent months. Thus, during the FARC-EP’s two-month unilateral cease-
fire [during the renewed peace dialogues], GAPDs were responsible for
48% (2,548) of displacements.’ As in the case of the paramilitaries, the
efforts of the public security forces to eradicate these gangs have been
insufficient and the state has failed to protect the civilian population
from the abuses of the post-demobilised armies (Human Rights Watch,
2010, p. 20).
A shift in the politics of the conflict occurred with the election
of Juan Manuel Santos, who defined the national situation in terms
of conflict rather than war against narco-terrorist guerrillas. Another
important change was the Legal Framework for Peace, a package of
transitional justice mechanisms designed to facilitate negotiations, pre-
vent impunity for serious war-related crimes and provide guarantees to
victims, adopted by the Congress in 2012. The legal framework aimed to
prepare the path to the peace negotiation between the FARC guerrillas
and Juan Manuel Santos’ government that started in 2012.
The peace dialogues have established a six-point agenda, which
includes an agrarian development policy, political participation, drug
traffic, justice and the rights of victims, an end to the conflict, imple-
mentation and verification. In 2014, President Juan Manuel Santos
was re-elected under the promise of the continuation of these dia-
logues despite the polarised debates about possible post-conflict agen-
das by different political sectors. In the meantime, the debate over
justice versus peace has centred on the necessity of re-integrating

guerrilla members while respecting the international law and victims’
rights.
Victims’ law
Law 1448, or the Law of Victims and Reinstatement of Lands in
Colombia, approved in June 2011, aims to reinstate stolen and aban-
doned lands to internally displaced Colombians, as well as offer repara-
tion, including compensation to victims of violations of human rights
and international humanitarian law (Restrepo, 2011). The law provides
mechanisms for attention, assistance and reparations to victims of inter-
nal armed conflict. The purpose of this law is to guarantee that victims
of internal conflict could benefit from judicial, administrative, social,
economic, individual and collective procedures within a framework of
transitional justice. It seeks to provide access to the full enjoyment of the
victims’ rights to truth, justice, monetary and symbolic reparation, as
well as guaranteeing non-repetition (CNRR, 2011). According to Article
3 of Law 1448, victims are
Colombians who have individually or collectively suffered harm

from events that occurred from January 1, 1985, as result of the
internal armed conflict. This status will be extended to the spouse or
permanent companion, same-sex couples, family in the first degree
of consanguinity, first direct civilian link with the victim, when the
victim has been killed or is missing.
(Restrepo, 2011)
However, the restitution of land only covered deeds that occurred

since 1991. There is a big challenge in returning the lands to vic-
tims in a country in which internal displacement is one of the gravest
humanitarian crises of the world. It will require local and regional insti-
tutions to be cleansed from the infiltration of paramilitary mafias who
could impede the restitution, as has been warned by the Organisation
of Victims of State Crimes (Movimiento de Víctimas de Crímenes de
Estado - MOVICE) (Human Rights Watch, 2010). The lack of political
will and security is a challenge for those reclaiming their rights over
land. Authorities and victims’ advocates have faced bureaucratic mazes,
threats and killings. For instance, some victims in Chocó reported
during fieldwork that GAPD’s members extorted the money that they
received as reparation.
In general, victims’ associations recognise that this law is an impor-

tant step towards peace in terms of the acknowledgement of victims
who have been chronically denied in the history of the conflict; but
they also consider that there are many flaws in the law. The Law cre-
ated a Special Administrative Unit for Victim Support and Reparations
(known as Victims’ Unit) that despite its institutional strength has been
criticized for having an excessively complex bureaucracy. However, the
most serious challenge for the implementation of the Victims’ Law is
the ongoing conflict; it is inevitable that the Law will be incapable of
guaranteeing the right to ‘no repetition’ of violence to victims, the cor-
ruption resulting from liaisons between business and illegal groups, as
well as the absence of truth-seeking mechanisms. Victims’ associations
have also complained about the lack of inclusion in the elaboration
and discussion of the Law (Mesa Nacional de Victimas, 2011) only, in
2014, victims started to be included in the peace dialogues between the
guerrillas and the FARC in Havana.
Historical memory
The CNRR seeks to influence the construction of national peace in
general and the reparation and reconciliation processes in particular
by developing specific recommendations. However, the proper imple-
mentation of such recommendations depends upon other public insti-
tutions for their formal approval (Garcia-Godos et al., 2010, p. 499).
The Commission works on building social and political coalitions at a
national and international level that support and promote justice, truth,
reparation and reconciliation.
In Colombia, a truth commission has not been created yet, but the
Legal Framework for Peace opened the gate for its creation. In the mean-
time, Laws 975 (2005) and 1424 (2010) supported the construction and
uncovering of the historical memory of the conflict by providing a non-
judicial truth-seeking mechanism which benefits former illegal armed
actors that contribute to the clarification of the truth. In this context,
the GMH, and later the Historical Memory Centre, part of the CNRR,
was created.
Its objective is to elaborate and release a narrative about the

Colombian armed conflict in order to identify ‘the reasons for the
upsurge and evolution of illegal armed groups’, as well as the differ-
ent truths and memories of violence, with a differentiated approach
and a preference for the suppressed or silenced voice of its victims.
Moreover, the group proposes public policies in order to facilitate
the effective exercise of the rights to truth, justice, reparation and

guarantees for non-repetition.
(GMH-CNRR, 2011)
The GMH is an autonomous entity that represents the official attempt

to create a common narrative of the conflict. It has produced several
reports based on a case-study methodology. One of them is the report
on the massacre of Bojayá titled ‘Bojayá: La Guerra sin Límites’, which
will be commented on later in this chapter. The study of these cases
helps to draw an image of the scenario of violence in Colombia, includ-
ing the diversity of actors, regions and target groups. The methodology
implemented in the construction of these reports consists of revision of
archives, newspapers, analysis of the paramilitary’s free versions, among
other sources. However the most relevant aspect in their work with
victims has been the inclusion of their testimonies through memory
workshops with local communities. In these workshops members of
the GMH create an interactive group format where relationships are
formed among the participants. They include different forms of memo-
rialisation, such as journals, drawings, maps, songs, dances and theater
plays. Furthermore, the conditions of the workshops allow processes of
remembering and reflection, from the subjective experience to the col-
lective dimension (Riaño-Alcalá, 2008, p. 286). According to the GMH,
these workshops are developed with a simultaneous historical contex-
tualisation and participative work with marginalised groups of victims
with the purpose of enabling them as social agents of change in terms
of social construction of memory, truth and reconciliation (GMH-CNRR,
2008). For instance, the booklet on the work with specific communities
includes the use of indigenous and Afro-Colombian cultural represen-
tations as a cultural ‘imagination’ guide by local communities in the
construction of national reconciliation (Cabarcas, 2009). In addition
to the official publications by the GMH and other agencies, there has
been fertile scholarship on the topic of memory recovery in Colombia
that highlights the importance of memory for the construction of peace
and reconciliation (Jaramillo and et al., 2008; Orozco, 2005; Sanchez,
2008).
The GMH has registered and supported local grassroots initiatives of
social memorialisation across the country. The center has made them
accessible to regional, national and international audiences through
different media and virtual outlets. However, grassroots initiatives of
memorialisation are challenged by the continuous presence of official
armed groups, GAPDs and subversive guerrillas with little political will
to engage in processes of reconciliation. Another of the pitfalls of the

official memorialisation is a weak impact and reception of the reports in
the local communities. This can be related to the fact that victims have a
higher demand of economical reparations (45.5%) and truth (44%) than
of recognition in memory of their victimised relatives (10.4%), and only
5.1% want the perpetrators to ask for forgiveness (Rettberg, 2008). For
instance, in the case of Bojayá, none of the interviewed victims claimed
to have read the GMH’s report.
Social peace and reconciliation

The necessity of achieving a political peace agreement with the FARC
and the ELN guerrillas has been discussed in the Colombian public
arena; one of the main demands is to avoid some of the mistakes that
occurred in the paramilitary reintegration. For instance, it has been
claimed that it is necessary to incorporate guidelines for reaching a pos-
itive peace process that could allow reconciliation and avoid new cycles
of violence. In this sense, a social peace process (Brewer, 2010) needs to
be considered as well. This agenda calls for the involvement of civil soci-
ety and grassroots victims into mechanisms that facilitate overcoming
past offences and present inequalities.
The fragmented perception that Colombian citizens have of the con-
flict has been one of the main difficulties in achieving a social peace
process. The most intense period of the conflict marked by massacres
and displacements (1995–2005) mainly took place in distant rural areas,
and despite the official reports of more than six million victims in the
1985–2014 period, the polarised versions of the conflict have impeded
the creation of a collective memory of past atrocities. This has been
an impediment in reaching a consensus about a negotiated solution to
the conflict; as a consequence, an important sector of the population
continues supporting the military solution of the conflict and a right-
wing political project while others support the peace dialogues with the
guerrillas.
It is in this context that the study of regional cases acquires further
relevance. It provides a localised approach to understanding the con-
flict and the different impacts of the conflict on the country. In this
sense, the study of the region of Chocó is relevant for understanding
acts of local grassroots resistance in the middle of the conflict. The
region of Chocó has been one of the most affected by the conflict since
1996. In addition, the indigenous and Afro-Colombian population, who
are a majority in this region, have chronically suffered poverty and
marginalisation. For those reasons, many of these rural communities
have centred their efforts on the defence of their territory and their
ethnic and cultural rights, often with the support of the local church.
The conflict in Chocó
In contrast to other areas of Colombia, the region of Chocó had lived

in relative peace until the 1990s. Chocó is located on the Pacific coast
of Colombia; it covers an area of 46,530 sq. km and has 471,600
inhabitants. Chocó abuts Panama and the Caribbean Sea to the north;
Antioquia, Risaralda and Valle del Cauca to the south; and the Pacific
Ocean to the west (see Map 3.1). Of the population of the Pacific coast,
90% is Afro-Colombian, 6% is formed by indigenous tribes (Embera
Dóbida, Embera Chamí, Embera Katío, Eperara Siapidara, Wounaan,
Awa and Tule) and 4% is formed by the mestizo communities. The
Atrato River is the main connection between the communities and
floods are common in this region, where people have learnt to coexist
with the humid forest and the river.
The indigenous groups were the first settling in the Pacific; they occu-
pied the territory for at least a millennium. Later, the Afro-American
population settled through the movement of people during the con-
quest and the introduction of African slaves. The African population
reached its maximum territorial and demographic number after the end
of the 19th century (Escobar, 2008, p. 45). The presence of the black
population increased through marooning and later more communities
settled there after the abolition of slavery (1851–1852). They created
autonomous social groups on the riversides of the humid forests, where
the numerous rivers that cross the region define their rhythms of life.
They elaborated a strong sense of territoriality and interdependence
with nature. The strong bond of the black communities to their land
is shown in ritual practices such as ombligamiento, in which the umbili-
cal cord of the newborn is buried in the soil and then a tree is planted
on top in order to fixate the vital strength and make it suitable to live
there (Millan, 2009, p. 35).
The territory is very rich in terms of biodiversity and mineral resources
and it has a privileged position that allows communication with the
Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. Nevertheless, Chocó is the poorest
region of Colombia. The natural richness of the region has been con-
sidered a curse, due to a history of pillage that has left scarce options of
development for local communities. There has been a chronic absence
of public institutions that provide health and education, where most
of the population lacks satisfaction of their basic needs. In Chocó, 70%
54
Map 3.1 Location of Bojayá, Chocó, Colombia (Map by Jeff Levy, University of
Kentucky Gyula Pauer Center for Cartography and GIS)
of the population lives in poverty, in comparison to the national level

of 45%.
Towards the end of the 1970s, the FARC entered into the region.
At that moment, they were not a threat against the population since
the guerrillas did not attack them directly but attempted to introduce
their ideology to the peasant communities. Later on, the guerrillas also
started to impose punishments on those members of the community
that transgressed their norms. However, the overall presence of the guer-
rillas did not bring an immediate outburst of violence since there were
no members of the public forces that could cause armed confrontation
in the region.
The Pacific lowlands of Chocó were officially considered empty lands
and forestry reserve until 1991. These lands were officially recognised
as belonging to autonomous black communities, thanks to the ethnic
organisational work that started in the late 1970s. In the late 1970s, the
local church created Base Ecclesial Communities (Comunidad Eclesial de
Base – CEBs in Spanish) with a pastoral work that was specific to black
peasant communities. The work of the missionaries emphasised reading
the Bible a liberation perspective, which allowed people to start a process
of social mobilisation. In the words of Nevaldo Perea (2012, p. 47), one
of the first leaders of the black social organisation COCOMACIA:
On those reflections on the Bible, we became aware that it was nec-

essary to get organised in order to defend our rights as a forgotten
people that was buried deep in the bio-geographical Chocó, a land
that is so much sought after by the big national and international
capital.
Ethnic social movement, local church and the Law 70 of 1993

The black communities, ‘with the help of Catholic groups inspired by
liberation theology, began to delimit their territory and develop strate-
gies for natural resource use’ (Escobar, 2008, p. 53). The church also
promoted the inclusion of black history and culture in education and
in the social movement (Trevisi-Fuentes, 2008, p. 64). The main goal of
the black organisations was the titling of the lands inhabited by them,
and to do so they needed to be recognised as autonomous ethnic groups
with a common cultural identity.
A challenge to achieving this public representation of their collec-
tive identity was the lack of common narratives that linked the many
black communities to a common past, as African descendants, but also
the apparent lack of memories of slavery and narratives that defined
their relationship to the territory. This apparent absence was filled by a

disperse and discontinuous regime of memory that was still present in
the everyday language, music, kinship systems and rituals that reflected
their African heritage and marks of colonial times (Almario, 2002;
Losonczy, 1999; Restrepo, 2002). Thus, the process of re-construction
of ethnic identity was a work of recognition and transformation of
knowledge that was already present, although not articulated through
narrative. According to Restrepo, this reconstruction was not a passive
enterprise: ‘these people are not limited to reproducing in advance what
has been assigned to them by the “ethnic imaginary”. On the contrary,
the local populations have taken different positions in relation with
their ethnicization’ (Restrepo, 2002, p. 50).
The work of the local missionaries was crucial in highlighting the
ethnic component in the Afro-Colombian struggle for the official recog-
nition of their lands. Several workshops were conducted, some of them
led by Catholic groups, through numerous riverside communities work-
ing on the reconstruction of their collective memory as means and
ends for the elaboration of their identity (Hoffman, 2002, p. 119). The
organisational process promoted by the missionary teams led to an
increasing awareness of the ethnic component in their struggle. The
Apostolic Vicarage of Quibdó produced several booklets, such as the Lit-
eracy booklet of the peasant pastoral (Cartilla de Alfabetización de la Pastoral
Campesina), which was initially called Awake with you: reading our life
((Despertar con Ustedes. Leer Nuestra Vida) and was part of the first organi-
sational initiative of the Claretian missionaries and lay communities of
the Middle Atrato. There was a booklet called Reading our life (Leamos (
Nuestra Vida) and ACIA’s magazine El Atrateño (De la Torre and ACIA,
2000, p. 72).
These booklets were published in the early 1980s and promoted the
organisational efforts and the protection and defence of the natural
resources. The Vicarage also produced a booklet on the history of slav-
ery, and another one on black leaders. Some of these books and the
Bible were sold in the communities for a minimal price that was sub-
sidised by the missionary teams (missionary, interview, July 2012). Most
of the booklets produced by the Vicarage dealt with issues of ethnicity,
land and justice. The missionary teams led several workshops focused
on the reconstruction of the ethnic identity of the black communities
as a mechanism of strengthening the organisational work in the Mid-
dle Atrato. According to Restrepo (2002), something similar occurred
in the Alto Atrato (south Pacific coast). In an interview by Restrepo
with Father Alex Jimenez, activist of Organichar (Organisation of Black
Communities of El Charco) in El Charco, 21 November 1998, he talks

about his experience in one of the many cultural workshops that took
place in the black communities:
We began by telling them that here in America there were no blacks.

This got their attention because they did not know this part of his-
tory. We worked a lot on that part of history, of course. For many
people that was new, and some of them had a notion. There was
a tape cassette that crudely tells how the slaves were put in ships,
how they were thrown into the sea. This got the attention of peo-
ple, and they considered that horrible. Moreover, when one said, for
example, their last names: you, the Carabali, the Carabali is an eth-
nic group there; it is a tribe of Africa. The Lucumi are the descendants
of the [African] Lucumi. These are Africans last names. This got the
attention of the people.
(Restrepo, 2002, p. 96)
In the Middle Atrato, the territory was rhetorically constructed at the

centre of the identity, around which their unique economic, cultural,
social and religious practices revolved. According to Escobar (2008,
p. 54), ‘The experiences of the middle Atrato were important in other
respects, such as the development of the technology of territorial and
cultural workshops (talleres) that were to become ubiquitous throughout
the rivers and towns of the Pacific.’
The first organisational instruments developed in the black com-
munities were the local committees, established in 1986. These com-
mittees were the main authority of the communities; they managed
the social and economic activities oriented towards the use of natural
resources (De la Torre and ACIA, 2000). In 1987, the ACIA (Asociación
(
de Campesinos Integral del Atrato, later known as COCOMACIA) was
established. According to one of the past leaders of ACIA, the church
supported the organisation, acting as ‘advisers and companions, since
they accompanied us for everything: in training, in the formula-
tion of proposals to be presented to the government’ (Interview, July,
2012).
During the late 1980s, there was an increasing number of local organ-
isations and the ACIA had achieved the official demarcation of 600,000
hectares that, ‘although still not legally titled for the organisation, were
put under a special management plan based on the cultural practises of
the communities’ (Escobar, 2008, p. 53). This was a big step compared
to the governmental declaration in 1959 that the Pacific lowlands were
considered public empty lands. In 1988, the first board of directors of

the ACIA was established (Perea, 2012, p. 49); other similar organisa-
tions followed in subsequent years all over the Pacific coast (Escobar,
2008, p. 53). Several workshops were organised during this period of
time by the ACIA and the missionary teams.
The work led by the black social organisations opened the gate for
Law 70 (1991–1993). Law 70, in recognition of the rights of black
Colombians to collectively own and occupy their ancestral lands,
guarantees the following:
The right of collective property for black communities as well as

enshrining protection of their cultural practises and traditional uses
of natural resources and guaranteeing the economic and social devel-
opment of their communities. Under Law 70, these lands are to
be ‘inalienable, imprescriptible and non-attachable.’ Law 70 also
reinforces rights to education, health and political participation.
(McDougall, 2010)
Law 70 enhanced the opportunities and preferential rights of the black

community, together with the recognition of their identity; for that rea-
son it has been called a pacific agrarian reform that could finally provide
some reparation for the African descendants (Roux, 2010). The rights
over the territory were oriented not towards individuals but towards
communities with historical presence in the region: ‘Over the last
decade the Colombian Government has assigned collective land titles,
more than 5 million hectares, to Afro communities along the Pacific
Coast. A total of 157 communities have received collective land titles in
six departments of the country, benefiting more than 60,000 families’
(Velez, 2008, p. 1). This law is one of the most progressive regulations
concerning reparation and recognition of ethnic minorities, but it was
far to solve the problems in the region.
Violence and mega-projects

There have been several difficulties in the recognition of the land titles
after Law 70, but the biggest problem of all has been the incursion of
violence in the zone. Some analysts have called these problems ‘the per-
verted or unwanted consequences of Law 70’ (Almario, 2002; Oslender,
2008; Wouters, 2001a). According to Wouters (2001b, p. 511):
The new legislation not only became a tool for ethnic empowerment,
but it also generated new territorial conflicts. Key for the escala-
tion of this conflict in the Chocó has been the lack of political
will and institutional capacity of the state and the official secu-
rity forces to ensure and protect the territorial rights of the black
communities.
Chronic conditions of poverty in Chocó could be considered a form

of structural violence, but a much more direct form of violence was
still about to happen. The beginnings of the implementation of Law
70 coincided with the incursion of the paramilitaries in 1996.
Violence emerged in the region when the presence of paramilitaries
and the Colombian army became stronger. They tried to justify their
presence with the argument of winning back the territory from the guer-
rillas that had occupied the zone since the 1980s. An important military
action called ‘the Genesis Operation’ took place in 1997 in the north
of the Pacific coast. During this operation the Colombian army was
working together with paramilitary forces of the Peasant Self-Defence
of Cordoba and Urabá ((Bloque Chocó de las Autodefensas Campesinas
de Córdoba y Urabá – ACCU) (Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz,
2011). Many human rights violations were committed during the oper-
ation, and religious and social leaders were targeted (Wouters, 2001b,
p. 506). As a result, there were 86 victims of murder, disappearance
and torture, but also the displacement of thousands more. In addi-
tion, attacks that involved civilians increased by 30% during the 1990s
(Almario, 2002, p. 655). Attacks against the civilian population have
generated what Oslender (2002) calls ‘geographies of terror’: these are
territories without people and people without territories. The processes
of de-territorialisation are mediated by feelings of terror embedded in
experiences of atrocity.
After a displacement, peasants’ lands are often used by multinational
and national companies interested in the extraction of timber, min-
ing or large-scale cultivation, particularly of oil palm trees, and for
the harvest of tropical plants and animals that could serve the mod-
ern biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. There is a connection
between the increasing violence through mechanisms of terror and
the capitalist interests in the region. One of the mega-projects pro-
posed for the region is the Mesoamerican Integration and Development
Project that aims to integrate Mexico, Central America, Colombia and
the Dominican Republic through the creation of large infrastructure
projects such as highways, air and sea ports, and electric and telecom-
munications grids. There are other ambitious initiatives for the local
infrastructural development, such as the Plaidecop, Plan Cólera, Corpes
de Occidente, Plan Holanda and Plan Pacífico, among others (Bello et al.,
2008; Florez and Millan, 2007; Sanchez, 2004, p. 743). These projects
threaten to destroy not only the environment and the culture of the
black communities but their processes of organisation in defence of their
territorial rights as well.
According to Leyner Palacios, a victims’ leader from Bojayá:
Companies have associated themselves with the armed actors in

order to kill the peasants, both FARC and the paramilitary, when-
ever one of these actors is in control of the territory they have
done extortions to the company in turn, mining companies, or any
other one. They impose ‘vaccines’ [extortions] and they reach agree-
ments, but all those agreements only make it easier for our people to
suffer.
(Speech at WOLA, 2014)
The government has also given land titles to mining companies, ignor-
ing the rights of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people over the
territory. The companies’ exploitation of the resources and the mega-
projects does not comply with Law 70, which demands Afro-Colombian
peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consultation and consent. The
alleged progress carried out by these projects does not reflect a benefit
for the local communities and it deeply affects the surrounding environ-
ment. Since Article 63 of Law 70 does not allow the land to be alienable,
black communities became an obstacle for these plans of ‘develop-
ment’. The strategies used by the companies behind these projects, and
particularly those in charge of the African oil palm farming, are to
increase division inside the communities that share collective titling,
establishing illegal contracts of land acquisition with members of the
communities (Bello et al., 2008, p. 22). In some cases, the paramilitary
groups have forced the displacement of Afro-Colombian and indigenous
communities in order to facilitate the implementation of projects, and
in other cases, they have forced communities to cooperate with mega-
projects (Florez and Millan, 2007, p. 16). Chocó had the highest per
capita rate of displacement in the country in 2013 (CODHES, 2014).
Conclusions
Despite the efforts to enact transitional justice mechanisms, the rein-

tegration of the right-wing paramilitary groups and the peace dia-
logues with the leftist guerrillas, the violent conflict continues in
Colombia. There are GAPDs using the same schemes and networks of
the paramilitaries. Law oriented towards the restitution and reparation
of victims has had the non-intended consequence of targeting defenders

of victims’ rights, while the outcomes in terms of reparation have been
very scarce. Less than 1.2% of the cases reported by the demobilised
paramilitaries have granted reparation to victims (Herrera, 2012).
The conflict in Chocó is mainly defined by the interests in the land
and its strategic geographical location. Armed actors have used strate-
gies of terror, such as the confrontation that led to the massacre that
occurred in Bojayá, in order to gain control over the territory and to
provoke the displacement of communities. According to WOLA (2014b):
Between 1997 and 2013, more than 40 percent of the population

of Chocó has been displaced (more than 170,000 persons); more
than 2,586 death threats have been made and there have been more
than 777 disappearances. In 2013 there were 10 mass displacements,
among which 82 percent were Afro-Colombians and a 13 percent
indigenous. These groups are displaced at disproportionate rates and
their social structures are shattered. There have been 32 incidents
of armed combat this year. The return of the rightful owners to their
lands has been carried out without ideal security conditions and with-
out integral assistance mechanisms to make those returns permanent.
Leaders continue to be threatened by illegal groups.
The systematic attack against black communities, which according to

the Geneva Convention are particularly protected as a vulnerable civil
population, raises the question about a possible ethnocide (cultural
annihilation) and genocide in the region (Almario, 2002; Oslender,
2002). In this context, the local Afro-Colombian and indigenous com-
munities have engaged in actions of peaceful resistance and struggle for
the recognition of their rights as ethnic groups and collective victims.
The support of the Catholic Church and particularly of grassroots mis-
sionary teams inspired by liberation theology has been central for many
of these actions at different stages of the conflict in the region, as is
explained in the next chapter.
4
Religious Peacebuilding in Chocó
Introduction
This chapter intends to explore how religion contributes to

peacebuilding at the local and grassroots level in Chocó. It analyses the
social and historical configurations that lay behind the actions of the
Diocese of Quibdó, which allowed them to become active promoters of
peace in the region. Religious peacebuilding is understood here as the
(intellectual, political, social or economic) processes by which religion
contributes to achieving peace during or after a conflict.6 The chapter
starts with a brief reflection on religious peacebuilding and the influence
of the Catholic Church in peacebuilding in Colombia. Then, it explains
the influence of liberation theology on the local church. It continues
with the analysis of the Diocese of Quibdó’s different types of strate-
gies of peacebuilding as a response to different stages of violence in the
region, from the defence of ethnic territorial rights to human rights.
Religious peacebuilding in Colombia
Religious peacebuilding has often been defined by its role in pro-

moting reconciliation, forgiveness of past atrocities and inter-religious
dialogue between antagonistic parties (Appleby, 2000; Carter and Smith,
2004; Hertog, 2010; Johnston, 2004; Lederach, 2010; Volf, 2006). These
actions often have occurred after a peace agreement has been signed, but
they can also be conducive to an agreement, as in the case of Northern
Ireland, where independent religious actors provided backchannels for
dialogue between antagonist parties in conflict (Brewer et al., 2011). Reli-
gion has been observed as a contributing factor to liberal peacebuilding
processes occurring at the top levels of negotiation and at different
62
Religious Peacebuilding in Chocó 63
levels in society (top level, middle range and the grassroots), as Lederach
(1997, p. 39) explains in his pyramidal scheme in Building peace.
In Colombia, at least 30,000 peace initiatives have been documented
(Esquivia and Gerlach, 2009, p. 295). Among them, the Catholic Church
has been the single largest organisational contributor to peace actions
in the last 30 years, both from below and from within the peace
projects (Lederach, 2010, p. 30). There is also an increasing participa-
tion of Protestant Evangelical churches in peace initiatives; however,
they are not covered in this book because their participation is not
representative in the region of Chocó.7 Catholic institutions, such as
the Catholic Peacebuilding Network (CPN), Catholic Relief Services
and the Colombian Bishops’ Social Pastoral National Secretary/Caritas
Colombiana (SNPS) promote spaces for dialogue and discussion of peace
issues at the top level (Garvey, 2012). The Catholic Church also influ-
ences organisations that conduct grassroots activities and those that
seek to participate directly in decision-making arenas (Garcia, 2006).
Grassroots organisations working for peace and the defence of human
rights face multiple challenges not only in terms of constant threats and
risks but also because their work is limited by Article 3 of Law 1421 from
2010, which bans any kind of dialogue with illegal armed groups unless
expressly authorised by the national government.
The position of the church has been on the side of peace negotiations
rather than military victory, supporting the humanitarian exchange and
release of prisoners and kidnapped civilians and social justice as a condi-
tion for peace. The church also claims that the redistribution of land for
peasants is a crucial element for the achievement of peace. The active
role of the Catholic Church in the dialogues and other local initiatives
for peace has been affected by the murder of 63 members of the clergy,
including an archbishop and a bishop, between 1984 and 2005 (Arias
and Gonzalez, 2006). The church has had a significant part in differ-
ent stages of several attempts of peace talks and the negotiation of the
reintegration of the paramilitaries, as well as in dialogues with the FARC
guerrillas and the ELN.
The church has engaged in activities of accompaniment to victims
and research of the conflict. The most relevant Catholic think tank in
the country is the Jesuit Centre for Investigation and Popular Educa-
tion (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, r CINEP). In addition,
the church has collected a database on forced displacement (Sistema de
Información sobre el Desplazamiento Forzado por la Violencia, RUT).8 Also,
the church has developed ecumenical projects to support the recovery
of social memory (Mejia, 2010), and they have produced the programme
on recovery of historical memory, called ‘Testimony, Truth and Recon-

ciliation’ (Testimonio, Verdad y Reconciliación – TEVERE), which is present
in 35 jurisdictions in Colombia (Henao, 2009, p. 179).
In addition, some religious communities, such as the Jesuits in
Magdalena and the Claretians in the Pacific coast, have developed
important research on the conflict and several projects aimed towards
development and peacebuilding at the grassroots level. Their work of
religious peacebuilding supports grassroots communities’ civil resistance
to armed actors ‘and the development of communitarian projects to
address some of the social consequences of the protracted violence’
(Garcia, 2006, p. 6). One of the most emblematic spaces of interven-
tion of the church at the grassroots has been in Chocó. In this region
the accompaniment of the church to the Afro-Colombian and indige-
nous population has led to a strong movement of defence of territorial,
ethnic and human rights, combined with a serious preoccupation for
the development of the region. In the case of the Pacific region of
Colombia, the Diocese of Quibdó, which received the national peace
prize in 2005, has been the main sponsor of the Afro-Colombian com-
munities and indigenous interests and projects in the defence of human
rights, cultural strengthening, grassroots organisation and humanitarian
intervention.
This chapter focuses on the role of religious peacebuilding at a
grassroots level in Chocó. One of the particular characteristics of
religious organisations, which makes them appropriate for leading
peacebuilding initiatives, is their closeness with victim grassroots groups
while influencing policy and decision-makers through national and
transnational networks (Bush, 2007; Gerstbauer, 2010). In the case of the
Diocese of Quibdó in Colombia, this closeness was enhanced by a theo-
logical vision of acompañamiento (accompaniment),9 which encouraged
a close relationship with the poor. This relation allowed the transla-
tion of private concerns of black and indigenous communities to the
public scene through acts of public denunciation of violence and social
memorialisation of past atrocities.
The influence of liberation theology in the Diocese

of Quibdó
In Latin America, as in other cases around the globe, religion has had
an ambivalent role in influencing both violence and peace; for instance,
even before the colonisation by Europeans, religion supported the estab-
lishment of the Inca and Azteca empires in a violent fashion. The
Jesuit Joseph Comblin (2006, p. 170) describes the ambivalent role

of the Catholic Church in his theological reflection on the theme of
reconciliation in Latin American theology:
The Church was involved in conquest – on the side of the conquerors

most times, but also, on the side of the conquered, even though
always as a vanquished minority, defeated, and never predominant
at the institutional level. In this reconciliation the Church will have
to bear an enormous part of the culpability, to make a profound act of
repentance and ask pardon for all the support which it gave to struc-
tural injustices and circumstances. After this it will have to pledge
itself to dismantle everything which up to the present day has con-
tributed to its commitment to the apparatus of domination. It will
have to examine itself profoundly, and in the light of Pauline theol-
ogy, discern what there was in itself to lead to such a compounding
of sin . . . Something in the structure of the Church was linked with
the apparatus of oppression, and it was not the individuals.
According to Comblin, the role of Christianity in promoting reconcil-

iation in Latin America is not only about bringing antagonistic parties
together but about reconciling the church with its own people, whose
marginalisation and exclusion it has justified. This perspective, which
is rooted in liberation theology, has influenced some sectors of the
Catholic Church working at the grassroots level in Colombia.
Liberation theology is a historical result of the transformation of
the church when Pope John XXIII called for the Vatican Council
II (Berryman, 1987; Lehmann, 1996). The Council, called the aggiorna-
mento (bringing up to date) by Pope John XXIII, reinforced changes in
the pastoral work towards a stronger commitment to the lived reality of
people. In this vein, Pope Paul VI advised that ‘it is clear that men [sic]
c
are not deterred by the Christian message from building up the world, or
impelled to neglect the welfare of their fellows, but that they are rather
more stringently bound to do these very things’ (GS, 34). The changes in
the church were reinforced by the subsequent Latin American Episcopal
conferences: Medellín (1968), Puebla (1979) and Santo Domingo (1992).
In these conferences the church emphasised the necessity to ‘put spe-
cial effort, according to the gospel and our mission in promoting justice
and defending the dignity and the rights of the human person’ (Puebla,
706). The promotion of social justice implicated a strong critique of the
neoliberal model that principally affected the poor (SD, 181). In this
sense, the preferential option for the poor meant the study, critical
analysis and action on the causes that created the ‘real conditions of
poverty’ (Castaño, 2012a [2001], p. 438).
For many Catholics, interacting with reality led to observing and deal-
ing with an unjust society, which presented them with the fundamental
moral choice of promoting social justice. In this sense, the preferential
option for the poor defended in liberation theology, allowed Catholics to
identify with the marginalised poor and the oppressed victims, and sup-
ported claims for collective change in pursuit of justice (Berryman, 1987;
Levine, 2012). In this context, the acompañamiento (accompaniment) of
the church, as a permanent presence among the poor and marginalised
victims, influenced missionaries’ responses to violence.
The implications of opting for the poor were not accepted by all sec-
tors, which generated different trends in the Catholic Church (Bidegain,
2004). On one side, there were revolutionary priests such as Camilo
Torres (Levine, 2012, pp. 171–176) and the Golconda group, and
on the other side there were very conservative ecclesial leaders that
supported the authority of the government. In the case of the church
in Chocó, the teachings of the Vatican Council II and liberation theol-
ogy had a fruitful non-violent response, thanks to the disposition of the
missionary teams and their bishop.
Bishop Jorge Ivan Castaño Rubio, who took office in 1983 as vicar
and then as bishop of the Diocese of Quibdó, played a fundamental role
in supporting the implementation of many of the changes proposed
in the Vatican Council II and the Latin American ecclesiastical confer-
ences. He promoted a ‘preferential option for the poor’ in the work of
evangelisation, and he was also open to promoting the participation of
all members of the local church, which included lay men and women,
priests and religious men and women, in planning a pastoral agenda.10
According to Father Gonzalo de la Torre:11
In the Annual Assemblies at the Diocese of Quibdó, current social

problems and possible solution were discussed. This was some kind
of internal revolution because that meant that they were able to hear
other voices and to take into account different positions. In that way,
there was a connection with the people; their needs were known; and
it was accepted that the marginalised people could make demands to
the church. This church tries to live the desire of social inclusion
manifested by Jesus in his Gospel.
The incorporation of a preferential option for the poor meant an increas-

ing understanding and critique of the reality of the indigenous and
Afro-Colombian communities, who were traditionally marginalised and

forced to live in the gravest poverty in the country. In addition, the work
of acompañamiento allowed the missionaries to represent the interests
and needs of grassroots population.
However, according to Garrard-Burnett (2011, p. 130), acom-
pañamiento consists of a milder version of early liberation theology
methodology:
Many of the Latin American bishops began to quietly withdraw their

support of liberation theology in favour of a more jejune position
known as acompañamiento. Here, the Church no longer placed itself
in the vanguard of reform but rather stepped back to ‘accompany’
the poor and oppressed in their daily struggles.
This transformation in liberation theology is explained by the current

bishop of the Diocese of Quibdó, Bishop Juan Carlos Barreto:
We are walking today towards a depuration and certainly there are

many positive elements [in liberation theology] that have been inte-
grated in the Pacific region, for instance, that perspective helped to
confront these problems [the conflict]. Perhaps in other places, the
absence of emphasis on social problems makes Christians marginal
to their socio-political commitment. However, we can say that lib-
eration theology is not the only source of inspiration for the social
commitment of the Church. It also exists in the Gospel and in other
perspectives as well.
In any case, the ethos and methodology of liberation theology that

emphasised working with the local grassroots communities influenced
the transition of the diocese from their defence of ethnic rights to
the defence of human rights. This transformation was a result of the
demands of their work with the local communities.
From ethnic rights to human rights defence
The armed actors FARC, ELN and Guevarista guerrillas were continu-
ously present in the region of the Middle Atrato from the 1970s, but
their presence did not directly affect the welfare of the local commu-
nities until 1996, when paramilitary troops entered the Middle Atrato
and later occupied most of the territory. Paramilitary troops used to
justify their actions of terror by labelling civilians as ‘guerrillas in civilian
clothes’, which increased the risks and the division in the communities.
A missionary who worked in the region during the 1980s and 1990s
remembers the first raid of the paramilitary troops in his town:
We were practising a play for Sunday’s gospel. It was a Saturday.

And then the ‘paras’ showed up, and there was no play, nothing
at all, because on the first night they killed a few boys . . . When the
‘paras’ arrived, people thought that we were going to leave. We never
doubted about staying, the Sisters and us, and that impacted the
community.
(Interview, July 2012)
The local missionaries had accompanied the communities in the cre-

ation of ethnic organisations, as was explained in the previous chapter,
but they had to create new paths of accompaniment and support the
communities once the violence started. The physical presence of the reli-
gious missionaries provided not only spiritual support but also visibility
to the sufferings of the community, thanks to their networks.
The paramilitary actions created a humanitarian crisis that affected
the work of the ethnic organisations in the defence of their territorial
rights. Law 70 aimed to protect the territory by making the communi-
ties’ rights over the land imprescriptible, inalienable and un-attachable,
but ‘the armed groups exercised a territorial, administrative – political
and economic control de facto’ (Berube, 2004, p. 731). After the intrusion
of paramilitary troops in 1996, the priorities were set around resisting
the armed conflict. A lay man, working with the missionary teams and
COCOMACIA for several years, explained in this interview the shift in
their work of accompaniment to the communities:
From the end of 1996, the problems of the communities revolved

around the armed conflict; for instance, they say ‘see they have raped
my daughter, killed my brother, they took this person, this other per-
son is disappeared’; then the situation is more complex. In that sense,
we played a role by accompanying the community . . . so the armed
actors would at least respect people’s life. Something else we had
to take care of was transportation; it was almost like doing charity,
because the little things that could be acquired in the communities
were there because we had taken them there. We had to implement
community shops, first-aid kits, threshing machines and other things
in order to help people to subsist the blockade imposed by the armed
actors.
Since then, the diocese developed more sophisticated strategies in order

to resist violence and manage conflict. For instance, in 1997 the diocese
organised an inter-institutional commission that comprised the Adviser
on Human Rights of the Presidency Office, the National General Attor-
ney, the Office of the High Commissioner for the United Nations for
Human Rights, and national and international NGOs concerned with
human rights crises. This initiative was censored by the paramilitary,
which threatened the lives of the members of the commission.
The paramilitary attacks against civilians were systematic and counted
on the support of members of the official army. For those reasons,
the social and religious leaders initially interpreted the conflict as an
attempt by the paramilitary and the army ‘to take the fish’s water away’
by killing and threatening rural communities, which had organised
local ethnic social movements and therefore could seem to be potential
supporters of the guerrillas.
The accompaniment of the church aimed to strengthen the neutral
character of the communities. More decisively, the local church felt
the necessity of implementing tools for reducing the effects of vio-
lence on civilians. For example, in the Pastoral Diocesan Assembly in
Carmen de Atrato in 1998, Bishop Castaño explained the necessity of
transformation of their pastoral strategies in order to respond to such a
conflict:
The days we are living are not easy at all. In previous Assemblies
we discussed the complex situation in Chocó but we have become
overwhelmed by generalised violence, which under diverse shapes
and masks, has got inside every institution and corner of the social
order of our region, of our people. I must confess, for example, that
we are experiencing pain, sadness, deep concern, and total impotence
in some of our evangelising groups that are facing acts that are clearly
violating human dignity and show total disrespect for life. These acts
leave us with big questions about what we have done so far, and
what we should do, from the Gospel perspective, in order to radically
change this atmosphere of death into new realities of peace and life
for everyone.
(Castaño, [1998] 2012c, pp. 526–527)
During this period, there were some victims among the religious organ-
isations. According to Parra, ‘those deaths hurt, but it hurts more those
800 or 1000 dead peasants in the Atrato since 1997’ (Lopez, 2005). Thus
their memory has been incorporated in a larger narrative of the victims
(lay and religious) of the conflict in Chocó. Miguel Angel Quiroga

(25) was a Marianist missionary of the parish of Lloró. He had started
working there in January 1998 and was murdered in September by
paramilitaries in a checkpoint on the Atrato River. Jorge Luis Mazo
(32) was priest of Bellavista and he was murdered by paramilitaries in
the Atrato River, together with the lay missionary Iñigo Egiluz Tellería
(24), a voluntary worker from the NGO Paz y Tercer Mundo (Peace and
Third World) on 18 November 1999. Yolanda Cerón (43) was a reli-
gious missionary woman murdered in 2000 by paramilitary members.
She was initially the coordinator of the Afro-American Pastoral Teams
of the Apostolic Vicarage of Tumaco. She was also the representative
of the Permanent Municipal Commission of Tumaco for the develop-
ment of the Transitory Article 55 of the National Constitution, which
gave Afro-Colombians collective rights to territory and which later led
to the creation of Law 70 in 1993. Yolanda, while the director of the
Social Pastoral Office of the Diocese of Tumaco, denounced many of the
crimes committed against the communities by the paramilitary groups
in coalition with the official armed forces and with the support of local
agribusinessmen (Giraldo, 2011).
In previous years, the diocese had insisted on avoiding charity
work with the communities and instead supported projects of self-
development. The joint work of the missionary teams and the ethnic
organisations COCOMACIA and OREWA12 helped to establish some
strategic projects that could help to reduce the humanitarian crises and
the displacement of the communities. One of these actions was the com-
munity boat called Arca de Noé (Noah’s Arc). This project consisted of
managing and supplying local community shops and transporting the
products of the peasants to Quibdó, Turbo and Cartagena. This initiative
was supported by the German NGO Misereor.
Another important strategy implemented in order to counter the
displacement of population in the riverside communities was the cre-
ation of Humanitarian and Community centres in Buchadó, Tagachí, la
Loma, Opogadó and Isla de los Rojas. This initiative was supported by
COCOMACIA, the diocese, PCS (Project Counselling Service) and the
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). The humanitar-
ian and communitarian centres were created across riverside villages in
order to receive displaced people who were fleeing or displaced peo-
ple who were in the first stage of return. For instance, in 2000 and
2001 more than 4000 peasants from Alto Baudó and other commu-
nities arrived in Quibdó due to threats from paramilitaries (Caicedo
et al., 2006, p. 22). The centres received the displaced population
until the highest risk had passed and they were able to get human-
itarian help. Their purpose was to avoid a potential humanitarian
crisis that could result from the arrival of large numbers of dis-
placed communities in cities such as Quibdó, Turbo and other urban
municipalities.
During this period, the Interethnic Solidarity Chocó Forum (Foro
Interetnico Solidaridad Chocó – FISCH) was created, which later supported
the creation of the Regional Peace Agenda in 2005 ‘by the communities,
organisations and for the communities and organisations’. The Forum
is a space of coordination and conciliation, dialogue and discussion for
ethnic and social organisations in Chocó. Its work has been supported
and advised by the Diocese of Istmina-Tadó, the Diocese of Apartadó
and the Diocese of Quibdó.
Pastoral dialogues
The Diocese of Quibdó has engaged in dialogues with different actors
that are involved in the conflict at a social, economic and armed level
(Hernandez, 2012). It has created opportunities for dialogue with and
between international funders, government agencies and ethnic organ-
isations. However, during the height of the conflict the dialogues that
needed more attention were with armed actors. According to Jesus Parra,
previous director of the Social Pastoral Office of the Diocese of Quibdó,
the dialogues constituted tools for protecting civilians’ lives by means
of reaching a common understanding and compromise from a Gospel
perspective. In an interview with Hernandez (2012, p. 320), Jesus Parra,
previous director of the Social Pastoral Office, explained his experience
of pastoral dialogues:
[Bp. Jorge Ivan Castaño] said: ‘if in order to save a person, to save a
community, to prevent a massacre, to prevent a displacement, which
means to defend life, I have to dialogue with the devil, I go to the
devil and dialogue with him’. Then for the Diocese of Quibdó this is
very clear, and when I say dialogue I mean to go and talk to them,
intervene, mediate, whatever you want to call it, but well, that is
what the exercise is about.
(Father Jesus Albeiro Parra Solis. Interviewed
by Hernandez, August 2010)
There was anecdotal evidence found during fieldwork of the impor-

tance of pastoral dialogues for the community. These dialogues did not
take place in religious spaces; churches and community meetings were
excluded from the dialogues since the armed actors were not welcome
in churches as long as they were carrying guns. The dialogues between
delegates of the diocese and the leader of the armed group occurred
in special settings after the diocese and the ethnic organisations had
reached an agreement on the main points to be discussed. The dialogues
kept a low profile and they were done in the name of the diocese, not of
a single person. They were held between representatives of the church,
organisations, communities and the leader of the armed group that was
generating the attacks against the civilian population at the moment.
However, religious people would not negotiate extortions over kidnap-
pings committed by the armed actors, following the principle that ‘life
is not negotiable’ (Hernandez, 2012, p. 324).
There were several outcomes of the dialogues: first, they helped to
strengthen the accompaniment of communities and reduce their feel-
ing of isolation; second, the dialogues helped to reduce the effects of
violence in the zone, by finishing a blockade of a community, releas-
ing civilians and recovering victims’ corpses; And third, the dialogues
brought together the communities, ethnic organisations and the mis-
sionary teams, since they relied on the information provided by the
communities in order to develop the dialogues. For instance, once they
had accumulated enough information about the actions of the armed
actors, they would contact them to reduce the impact of their acts of vio-
lence by releasing captured civilians or intervening for the suspension
of extortions. Mediation occurred with the help of community leaders
and ethnic organisations. People who worked in the ethnic organisa-
tions had a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and they
worked very close together with a common purpose that was shared by
the diocese. In the words of one of the missionary women, ‘we used to
work together as one’.
Pastoral dialogues are still considered controversial by the govern-
ment, even if the government has asked the diocese to mediate in the
liberation of kidnapped policemen (Hernandez, 2012, p. 341). Dialogues
with armed actors have been politically constrained, but religious lead-
ers still consider them to be part of their pastoral work, in the sense
that they contribute to an atmosphere of peace and justice and rein-
force their option for life.13 In his research on Catholic peacebuilding
in Colombia, Lederach (2010, p. 52) argues that pastoral dialogues are
a trademark of the work of the Catholic Church in several regions of
Colombia: ‘even when politically restricted, religious leaders encounter
the enemy as a pastoral requirement. This was particularly true in
Colombia, where priests and bishops alike trumped the political tactic
of isolation with the pastoral obligation of encounter and relationship.’

However, this is still a sensitive topic for some of the missionaries in the
region:
We do not need to ask permission for doing what the Gospel says;
we do not need to ask permission for doing justice. The principle
that we use is to help people in need, and to do it keeping a low
profile, do not make noise, do not search for means when you are
not supposed to. Do your work in silence and God will reward you.
Then we do a peace work that is always hidden. You do not imag-
ine what missionaries need to do in order to keep hope in those
communities.
(Missionary man, Interview, April 2012)
Pastoral dialogues require a high degree of cooperation and precaution,

since this kind of mediation often exposes religious actors and social
leaders to risk while trying to build less violent situations for the com-
munities (Hernandez, 2012, p. 345). Some of these precautions included
denouncing human rights abuses in the name of the entire diocese, not
of an individual; using colourful boats in order to be easily recognised
while travelling through the rivers; ensuring that participants in the dia-
logues are recognised leaders of the community, organisations, diocese
and high ranks of the armed actors; and ensuring accompaniment by
national and international organisations such as the UNHCHR, SweFOR
(Swedish Fellowship for Reconciliation) and CPS (Project Counselling
Service), among others. Part of the mechanism used in order to prevent
risk was the close work between missionary people and local leaders.
According to Father Sterlin Londoño:
A very concrete moment was in 2000, they had killed two priests and
a volunteer. We believed that the armed actors knew no limits, so
we understood together with the organisations, that we needed to do
a joint work of cooperation. Priests do not protect the community
leader, and the community leader knows he is not going to protect
the priest, but we work together and that is the mechanism that has
been successful for us.
The pastoral dialogues were negatively affected by the alleged reinte-

gration of paramilitary groups. There was not an identifiable chain of
command in the post-demobilisation armed groups, and there was a
general feeling that the reintegration of paramilitary members to civil

life legitimised the paramilitary project. The apparent reintegration of
paramilitary groups and the continuation of violent activity by the post-
demobilised armed groups generated a sense of ‘confusion and danger’,
since it was sometimes not possible to say if a person was a paramili-
tary or if he held any rank in the group. Nevertheless, there was a new
stage in the conflict, where violent attacks against civilian population
reduced.
Denunciation and collection of testimonies
The diocese made the most of the reduction in violent attacks by col-
lecting victims’ testimonies and starting the more systematic work of
recovering historical memory of atrocities and human rights crimes in
the region. Father Ulrich Kollowitz, a German priest who has spent over
30 years in the region and is a member of COVIJUPA,14 explains this
shift in the situation of conflict and how the diocese responded:
During those years we had to do a firefighter job, constantly fight-

ing fires. We often had to run from one community to another, it
was practically useless to make a work plan, the plan was made for
us, and the armed actors imposed our work plan because we had to
react to every situation. That situation has changed in the last years;
we have been able to dedicate more time to collect the information
for [building] a historical memory. You can see what we have been
doing in the chapel, we started doing that in 2007 . . . because in the
decade 2010 we had to run less to fight fires, but in that period, at the
end of the 1990s and beginning of 2000, there was a constant work
accompanying journeys for supplying community shops, to prevent
them to be plundered by paramilitaries or guerrilla groups, that was
our main job in 1998.
(Interview, 25 April 2012)
After the years of more extreme violence, COVIJUPA’s work could take
off. COVIJUPA, the Social Pastoral Office, the Afro Pastoral Office and
the Indigenous Pastoral Office work in an integrated manner. This
chapter focuses on the work of COVIJUPA due to its attention to
the social construction of memory of the atrocities that have taken
place in Chocó. The work of these different dependences of the dio-
cese is all equally inspired in its pastoral options, which are constantly
updated and oriented towards accompaniment, support and denuncia-

tion (Giron et al., 2012).
Missionaries developed a consistent accompaniment to victims; they
supported the creation of memorialisation events and the regular
publication of the magazine Voices of Black, Indigenous and Mestizo
People ((Las Voces del Pueblo Negro, Indígena y Mestizo). This annual pub-
lication started in 2004, coordinated by COVIJUPA and supported by
several agencies at different stages of its publication: Catholic Relief Ser-
vices, Misereor IHR Hilfswerk, Christian Aid and Project Counselling
Services, among others. The database on crimes in the magazine has
been built through a network of different local communities of the dio-
cese, missionaries, social leaders, national and international NGOs and
international organisations such as the UNHCHR. The work of systema-
tisation is important in transforming the construction of social memory
at a social level into a work of denunciation in the legal arena.
COVIJUPA’s definition of victim is based on the theoretical framework
built by the CINEP (2009).15 In addition, it is important for the commis-
sion to register the ethnic background of the victim, not only if a person
was indigenous, but to which indigenous group they belonged (if she
was Embera-Chami or Embera-Wounan, for instance). The commission
only registers civilians (those who are not holding any arms); for them
any person is a civilian until they get into a group ‘with uniforms and
guns’. Support of civilians for armed groups does not qualify as mem-
bership of an armed group because it is very difficult to discern ‘forced’
cooperation from sympathy with the groups.
The collection of information is done in strict confidentiality and the
cases that are part of a denouncement need the previous agreement of
victims before making them public. This has proved to be a challenge in
at least two situations: when the event (murder, aggression, disappear-
ance) is too recent and when it is related to sexual violence. There are
only three or four cases registered in COVIJUPA’s database for 2011 and
2012, even if there were more than 30 cases in the city. It is possible that
some of those people who were murdered were people who had been
involved with illegal groups. Many of the murders were allegedly com-
mitted by the police or other official forces, thus appearing in the official
records as common crime. This is why COVIJUPA does not include them
in the list of crimes against human rights. The commission can only rely
on the victims’ testimonies for doing so, but the victims feel that it is
easier to talk about cases that happened in the 1980s as opposed to those
that are more recent.
In regard to cases of sexual violence, it has been hard for the

commission to register them. According to one of the missionaries:
[Sexual violence] is a point that is rarely touched. Sexual violence

against women in armed groups is a topic that is widely discussed
in the organisations, but there are very few women who really speak
about this. That is a job that needs to be individual, very seldom with
two or three women, but that cannot be addressed in big groups. That
is a job that needs time, lots of time. We hear cases nowadays, and
we have always thought that we knew most of the cases in the field,
but we were mistaken, we have received new cases because only now
people would come and talk.
COVIJUPA creates a feeling of trust and the confidentiality that is nec-

essary for the collection of testimonies related to sexual violence. This
is an activity that would probably be more difficult to carry out in other
organisations. COVIJUPA also supports activities of memorialisation
through the public communal space of the church. Following that goal,
they have created ‘Memory Chapels’: two in Quibdó, one in Carmen de
Atrato and one in Lloró. In those chapels they have almost 300 pho-
tos of victims with their name, age, the armed actor who perpetrated
his/her murder and the place and date where the murder occurred. (see
Figure 4.1). In cases in which the families do not have a photograph of
the victim they replace it with the picture of an illuminated cross. Vic-
tims carry these cards when they conduct manifestations through the
streets in Quibdó.16
Accompaniment to victims
COVIJUPA’s accompaniment to families consists of emotional and social
assistance and legal training on their rights as victims (and particularly
as collective victims). COVIJUPA’s members encourage victims’ families
to write their own memory book – a small notebook where they can
have ‘conversations’ with their deceased relatives and can write some-
thing about the victims to those who do not know them or to their rel-
atives. COVIJUPA’s psycho-social support for the families aims towards
the healing of victims’ families. They also coordinate small groups where
victims can get some improvements in their quality of life. These groups
regularly meet in Quibdó, Carmen de Atrato, Murindó and Bellavista.
They are dedicated to the production of handicraft, baked goods and
small-scale farming. The aim of this type of accompaniment is to create
Figure 4.1 Chapel of Memory at the Claretian’s convent, Quibdó (2012)
a sense of purpose for the members who are victims of displacement,

those who have returned or are ‘forcefully emplaced’ in the territory.
Once per month COVIJUPA organises a mass in the chapel of the con-
vent, celebrating the anniversary of deaths of relatives, Christmas or
other important dates. COVIJUPA directly works with 800 victims; how-
ever, those who regularly attend its activities number around 150. Part
of its work is to create a network of support for victims, most of whom
live in conditions of extreme poverty.
One of the missionary women explains about their work at
COVIJUPA, which does
accompaniment to victims’ families, building a database [of human

rights crimes] and accompanying a process, a petition to the Inter-
American Court for the murders of Father Jorge Luis Mazo, volun-
teer Inigo Iguiluz and Miguel Quiroga, killed by the paramilitaries.
We presented those cases, but we did not want to present only the
cases of our partners in the Diocese and also all those cases that we
knew about, and those were at that moment around 140, but now
we are in 918 cases in the Diocese. The first case was in 1963, and
there were only a few cases reported during the first years but they
started strongly increasing in 1997. The years before that, particu-
larly since 1992, there were cases in La Carretera . . . those cases were
known because the people were in the jurisdiction of the Diocese, or

their relatives live here and they have killed them in other areas. For
instance, many people from Carmen de Atrato have been killed in
Jerico, Bolivar; many people from here in Yuto have been killed in
Istmina; people from Bojayá have been killed in Riosucio; or the dis-
placed that are living in Riosuscio they are coming from Curbarado,
Jiguamiando. They are all in our database.
Using this information does not only help build a memory of the
violence, but it also has the potential to reach a legal arena; keeping
and publishing a record of crimes provides evidence of the systematic
trajectory of crimes in the region.
COVIJUPA has carried out several workshops with victims, most of
them women. There are currently 26 groups working with the displaced
population: four of them in the rural areas of Bellavista, Carmen de
Atrato and Quito River, and the rest in Quibdó. These groups have been
oriented towards improving the material conditions of peasant families,
but they were also working as therapeutic centres for victims. According
to Juana Perez,∗ victim of the massacre of Bojayá:
The groups started in 1997, by initiative of father Jorge Luis Mazo

and the Augustine sisters. That was when the violence started in
May 1997 when the paramilitaries entered for the first time to the
town. Then, people were afraid, that fear that one always had; when
it was six in the afternoon and one had to be locked in the house,
which was not habitual. In those years father Jorge Luis was killed
by the paramilitaries [in 1999]. The Sisters were here [in Bellavista],
and many women of the community got together and we talked to
them about what we were going to do, because one was just there,
thinking, who was going to be the next to get caught, whom they
were going to kill. During those days, with their company, we met
and they asked what we would like to do, and we started a sewing
workshop.
Groups such as Guayacán in Bellavista helped victims to organise them-

selves and to rebuild solidarity bonds that had been harmed by the
actions of the armed actors. Similar outcomes were reported by Adams
(2013) in her research on arpillera women involved in quilting groups in
Chile, where victims report that these groups were very important for
getting together and reflecting on the situation that they were suffering.
In the words of one of the missionaries working in the region:
In that situation, the women’s husbands were being persecuted, their

brothers and the women were aware of that situation more than we
were. Then the women came to our house and crying they told us
‘they have taken my husband, my brother’. We did not know what
to do but at that moment we had to learn. Then we wrote the name
of the disappeared person and the circumstances in which he was
taken; that is how we started putting together a database of victims
and disappeared . . . then we found that a right method for organising
women’s meetings was through the sewing groups. They got together,
shared the pain and discussed possible solutions. They started to
denounce the paramilitary abuse in those groups.
In the conversations during sewing sessions, the need for starting

a record of the abuses against human crimes became visible. The
groups were a mechanism for organising women who were victims that
returned to Bellavista and victims of displacement in Quibdó, who were
living in inhuman conditions in the stadium of Quibdó. For instance,
displaced women who met at occupied public spaces to embroider felt
that they were performing an act of resistance that helped them to
avoid forceful eviction by the authorities. These activities as practices
of memorialisation and management of victims’ emotions are studied
in further detail in the following chapters.
Some outcomes of religious peace initiatives
The pastoral dialogues were affected by the demobilisation of the

paramilitary troops since it was not possible to identify who was the
leader of the new criminal units that replaced the paramilitary. In addi-
tion, the guerrillas continue to be very active in the region and they have
attempted to display their power and control through armed strikes and
influencing the political scenario. For instance, they have tried to pres-
sure elections in ethnic organisations and to infiltrate popular marches
organised by civil society. This situation has raised concern in the local
organisations and in the diocese, as they have actively sought to express
their independence from the FARC-EP guerrillas in the area.
The effects of the actions of armed actors in civil society have weak-
ened the work of religious peacebuilders in the communities. During the
first stages of violence, it was clear to the religious peacebuilders who

the armed actors were and what the conflict was about. But the conflict
has changed; there is a new presence of post-demobilised armed actors
who have provoked the displacement of peasants and have imposed a
new economic model based on the indiscriminate exploitation of natu-
ral resources and a total disregard for the local communities. In this new
scenario, the response of religious peacebuilders concerns continuing
the accompaniment to communities and denouncing crimes against the
human rights of the population. Some of the results of initiatives such
as Atratiando were to get greater visibility of the conflict experienced in
the region and to create the possibility of recuperating the geograph-
ical space of the river. However, there is a lack of concrete results in
terms of the reduction of violence or protection of human, civil and
cultural rights over the territory. The feeling that has been expressed in
the communities and registered is as follows:
Those actions may have an important immediate effect but they lack
efficiency in the sense of real transformative actions. There is the
feeling that the defence of the communities could have been more
efficient. But if the state does not really control the intervention of
their public forces, nothing good can be expected.
(COVIJUPA, 2006, p. 12)
During the most violent period of the conflict, organisations’ and mis-
sionary teams’ main goal was to reduce the effects of violence in the
communities. The efficiency of their accompaniment is difficult to mea-
sure since violence has diminished but continues in a different way.
There are fewer massacres and large-scale displacements, but displace-
ments continue in a systematic fashion, family by family, without gen-
erating the massive reaction large-scale displacements did (COVIJUPA,
2008, p. 44). According to Ursula Holzapfel, a German lay missionary
who has been working in the region for over 30 years:
We are supporting people’s resistance in their territory, the defence

of their territory to the limit. When the aggression was with bul-
lets, there was even more resistance, more capacity because the
indignation was authentic, and it was healthy to rebel against these
injustices, against this violence, against all the blood shedding; peo-
ple strengthened their organisations, the community shops worked
better than ever during the economic blockade. Now, the danger
is that companies come with economic offers to buy consciences;
they buy leaders of organisations, raise doubts and divisions in the

organisations. This is more dangerous and nobody knows how long
communities can still resist that.
Violence has been transformed. It is no longer only the result of direct

confrontation but rather of pressures of national and transnational
companies with strong interests in the territory. The danger is that com-
panies disrespecting the agreements and not following the protocols for
getting the informed consent of Afro-Colombian communities can cre-
ate divisions in the organisations, which could diminish many of the
legal and organisational achievements obtained in the 1990s. Therefore,
one of the challenges faced by the diocese is to help communities under-
stand the new situation, to resist the economic pressures in the midst of
extreme poverty and to comprehend that this is part of the evolution
of the conflict and how it can affect them. It has been challenging to
raise awareness of the risks they are facing since the threat of violence
is less direct than in previous years. The following story told by one
of the missionaries depicts the source of the challenge brought by the
transformation of the conflict:
Missionary: I remember once, in a confrontation between paramili-

tary and guerrilla in Tagachí. The guerrilla was shooting from the
jungle, from the river to Tagachí. It was 11 in the morning and the
children had just left the school, they walked through the street,
and they stood there, watching. I was screaming at the top of my
lungs: ‘get inside through the backside! Through the nursery door!’
That was the only house that had a wall made of cement at that
time, in that house they could hide in the back using the cement
walls, instead of a piece of wood. When the bullets hit the river and I
felt the water, I said, those who did not understand will understand
now and I will take cover, but I was still yelling at them. And when
they saw me running, then they deigned to come behind. I thought
then, I shall not scream more to them asking them to come. They
were just standing there.
Sandra: So, people did not listen.
Missionary: No, they thought it was a movie, they did not under-
stand. And I think they do not understand now that this is the
real danger. It was only when they saw the bodies there then they
understood. And now . . .
Sandra: Now are there other strategies that they do not see?
Missionary: Now they get it, they understand it is a strategy to take

them out, it is late now, I guess they do not believe such evil exists.
The missionary’s concern about the lack of awareness of some com-

munity members and leaders of the black organisations is linked with
the risk of signing agreements with corporations that are interested in
the natural resources of the communities. Since 1993, Afro-Colombian
communities have a legal right based on national legislation and inter-
national treaties (Colombia has ratified the ILO Convention 169) to
prior consultation/informed consent (consulta previa) about all new laws
that may affect their rights and development projects that may affect
their land use patterns. This right of previous consultation ‘entails
the consultation and participation of local communities in the design,
approval, implementation, and evaluation of development projects that
could affect them and their territories’ (The Rapoport Center for Human
Rights and Justice, 2010). The problem according to Nevaldo Perea
(2012, p. 105) is that ‘the Law does not protect the territory from the
mega-projects because the subsoil is still the state’s property and the
previous consultations have become a distraction’. Despite the efforts of
ethnic organisations like COCOMACIA and OREWA and the missionary
teams, there are still divisions between the communities with regard to
accepting the conditions imposed by multinationals in order to make
a profit out of the exploitation of their resources. Such profit is usually
nominal and sometimes is ascribed to some members or leaders who
seek personal benefit or who are now aware of the consequences of those
agreements.
The work of religious peacebuilders in Chocó has been integrated with
the activities of the social organisations since their inception. Indeed,
one of the challenges has been to reinforce the autonomy of the organi-
sations that are considered the diocese’s ‘daughters’. There are networks
of interdependence that help to motivate and coordinate the efforts of
resistance and organisation from different angles. However, it is difficult
to identify the positive outcomes in terms of improving the quality of
life of the black peasants or in terms of reducing violence. In some cases,
some Afro-Colombian peasants regard the situation as more critical than
in the past, in spite of the less frontal attack of the armed groups. Part
of the achievement of the organisational work is the act of resistance
itself. In theory, Law 70 appears as a sophisticated law that in princi-
ple supports marginalised ethnic communities. Additionally, the Victims
Law underlines the severity of the Afro-Colombian victims’ situation
and proposes paths for their reparation. In practice, the local bureau-
cracy, corruption and the lack of political will at a local and national
level impede the appropriate recognition of these communities and its
victims, which in the region of Chocó are often the poorest of the poor.
Conclusions
The pastoral letter signed in 2012 by the bishops of the Dioceses of

Tumaco, Guapi, Buenaventura, Istmina-Tadó, Quibdó and Apartadó (all
of them located on the Colombian Pacific coast) demanded a solu-
tion to the current situation of conflict as a process that has evolved
from the spread of acts of terror to systematic military attacks that aims
towards ‘real dominion over the territory’. In the most recent stage of
the conflict, post-demobilised armed groups still have some support of
the official armed forces and some sectors of the government and civil
society because they contribute to the control over the land for their
economic projects, such as the exploitation of natural resources and the
growing of drug fields run by the illegal groups.
In this context, according to Father Sterlin Londoño, ‘the reality in
Chocó made [it] impossible to practice a conservative pastoral work.
A pastoral work characteristic of our communities (pastoral
( propia) was
developed during the 1980s–1990s; the pastoral propia creates an ethical
dimension, an attitude for accompaniment and resistance’ (Fieldnotes,
April 2012). This pastoral propia was developed as a response to their
concrete situations, but it was also a result of their process of inter-
cultural dialogue with indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
In this context, their work of acompañamiento allowed them to incorpo-
rate the defence of their territorial, cultural, economic and human rights
in their pastoral options.
There is an ambivalent relation between the local church and the
hierarchical church in Colombia. On the one hand, the Diocese’s recog-
nition that comes from being part of the Catholic Church allows it to
mobilise resources and transnational networks with religious and non-
religious organisations; on the other hand, they are under the scrutiny
of the hierarchy of the church. Hierarchy is a key element to understand
Catholic peacebuilding; as was explained in this chapter, the initiatives
of peacebuilding and community development flourished, thanks to
the support that Bishop Castaño gave to them. At the same time, the
Catholic Church is an important actor in Colombian civil society that
still has strong credibility with the citizens. The role of the local church
in creating a bridge between the private interests of victims and the
public arena is a complex one, which is explored in further detail in

Chapter 8 when discussing religious peacebuilding and emancipatory
peacebuilding.
This chapter presents the history of the conflict and the responses of
religious actors in terms of peacebuilding in the region. It is argued here
that the construction of social memory can be a tool for peacebuilding
in times of conflict; however, social memory is not the territory of one
carrier but it is an open arena where multiple carriers dispute the author-
ity about the authenticity of the version of the past. Chapter 5 analyses
how multiple versions of the massacre of Bojayá were constructed by
different carrier groups and how social memory has become a tool for
peace and war in this context.
5
Multiple Memories of the Massacre
of Bojayá
Introduction
One of the central claims of this book is that social memory can be a
tool for peacebuilding, even during conflict. However, there is neither
a single process of social construction of memory nor a single version
about the past. Social memory is best understood as a multidirectional
enterprise where different versions of the past are ‘subject to ongoing
negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not
private’ (Rothberg, 2009, p. 3). In the case of past atrocities, there is
no monopoly over the truth of the events. Different social groups have
different interests about the version that they want to present about
the past, and borrowings and overlapping of details occur in the con-
struction of these multiple versions. In this chapter I use the concept
‘interpretative repertoire’ from the field of discourse analysis in order
to explain how similar pieces of information are used to build different
narratives (Edley and Wetherell, 2001; Wetherell, 2006).
Not every narrative or process of construction of social memory can
be conducive to peacebuilding. Some narratives can contribute to make
sense of victims’ sufferings while others aim to avoid the responsibility
of the perpetrators. Some memory initiatives can indeed reinforce ‘the
cultures of silence that exist after violence and that perpetuate impunity’
(Impunity Watch, 2013, p. 1). Furthermore, some forms of social remem-
bering of past atrocities can be conducive to the re-traumatisation of
victims or the legitimisation of weak transitional processes and rotten
compromises.
There have been multiple versions about the massacre of Bojayá that
compete over their status as ‘master narratives of suffering’ (Alexander,
2004b, p. 12). They have been implemented in order to make sense
of victims’ experiences of suffering and the accountability of those
85
involved in the massacre. These narratives take different forms accord-

ing to the arena where they are represented – media, academia, arts or
law – and change over time. Narratives of social memory are performed
by different carrier groups; in this case, the versions of perpetrators
(guerrilla, paramilitary and government), victims and humanitarian
agencies (local church, researchers, NGOs and ethnic organisations) are
analysed. The Weberian concept ‘carrier group’ applied to the memori-
alisation of traumatic situations has been developed by Alexander in his
theory of cultural trauma. According to Alexander (2004b, p. 11):
Carrier groups are the collective agents of the trauma process. Car-
rier groups have both ideal and material interests, they are situated
in particular places in the social structure, and they have particular
discursive talents for articulating their claims – for what might be
called ‘meaning making’ – in the public sphere. Carrier groups may
be elites, but they may also be denigrated and marginalised classes.
This chapter uses the concept of carrier groups to identify different inter-
ests involved in the task of building narratives that give meaning to the
massacre. It explains how, beyond the legal definition, these narratives
contribute to the creation of two competing and complementing nar-
ratives: the massacre of Bojayá as a crime of war or as a crime against
humanity. Instead of focusing on the legal implications, this chapter
observes the different consequences of these versions for social memory
and peacebuilding. But first, an account by one of the victims of the
massacre is presented.
Testimony of the events that surrounded Dos de Mayo by a

woman inhabitant from Bellavista
We used to have meetings at different communities in order to
write the document [regulations for coexistence and survival],
and the first thing we did when the armed groups arrived was
to read this document that showed our position, which was that
we did not accept any armed group. We were doing just that
on 30 April, ten years ago, when we were at the church in a
meeting with the paramilitary leader; we showed him that letter
and we were reading it to him. He left because he told us there
was an emergency; the guerrilla was coming . . . Later, they [the
paramilitary] responded saying that they refused to leave; they
claimed that ‘they all were Colombia as well and that they would
Multiple Memories of the Massacre of Bojayá 87
leave whenever they wanted to do it’. The paramilitary were living

in Vigía and Bellavista; that was the reason why the confrontation
occurred because the guerrilla said that wherever the paramilitary
were, they would come.
I was the first one to hear it; it was six in the morning; it
was raining and my bedroom was close to the street; there was
a flood in the town and a thunderstorm. When I woke up I saw
the paramilitary troops running in the water and shooting, and
then I saw on the other side the guerrilla. I asked to one of those
who were running ‘what’s happening?’ and he said ‘these sons
of bitches entered the town’ [pointing at the guerrilla]. I went to
knock the door of my neighbour and told them to wake up.
After that, neighbours were hiding in other neighbours’ houses
[trying to get away from the shootings]. And the paramilitary and
the guerrilla later occupied the empty houses, shooting at each
other. One thought that things were going to calm down but then
the shootings started again. The children were hiding under the
mattresses. People who lived in Pueblo Nuevo went to the church.
We were further and we kept just moving from a house to another.
Sometimes they [armed actors] would get in those houses but then
they would move to the next one.
During that time mobile phones did not exist. Some men risked
their life by going to the Telecom shop, but they did not know
who to call until somebody found a calendar with the Red Cross
number but by the time they arrived to Telecom, they [the armed
actors] had already taken over. They could only hear the phone
ringing incessantly.
After that, many people were moving toward the church. I was
insisting to my dad to go to the church as well but he said that if
he was going to die he preferred to do it in his house. We thought
about going first to the community shop and because we had so
many children with us we decided to cook them some rice. At that
moment, they told me that the guerrilla was going to launch the
pipeta from a neighbour’s house. And the owner of that house told
them, ‘do not launch that because that was going to kill too many
civilians’ but the guerrilla members said that they were going to
do it because the paramilitary were in the church. However, there
was only one paramilitary guy behind the church, because it was
the only dry part in the middle of the flood. So, for wanting to kill
one man they killed more than a hundred people.
(Continued)
[ . . . ] After we heard the explosion we saw many people coming

toward our direction. All kind of injured people were there, cry-
ing. We tried to clean their injuries, to treat them; there was a
doctor here but when he run out of medical supplies, he was
so despaired. [ . . . ] we all tried to calm down but the shootings
continued. [. . . ] Finally, we left to Vigía, carrying many of the
injured people, but many of them died because their injuries got
infected.
(Ana*, Woman inhabitant from Bojayá, April 2012)
The ‘monster’ guerrilla: The official version
The official version produced by the army was widely circulated by

the news media, particularly in the initial years after the massacre; it
stated that the FARC guerrillas were mainly responsible for the massacre
because they shot the pipeta against the church. This version is relevant
because it reduced the responsibility of the paramilitary, the govern-
ment or the army in the event, and it allowed labelling the FARC as
terrorists to the international community. For example, after this event
the European Union included the FARC in a list of international terror-
ist groups (GMH-CNRR, 2010; Lancheros and Rincon, 2007). Instead of
being possible interlocutors in a peace process, the FARC were presented
as ‘monsters’ that needed to be feared and eliminated (GMH-CNRR,
2010, p. 29).17
The army hung a big banner with the image of a black child with a
warning: ‘In their memory. Here on 2 May 2002 the FARC killed 119
people. We shall never forget!’ ((El 2 de Mayo de 2002 aquí las FARC
asesinaron a 119 personas. ¡Que no se nos olvide nunca!) The banner oper-
ated as a marker of memory of what had occurred in Bojayá; it was
described as an atrocity for which the guerrilla was the only respon-
sible actor. The official narrative attempted to re-appropriate victims’
memory: it is written in the first person plural, ‘we’, and there is an
image of an unidentified black child, but which suggests it is a local
child.
In addition, critics of Pastrana’s government used the massacre as
evidence of its weakness and the need for a military solution to the
conflict. For instance, a column in the national newspaper El Tiempo

published a few days after the massacre expressed the feelings of a
sector of Colombian society: ‘We are in front of bloodthirsty beasts,
strengthened and emboldened but the state has left so many popula-
tions abandoned and exposed to those butchers’ (El Tiempo, 2002). This
position argued that the FARC took advantage of the peace process to
become stronger. This interpretation contributed to the election of Pres-
ident Alvaro Uribe a few months later; he campaigned for a hard-line
democratic security policy.
Another strong criticism of the government was from research con-
ducted by the office of the UNHCR, which ‘confirmed that the govern-
ment ignored the local population’s warnings and found that govern-
ment forces permitted the paramilitaries to pass undisturbed into the
Bojayá region’ (United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants,
2003). This investigation was strongly criticised by the Colombian gov-
ernment, the national attorney office and the army (GMH-CNRR, 2010,
p. 263). The guerrilla and the paramilitary groups also presented their
own versions of the events.
‘This is war’: The perpetrators’ voice
Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010, p. 5) argue that in war ‘the battle is

for how things are seen and perceived. This means both a battle of
symbols and representations, and also a battle to construct how per-
ception operates in the first place.’ In this case, the notion of war
itself was part of the interpretative repertoires used in the battle for
the representation of the massacre of Bojayá by government, guer-
rilla and paramilitary in order to reduce their responsibility in the
events. The idea that war is an extraordinary situation, where con-
ventional moral rules no longer apply, has been used as a rhetoric
device in other political settings. For instance, according to Jackson
(2005, p. 147), ‘the language of the “war on terrorism” is a very care-
fully and deliberately constructed public discourse that is specifically
designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inher-
ently “good” ’. In Colombia, the introduction of stronger policies of
militarisation has been justified under the rhetoric of a war against
terrorism and drugs, which has contributed to the dismissal of the
social causes of the conflict and to ‘normalise’ it, as I explain in the
following.
The official version explained that the massacre where 79 civilians
died was the normal result of a situation of war and a country in conflict.
The following extract is part of an interview with President Pastrana in

Bellavista on 6 May 2002:
Unfortunately, this is how things are; we are in the middle of a con-

flict, we are in the middle of war. This happened despite inhabitants’
early warnings, despite General Montoya’s work of intelligence in
order to save the civilians from the confrontation.
(President Pastrana interviewed by Caballero, 2002)
In turn, the FARC expressed in an official answer their regret over the
consequences of the combat between them and the paramilitary group
supported by the Brigade 17 of the army; however, again they claimed
that this was the result of the situation of war. They stated:
Those who throw up their hands in horror in Bogotá are the same
ones who have ignored you and abandoned you for centuries. We ask
you to not be manipulated by the big press and the Government, who
only see one responsible. The paramilitaries are responsible because
they act as they please in the Middle Atrato in close coordination
with the National Army and keep a blockade that has lasted for years
in that community. If the Army with their ships and piranhas took
too long in arriving to Bojayá it was because all their efforts were
focused on rescuing the paramilitary who were cornered by the guer-
rilla . . . the State is responsible because it covers up a dirty war against
its people and its state terrorism through the paramilitary action.
Finally, the last and concrete responsible for this war and the chaos
that this country lives is Mr Pastrana, president of the Republic.
(GMH-CNRR, 2010, pp. 73–75)
The FARC claimed that their responsibility in the massacre was inferior
to the responsibility of the state and the paramilitaries. Their definition
included not only the operations by the paramilitary and the army but
also the centuries of injustice committed by the oligarch elites. Their
definition of war as the necessary result of structural injustice aims to
justify their assumed lack of responsibility. At the same time, war is por-
trayed as being beyond their control, and therefore they cannot be held
accountable for it.
However, at the time of the writing of this book in 2014, the FARC
asked for forgiveness from the community of Bojayá in the framework of
the peace dialogues between the FARC and the government. In response,
representatives from Bojayá demanded concrete actions to stop the
re-victimisation not only of Bojayá but of the rest of the communities in
the region (Delegación de Paz de las FARC-EP, 2014). In 2015, leaders of

the community met to discuss the issue of forgiveness and reconciliation
with members of the local church, ethnic organisations and with the
support of the Colombian Pacific Regional Coordination, Victims’ Unit,
Human Rights Office, UN and the IOM (International Organization for
Migration), among other organisations.
In the case of the paramilitary, Freddy Rendón Herrera, aka ‘El
Alemán’, presented his account of the massacre in the frame of the ‘free
versions’ in the process of the Justice and Peace Law. Six years after the
massacre occurred, the inhabitants of Bojayá finally heard the paramil-
itary version through a video transmission. The following is a report of
El Alemán’s declarations about the event:
He insisted that everything was the FARC’s fault; they launched

the pipe bomb over the Church. He insisted five or six times that
his men helped victims after the explosion. Even that he, in per-
son, organised the preparative with the governmental agencies to
take out the injured and to bury the dead . . . The delegated attorney
asked him if he was in the town while the shootings were happen-
ing, he answered no, everything that he saw was through binoculars
from a small plane . . . Late in the evening, Fredy Rendon accepted his
responsibility for the massacre.
(Semana, 2008)
El Alemán’s response clearly expresses an attempt to reduce his respon-

sibility. He argues that this was not only a consequence of the war but,
his troops were fighting on the ‘good’ side of the war, sharing the same
objective of the government. El Alemán also claimed in his free version
to the Justice and Peace Unit that the paramilitary received support from
local politicians in the region:
We had a good relation with Joaquin Palacios, mayor of Bojayá, and

Wilson Chaverra, major of Vigía del Fuerte. That was our financial
soul in the Atrato zone, who gave us the support for our troops.
(Choco 7 Dias, 2009)
El Alemán justifies his actions as part of the paramilitary project in the

eyes of the national society; his account is directed towards the national
audience and not towards the local victims who know the truth of the
events. This type of account reveals the politicisation of truth claims
by perpetrators; their interests in portraying a political image rather
than contributing to the clarification of the historical aspects of the
conflict. The use of memorialisation as a mechanism of transitional jus-

tice should provide tools for protecting victims who feel harmed again
by the manipulation of versions of the past by the perpetrators.
There have been 15 members of the FARC-EP sentenced for the mas-
sacre of Bojayá, eight of them have been prosecuted (GMH-CNRR, 2010,
pp. 214–217). In addition, the state represented by the Ministry of
Defence, the Army and the National Police have been sentenced due
to its omission in the massacre. It received an administrative sentence
for not protecting the town despite an early warning issued by the local
ombudsman. The nation has paid a total of 1,552,000,000 pesos (aprox.
£550,000) to a number of victims (Bedoya, 2012). And there has been
no conviction of the paramilitary group for the events.
Perpetrators share the use of the notion of war as an interpretative
repertoire designed to provide a quality of out-there-ness in their dis-
courses. According to Potter (1996, p. 150), out-there-ness is a rhetorical
device used to construct descriptions as independent of actors’ agency in
what they have described, with the intention of drawing attention away
from their accountability or responsibility. In this sense, the description
of war as a situation that is out of control and that it is simply evil aims
to divert attention from their responsibility in the event. The ideological
repertoire that they use is that it is a rule of war that sometimes civilians
get caught in the crossfire and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
How do victims remember Dos de Mayo?
In 2007 Bellavista was relocated to a new place a few miles away from
the old one, in an official social investment decision that is explained
in Chapter 7. In the old town of Bellavista, only the church and the
Augustine missionary women’s house are still standing, the rest of the
houses have been abandoned after the construction of ‘new Bellavista’.18
Once a year, people from Bellavista and surrounding villages reunite
to celebrate the anniversary of the massacre in the San Pablo Apostol
Church. In one of our visits to old Bellavista during the preparations for
the tenth commemoration, Pedro∗ , a victim of the massacre who lives
in the new Bellavista, commented that he was not able to attend the
commemoration of Dos de Mayo for several years because he could not
bear the pain of entering in the church again after most of his family
was killed in the attack.
In a similar way, although a different situation, victims who have been
forcefully displaced to Quibdó remark that they feel pain because they
do not have enough money and resources to visit Bellavista as often as
they would want to; they cannot visit the cemetery and the church. Vic-
tims’ place of residence is only one of the many factors that influence
how they remember the massacre and how they perceive their duty to
remember the deceased victims of Dos de Mayo. Even people from neigh-
bouring villages reveal that not only those who lived in Bellavista at
the time of the massacre feel affected by it; they also were profoundly
shocked when they heard the explosions and the gunfire but they could
not help their relatives and friends. They feel they share the traumatic
memory of the massacre as a central aspect of their identity. In that
sense, it is not possible to talk about a single version of victims’ memory
of Dos de Mayo, not even in a case which is relatively small compared
with larger collective traumas that have shaken the nation. Thereby, in
order to discuss the construction of this narrative from the perspective
of the victims as a carrier group it is necessary to take into consideration
the multiple interests behind their narratives of social memory.
(1) Some of these interests correspond to the necessity of overcoming
the normalisation or routinisation of the atrocities that have occurred
in the country. Victims feel that their suffering can be easily forgotten
by the national society because they receive only sporadic attention
from the national news media; therefore they need to overcome the
emotional fatigue of repeating their testimonies and the fatigue of the lis-
teners. (2) Victims’ associations consider that the government should be
accountable for the agreements and promises of collective and integral
reparation. (3) Finally, victims are exposed to risks of renewed violence
when their narratives of social memory point towards claims of truth,
justice and reparation in presence of armed actors in the region. These
aspects are explored in the following pages.
Overcoming the normalisation of suffering

Victims use different types of descriptions of the gruesome attack: a wall
made of meat; everything was covered in worms after two days; a horrible
smell, their bodies were found looking like minced meat. These images have
the power to convey the horror of the event and shake the listener every
time the witness retell their story, even though victims have retold these
stories an indeterminate number of times. The feelings of disgust evoked
in their narratives create a powerful relation between listener and nar-
rator that, contrary to the emotion of empathy, does not require an
attempt to create political or moral sympathies but is sufficient to evoke
strong feelings in the listener. The creation of a social emotion of disgust
allows victims to communicate their suffering and momentarily make
the listener a participant of their experience, propitiating not a senti-

mental response but an emotional response based on disgust. Seidman
(2013, p. 5) has argued that disgust evoked in phobic discourses ‘warrant
neither empathy nor affirmative identification; instead, these figures
trigger an almost primitive sense of repulsion and abjection’. In this
case, disgust evoked in victims’ testimonies aims to disrupt any possi-
ble sympathy between listeners and perpetrator and can help to provide
an advantage in the competition for attention over the numerous mas-
sacres that have occurred in the country. Sontag (2003, p. 13) claims
that pity and disgust provoked by war photography create distractions
that impede the spectator to ask why this violence happened. In that
sense, the challenge in victims’ testimonies is to create a narrative that
addresses causes and consequences of present and past suffering.
Victims from Bojayá have repeated their testimonies about the mas-
sacre perhaps too many times. Their testimonies are highly valued by
journalists particularly around the time of the annual commemoration
of the massacre. For instance, during the tenth year commemoration of
the massacre, around 30 April 2012 most journalists started to arrive in
the region and they stayed in Bellavista shortly after 2 May. Most of the
victims who are part of victims’ associations acknowledge the retelling
of their testimonies as part of their mission, ‘to keep the memory alive’.
At the same time, victims’ associations want to keep the memory of the
governmental promises of reparation that were made in the aftermath
of the massacre alive as well. In that context, there are some clashes in
the narratives of memorialisation of the massacre, between the duty and
pain of keeping the memory of the victims who died alive, while recog-
nizing the political influence of this memory for their current resistance
and demands.
Representations of victimhood
The remembrance of the Dos de Mayo constitutes a challenge for vic-
tims not only because of the traumatic character of their experiences
but because their narratives could impact their process of reparation.
Victims were aware that they have been labelled as passive beneficiaries
of the government, even though most of the promises of repara-
tion have remained unfulfilled. Therefore, victims considered it neces-
sary to change the label of beneficiaries but at the same time they refused
to forget the agreements and promises that the government had made
to them, particularly under the recent Victims’ Law enactment in 2011.
In conversations with people in Bojayá, some of them manifested
their feelings of frustration because the media only covers the story of
Bojayá because of the massacre and not because of other humanitar-

ian crises that occur in the region. Nevertheless, Dos de Mayo is still an
icon that could aid to pressure the government into providing mech-
anisms for integral reparation and other forms of social investment.
In the years after the massacre, the government has provided social aid
as a way to address victims’ needs but these mechanisms do not address
in a transformative way their needs for truth, justice, reparation and
guarantees of non-repetition of violence, as is explained in Chapter 8.
Instead, the relationship of the government with victims has labelled
them as passive receptors of governmental charity. According to one of
the victims who lives in Bellavista:
This event is very important; the community needs to dialogue with

the state because there are many unfinished things here. There are
houses without doors and windows. They [the state] make the world
believe that they did a job with all the communities in Bojayá, while
they only worked with the capital of the municipality . . . but accord-
ing to the budget that appears in the CONPES document, they could
have relocated two or three towns more.
Memory and reparations

Since these Afro-Colombian communities live in grave conditions of
poverty, they expect that at the least their conditions of marginalisa-
tion will be overcome as a result of the government’s attention. This is
why victims’ claims about the failed promises of the government over-
lapped and often overshadowed the memory of the massacre. In a way,
memories of the struggle of the community to resist displacement and
poverty, and to demand their reparation, have become an extension of
the social memory of the massacre.
There are different narratives over these events. Some victims with
whom I spoke refer vividly to their situation around the massacre; they
recount the moments of horror of those couple of days in 2002. How-
ever, others consider that their pain is not limited to those days. Some of
them claimed that at least for those who died the pain was over, but for
those who survived it only started. Luciana∗ , for instance, spoke about
the pain of losing her mother to cancer after she was injured by the
explosion in the church. Emiliana∗ seemed to accept that her daughter
Gloria∗ suffered from mental illness after surviving Dos de Mayo. Gloria∗
was then five months pregnant. The consequences of the massacre have
not been the same for everyone. Some people left, others returned with
nothing more than promises and the permanent presence of the armed
actors. They consider that the development projects led by the gov-
ernment do not solve their precarious situation. For instance, Mariana∗
comments:
Right now, our main problem is that there are no sources of employ-
ment. They have brought some small projects, but that has not solved
anything. At this moment, people are migrating, and many more are
leaving. Because there is nowhere to find a job here.
(Interview, May 2012)
Victims feel that they need to portray the urgency of their situation
without undervaluing the suffering of those who did not survive the
massacre. Some questions that come to the surface are: is it fair to speak
about their poverty and marginalisation in the same terms as the suffer-
ing of children who died in the massacre? Is it good that Bojayá is only
mentioned in the news as the place of the massacre and nothing else?
How to speak about the demands of the present without dishonouring
the past? I found that victims’ organisations answered these questions
by focusing on their present demands and how they could negotiate
with the government. The promises of the government are located in
the past; the negotiation is in the present and the solutions are in the
future. However, in the discourse of victims’ organisations the massacre
in itself is seldom mentioned. It seems like in their narratives, the line
of time does not reach the massacre itself. The massacre is a fact that
did not need further discussion. Or at least that was how it seemed
until some friction between victims, leaders of victims’ organisations
and local missionaries occurred during the tenth commemoration of
the massacre, as is explained later.
Victims’ demands consisted of the construction of a hospital, electric-
ity service, productivity and business projects, and dredging the river,
among others. Their list of demands was a result of long meetings
and discussions that included the participation of representative lead-
ers of every community in Bojayá (San Martín, Puerto Conto, Buchadó,
San Miguel, Murrí, Tagachí, el Tigre, San José de la Calle, Veracruz,
San Antonio de Padua, Palo Blanco, Arenal and Vuelta Cortada). For
three days during the tenth year commemoration the leaders met and
discussed these points, and they also expected the presence of decision-
maker officials from the national government. During these three days,
journalists from national newspapers, television and radio were in the
town and had transmitted short snaps of the ceremonies and interviews
on national television. But on the scheduled day the government offi-
cials did not show up; only some bureaucrats in charge of the Victims’
Unit and other minor agencies came to Bellavista. This generated frus-
tration in the community leaders. The frustration generated friction in
the community, particularly between the victims’ organisation, a sector
of the people and some of the missionaries (This friction is discussed in
more detail in Chapter 8). The indigenous leaders proposed a general
strike and some leaders of the victims’ organisation manifested their
intention to cancel the religious ceremonies as well. This created some
apprehension in the communities because many of them considered the
discussion with the government important, but they also considered the
religious commemoration of the dead necessary.
During this friction, the problem of how to remember Dos de Mayo
came to the surface again. There were some discussions of whether the
event should be remembered only through the political meeting of the
assembly or if it was a religious duty to continue with the religious cel-
ebrations. Religious leaders reminded victims’ leaders of their duties to
the deceased victims. Talking again about why they were congregated
in assembly, what they were commemorating. Finally, the community
decided to continue with the religious commemoration.
Victims’ risks while remembering

Herling Perea Chalá, one of the leaders of the victims’ association in
Bojayá, explains the situation of Bojayá in the middle of the conflict:
Today our territories are still part of the scene of confrontation

between armed actors, making us leave the territory. In this way
they can keep all the wealth that exists in our territory and exter-
minate our population and culture. Today we want to say that we are
marginalised, exploded, and looted because they have taken our land
with bullets and massacres but we also demand our rights and we are
not looking for anything else. What we want from the state and its
current rulers is our right.
(Forum ‘Bojayá una década después’ at the National
Museum of Colombia, Bogotá, 27 April 2012)
Perea’s complaint about the continuous presence of armed actors in the

territory was made in Bogotá, but at the event in Bojayá victims’ leaders
did not overtly discuss the issue of security.
The reason for this gap is that the very presence of armed actors makes
it difficult for victims to denounce it, as Carlos∗ , a local inhabitant,
claims:
People here are too conformist; they mistake humanitarian help

for reparation. People should be fighting for their reparation, truth
and justice, but there could be consequences if they do so. I have
had experiences in meetings in Quibdó, where there have been
denunciations, and I have found those who denounced murdered
later.
Even after transitional mechanisms started, such as the implementation

of the Victims’ Law, victims still do not feel safety. According to Father
Adriel Ruiz, who works in the Pacific city of Buenaventura: ‘Victims need
some guarantees in order to affirm their rights; the acknowledgment
of their territorial rights is the existential and physical guaranty they
need. People are going to be out of civil tools for demanding their rights’
(Ruiz’s speech at WOLA, 2014). Further, Leyner Palacios, who has been a
victims’ representative in the peace negotiations between the FARC and
the government at Havana, claims that:
Victims do not receive any protection mechanism. Leaders who had

to leave their territories have to move without protection, because
their bodyguards are often not being paid, they do not have trans-
portation, which poses a risk for them. They [the government] assess
our risk from the perspective of local officials who are often in
complicity with the violent actors.
Nevertheless, victims have resisted and denounced violence and injus-

tice through less direct means. Victims’ claims for justice and truth are
done in a symbolical way through storytelling, performance and move-
ment among other actions (Riaño-Alcalá and Baines, 2011). Songs have
helped to remember Dos de Mayo but also to denounce the continu-
ous presence of armed actors, failure of reparation and poverty (Millan,
2009; Vergara-Figueroa, 2011). This is a response to the silence imposed
by armed actors in their risky geopolitical position.
For instance, there have been several singers/composers who have
included their experiences about the massacre and have directly
addressed the responsibility of the perpetrators and the unfulfilled
promises of reparation by the government. Some of these songs are per-

formed in a religious context, using the melody and style of funerary
songs ‘Alabaos’, while others have the form of popular song. Noel
Palacio, a survivor from Dos de Mayo, has produced several popular songs
inspired by the events:
They call us displaced because we come from another municipality

But they do not know that this could happen to them as well
To leave the land behind
I ask God to not let happen to them what happened in Bojayá.
(Noel Palacio, quoted by Hurtado, 2013)
Domingo Mena led the group that collected and buried the bodies after
the massacre; he also produced several songs about the situation in
Bojayá:19
When I entered the church

And I saw the people destroyed
My heart lurched
While my eyes cried.
Domingo Mena claims that ‘he needed to do those compositions so that

what happened in Bojayá would not stay in oblivion. Because I could
die tomorrow and everything will be gone.’ Mena’s songs are a way
of transmitting the memory of Dos de Mayo and their power resides in
the articulation of the feelings and emotions of victims at the moment
of the massacre. The song expresses the feelings of utter defenceless-
ness, suffering and despair, where even the patron saint was destroyed.
It also denounces the perpetrators and expresses people’s lack of trust in
the government, since they displaced despite the arrival of the official
institutions.
Millan (2011) explains that these songs are a way to vent the pain
but also to build and transmit the social memory of Dos de Mayo.
Millan describes these cultural repertoires as subaltern memories that
correspond to a particular logic of the community that beyond locat-
ing accountability for the massacre or explaining its causes privileges
an action of meaning-making. According to Millan (2011, p. 37): ‘The
songs are not composed by a standard narrative of loss and suffering,
but through a narrative that allows them [the victims] to re-narrate
themselves, to rebuild the meaning of the horrified world and relocate
times and spaces that were left unconnected’.
I agree with Millan’s remark about the potential for meaning-making

in victims’ cultural repertoires, but I consider that there is also a version
of accountability in these representations. For instance, during the tenth
anniversary, in the play Entre Ruinas,20 the actors used the ruins of old
Bellavista as their stage, walking through the deserted houses while one
of the actors was a powerful and cruel leader, whose pet is a little shoe
that he carries around on a leash. The little shoe is used as a reminder of
General Mario Montoya, commander of the IV Brigade of the National
Army, who appeared on national television holding a little shoe at the
ruins of the church and crying over the lost lives of the children killed
by the guerrilla. The play criticises the disparagement and manipulation
of the emotions that the media has aroused after the massacre. The play
disapproved of the political uses of Dos de Mayo and how it has had little
positive impact for the victims. There have also been other multiple
representations of the massacre in the arts.
Arenas of representation of the massacre of Bojayá
The social memory of the massacre of Bojayá in the arts

The memorialisation of the massacre developed in the cultural arena
has aimed to incorporate the trauma of Bojayá victims in the aesthetic
realm. At a local level there have been dance groups comprised of young
victims of the massacre, such as the group Jorge Luis Mazo, named in
honour of the martyr priest of Bellavista; this group creates choreogra-
phies with traditional music and dance. According to Millan (2009) and
GMH-CNRR (2010, pp. 288–289) their dances are a way of expressing
their experiences of suffering, trauma and displacement, but also of
resistance and the importance of defence of their territory. The local
theatre group directed by Kleutgens produced the plays The Dead Speak
((Los muertos hablan); Among Ruins ((Entre Ruinas) and another dozen plays
with the group Imágenes (Kleutgens, 2008).
Meanwhile, in Bogotá a few plays on the topic of the massacre have
been produced such as Kilele, a Handcrafted Epic Poem ((Kilele, una epopeya
artesanal) and Nine Funeral Wakes for Bojayá (Nueve Estelas por Bojayá)
that incorporated funerary rituals and songs, by the company Varasanta;
Bojayá, Five Mysteries of a Genocide (Bojayá, los cinco misterios del geno-
cidio) by Génesis and Mal Ejemplo and the dance performance Alabao
by Zajana Danza. In New York, the company Pajarillo Pintao produced
a dance project called ‘Bella Vista’. As was mentioned before, there have
also been several musical compositions around the memory of the mas-
sacre, including the singer/composer Noel Palacio ‘Javiman’, the local
groups of women singers from Bojayá, the artistic installation called

Bocas de Ceniza that brings together several local singers of the region,
produced by Juan Manuel Echavarría, and a symphonic composition
named Bellavista by Elmer Castillo.
In a more controversial tone, on 11 and 12 June 2013 the soap opera
Tres Caínes was broadcast on national television, based on the life of the
AUC paramilitary leaders; it presented the case of the massacre of Bojayá
following the version of the perpetrators and representing victims and
the religious missionaries as passive actors and the priest as responsi-
ble for locking the people in the church. Needless to say, this episode
generated a strong reaction by local victims and the church because of
the abusive lack of accuracy and the re-victimising component of the
narrative that it employed (Diócesis de Quibdó, 2013).
The role of storytelling in theatre has permitted to bring victims
closer to communicate their experience of atrocity to a wider audience.
According to Alexander (2004b), the meaning created in the arts can per-
suade a wider audience that they too have become traumatised by the
atrocity. However, it is not clear if at this point appropriate representa-
tions of the events and victims’ suffering have been widely transmitted
by these artistic works. In this sense, more research is necessary in order
to understand the reception of these works at a national level.
The social memory of the massacre of Bojayá in the media

An analysis of the role of media in the Colombian conflict should start
by stating the risks of being a journalist in the country, since 95%
of crimes against journalists have gone unpunished (Ricchiardi, 2003).
There are a number of journalists and editors of media outlets that
have bravely reported and uncovered some of the most dramatic situ-
ations of corruption, human rights abuses and other illegalities in the
country. In that sense, the media is today an actor that has sometimes
contributed towards peacebuilding (Ordoñez, 2010).
Having said that, the longevity of the conflict in Colombia has led to a
normalisation of violence, where news about massacres, disappearances
and other atrocities compete for the attention of readers and they are
often quickly forgotten, which is described by Taussig (1989) under the
category of ‘terror as usual’. The longevity of the conflict in Colombia
has resulted in a situation that can be understood in Kundera’s (1996,
p. 10) terms:
Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the
morning dew and thus is no longer the day like the morning dew
and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator’s tale but rather

an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the familiar
banality of private life.
The slowness and complexity of the events in this conflict, which has
lasted several decades, contrast with the fragmentation and rapidity that
the audio-visual news requires (Rey, 1998). In this sense, the relation-
ship of the media – or some media – with the past becomes fragile.
Barbero (2000) explains how media does not recognise the past as a part
of memory, but rather as an ingredient of a pastiche:
This is an operation that allows mixing facts, sensibilities and styles,

mixing the texts from any epoch in an isolated manner, without
any articulation of the contexts and meaningful movements of that
epoch. And such kind of past cannot illuminate the present, it cannot
make it relative, because it does not allow us to take some distance
from what we are immediately living, in that way, it contributes to
bury us in a present without bottom, ground or horizon.
This is particularly true in the case of audio-visual media, because their

work is based on the simultaneity and instantaneity of the information,
which often does not take into account balanced information about the
context and the past of the events that they inform.21
In the aftermath of the massacre, national newspapers reproduced
descriptive accounts of the carnage of Dos de Mayo but they did not
provide any context for it. They just explained it as the simple con-
frontation of two armed actors over the control of the territory, and
the chronic poverty in the region. Newspapers made little or no men-
tion of the issues of land tenancy in the area or the murder and
threats that ethnic organisation leaders have received in the last years.
According to research conducted by Medina and Pardo (2011, p. 48),
in which they analysed 113 articles produced in the six months fol-
lowing the massacre in three important local and national newspapers,
‘only 18.6% of the articles had at least a paragraph of antecedents
and 22.1% one or more paragraphs of consequences’. The lack of
insight into the context in which the conflict in Chocó developed
in the years before the massacre presented a dis-articulation between
the experience of atrocity and the larger history of the conflict in the
country and the regional aspects of the conflict. Even though in-depth
investigation has been recently conducted by CMH-CNRR, it has not
been sufficiently represented in the media; therefore a denunciation
that establishes blame and responsibility for the massacre has been
fragmented.
In what follows I explain three ways in which the representation
of the memories of the massacre of Bojayá has been affected by the
media. The first one is the dramatisation of victims’ suffering, which
encourages a sentimental response that does not aim towards the
accountability of the perpetrators or to provide ‘moral lessons’ to be
learnt. Second, victims’ frustration with the representation that they
have received by the media and by practices of ‘parachute journalism’.
Third, the media has contributed to the paradox of representing victims
as invisible.
The dramatisation of victims’ suffering

The news media has emphasised reporting atrocities and other forms
of abuse against human rights in the region, while they have paid sig-
nificantly less attention to the more commonplace economic, social
and cultural crimes that affect people in the region, such as poverty
and social injustice derived from inadequate mechanisms of protec-
tion of Afro-Colombians’ rights over their land. This situation reflects
Humphrey’s claim that ‘Spectacular violence when carried out by others
is sensational, and even entertaining’, however, ‘mass death through
slow degradation of bodies through starvation . . . remains invisible’
(Humphrey, 2014, p. xi).
The lack of proper contextualisation of the violence in the region by
the media has led to a dramatisation of the massacre and the sacralisa-
tion of its memory (Misztal, 2004). This means that the memory of the
massacre has been constructed in such a way that the massacre seems
to be unique, incomparable and unexplainable. It is sacred in the sense
that its representation is separated from the profanity and vulgarity of
other forms of everyday violence that have affected the region.
The consequences of such kinds of representation are an excessive
emphasis on isolated atrocious events, and the lack of accounts of
systemic violence impedes creating a denunciation but encourages a
sentimental response. According to Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010), in
a sentimental reaction spectators set aside questions about blame and
responsibility, but the emphasis is to relieve suffering. In such cases,
‘there is less need to investigate the cause of the suffering, to assem-
ble proof of causal links or to appeal to principles of justice’ (Hoskins
and O’Loughlin, 2010, 30). The uniqueness of the massacre has made
it difficult to create a representation that could provide bridges of
identification between victims and different audiences.
The lack of proper bridges of identification between spectators

and victims’ suffering facilitates the exoticisation of the victim as
the ‘other’, particularly when the victim belongs to a low social
class and ethnic minority, as in the case of Afro-Colombian and
indigenous groups in Chocó. For example, in the report on the
tenth anniversary of the massacre by Noticias Caracol, the journalist
said as she presented images of the activities of commemoration in
Bellavista:
Here, on the Pacific coast communities manifest their moods through

music that helps to clean the soul, to exorcise the pain and in
this case to remember the dead . . . those seventy-nine people mur-
dered ten years ago in the middle of a combat between guerrilla and
paramilitary, when 300 people from Chocó were seeking shelter in
this church of Bellavista. Today, in order to remember their loved
ones the cantadoras [singers] accompany the communities in order
to remember once more, a year more, their defenceless children who
were murdered.
(Noticias Caracol, 2012a)
The news describes the importance of music in the emotional life of

people. However, the lyrics of the songs are indistinct when they appear
on television; in the video only some parts of the songs are shown but
the lyrics cannot be heard over the short interpretation of the journalist:
‘people in Chocó remember their dead relatives with music’. There is a
risk that the powerful character of the memorialisation of Dos de Mayo
through music and theatre might be exoticized and it could become
a marker of the ‘other’, rather than a bridge of identification with the
suffering of victims.
The play Among Ruins was also broadcast on national television for
a few seconds, but only showed some snaps, and no comment on the
content was made. When they interviewed one of the actors, he man-
aged to say ‘that he wanted the world to know that not everything here
is a bed of roses now, but there are things that are still happening’. The
impossibility of this young actor saying what is happening is associated
with the risk they are still suffering.
Victims’ frustration and risk

The gap between the reality of the conflict and its representation by the
media has affected local victims. In their book They are killing us and on
the radio they say nothing,
g Ferrer and Restrepo (2010, p. 57) refer to their
experience in a community of the Middle Atrato: ‘people were angry
because many of their friends were killed in the town but on the radio
there was no news about that’. The lack of coverage in the news of vic-
tims’ suffering contributes to their feelings of isolation and supports the
idea of impunity for perpetrators. However, when the media speaks pub-
licly about the victims’ situation of risk, they might be putting victims
and the human rights defenders on the spot.
Victims have also criticised practices of ‘parachute journalism’
(Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). The Spanish journalist Paco Gomez
(2012, p. 118) has criticised journalists who ‘take a picture and run out’
while covering news such as the massacre of Bojayá. Their lack of close
contact with the riverside communities has generated a narrative that
is mediated by the army, which acts as the main gatekeeper for some
journalists. This situation affects their non-partisan journalist’s respon-
sibility. However, not even journalists such as Gomez, who has had close
contact with people in the region for several years, can avoid the ambi-
guity of the responsibility of the media while covering and representing
the memories of the violence in the Middle Atrato. Gomez (2012, p. 119)
recalls:
I remember the first time I arrived in the community of Bella Flor del
Remacho to meet with some civilians who called themselves resis-
tant. They had been encaletados [hidden] for two and a half years by
that time; they were in the mountains in order to avoid the attack
of the paramilitary. They looked at my notebook as if it were a pass-
port for salvation. A community leader told me ‘now the world will
know and it will not allow this to happen’. Another leader said ‘with
international support I will declare against those murderers even in
Rome’. I closed my notebook with fear, with a mark of responsibil-
ity that still has not disappeared today. It is needless to say that the
published reports served to start an attack by the AUC paramilitary
and set on fire all the houses of Bella Flor and one of the leaders was
dismembered.
The work of the media in portraying memories of the massacre of Bojayá

is not disconnected from the conflict that is still ongoing in the region.
The media has helped to transmit some of the needs expressed by
Bellavista’s victim’s organisations at a national level. More recently, after
the production of the report by GMH-CNRR, the media has included
some of the problems of structural violence in the region, such as
poverty and marginalisation.
Victims often have ambivalent feelings of suspicion and appreciation
in regard to the media. Mariana Perez∗ , a woman inhabitant of Bellavista
and survivor of the massacre, expresses her concern about the role of the
media:
A few years ago it was different; today there is only one camera. I do
not know if perhaps they are tired of this, because the situation here
is not as shocking as before. Dos de Mayo should be a time for reflec-
tion, but it should also be mentioned [in the media] more often.
Because one watches TV, and one knows that there are other countries
where things are stronger, and more developed, and a municipal-
ity [like this one] is different. But things like what happened here
have not happened in any other place. So, we cannot make those
comparisons.
Mariana claims that even though atrocious events have occurred in

other places, in probably more developed cities, it does not mean that
what happened in this small village should not be remembered in the
media as well. The decaying attention of the media on Bojayá can be
explained by the professional practices of journalism by which only
certain events count as news and are true and factual (Hoskins and
O’Loughlin, 2010, p. 64).
There is an ambivalent relationship between victims and the media.
The media is still considered to be an important actor for making vis-
ible the suffering and resistance of Afro-Colombian and indigenous
communities, particularly in their transmission to the international
community. However, victims fear that their memory has been abused
by media, which have not brought any concrete benefit to the commu-
nity. In sum, it is possible that the media reveals as much as it conceals,
which results in an invisibility paradox.
The invisibility paradox
The media has used some of the following descriptions when referring to
the massacre of Bojayá: ‘the worst humanitarian tragedy occurred in the
Colombian conflict’ (Noticias Caracol, 2012b), or ‘the worst massacre
in the recent history of the country’ (El Espectador, 2009). At the same
time, some metaphors that are associated with the situation of Bojayá
after the massacre are invisibility and oblivion. A review of the news
media during the tenth anniversary of Dos de Mayo reveals the repeated
use of the metaphors of invisibility and oblivion. For instance, Noticias
Caracol titled its report for the tenth anniversary: ‘Bojayá survivors live
another tragedy: oblivion’ (Naranjo, 2012). Testigo Directo (2012), a pop-

ular show on prime-time national television, used a similar title for its
report: ‘Bojayá a forgotten massacre: Reparation or Oblivion?’. The news-
paper El Colombiano (2012) used the title ‘Bojayá is subjugated to oblivion
as strong as the massacre’. Semana, one of the most important national
magazines, described Bellavista as ‘a town from Chocó almost invisible
for the rest of Colombians’ (Builes, 2013).
The notions of invisibility/visibility and remembered/forgotten are
relational; after all, one cannot be forgotten by oneself; the sight of
somebody else needs to be addressed towards one in order to be consid-
ered invisible. These notions mean that Afro-Colombian victims have
been forgotten by somebody – there is somebody who cannot see the
Afro-Colombian victims – and victims might perceive themselves as
invisible or forgotten depending on the reaction of the other. The
notions of invisibility and oblivion are interpretative repertoires that are
part of a larger body of representation of Afro-Colombians as invisible.
Invisibility and oblivion are two metaphors that are closely related;
they suggest that when people forget about victims they become invis-
ible, and that the victims become visible thanks to the social remem-
bering of the massacre. It is common that narratives about victims in
different regions of Colombia use descriptions based on the oblivion
of the government that forgets the rightful reparation to victims. For
instance, the report by the GMH-CNRR (2010, p. 139) describes Bojayá
victims as ‘invisible lives, non-listened voices, excluded memories that
resist to be silenced’. However, it is important to underline that these
descriptions used to be applied to the Afro-Colombian population even
before they became victims.
Afro-Colombian invisibility in the academic arena

The category of invisibility comes from the early anthropological stud-
ies of black people in Colombia and permeated popular representations
of Afro-Colombians in the country. The notion of invisibility was used
to describe the situation of black people in regard to the Colombian
nation. The invisibility of black minorities was understood as the result
of a process of whitening, marginalisation and exclusion of black com-
munities and individuals (Friedemann, 1984). According to Friedemann
(1992, p. 14):
The invisibility in sociocultural processes is a strategy that ignores

the present, history and the rights of individuals. Its exercise implies
the use of stereotypes understood as absurd reductions of the cultural
complexity that pejoratively blur the reality of the groups, which are
victimised in that way.
An example of this kind of invisibility of black people can be found in

the denomination of the Pacific lowlands as empty lands, even though
black communities had been living there for centuries; also in the
absence of recognition of an ethnic element in the Colombian conflict
(Arocha, 1998).
The use of the term invisibility to describe the situation of Afro-
Colombians has an important place in the analysis of Afro-Colombian
social movements and the constitution of academic programs centred
on the subject of Afro-Colombian issues. According to this perspective
the invisibility of Afro-Colombians started to change with the inter-
est in understanding or unveiling the reality of Afro-Colombians. This
interest was transmitted in the support of academia and social organ-
isations towards actions of resistance and social mobilisation of the
Afro-Colombians. In this sense, the creation of the Law 70 of 1993 was a
crucial moment in which Afro-Colombian communities became visible
to the country.
The perception of the invisibility of Afro-Colombians has been a
strong tendency in anthropology and it permeated the public discourse
about the black population in Colombia despite the critique by authors
such as Cunin (2003), Vasco (2013) and Wade (1997) among others.
I concur with their critical reaction, which is based on the argument that
the concept of invisibility is rather a reflection on the gap in the study of
Afro-Colombians by anthropologists than an explanation of the reality
lived by Afro-Colombians. Afro-Colombian communities and individ-
uals have not been invisible, especially not to themselves, contrary to
what Friedmann and others claim. Afro-Colombians have been far from
invisible since they have produced a vivid tradition of oral history, dis-
courses of resistance (Oslender, 2003) and music (Wade, 2003) among
other aspects.
In that sense, the invisibility of Afro-Colombians was not an objective
result of discrimination but was a problem of representation, related to
the way in which they were inserted into the structures of alterity (Wade,
1997, p. 37). Afro-Colombians have not been invisible to themselves or
even in the national public arena. Rather, the metaphor of invisibility
reflects the multiple identities of black people in Colombia, which have
not corresponded with the popular and academic criteria of definition
of the black as the other (Cunin, 2003).
The metaphor of invisibility in the case of Bojayá is used to signify

that Bojayá ‘had its day’ thanks to the massacre but now it would be
going back to its reality of invisibility through a process of oblivion.
The echoes of the discourse of invisibility in academic circles influenced
the definition of the population of Bellavista as invisible, together with
the rest of the communities of the Atrato riverside. Invisibility became
a common explanation of the poverty and marginalisation in Chocó.
This circular explanation in regard to Bojayá’s victims considers that
they only became visible to the national context because of the mas-
sacre but the massacre occurred because they were invisible in the first
place; ‘thus a general reading of [victims’] rights is done through the
perspective of being victims of socio-political violence, not from the per-
spective of exclusion and the exercise of citizenship rights’ (Bello et al.,
2005, p. 159).
Bello et al. (2005, p. 169) claim that the community had learned to
live out of the massacre. ‘The community admits that being victims of
horror has meant the possibility of existence for others (authorities, press,
NGOs, etc.), and in that sense they are visible “thanks” to the tragedy,
which can “help” to receive in exchange resources, protection, and
recognition.’ Some Afro-Colombian victims use the metaphors of invis-
ibility and oblivion because their victim identity has been defined by a
model of official alterity, as it is called by Rojas (2004, p. 163). Accord-
ing to this model, equality is only given to those who are different,
marginalised and excluded.
However, the notion of invisibility that is used by others to describe
the situation of the community before the massacre has also been
used by members of the local black populations to describe them-
selves. In their rhetoric, invisibility becomes part of the system that
they are resisting in their activist work and they address the obliv-
ion. Conversely, this perspective has contributed to highlight the gap
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, namely, the urban mestizo majority and the
rural Afro-Colombian minority. Even though the media has given some
recognition to victims of the massacre, the moral lessons of the mas-
sacre as an emblematic case of the violence on the Pacific coast have
been overshadowed by claims of the uniqueness of the massacre.
In sum, the use of the metaphors of invisibility and oblivion by the
communities of victims is used to underline the gaps between them and
the national society. This is revealed by the complaint of one of the vic-
tims: ‘We are Colombia too!’ Metaphors of invisibility and oblivion are
used in the media to address the unfulfilled promises of the government
that has ‘forgotten’ about the victims of Bojayá, and they are also used
to provoke an emotional reaction in the audience: ‘We should not for-
get Bojayá.’ The responsibility of the audience would be limited to not
forgetting the victims, to remembering them.
However, this claim is also expressing that victims are Others and they
are out-there (there is not much we can do to change their situation),
which is characteristic of a sentimental approach to the coverage of suf-
fering (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). This means that the spectator
sympathises with the suffering of the victim and wants it to stop but
it does not address its indignation against the perpetrator (Hoskins and
O’Loughlin, 2010). The message for the wider audience is that they are
the ones who have the power to remember and therefore to make vic-
tims visible, otherwise they would remain passively invisible. The use
of the rhetoric of invisibility and oblivion reinforces the belief that
victims are dependent on the will of the mestizo majority in order
to exist and overcome their victim status. However, this claim rein-
forces the view of Afro-Colombian victims as exotic others and denies
the local struggles for the recognition of their civil, ethnic and human
rights.
The description of black victims of the massacre as invisible and for-
gotten is constructed as a fact in the news. The news media entrust
themselves and the majority mestizo society as grantors of victims’
moral visibility. According to that perspective, victims that are out of
sight or below the threshold of moral vision are put back in the moral
spectrum by the media. The negative consequences of this process
are that victims’ subjectivity is reduced to an object of contempla-
tion of human suffering, and the ‘victims end up reproducing their
victimhood as a social benefit’ (Humphrey, 2014, p. 107). As Humphrey
(2014, p. 134) argues, ‘archiving collective memory is not sufficient; the
imagination has to be constantly reapplied to it’. In that sense, narra-
tives that define and describe past atrocities are important to help the
national and international audience to imagine and overcome moral
distance but metaphors that act as barriers do not help to achieve
that task.
The social memory of the massacre in academia: War crime
In the first part of this chapter I explained some of the multiple versions
of the massacre of Bojayá constructed by different carrier groups: the
official version, perpetrators and victims. These representations compete
in their capacity to persuade a national audience over the interpretation
of these events. I argue that the use of these narratives of social memory
have important consequences for the understanding of the conflict,
reparations and political transition. As an independent actor close to
the academic model, the work developed by the GMH has consolidated
the version of the massacre of Bojayá as a war crime, and this version
has been transmitted by the media as well.
The definition of the massacre of Bojayá as a war crime was supported
in the first instance by the investigation of the UNHCHR (2002) then by
academic researchers from the National University of Colombia (Bello
et al., 2005; Millan, 2011) and independent scholars who were part of
the GMH-CNRR, who wrote the report Bojayá: The War without Limits
((La Guerra sin Límites). This report was written with the support of local
teams, the Diocese of Quibdó, missionary groups and ethnic organi-
sations. According to this version, the massacre was indeed the result
of a situation of war; however, during this war the armed actors broke
the international humanitarian law about the protection of civilians in
military operations (Article 3 of the Geneva Accord, Article 13 of the
second Additional Protocol). These laws were broken not only by the
guerrillas but by the paramilitaries and the army that attacked without
distinction, limitation or proportionality in regard to the civil popu-
lation. Furthermore there is evidence that paramilitaries and the army
had alliances of military convenience (GMH-CNRR, 2010, pp. 14–15;
OACNUDH, 2002).
According to the GMH-CNRR (2010, p. 91):
the massacre of Bojayá presents at least five particular characteristics:

a high number of children and women among the murdered victims;
the massacre occurred in a church, a symbolical place and sacred for
the population; third, there was a massive flight and a forced dis-
placement that for some of them was definitive; dead and harm was
caused by a non-conventional artefact; the murdered victims and the
injured were civilians affected in a ‘non intentional or premeditated’
manner.
GMH-CNRR’s report analyses different dimensions in which the conflict

has affected the black communities in their material but also cultural
experiences. Some of these damages are:
• Socio-cultural damages: that affected the belief that the innocent

(the children), the elderly and the sacred place could be a source of
protection.
• Objective damages: in the looting of their belongings, destruction of

their houses.
• Moral damages: related to the humiliation, guilt, absolute defence-
lessness and constant fear lived by the communities.
• Damages to their life project.
• Damages in the relationship with their territory due to the displace-
ment of the communities. Finally, the report establishes a series
of recommendations in the work with victims and displaced peo-
ple from the Middle Atrato, in regard to measures of truth, justice,
reparation and guarantees of non-repetition (GMH-CNRR, 2010,
pp. 309–323). The National Historical Memory Centre has also sup-
ported the creation of more local initiatives of memorialisation,
such as the radio series La Vida Cuenta ((Life Counts) and the project
Memorias del Atrato.
Despite the unpartisan character of the work developed by the GMH,

the news media have emphasised the responsibility of the FARC-EP
in launching the gas pipe explosive, rather than other broader aspects
of the conflict explained by the report. This has reinforced the public
understanding of the massacre as the result of the misconduct of armed
actors in the middle of a confrontation. The emphasis on the horror of
the ‘war without limits’ has focused on the fact that civilian life was
not respected at this particular event, and has overshadowed the ver-
sion that emphasises the horror of the war that has been occurring in
the region since 1996.
The social memory of the massacre in the religious

and activist arena: Crime against humanity
Father Antun Ramos, who survived the massacre and led the survivors
to the relative safety of the neighbouring town of Vigía del Fuerte after
the explosion in the church, has become one of the authorised voices
of social memory of the massacre. He has often been interviewed by
national news media and he was one of the main characters in several
documentaries, including Severá (Hoyos and Franco, 2012). In this doc-
umentary, Father Antun recalls the events, how he was affected by the
conflict in multiple ways, the kidnapping of his brother before the mas-
sacre and how he had trouble articulating his thoughts into words after
the massacre, how he recovered and returned to Chocó.
Father Antun is interested in setting the memory of Bojayá right,
particularly, when paramilitary versions claim that the massacre was
possible because Father Antun locked the people in the church. The
paramilitary version has been contrasted to the official version recorded
by the GMH. However, the passivity of the church is still mentioned in
some circles, for example it was reproduced in the soap opera Tres Caínes.
The local church also has a strong interest in guarding the memory
of the massacre. For example, they are interested in keeping ‘memory
coffer’, where they save all the information and reports about Dos de
Mayo. In a more global and systematic way, the Social Pastoral Office
has sponsored the creation of the website www.bojayaunadecada.org.
Another important mechanism for guarding the memory has been
the Memory Chapels (Figure 5.1). There are several memory chapels in
the region; this one is at the Claretian Missionary convent in Quibdó.
The Catholic chapel has turned into a memory chapel where hun-
dreds of photos are hanging from the walls, each of them belongs
to a victim and under their photo there is a label with some infor-
mation about their murder or disappearance. The image shows an
Afro-Colombian woman staring at the large number of photos that
cover the walls, in an act of contemplation with religious undertones.
The picture also shows a missionary and a lay person re-arranging
and including new pictures, which reveals the necessity of constantly
updating the memory in this ongoing conflict. Only a section of the
walls is occupied by victims of the massacre of Bojayá; many others
correspond to those victims of a violence that is still haunting the
region.
The memory chapels are not only a constant reminder of the many
victims who have been killed during the conflict, but they also func-
tion as a pinboard, where pictures of victims who have been killed or
disappeared at different times and different places meet. In her study
of ‘crime-solving’ pinboards, Lehmann (2014) argues that pinboards are
memory devices and their contemplation has echoes of a religious prac-
tice, where the observer meditates in front of the pinboard in expectance
of a revelation or an epiphany. There are some resemblances in the
images that occupy the memory chapels to a crime-solving pinboard.
The pictures of the victims represent an array of apparently chaotic
evidence; there are victims of the FARC, AUC and the official forces;
they have been killed in different decades and different towns of the
Pacific coast, however, a close meditation and contemplation of this evi-
dence reveals a deeper truth. Contrary to the crime-solving pinboard
the memory chapel does not solve a crime but defines it. It reveals
the truth of the widespread attack against the Afro-Colombian and indige-
nous communities in Chocó. According to this narrative, violence in the
Figure 5.1 Chapel of Memory at the Claretian’s convent, Quibdó (2012)
region has continued in a process of systemic violence as a result of

poverty and marginalisation, and the incursion of the paramilitary
in 1996.
In the same vein, the report on Bojayá produced by the Jesuit think
tank CINEP (2008) starts with a long introduction explaining the black
communities’ struggle for the defence of their territory since the colonial
times. They consider that this is an important part of the explana-
tion of events such as the massacre of Bojayá. Additionally, in 2005
the Afro-Colombian and indigenous organisations led an inter-ethnic
commission (Minga Interétnica) that coincided with the third anniver-
sary of the massacre of Bojayá. In this commission they observed and
denounced the humanitarian crisis of the peasant communities that
live in their territories along the rivers Atrato, Bojayá, Opogadó, Pogue,
Napipí, Cuía, Duguadó and Tugena. They collected evidence and testi-
monies of the continuous presence and attacks by paramilitary, guerrilla
and the army (COCOMACIA, 2005).
Furthermore, Bojayá’s victims have defined the massacre as an
ethnocide against the Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, as
was stated in the slogan of the tenth commemoration of the massacre
(see Figure 5.2 and Figure 5.3). This concern had been presented in a
document written by the diocese one year after the massacre:
Does the world know that after 1996 until today, when the armed
conflict has worsened in Chocó, legal and illegal armed groups
have murdered more than 600 black civilians, in an ethnocide that
is almost compared to the one perpetrated by Europeans against
indigenous and African peoples?
(Diócesis de Quibdó, 2003)
This view is also supported by some scholars and journalists. For

instance, Jesus Abad Colorado, a photographer who has been very close
to the communities of Chocó, in a recent interview explained:
If I talked about Bojayá, I should also talk about the Genesis

operation, what happened with the territories of Jiguamiandó or
Curvaradó, the territories of Salaquí, Cacarica . . . many of these ter-
ritories passed into the hands of big businessmen, and on this zone,
as in other zones of the country, there is African palm or oil palm
cultivation. [All this happens] while we know who lost their life, who
lost their land.
(CMH, 2013)
Figure 5.2 Banner by the victims’ organisation ADOM. It says ‘Ethnocide Bojayá
Tenth Anniversary. Regional Assembly of Black and Indigenous Communi-
ties. Meeting with the National Government. Bellavista, 29 April–3 May 2012,
Welcome, Bojayá in the path of dignity’
Figure 5.3 Tenth commemoration of the anniversary of the Massacre of Bojayá.

San Pablo Apóstol Church, Old Bellavista
Activists, the local church and ethnic organisations have used a lan-
guage that reflects the understanding of the massacre of Bojayá not only
as a war crime but as a part of crime against humanity. Crimes against
humanity are codified in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the Inter-
national Criminal Court (ICC); they comprise inhumane acts such as
murder, extermination, rape and persecution, which cause great suffer-
ing or serious injury to both mental and physical health. These acts are
committed ‘as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against
any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack’.
The recognition of the massacre of Bojayá both as part of a war crime
and as a crime against humanity would have consequences in the legal
arena, particularly for the perpetrators who have reintegrated or who are
planning to reintegrate, and for members of the Army; they are chal-
lenged to recognize their participation in an ethnocide. So far, there
have been 15 guerrilla members judged and captured in relation to the
massacre of Bojayá. The government has also been condemned for its
irresponsibility in ignoring the early warnings; but there has been no
condemnation of the cooperation between the army and the paramili-
tary bloc Elmer Cardenas. The recognition of the criminal events that
occurred in the Middle Atrato as part of a widespread attack against
a civilian population with a discriminatory element could also attract

international interest.
The narrative of the systematic attack against the Afro and indigenous
communities is reflected in the work of COVIJUPA. According to one of
its members:
We are also accompanying a process, a petition to the Inter-American

Court for all the cases that have happened, above all our own friends
from our diocese, Father Jorge Luis Mazo, volunteer Iñigo Eguiluz
and Father Miguel Quiroga, were murdered by paramilitaries. Then
we present these cases but we did not want to present only the cases
of our friends from the diocese, but all the cases that we knew at
that moment. Those were 140 cases back then, but now we have a
record of 918 cases in the diocese. The first case is from 1963, there
were only a few cases reported during the first years, and there is not
much progression. Since 1992, there were cases in La Carretera, in
Medellín. The number of cases strongly increased in 1997.
Despite the large number of cases, the advantage of focusing on the mas-
sacre of Bojayá is that it allows one point in place and time to identify
a single act of violence. Even though, violence suffered in the region
has been larger, for instance, only Carmen de Atrato has had more vic-
tims than Bellavista. The story of the massacre allows a clear narrative
with beginning, middle and end (protasis – epitasis – catastrophe) that
helps to provoke a response from the wider audiences (Alexander, 2004a,
p. 61) in a more straight forward manner than the complexity of the
humanitarian crises that occurs in the region since 1996.
Conclusion
The multiple narratives both at a local and at a national level compete

for the attention of the national audience. Local narratives that connect
the violence of the massacre with other experiences of violence, such as
the one developed by the local church and victims’ associations, have
not been fully transmitted at a national level, which is evident in the
analysis of the narratives selected and transmitted by newspapers and
news broadcast at a national level.
There are some voices that speak about widespread violence that are
also present in the cultural and aesthetic arena, and in the work of the
local organisations. However these concerns have not been successfully
transferred into the legal arena yet. In contrast to other atrocities such
as the Holocaust, 9/11 in the United States of America, or 3/11 in Spain
that have become cultural traumas, and that have transcended the war
crime label, in the case of the massacre of Bojayá this has not happened.
One of the reasons for this failure is expressed in the use of rhetoric
categories such as oblivion and invisibility as part of the interpretative
repertoires of the social memorialisation of the massacre, which cre-
ate barriers that do not contribute to overcoming the moral distance
between victims and audience. Nevertheless, one of the goals of the
initiatives of memorialisation from below is to counter the effects of
invisibilisation and exotization of victims’ suffering. The idea behind
labeling the massacre of Bojayá as part of an ethnocide and a crime
against humanity is to reveal the systematic character of the attacks
and the vulnerability of the inhabitants of this region that goes beyond
the explanation of two illegal armed actors fighting over the territory;
instead it addresses other economic and political interests. The label of
crime against humanity could also aim to provoke stronger and urgent
reactions in national and international audiences.
6
Religious Emotions and Social
Memory after the Massacre
Introduction
Narratives of social memory of the massacre of Bojayá led by the local

grassroots church have helped to convey the notion of a systematic
attack against the black and indigenous communities, from which Dos
de Mayo is only a part of a long chain of atrocities. This narrative is con-
ducive to a reinterpretation of the past that can help victims to manage
a fatalist view of the event in which the atrocity becomes the centre
and the core of victims’ identity, and it allows processing of other types
of suffering that are still taking place. Even though these accounts are
neither particularly optimistic nor pessimistic, they still allow victims to
create paths of resistance to a violence that is still happening.
This chapter analyses how acts of memorialisation and membership
of local workshops and groups affect victims’ processes of management
of emotions. Some of these initiatives consist of quilting the names of
the victims of the massacre of Bojayá in a curtain, creating workshops
for victims and building ‘Memory Chapels’. This chapter explores how
displaced women’s participation in workshops, such as manufacturing
dolls, embroidery and other handicrafts, contribute to the management
of negative emotions. In this section, I particularly focus on the con-
struction of happiness and ilusión (illusion) and analyse it from the
Marxist perspective of ‘religion as the opium of the people’.
Overcoming fear and distrust
The memorialisation of the massacre of Bojayá as part of a process of

resistance has been relevant for missionaries and victims’ associations
since the early stages of the conflict. After the return of the communities
119
from their displacement, some of the local missionaries visited each one
of them and led workshops on recovery of memory:
In a very short time, we started talking about the need to recover

memory, and as a matter of fact we got a little booklet that explained
the importance of keeping the memory. And we went to every com-
munity, because people wanted to forget this, in a way they did and
they did not want to know about this, at the same time. Perhaps they
did not even want it to be written because they wanted to forget. But
we went to every community; we left them some material, a book-
let, telling the importance of recovering memory, and like that, little
by little people were realising that we did not have to forget . . . that
we had to write about this, and that we should not be afraid, even
though we should be careful to whom we would tell our stories.
(Female missionary, interview, April 2012)
The importance of pursuing social memorialisation was equally under-

stood by victims. This is explained in the missionary’s terms: ‘victims
wanted and they did not want to know about this’. This ambiguity did
not mean that victims would not have remembered the massacre in the
safety of their homes or that they would not be haunted against their
will by the terrible memories of what happened. Victims’ will to remem-
ber was divided by the nurturing of silence as a way of healing their
own pain and by their duty to publicly remember their relatives, which
is expressed in terms of necessity and duty: ‘have to’. In the passage
above, the missionary woman claims that ‘we did not have to forget’,
in the sense that forgetting was presented as a possibility and not as
an inescapable fate. At the same time, she claims that ‘we had to write
about this’ because the importance of having a written record of the
crimes was not only in order to support a further legal claim against the
abuses that victims suffered in the region but to help victims give their
testimonies in a written record to fulfil their duty to publicly remember
their relatives; at the same time, victims could decide when and how to
let go of their painful memories at a personal level.
However, for the missionaries, it is important that victims participate
in the activities of memorialisation not only recording the informa-
tion of the abuses that they suffered. These activities were, for instance,
Catholic masses, victims’ meetings, public manifestations, groups and
so on. These activities were a way of providing continuous accompa-
niment that goes beyond the collection of testimonies. The interviewed
Religious Emotions and Social Memory after the Massacre 121
missionary considers that even though many victims do not want to talk
because they feel it is too hard to revisit their memories, many more do
not do it because of fear. That is why it is so important that the local
church provides a safe environment in which victims could talk about
the events without feeling exposed.
Furthermore, for missionaries, social memorialisation has a transfor-
mational property. According to one of the missionary men, the purpose
of remembrance is to move from a narrative of pain and resentment to
a narrative of life and resurrection. He considers that memory is about
‘a renewal of life and not of death, in order to reach the resurrection.
Works of memorialisation are done as an interpretation of reparation in
the context of resurrection’ (interview, April 2012).
However, the assumption about the potential benefits of remember-
ing has not been homogeneously accepted by the community. The work
of social memorialisation led by the Diocese of Quibdó through its mis-
sionary teams and COVIJUPA has found some initial reluctance from
victims who find it hard to publicly remember the atrocities they suf-
fered. Some victims do not perceive any benefit from talking about Dos
de Mayo and they rather consider that it has been others who have
capitalised on their suffering.
The local church supports the idea that it is important to remember
not only in order to build hope but also in order to transcend from an
individual memory to a social memory that resonates in a legal arena.
This can be understood in Alexander’s (2012) terms, as the effort of
creating master narratives of suffering that transcend different arenas
of public representation. According to one of the missionary women
involved in the process:
People initially were very afraid of talking about their dead relatives,
and to say who killed them . . . but people can recover their strength,
the work of memorialisation was very incipient back then . . . there are
a hundred people talking about their case that before did not want to
know anything about it [the memorialisation]. There are still places
in which people do not want to know anything about it; there are
people who say I can’t tell you that, because it is still too fresh; it has
been five or seven years, but they feel like they were still living it;
and we respect that. But there are also other people who say I want
to break my silence; I want justice; I want this to be denounced;
I want the picture of my son, of my wife to be there [at the Memory
Chapel] . . . It is possible that the contact they have had with other
victims and with other processes at an international level has also

motivated them . . . we tell them this [the results of their work] will
not come today nor tomorrow; perhaps you will not see it, nor your
children will see it, but perhaps your grandchildren will; you can see
this from the Women from Plaza de Mayo [Argentina], many of them
have already died, many of their children have died as well.
Some of the missionaries focused their efforts on building a system-

atic register of the abuses against human rights in the communities,
for which they needed the trust and testimonies of victims. They also
needed victims to understand the importance of building a social mem-
ory without creating false hope about outcomes that probably would
not happen in their lifetime.
However, hope was not the only emotion subject to management; fear
was also another important emotion that needed to be controlled. As the
missionary explained, victims’ fear is a reality that needs to be addressed
in their work of denunciation. The collection of victims’ testimonies is
only possible when minimal conditions of safety are granted in order to
help victims manage their fear. The management of victims’ emotions
has been part of the religious peace work of social reconstruction of
memory after the massacre.
Handicraft workshops
Overcoming the barriers of pessimism, distrust and fear requires a pro-
cess of transformation of victims’ emotions. The local church led activ-
ities that brought victims together and created safe spaces where it was
possible to talk about past and present violence, such as sewing work-
shops, dance and singing groups, theatre groups and, more recently,
victims’ associations. In the 1990s, the missionary teams led the creation
of handicraft workshop groups that have been oriented towards improv-
ing the material conditions of the existence of peasant families, but they
also work as therapeutic centres for victims. Groups such as Guayacán in
Bellavista helped victims to organise themselves and to reinforce links of
solidarity while armed actors were trying to impose their mechanisms of
terror through massacres and selective killings. Victims report that these
groups played a significant role in getting together, reflecting upon their
situation and considering the need for starting a record of the abuses
against human rights.
After Dos de Mayo, the group was strongly affected, since many of the
women who participated in it were killed, as Juana Perez∗ explains:
Figure 6.1 Quilt with the names of the Massacre of Bojayá’s victims, elaborated
by the group Guayacán
Many, many of the women from the group fell in the massacre and
many others stayed there in Quibdó; they did not return. And there
were a few of us who stayed here, a few of us were the old members
of the group . . . the group is still there but it is not strong like it was
before.
After their return to Bellavista, the group of women made a quilt with
the name of every victim who perished in the massacre (see Figure 6.1).
The quilt had 14 lines with six names in each one; in total, it extended 6
metres by 2.5 metres and at the bottom it had the following inscription:
‘By river and by jungles/keep the memory/of so many black people/that
we remember here’ (GMH-CNRR, 2010, p. 285). There are more names
than the official number of victims recognised in the massacre, includ-
ing others who did not die in the church but who were also affected
by the explosion. This represents victims’ expansion from the official
accounts of who is a victim. They include those who disappeared and
those who later died of cancer or due to their injuries. According to
Bello et al. (2008, p. 132), these practices exemplify how ‘the community
autonomously remembers with their own resources; they keep a painful
experience and they allow to express their feelings. In this way, they
“work through” mourning, which help them to elaborate their traumas’;

these groups had a therapeutic dimension, as one of the missionary
women explains in the following extract:
After the massacre, the quilt has been a psychological treatment, for
instance, a mom, who has lost her little child, says that it was a heal-
ing process to embroider his name with the little pieces of cloth that
were used to make the curtain, where the lady held the little piece of
cloth as if she were holding a baby, with such tenderness, with such
love, she cried, talked and remembered beautiful things. Then it was
some kind of healing that allowed women to return [to Bellavista] in
order to keep struggling and resisting, despite all the situations, they
had to carry on. This is the process that all these women that are
sewing the life have gone through . . . this project came from Bellavista
and soon was spread throughout the region.
These actions can be considered therapeutic and a way to reconstruct

the memory of the events, working through the negative emotions of
despair and horror (Bello et al., 2005; GMH-CNRR, 2010, pp. 283–285;
Millan, 2011). According to Riaño-Alcala and Baines (2011, p. 13), ‘this
quilt is an accurate and immense record, a woven archive, of those who
died and a powerfully crafted artefact of commemoration to their live’.
Sewing the quilt was a process that allowed for socially remembering in
ways that are more flexible than the structure provided by the narrative
or the solidness of a plaque. In addition, it could be understood as a
form of performance (Taylor, 2003), because the memorial is not only
about the final product but about the process in itself of sewing the quilt,
designing the images and putting it together. In the process of sewing
the quilt, cloth allows the manipulation of the memorial, its repair and
its reinvention.
A similar initiative was conducted by the Relatives for Justice Remem-
bering Quilt Project for people who have lost someone as a result of
the conflict in Ireland. Comparable projects have been also registered
in several post-conflict societies such as Peru, Chile and Greece, among
others, where women have developed quilting groups as a form of build-
ing solidarity, resisting ongoing violence and denouncing abuses against
human rights. Adams (2013), in her book Art against dictatorship: making
and exporting arpilleras under Pinochet,
t examines the work of these sewing
activities for empowering women victims of violence. Another relevant
project occurred in 1992 in San Francisco, called Project NAMES, which

counted with 20,000 panels in 1992 with placards of people who had
died of AIDS. Connerton (2011, pp. 14–15) comments about Project
NAMES:
Cloth is the privileged material because it is yielding, because it is

not stone or bronze or steel. When a memorial is made of stone or
bronze or steel the rhetoric or the material implicitly claims that the
memory of the dead recorded there will last forever. Cloth carries no
such illusions of enduring witness. It is fragile, it fades and frays, and
it needs mending. It remembers the dead by sewing together mere
fragments of their lives.
In Colombia as well as in North America, quilting is considered an inti-

mate female activity; Connerton claims that it can be considered as ‘a
distinctively female form of historiography’ (2011, p. 15). In Bojayá and
for the displaced victims of the Middle Atrato living in Quibdó, quilt-
ing has been a process of mourning that has brought them together;
women made the quilt, but most of the people feel that it represents all
those who died in Dos de Mayo. For instance, in one of the workshops
organised by Riaño-Alcala and Baines (2011, p. 13):
One Colombian participant, the only man at this meeting, shared a

story of how . . . on one occasion when he felt close to despair because
of the devastation of the war and the fear pervading his community,
he wrapped the quilt around himself to find courage.
These acts of social remembering aimed to work with the victims and
channel their need to talk about the massacre and their loved ones;
respecting when victims did not want to talk and allowing the expres-
sion of victims’ pain through narratives that were collected not only by
COVIJUPA but also through less structured ways of memorialisation.
Victims’ management of emotions took different shapes accord-
ing to the activities of memorialisation. For instance, members of
COVIJUPA report that some victims did not want to participate with
their testimony begin recorded, even though they participated in the
religious commemorations for their assassinated relatives. This was due
to the fear that victims felt, or because their loss was still ‘too fresh’.
However, those group activities that comprised, among others, the-
atre, dance, quilting and choirs were more openly embraced actions of
social memorialisation. Sewing groups were also a mechanism used by

the diocese for organising victims of displacement who were living in
inhumane conditions in the stadium of Quibdó in 1999.
The paramilitary incursion into riverside villages from the Middle
Atrato region forcefully displaced around 2000 people in 1999. Close
to half of the displaced victims occupied the coliseum of Quibdó for
almost two years, even though it was not an adequate place to cope with
a humanitarian crisis. Displaced victims’ sanitary conditions were insuf-
ficient; they did not have any privacy; their food was heavily rationed;
and they were always facing the threat of a forced eviction by the
authorities.
This is the context in which the sewing and handicrafts group called
Choibá started. Lorena Osorio∗ , a member of the group, recalls:
We went to the coliseum; we took refugee there in order to build

resistance, because they [the government] did not want to listen to
us, so we took the coliseum in order to manifest our resistance.
One of the missionaries had previously lived with displaced victims

from the Low Atrato, who had been forcefully relocated in a coliseum in
Turbo by the police. They lived there for four years. After that experience
she accompanied victims in Quibdó:
The problem was that the community was not directed to the coli-
seum but that they took it in order to make their struggle for their
situation of [forced] displacement visible. Then, there was the danger
that they were going to be evicted and the police was surrounding
that place, and people were scared that at any moment they could
be evicted. Then, we started these courses organised by the diocese.
Then I asked at the beginning to some elder Sisters to come with me,
we got some chairs and we sat outside of the coliseum to work . . . and
there were so many people . . . it was around fifty people one day, on
the other day there were a hundred and fifty, everybody wanted to do
something. Then, I saw that those who knew a little bit: Lucia, Rosa,
Rubiela and Luz, those four I saw that they made some progress and
they had their own ideas. Then I made little groups, and I told them
‘when you have a question you go and ask Mrs. Lucia, Mrs. Luz’; they
had their own smaller groups, and I went to work with those who
did not know anything, and those who knew some helped there.
Thus, that was the strategy that we used in order to avoid eviction.
Then when the police came we were outside of the coliseum making
embroidery, and other things; and inside the coliseum, there were
the leaders doing meetings. There were the nuns with some women
sewing, and that helped so that nobody would suspect that we were
planning who knows what.
(Interview with Choibá group, July 2012)
These sewing groups were not religious in nature, but they followed
strategies used by the diocese, such as accompanying local development
groups in their process of organisation. Ursula Holzapfel had the support
of the diocese and other agencies for leading the project, and Choibá’s
shop can be found in the house of the Augustine Sisters. Ursula’s house
hosts other groups of women that make bread and alternatively also
work with Choibá. Choibá’s headquarters are in a house where they
have their sewing machines and make their famous black ragdolls. Their
members define Choibá as a group that is born thanks to the church.
The activities of sewing and embroidering were thought of as an
action of psycho-social accompaniment for the displaced communities.
At the same time, sewing in public with women and older nuns helped
to change the image of the displaced communities in the coliseum and
reduce their image as a threatening other, r trying to evoke empathy for
victims. The image of the victims as a distant other has been reinforced
in the narratives used in the media about the conflict, as was explained
in the previous chapter. The activities in the group such as sewing, knit-
ting, teaching other women to knit, learning to use the sewing machine
and making a business plan meant being able to connect and build their
identity through actions that were different from the experiences of vio-
lence. This was an important step in the transformation of their identity
and in the reconstruction of social relations, cultural forms and eco-
nomic networks. The participation of women in Choibá was a way of
putting the wheel of ordinary life into motion. After the extraordinary
event of surviving a massacre or being forcefully displaced, the lesson
was that life must continue.
Participation in the group helped them to adapt to urban life and to
create means of self-sufficiency, but it also created new challenges, such
as the transformation of gender roles. For instance, sometimes women
had to confront their husbands and the male leaders of the group due
to their work in Choibá:
Patricia∗ : There were some women who did not continue because
their husbands told them that this was a silly thing. Others were
told that if they saw them with thread, they would kick them and
throw the thread away.
Sandra: Why?
Patricia: They are too machista.
Lorena∗ : We already really liked sewing and even if they told us not
to do it, we continued doing it.
Patricia∗ : Sometimes, even the [displaced victims’] leaders criticised
us when we were in the meetings with thread and needle. And we
would say, ask us about what you are talking and we will answer,
because we are listening. But they wanted us to be looking at them
with crossed arms. Nevertheless, we always had thread and needle
in our purses wherever we went.
(Interview with women from Choibá, July 2012)
The interviewed women considered that their experience in the group

helped to reposition them in their families and in society as more inde-
pendent women, which has boosted their self-esteem and confidence,
even though this experience was hard at the beginning. They learnt
how to make a business plan; they travelled to other cities to put on
exhibitions; and they have become teachers themselves:
We have taught workshops in embroidering and knitting. We have

been multipliers. We have been in the Subestación and in Ursula’s
house, far away at the Sisters’s place in Guapango, in the Obrero, and
now I am teaching a handicraft course to children with disabilities.
I have my moulds here and I am going to take them to my boys,
for the workshop in Padua. I have been in Munguido, Bellavista, in
Nariño.
(Lorena∗ , interview, July 2012)
In addition to learning skills, increasing self-confidence and transform-

ing their gender roles, women claim that their participation in the group
has helped them to confront and to ignore (or forget) the emotions that
haunted them. For instance, Eugenia∗ reports that participating in the
group helped her to create a distraction from her reality in the coliseum:
We met Ursula when she came to provide some support for enter-
taining oneself, because one was just sitting there doing nothing,
starving, suffering so many crises and illnesses. There were so many
different kinds of people and a bad smell, because there were no
appropriate services at all. Then she came giving us support with
the handicraft in order to use that time and that we would not be
thinking of the things that happened and the things we were living,
and we were entertained with her. In that way we met, and there
she started teaching us to make the dolls, to knit, and many people
started to knit, in that way one killed time there.
(Eugenia∗ , displaced woman, interview, July 2012)
When members of the quilting group were asked in personal inter-

views about the main immediate outcome of their work with the group,
they answered, ‘distraction’ or ‘entertainment’. In interviews with the
group when the religious leader was present, she quickly corrected them
by saying that this is a task of peaceful resistance, autonomy or self-
employment. However, Eugenia’s claim that knitting and sewing helped
her to ‘not be thinking about the things that happened and the things
we were living, and we were entertained with her’ is a remark about the
importance of this ‘thinking about something else’. In this context, dis-
traction in the context of living in extreme conditions of displacement
can be understood as a form not simply of alienation but of emotion
regulation.
The illusion of liberation or liberation as illusion

The Oxford Spanish-English Dictionary translates the word ilusión from
Spanish as ‘hope’. Other senses of the word that are most commonly
used in Spanish are ‘thrill, excitement, illusion, and enthusiasm’. The
term ‘illusion’ is used here instead of hope because it conveys the
notion of it being a false notion or a false hope. Optimism and thrill
are important components of illusion but in subtly different ways than
the concept of hope conveys. The difference between hope and illusion
is a point to which I will return in detail at the end of this section. Illu-
sion can be associated with the work of a magician, an illusionist that
would entertain people with its apparent magic; in a similar way that
women in Choibá claim to have been entertained by their participation
in the group. Illusion is an emotion that comprises the feeling of having
a fond wish, a goal, something or somebody to love. Feeling illusion or
estar ilusionado is not a strong emotion to die for, but it is an emotion
that helps one to think of reasons to live. I consider illusion to be an
important religious emotion but is different from the ‘intense religious
feelings’ that can give birth to extreme ethno-nationalisms or religious
violence, as those that raised Appleby’s concern (2000, p. 68).
Father Gonzalo de la Torre explains the process of creating ilusión
in the communities of the Middle Atrato as part of the local religious
peacebuilding strategies. His definition of peacebuilding concerns main-

taining a horizon of happiness even in the middle of conflict:
The Pastoral Options of the Diocese of Quibdó reveal its position in

regard to peace, because all of them are part of the totality that is
called ‘the horizon of happiness of people’, which defines in reality
what peace is. Peace or Biblical ‘Shalom’ is not peace in absence of
war, but peace reached through the achievement of values, a digni-
fied life and the practice of Human Rights for men and women, for
individuals and cultural groups.
In that sense, peace is understood in negative terms not only as the

absence of violence but as the permanence of a horizon of happiness,
and in this context, the creation of illusion exists as the creation of a
reason to live. Victims of atrocity consider that the task of meaning-
making is oriented towards making sense not only of their past but of
their presents and futures. Illusion is part of the process of management
of negative emotions of despair and suffering by creating a distraction
and goals that could also help victims to go through the challenges of
surviving, experiencing forced displacement and an insecure return to
their village. It allows them to reinstate a sense of future.
Bello et al. (2005, p. 122) describe the negative emotions in medical
terms as the psychological consequences of the socio-political violence
suffered by victims: emotional symptoms such as anxiety (fear, hyper-
vigilance, apprehension, uncertainty and tremor) depression, insomnia,
resignation to extreme situations, alcoholism and silence. To this list of
negative emotions we could add pessimism and humiliation.
Pessimism is a result of a feeling of harm and humiliation. The
harm was done by the armed actors and a long history of poverty and
exploitation of Chocó’s resources. The humiliation comes from the gov-
ernment and the larger society. This is a result of the paradox that
the government represents legality and justice; however, members of
the government have been working with paramilitaries under total
impunity. Humiliation comes from the bureaucrats in charge of victims’
reparation offices and welfare institutions, which treat them as charity
beneficiaries, and the larger society who re-victimises the displaced by
stigmatising them. Victims, particularly the displaced victims living in
Quibdó, continuously complain about the precarious work of the gov-
ernmental offices in charge of assisting victims. Lourdes Villavicencio∗ ,
a displaced victim living in Quibdó, expresses her concern about

fraudulent relations, corruption, discrimination and plain mistreatment
in these offices:
That is very complex because, the truth is that sometimes people suf-
fer. The State should have a law for investigating some things to see
what is happening. We are displaced people from X or Y river. Then
you are the manager of the resources [for the displaced population].
You have so many friends who are policemen, doctors, and then you
put them there in that displacement [the list of beneficiaries]. And
we, who suffered in our flesh the situation, we do not receive any
help, but your friend does. We, the displaced people, are not receiving
anything. This is very complex.
(Lourdes∗ , Interview, April 2012)
Mixing feelings of humiliation and the perception of impunity creates a

feeling of pessimism in victims. It has been over ten years since the mas-
sacre happened, and even though a new town has been built, there has
not been integral reparation for victims of the massacre of Bojayá. Reli-
gious missionaries answer these negative emotions by leading projects
of construction of happiness. It is pertinent to underline here that these
projects of happiness-building are not oriented towards the individual,
but they are communitarian in nature, and in this sense they resist
a psychologisation of social problems (Furedi, 2004, p. 27). The focus
on community is rooted in the importance of collective identity for
local culture. The history of resistance of the community and the pas-
toral agenda of the diocese privilege the social organisational work over
individual attention, humanitarian aid or charity. In addition, people
have learnt skills in the organisational process that have helped them to
organise themselves as victims and displaced groups and to find comfort
through organisational actions.
Another important element in the construction of illusion is dignity.
No initiative that allows the creation of illusion in the community is
supported by the diocese. For instance, some members of the mission-
ary teams did not support the creation of Villa España, a neighbourhood
in the outskirts of Quibdó built with the cooperation of the Spanish
Red Cross for the displaced community. It was initially built as a provi-
sional response to the humanitarian crisis of forced displaced people
who arrived at Quibdó, but it became a permanent neighbourhood.
They considered that this neighbourhood was not dignifying for the
community, but it was just a distraction for people to leave their struggle
of resistance in the coliseum. According to one of the missionaries:
They were all together, side by side in a little house, and one could
see all the problems that could happen there. But then we said that
if they [the government] do not listen to us, if they do not get more
land and make it closer to the city . . . that reminded me of a concen-
tration camp. All those little houses, they were just missing the sign
saying ‘labour makes you free’. We decided that we were only going
to be close to the people through social work, but that we were not
going to participate in that project.
In the same direction, religious and social leaders criticise the Law of Vic-
tims because it is a way of keeping people in an illusion, ilusionada, but
without receiving any concrete solution to their problems or dignified
reparation. As one of the members of the ethnic organisation explains,
this law keeps victims ‘like a son who does not know his father but who
is waiting for the day to hug him’ (Interview, 29 July 2012).
Religion as opium: Medicine, source of protest and of utopian

visions
The role of religion in creating happiness and illusion can be analysed
in terms of Marx’s explanation of religion as the opium of the people:
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression [Ausdruck

[ ] of real
suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit
of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The [Aufhebung
[ g ] [abolition] of religion as the illusory happiness of the
people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give
up the illusions of their condition is a demand to give up a condition
that requires illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ
of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.
(Marx, 1977: 64, emended, Marx’s underlining)
(quoted by Mckinnon, 2005, p. 24)
McKinnon’s (2005) explains the historical context and the real meaning
of the expression ‘opium’, which is useful for this analysis. McKinnon
(2005, p. 25) argues that Marx’s underlining (expression, protest,
t opium)
suggests that religious suffering is an expression of real suffering and
as a protest against real suffering ‘comprise a single moment, and an
indivisible whole that is contained in the metaphor of “opium” ’.

McKinnon’s analysis of Marx’s metaphor in its original historical con-
text reveals more than the soporific qualities of opium:
I suggest here several connotations of ‘opium’ that would have been

relevant in Europe in the middle of the 19th century: opium was a
medicine (albeit one with significant, newly discovered ‘problems’);
it was a source of enormous profit (which also provoked protest and
rebellion); finally, it was a source of ‘utopian’ visions.
(McKinnon, 2005, p. 18)
In this sense, the use of opium as a metaphor for religion meant that
‘religion is part and parcel of the economic production and exchange’,
and in that situation of oppression and alienation, religion offers a seed
for happiness: illusory happiness. Following McKinnon (2005, p. 28):
Marx’s demand, then, becomes to actualize the utopian kernel that is

the spirit of a spiritless situation, to achieve a dialectical overcoming,
whereby the promised happiness becomes an actualized or, as Marx
puts it, a ‘real happiness’.
It is in the realisation of happiness that religion’s seed of emancipa-

tion and liberation is actualised. The transcendence of religion would
be to transform the situation that requires illusion, but in the meantime
ilusión offers a utopian dream, and a promise of happiness. Ilusión (as
was explained before in its meaning in Spanish) for victims from Bojayá
provides a mere glance to a possibility to keep living, to continue the
resistance despite there being no evidence of its success. In addition,
ilusión for religious and social leaders provides the seed for engaging
in activities of human rights and territory defence at the risk of their
own life.
The difference between illusion and hope is that illusion contains the
germ of its own falsity, just like opium, the utopian worlds revealed
are known to not be real. The emotion of illusion helps in self-
deception, but this process can be conscious or unconscious, intentional
or unintentional.22 Illusion helps to alter the perception of the reality.
Contrary to this, the emotion of hope helps in imagining and believ-
ing in a desirable version of the future in this world and the ways to
get there, and it is associated with the positive feelings of excitement
and anticipation (Brewer, 2010, pp. 127–128). Hope is also related to
the perception of means and goals: ‘it is based on realistic and con-
crete goals and directed thinking with pragmatic ways how to achieve
it’ (Jarymowicz and Bar-Tal, 2006, pp. 379–380), while illusion is located
further from that schema. In sum, while hope is understood as the light
at the end of a dark tunnel (Jarymowicz and Bar-Tal, 2006, p. 373),
ilusión is the light of the matches in the story of the little match girl.
The illusory happiness provided by religion, or stimulated by reli-
gious actors, can help to create ‘utopian’ doors or glances to another
world (McKinnon, 2005, p. 27). This utopia is not necessarily a pro-
jection of this world towards the future; actually, it might be that it is
not located in this world at all. One of the characteristics of religion
is that it acts in a line of time that is different from the secular one.
Its ‘sacred time’ runs at a different speed and follows a different logic,
which helps to understand otherwise irrational means for achieving cer-
tain outcomes. It goes beyond a rationalist implementation of means to
ends, since the time where those ends exist does not necessarily run in
this world.
For instance, when the emotion of religious illusion is framed by
extremist ideologies it can give rise to violent revolution. It could pro-
voke actions that distract people from their current suffering in order to
defeat a system of oppression, even if those actions are almost insignif-
icant in comparison to the magnitude of the system. An example is
terrorist acts, such as the destruction of the World Trade Centre, which
would not bring to an end or even provide a step towards the end of the
American empire; however, there is the illusion that it would generate
a change towards another possible world.23 Similarly, local activities of
development, such as Choibá or Guayacán, might not take people out
of poverty but they help to ‘ground’ hope and to create an illusion of
change that helps people not to be buried in their own suffering.
Despite the alleged benefits of the ‘happiness building’ strategy, one of
its pitfalls is that it needs a strong leadership and close relationships, as
those provided in the workshops, in order to last in time. Younger priests
not trained in liberation theology claim that they do not understand
why people continue those activities while knowing that they are not
profitable, thus it is possible that the new generation of missionaries will
not continue supporting these activities. But more experienced mission-
aries consider these activities necessary. For instance, Father Gonzalo De
la Torre explains:
We welcome everything that can give a possibility of happiness to

people. They have taught us that ‘the small is beautiful’. This is why
those small projects that are easily directed by the communities, aim
to make people think and commit to projects not matter how small,
teaching them teamwork, showing them the value of organisation.
They are useful for instilling hope and healing the psychological
impact of the permanent assault of the war . . . The fact that we are
not psychologists or professional psychiatrists should not restrain us
from providing words that makes us closer, interchange feelings, sim-
ple engaging actions that help people for spiritual recovery. I believe
that to feel illusion again, helps to heal the unconscious.
Pursuing local development initiatives has been a priority for many mis-
sionaries of the Middle Atrato. Aurora Bailón, a Spanish lay Claretian
missionary working in the area for over 30 years, claims: ‘we have always
worked more for the productive economic initiatives, because a social
organisational process that does not have results that improve people’s
living conditions, their welfare is going to be very difficult to be main-
tained’ (Interview, 18 April 2012). However, as the women from Choibá
and later Father Gonzalo de la Torre explained, their participation in the
workshops also helped them to create an illusion. Illusion and faith are
important resources for the transformation of their negative emotions
rooted in the past towards something to look forward to in the present
and in the future. Illusion helps to overcome negative feelings and to
have faith in overcoming the challenges of the displaced communities
in the city; but also the illusion of resisting in the territory despite the
risks. In this regard, another missionary woman explains:
One sees that people despite being tired, that they see things like very
far away, they are still dreaming. I believe that is what it keeps them
going, isn’t it? They dream . . . We believe that this is our territory, this
is where we were born, I have the jungle here, I have plantain here,
I have this, that, I have everything here. The reason to stay is because
I do not want to leave this territory in hands of somebody who is
not its owner. That is what we have found in what the indigenous
and Afro-Colombian people call the feeling of belonging to their ter-
ritory, and their identity with their territory. Because resignation is
not good for people, to not have dreams. People in the middle of this
tragedy need to have a dream, the dream that we can return to our
land tomorrow.
Conclusion
Narratives of social memory that define the massacre of Bojayá as part

of the systematic attack against black and indigenous population in
Colombia can contribute to the creation of meaning and understand-

ing of the atrocity. It can contribute to managing emotions of anger and
resentment against individual perpetrators, redirecting it as a rightful
anger against an oppressive system that has deep historical roots and is
in need of deep social changes.
However, the impact of the initiatives of the church is stronger in
their processes of acompañamiento to victims’ groups through different
workshops that help them to overcome feelings of powerlessness and
pessimism. This type of accompaniment has religious roots:
It is important that the acompañamiento does not manipulate the

consciousness of people; for instance, presenting the image of a
punishing God that is charging for the sins of the people. Instead,
the acompañamiento is done from the presence of a liberating God.
Reflecting on the war can be an opportunity for correcting and
transforming the causes of the war. This should be the base of any
dialogue, in order to have an emancipatory result when the war is
over.
(Interview with Father Gonzalo
de la Torre, April 2012)
The acompañamiento is part of the work with victims, such as workshops

and other organisational activities, and it also has the role of supporting
actions of resistance. However, participants in these workshops report
that one of the benefits of their membership is the feeling of being
‘entertained’ or distracted from their memories and present situation.
I have explained this process under the emotion of illusion, in a reli-
gious context, which helps to create ‘illusory happiness’ or ‘seeds of real
happiness’ in Marxist terms.
The religious emotions elicited in these groups are inscribed in a
peaceful resistance and therefore they do not support a violent revolu-
tionary programme and they help people to cope with their suffering
and to transform their conditions of life. The workshops led by the
religious missionaries provide paths for the transformation of victims’
emotions but there are also symbolical and religious resources in the
Afro-Colombian tradition that have been enacted in the social memori-
alisation of the massacre. In the next section I analyse how a funerary
ritual is used in the commemoration of the massacre and helps to
transform victims’ emotions through public grieving.
7
Funerary Rituals as Resistance
and Memorialisation
Introduction
This chapter analyses the re-enactment of funerary rituals, especially of

the children’s funerary ritual known as Gualí and traditional funerary
songs for adults known as Alabaos, as forms of social and cultural memo-
rialisation. There are two aspects that are relevant for this analysis; first,
the re-enactment of these funerary rituals can be understood as a form
of resistance to cultural annihilation. Second, they contribute to man-
aging negative emotions associated with memory afflictions such as la
mala muerte. The re-enactment of death rituals is analysed by reviewing
the literature on spontaneous shrines, grassroots memorials and public
mourning, taking into account the relevance of the religious component
in these practices.
Funerary rituals in the Afro-Colombian culture of Bojayá
There is a strong connection between the world of life and the world
of death in Afro-Colombian religious representations, which is enacted
through elaborated funerary rituals, which permit a ‘good death’ that
allows the deceased relative to become an ancestor that could protect
the community. The funerary rituals for adults comprise songs and
praying for nine days according to popular Catholic and local religious
traditions. The funerary songs used in the ritual for adults’ burials are
known as Alabaos, in which profuse sorrow and tears are displayed.
In contrast to adults’ funerals, in children’s funerals, known as Gualí
or Chigualo, less sorrow is displayed. It is believed that children become
angelitos, ‘little angels’, who protect their families and their godparents.
It constitutes a rite in which the corpse of the child is dressed in white
and passed hand in hand by the neighbours and the family. Women
137
sing traditional funerary songs and men play musical instruments; all
this happens while people are dancing around the child. It is said that
tears should not be displayed during the ritual because the child’s soul
might drown in those tears. Once the Gualí is done, there is a proces-
sion led by the elder children to the cemetery where the child’s corpse
is finally buried (Losonczy, 1991; Restrepo, 1995; Serrano, 1994).
The Gualí can be interpreted as the act of celebrating the death of a
pure soul that does not need rituals in order to reach heaven. Children’s
souls only need guidance to go to heaven, not intermediation. Tobon
(2009) describes Alabaos as praying in dialogue that has the form of a
song that follows the style of ‘romance de pasión’ with religious motives,
while the songs in the Gualí have historical themes, picaresque and
satire that are playful, emotive and joyful. Death rituals help to man-
age and work through the emotions associated with the loss of a loved
one, and in that sense the Gualí is no different. Davies (1997, p. 15)
underlines the importance of rituals for building the emotion of opti-
mism, creating the feeling that life can progress as normal even after
irremediable loss. In this sense, the Gualí would help to build optimism
supported in the community in the middle of the anguish of the loss of
a loved child.
Restrepo (2002) claims that the roots of this tradition are located in
the slavery past of the Colombian black communities, and the ‘celebra-
tion’ of death in a funerary rite of a child would mean the celebration of
his/her escape from a life of slavery. Later on, the elaborated funerary
ritual for children would reflect the tragic reality of the loss of chil-
dren to malnutrition, sickness and violence, in a context of high rates
of deaths and births, which provoke confronting emotional reactions
similar to those described by Scheper-Hughes (1990) in Death without
weeping. Contrary to the case described by Scheper-Hughes in Brazil, the
local church in Chocó aimed to defeat the causes of children’s death,
while allowing and supporting the local funerary practices, under the
notion of intercultural dialogue (De la Torre, 2012).
The Gualí is a traditional practice that is slowly decaying; there are not
enough cantadoras, women who know the songs and the dances, and
many of them have been forcefully displaced to the cities. Nevertheless,
there have been many initiatives to keep these traditions alive, such
as the festival Alabaos, Gualies and Levantamiento de Tumbas that has
been annually celebrated in Andagoya for the last 17 years. These tradi-
tional Afro-Colombian funerary practices were recognised as Intangible
National Heritage in 2014, due to their strong cultural and historical
meaning.
Funerary Rituals as Resistance and Memorialisation 139
Absence of funerary rituals for Bojayá’s victims
Despite the importance of funerary rituals for Afro-Colombian culture,

Bojayá’s victims could not receive appropriate funerals. The deceased
victims of the massacre of Bojayá were left abandoned, while the sur-
viving victims fled to the relative safety of Vigía del Fuerte, where they
tried to protect themselves from the shootings that were still occurring.
Some of the victims remember that at some point the guerrilla allowed
them to remove the dead bodies; they argue that the guerrilla probably
did not want the journalists to find the rest of the corpses in the church,
which is why the guerrilla said that if the people from Bellavista would
not collect the bodies, then they would throw them into the river. The
bodies could not be recognised. According to Father Antun, nine or ten
pregnant women died, ‘and the tiny unborn babies were found stuck
to the walls’ as a result of the shock wave of the explosion (quoted by
Vieira and Cariboni, 2007).
Some men, including Domingo Mena and Father Antun, went back
to Bellavista to collect and bury the bodies, which were already decom-
posing. Mena claims:
The mayor of Bellavista delegated me to gather a reliable group and

go to Bellavista to collect those bodies that were in the church. I got
more or less ten people to go with me, and I told them in Vigía, those
who have any problem with the guerrilla do not go with us because
we are going to be among guerrilla, because in Bellavista more than a
thousand guerrilla people were walking by the street as ‘dogs without
leashes’. Then we crossed the river and when we entered the church,
many of my mates left running because they were not capable of
going with me, because they poked their head round the church and
they saw the mangled bodies and they left. I could not lie to you,
but my strength came from drinking. I had a mate who was car-
rying the aguardiente [local alcoholic drink] for me and he was the
one who gave me drinks to recover and endure the stench of the
thwarted people. One would put a shovel and fill it completely with
worms because that entire people spent three days totally covered
with worms.
(Domingo Mena, speech at the Forum ‘Bojayá
una década después’ at the National Museum
of Colombia, Bogotá, 27 April 2012)
The bodies packed in black trash bags were later buried in a common
grave, and Domingo sang the Alabaos while he shovelled the sand in a
place on the riverside that was not covered by the flooding, and they
were identified weeks later by the attorney’s researchers. Only a small
percentage of the bodies buried in the cemetery were later recognised by
their relatives.
Cultural annihilation
Funerary rituals are important for Afro-Colombian communities, partic-

ularly for their function of giving to the deceased people the full status
of a ghost or a place in the community of ancestors (Evans-Pritchard,
1949, p. 62). They also contribute to reinforcing the solidarity in the
community, by sharing the pain of the loss, as is shown in the act of
passing hand in hand the body of the deceased child. During the con-
flict, armed actors got rid of the corpses of their victims, often throwing
them into rivers. Arocha and Gonzales (2009, p. 140) have described
the prohibition or profanation of Afro-Colombian funerary rituals as
ethnocidal because they threaten the cultural practices and solidarity
mechanisms of the Afro-Colombian communities. This is related to the
concept of cultural genocide, where ‘fundamental aspects of a group’s
unique cultural existence are attacked with the aim of destroying the
group, thereby rendering the group itself (apart from its members) an
equal object and victim of the attack’ (Nersessian, 2005, p. 9).
The profanation of corpses through mutilation or ‘disappearance’ has
been a common practice in the Colombian conflict, as well as in other
conflicts in other parts of the world. For instance, the Ndbele’ belief
that the tears of the living must be shed to release the souls of the dead
was not respected in Zimbabwe’s conflict during the 1980s. In fact, the
‘Fifth Brigade insisted that there be no mourning for those they killed,
and in some cases shot family members because they wept’ (Dugger,
2009, quoted by Levine, 2012, p. 190). Similarly, in Peru, the Senderistas
burned Catholic churches, and peasants had trouble celebrating hol-
idays or death rituals due to lack of safety (Theidon, 2004, p. 153).
According to Levine (2012, p. 190), ‘in Peru both the army and Shining
Path (like the Romans in Antiquity) forbade access to the bodies of the
dead along with public burial and rituals of mourning’. In Guatemala,
only a third of the survivors could bury their relatives who were victims
of violence. According to the Recovery of Historical Memory Project
(REMHI) (Vol. 1, 1998, p. 208):
In the manual of counter-insurgence from the Guatemalan Army,

there are precise instructions for hiding the location of the murdered
people:
The civilian dead, friends and enemies, will be buried by the military
personnel as fast as possible in order to avoid that these were used by
the subversive in their work of agitation and propaganda.
The interruption of funerary rituals, as in the case of Bojayá, could

be considered a practice of cultural annihilation. These are acts that far
from being a collateral damage of war are premeditated and oriented
towards the spiritual destruction of social groups, particularly of ethnic
groups with bonds socially constructed through rituals (Brewer, 2010,
p. 22). The relations of solidarity in the community have been weakened
after the massacre, partly because of the absence of funerary rituals, the
reception of indemnification money and the participation in commem-
oration activities. This division is detrimental for their existence as an
Afro-Colombian autonomous entity.
According to the GMH, the feeling of abandonment of the deceased
victims and the absence of rituals have ‘broken the spiritual and social
order and eliminated any possibility to create meaning’ (GMH-CNRR,
2010, p. 103). In that sense, the absence of funerary rituals impeded
the creation of optimism, the feeling of reintegrating suffering into the
history of the community through rituals, affecting their identity and
weakening the social ties in the community.
When people used to live in old Bellavista, the village was known
as the ‘town of the living dead’, where the dead were lamenting their
lack of proper funerary rituals (Caicedo et al., 2006, pp. 41–43). After
the relocation, the new Bellavista was close to the cemetery where the
bodies of the victims were reburied. The close proximity to the new
Bellavista was contrary to the traditional beliefs of the Afro-Colombians,
who prefer longer spatial distinctions between the world of the living
and that of the dead. The cemetery had been neglected most of the
time, mainly because not all the bodies that lay in the graves have been
identified by their relatives (GMH-CNRR, 2010, p. 199). The abandon-
ment of the cemetery has created division in the community. Domingo
Mena composed a song that describes this situation:
It is so painful/ when I come to the cemetery/

To see the villagers/who died in the church //
So abandoned/as a dead without mourner //
They took the money/and they never remembered them //
The sticks have fallen/the flag has rotten //
Many ask me/because I tell.
(Song, Domingo Mena)
(GMH-CNRR, 2010, p. 199)
Another important source of division and weakening of the social ties

in the community is related to the participation in the commemora-
tion of the massacre and the perception of individual indemnification.
For instance, during the opening of the commemoration of the tenth
anniversary of Bojayá, one of the women victim leaders, Ofelia∗ , spoke
into the microphone about the discomfort in regard to relatives who
had received money from individual administrative reparation and eco-
nomic compensations from the government and do not participate in
the collective commemoration. Most of the people from Bellavista have
not received this kind of compensation. Victims who have started a
collective case of denouncement and claiming collective reparations
have not got any positive response from the government, contrary
to those victims who had individual cases and received administra-
tive indemnification in exchange for dropping any further demands for
reparation.
As was explained before, the community has only received social
aid in the form of the reconstruction of the village in a new
location, but they have not received integral reparation. Ofelia was
discomforted about the families who had received money from indi-
vidual administrative reparations because she considered that they
took the money but did not sufficiently participate in the services
and memorials. She says that they are only interested in the com-
pensation money. She feels that the ‘real victims’ have not been
respected.
This claim has been shared by other members of the community, gen-
erating discomfort and division because other victims expressed that
they felt insulted by these remarks, even though they have not received
any money from the individual administrative reparations. They feel
guilty because they feel they should do more for their deceased rela-
tives who did not receive proper funerary rituals. In a conversation with
Julia∗ , she expressed her feelings about her deceased relatives who died
in the massacre; she had promised to buy them a bench for the church
in their name, but her scarce income is spent taking care of her grand-
children instead. She prays for forgiveness to her deceased relatives,
and every day she feels that her debt towards them is getting bigger.
Julia has been unable to fulfil her promise for economic reasons, and
even though she did not receive any indemnification, she feels offended
by Ofelia’s comments about people not being faithful to the deceased
relatives. The money from the individual compensation that some peo-
ple have received has become another source of disintegration in the
community.
Memory affliction: La mala muerte
In her research with indigenous communities of Ayacucho (Peru),

Theidon (2013) encountered several people, particularly women,
plagued with llakis. These are ‘emotional thoughts’ that grab the per-
son and inundate her with pain and sadness. According to Theidon,
‘Llakis can rob the person of their use of reason, leaving them sonso
(senseless or mad). And as llakis mature in the body, they can be fatal’
(2013, p. 41). Theidon describes the llakis as memory afflictions, ‘just
as a person can possess memory, so can memory possess the person,
grabbing them, filling their body, maturing to the point that their body
itself becomes unbearable. So villagers emphasise their desire to forget.’
Theidon considers that contrary to the therapeutic notion of maladies
de la mémoire, which emphasise the individual and abnormal process
of unclaimed traumatic experience and its recovery, the term ‘memory
afflictions’ does not underline an internal world of private suffering but
‘a social world that causes distress, and invokes a chain of mutual aid
and response. The memory of unaddressed wrongs, of economic dispos-
session, of loved ones brutally killed – these memory afflictions indict a
social world that is capable of making people very ill indeed’ (Theidon,
2013, pp. 42–43).
Memory afflictions should be considered not only from the medi-
cal perspective of an illness but as interpretations of political violence.
In the case of Afro-Colombian victims, the negative emotions associ-
ated with their experiences of suffering have been explained in terms
of la mala muerte (bad death), which occurs when there have not been
appropriate death rituals. The bad death transforms the soul-shadow of
the deceased into lost souls that float in the world of the living and
consume their energy or living force (fuerza vital) (Millan, 2011).
Some of the symptoms of the mala muerte are the repetitive dreams
that torment victims. They have reported being visited in their dreams
by the soul-shadow of their relatives:
I stayed with the pain of my son . . . I cried every day and every night
because of the pain of my son and the pain of my niece who had also
fallen there . . . one night she appeared to me and said ‘mom, don’t
cry anymore, because you will make me a lost soul’. I got scared and
stopped crying.
(Old woman, Bellavista, 2009) (GMH-CNRR, 2010, p. 92)
Following Theidon, la mala muerte can be understood as the hunting of

the memory of the atrocity and dispossession. The pain experienced
by survivors is difficult to put into words even though it is some-

thing strong and perceivable. Rosa Chaverra presented her testimony
during the event at the National Museum for the tenth commemo-
ration of the massacre of Bojayá. Her case provides an insight into
the consequences of the massacre, since this woman lost her par-
ents, nephews, cousins, uncles, aunts and brothers. In addition, six
of her eight brothers have displaced to Quibdó with their families
and one of her sisters was permanently injured in Dos de Mayo.
She says:
I have seen my dad and my mom in my dreams, and I ask them what
they wanted because I saw them upset. And they answered to me, ‘oh
darling, I am very hungry’, and that was because she [my mother] did
not eat, since the armed groups entered. She did not eat anymore, so
she left very hungry. I ask her about my dad, and she points over
there, he is working, and then I wake up, and then I can sleep no
more. The next day I tell my dream to one of my neighbours, and
he tells me that I should pray for them, because they are people that
were gone without praying [funerary rituals]. I did not see where my
parents were when they killed them, the truth is that my brother
went to search for them to bury them. He did not find them, the
grave was open and they had to close it again empty. The truth is
that I don’t know where my parents are because my brother did not
find them . . . because my parents were like minced meat. And that
makes me very sad; not being able to bury my parents is too much
pain for me.
(Rosa Chaverra’s speech at the Forum ‘Bojayá
una década después’ at the National Museum
Rosa’s pain is increased by the lack of funerary rituals of her relatives,

especially her parents for whom she feels that she had a particular obli-
gation. She and her brother made a grave that they had to close empty
because they did not find the bodies to bury. Victims’ pain is under-
stood in terms of grief; however, the conditions in which their deaths
occurred and the lack of death rituals create a particular set of conditions
for victims. Communities who have been affected by the impossibility
of performing proper death rituals for their victimised relatives are con-
fronted with the task of remembering without the ritual mechanism to
transform their pain.
Re-enactment of the Gualí
According to Davies (1997, p. 21), death rituals can be understood as a

source of ritualised human optimism. Death rituals are ‘words against
death’ that bring sense of hope to bear upon the hopeless. According to
Davies, ‘It is through funeral ritual that a people tell their stories of the
meaning of life and enact their rituals of transcendence’ (2005, p. 12).
This is true particularly in the case of tragedies where ‘death rituals help
to ensure that death can be coped with if it is not seen as senseless
and meaningless’ (Davies, 1997, p. 22). Davies (1997, pp. 53–54) claims
that bereavement cannot be explained according to a medical model;
there are no stages of recuperation that need to be overcome. Rather,
bereavement should be understood as a social process in which a per-
son’s identity is deeply affected and changed. I agree with Davies when
he claims that it is foolish and impossible to speak of recovery in certain
situations:
Some experiences influence human life so much that people are never
the same again. They simply become different people through what
has happened to them. To speak of recovery is to talk about a kind of
backwards change, an undoing of what has been done, an unliving
of part of life. And this is impossible.
(Davies, 1997, p. 52)
According to Goldie (2012, p. 69), the process of recovering from grief

is not the healing of the suffering and pain caused by bereavement; it
rather constitutes a type of process that requires a narrative that can help
to express grief, reveal it and explain it. In such cases, funerary rituals
play a fundamental role in the creation and sharing of those narratives.
Death rituals are cultural mechanisms that help to get social support
and overcome this hardship. Even if it is not possible to recover from
the experience of loss, particularly when funerary rituals were not pos-
sible, people from Bojayá have resisted in alternative ways, using their
own religious resources. For instance, Domingo Mena says about his job
handling the bodies after the massacre, ‘I had to take them out in black
bags and put them in a boat to bury them later. People could not cry for
them, but I did it for them and I sang the Alabaos’ (quoted by Macias,
2012).
La mala muerte is an expression of how experiences of suffering are
interpreted in religious terms. In this case, religious beliefs can be a
source and expression of both negative and positive emotions. On the

one hand, there is a rupture with the religious rules because the funerary
rituals were not implemented, which is a source of further concern and
pain for victims. On the other hand, there is a possibility to trans-
form religious rules and create new rituals that would help to transform
negative emotions. Experiences such as mala muerte are explained by
Theidon (2013, p. 45) as males del campo (countryside maladies) that
‘refer to disordered social relations and to the spiritual and moral con-
fusion that characterizes a postwar society . . . in addition to causing
individual illness, certain emotions are considered socially disruptive
and dangerous. Managing strong negative or retributive emotions is one
part of managing conflict.’
Victims have created cultural responses that aim to manage these neg-
ative emotions and resist the violence and humiliation inflicted on them
by the violent actors. For instance, Domingo Mena sang the Alabaos that
the community could not sing in the funerary rituals, and his songs
have become a living archive of the memory of the massacre and have
also become important for the community even though they were not
performed in the appropriate ritual context (Riaño-Alcalá and Beines,
2012). The efforts of victims of Bojayá to overcome the mala muerte
have been documented in their symbolical practices of dance and song:
‘those who sing expel their own silence and exhort the collective body
that once had been immobile to move’ (Millan, 2011, p. 38). Victims
have composed songs that tell the story of what happened and create
energy to overcome their numbness. Furthermore, victims have per-
formed death rituals in the commemoration of the anniversary of the
massacre, bringing the power of grief into the public arena.
In addition to songs, an important performance took place during the
tenth year commemoration of Dos de Mayo; a group of women from
Pogué, a village from Bojayá, performed a Gualí:
Women were in a circle singing very emotive and satirical songs. The
songs that I heard had a subtle sexual content, with mocked refer-
ences to men’s sexual performance. The songs have a responsorial
form, where a main singer starts and the choir answers. They have
a repertoire of songs but there is also a component of improvisation
that was evident when one of the singers could not answer in time
to the previous verse. They replaced what would have been the body
of a child with a bag or a piece of cloth. This replacement expressed
the absence of proper funerary rituals for children who could not
become a little angel. Women usually do not sing the songs from
the Gualí outside of the ritual context. As Tobon (2009) noted from
his fieldwork in San Miguel, Ubertina Parra, one of the cantadoras
[singers] said that she would not sing romances, because even though
they are ‘happy songs, they are very sad . . . it is very sad to sing them,
and they can bring death to children here’.
During the re-enactment of the Gualí, í there were very distinctive move-
ments, emotive and happy songs and dance; it was a celebration of
death. Singing Alabaos and dances are common practices of memori-
alisation which are particularly relevant during the commemoration of
the massacre at a local level. These practices have also been replicated
in other contexts where Afro-Colombian displaced people have relo-
cated, as Castro (2005) reports in the case of the church Maria Madre
del Redentor in Bogotá.
In further conversations with some of the singer women from Pogué,
some of them manifested enthusiasm by performing these rituals even
in a context different from the traditional; others claimed that initially
they felt they were very tired; they did not want to continue performing
the Gualí at the commemoration of the massacre every year. However,
the singers had been convinced by some of the missionary women, who
had also joined them during the Gualí. í They believed that when women
of Pogué stopped singing their songs and performing their Gualí, í the
violent actors would have definitively won.
This is a ‘re-enacted’ Gualí,í where the songs and the dances were
present but in a different context; most importantly, it is not only
a representation of a funeral but a cultural response to mala muerte
and the social injustice that affects the victims of the conflict in the
region, which means that it acts as an event of public/protest mourn-
ing, a ‘grassroots memorial’ of an atrocity. It might be necessary to
underline here that normally the Gualí is not used as a form of remem-
brance, but given the traumatic character of the massacre of Bojayá and
the opportunity of bringing several communities together, the women
from Pogué convinced by the local missionaries decided to re-enact a
Gualí.í
The Gualí performed as a form of memorialisation aims to remem-
ber that 48 children died in the church of San Pablo Apostol and their
funerary rituals did not take place. It also expresses the feeling of grief
and permanent bereavement that cannot be overcome. However, this
is also a death ritual that calls for identification with victims’ suffering.
This is a dramatisation of a funeral, since it does not have a body to
bury and other elements strictly incorporated in the ritual, such as the
place, clothes and food, are different. But at the same time, the songs
are performed by authorised singers and the movements correspond to
the ‘real’ ritual; thus, they convey truthful emotions that are supported
in victims’ background culture.
The ritual also helps to bring together the community that has been
subjected to threats of cultural annihilation, not only through the
impediment of their death rituals, but in the measures of reparation by
the government. Individual economic reparations have been a source of
disintegration in the community and the relocation of the town repre-
sents a violent act against their culture and the memory of the murdered
victims. The Gualí, í as well as other acts of performative memorialisation,
contributes to bringing the community together around an experience
of collective and public mourning. Furthermore, the re-enactment of the
Gualí can be understood as a way of building optimism in the middle of
their situation of abandonment by the government and of continuous
conflict.
The re-enactment of the Gualí ten years after the massacre, and know-
ing that the original Gualí could not be performed, can be interpreted
as a form of making visible the inconclusive nature of the bereavement
of the community, as is explained below.
Grief and public mourning as protest
The cultural memory associated with the Gualí goes as early as the
slavery past, according to Restrepo (1995), and is used in the commem-
oration of Dos de Mayo in a political sense. The re-enactment of this
ritual can be understood as a grassroots memorial (Margry and Sánchez
Carretero, 2011), which consists of not only an expression of grief but
social discontent and protest after traumatic death. Margry and Sánchez
Carretero (2011, p. 2) explain it as ‘the creation of memorial bricolages
and makeshift memorials in public space in order to achieve change’.
This is a practice of ‘mourning in protest’ (Senie, 2006); it is a per-
formative event directed towards societal grievances that contains a
transformative intent of memorialisation towards change; in this case,
change is related to the victims’ agenda, as is explained in Chapter 5.
Senie (2006) argues that spontaneous memorials in cases of unjust
death are not only private expressions of pain and bereavement made
public. The second nature of these memorials is to reach those in power
and the elites, which can make a difference in terms of policymaking
‘so these unjust deaths would not happen again’. Senie (2006, p. 45)
provides a list of examples of spontaneous memorials:
The memorial to Malice Green was also a protest against police bru-
tality; the Oklahoma shrine was a wailing wall at the destruction of
random terrorism; the creation of the symbolic cemetery in Colorado
was accompanied by cries for gun control and the study of violence
in youth culture.
The re-enactment of the Gualí in this particular context of the tenth

commemoration of the massacre does not primarily constitute a sub-
stitution of the funerary rituals, but it is a memorial and denunciation
of the criminal acts that led to the absence of the original funerary rit-
uals. It is also a cultural grassroots response to the memory afflictions
that result in the mala muerte; its function is to help heal the spiri-
tual and moral confusion that resulted from the social disorder after
the massacre.
The re-enacted Gualí expresses intimate connections between grief
and social memory of atrocities. Grief is associated with the feelings of
pain and suffering of those who have lost their loved ones, who can be
their close relatives or the members of the national imagined commu-
nity. Grief appears as a spontaneous emotional reaction to loss; it is also
a strong emotional reaction that can be long-lasting and that can affect
how the past is remembered. I agree with Butler (2004) when she claims
that the potential of grief is not only enticing new violence, what it
‘might be made of grief besides a cry for war’ (Butler, 2004, p. xii). Grief
can also help to understand how atrocity has affected the way people
cope and transform their emotions of suffering.
The sabotage and prohibition of public expressions of grief for vic-
tims in Colombia, and particularly for ethnic minority victims, can be
understood as a cultural weapon during war, a tool for cultural annihi-
lation. In short, prohibiting and sabotaging death rituals during war are
symbolical practices that aim towards the dehumanisation of a person:
Those who carry out the massacres have before them strangers who
do not belong to their world, archetypes of the unspeakable: physi-
cally close but spiritually distant. As such, what we have in Colombia
is a deadly game of representations and self-representations trapped
within a perverse and inhuman logic.
(Uribe, 2004, p. 95)
The public expression of grief can help to reinstate the feeling of order
and its repression can lead to new cycles of violence (Butler, 2004). In
that sense, social grief has an important role for social transformation
because it can be a political force if it is moved beyond the narcissistic

emotion of melancholia and forces us into looking to our shared vulner-
ability and others’ source of suffering (Butler, 2004). In this sense, grief
can contribute to building bridges of vulnerability among victims and
audience. Grief is both fuel for violent reactions and a political resource
that comes from mourning in the social sphere. This dual character is
explained in the case of Bojayá when the government used ‘grief’ in the
politicisation of the memories of the massacre. It was used to justify the
militarisation of the Middle Atrato in 2002 and in attempts to spoil the
peace dialogues between the government and the guerrilla in 2013.
Victims are not passive players in this ‘game of representations’. Their
re-enactment of funerary rituals is used as a mechanism of emotion reg-
ulation that seeks to transform feelings of humiliation associated with
the dehumanising experience of extreme violence and lack of funerary
rituals. The re-enactment of funerary rituals shapes communal memory
(Connerton, 1989, p. 48) and contributes to intensifying emotional feel-
ings of solidarity and social relations in the participants, in opposition
to the division and weakening of social bonds that have been caused
by poor reparation strategies. According to Knottnerus (2014), ‘the re-
creation of rituals, some of which involve collective emotions, can help
people to cope with disruptive situations which lead to “deritualisation”
or the breakdown and loss of previously engaged in ritualized activities
that occur in daily life’.
The re-enactment of the Gualí and the use of the Alabaos for transmit-
ting the historical message of the massacre and the political claims of
victims’ rights help to transform the emotion of grief from an intimate
feeling of melancholia to a social narrative. This narrative makes the vul-
nerability of the community visible at the same time as it strengthens
victims’ claims. Butler claims that grief as a resource for politics opens
the gate to understand what counts as ‘grievable’ for society. In other
words, the expression of grief in the public arena has the potential of
creating a cultural extension and psychological identification with vic-
tims of violence. However, in the case of the massacre of Bojayá, grief
has only reached a local circle, creating a narrow cultural trauma.
Conclusion
The re-enactment of Alabaos and Gualíes helps to construct optimism

in the middle of the conflict, and it contributes to the restoration of
the emotion of dignity in victims after the massacre through symbol-
ical and cultural acts that struggle against the dehumanisation that
victims suffered through acts of extreme violence, as is explained by

Uribe (2004). Re-enacting their funeral has the dimension of reinstating
the destroyed bodies to the realm of the human again.
Death rituals are acts of commemoration with the potential for
becoming acts of political resistance. The performance of death rituals
in defiance of prohibition by the powerful perpetrators appeals for the
re-establishment of social justice in the middle of chaos. This dimension
has religious resonance, as is found in the biblical example of Rizpah:
10 Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for her-
self on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured
down from the heavens on the bodies, she did not let the birds of the
air touch them by day or the wild animals by night. 11 When David
was told what Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, Saul’s concubine, had done,
12 he went and took the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan from
the citizens of Jabesh Gilead. (They had taken them secretly from
the public square at Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hung them
after they struck Saul down on Gilboa.) 13 David brought the bones
of Saul and his son Jonathan from there, and the bones of those who
had been killed and exposed were gathered up.
(2 Sam 21)
According to the feminist theologian Silvia Schroer (1998, p. 154),

Rizpah is a model for women who resist the disappearance of their chil-
dren at the hands of violent governments. Their resistance is understood
in terms of remembering ‘until the guilty are brought to justice’. Follow-
ing Butler (2004), it is understood that the emotion of grief when made
public outside of the proper ritual context, or as ‘mourning in protest’,
exposes one’s own vulnerability, creates shame and guilt on the perpe-
trator and reinforces broken bonds of solidarity. Similar elements have
been observed in the re-enactment of the Gualí, where women have a
strong role in carrying the cultural memory of the funerary rituals as
mechanisms for political and social mobilization.
8
Religious Peacebuilding and
Transitional Justice from Below
Introduction
The previous chapters discussed how the Diocese of Quibdó developed

religious peacebuilding strategies such as initiatives of social memori-
alisation that contribute to create demands for social justice and the
recognition of victims’ rights. The local church and victims’ associations
share many of the narratives of social memory about Dos de Mayo and
about the conflict in the region. However, there is some friction between
these organisations in regard to the uses of social memory in a context of
transitional justice, which is analysed in this chapter. It also studies how
these initiatives contribute to an emancipatory peacebuilding model.
Emancipatory peacebuilding is considered here as a suitable category
of analysis for religious peacebuilding because it allows one to emphasise
the work of religious actors at the grassroots in constructing bottom-up
approaches to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition
of violence (Richmond, 2007). Thiessen (2011) describes the methodol-
ogy of emancipatory peacebuilding as less coercive than the (neo)liberal
project and more flexible in its conceptions of politics, economics and
human rights. Thiessen (2011, p. 123) claims:
Emancipatory peacebuilding, in short, broadens the narrow

top-down state-building focus of liberal peacebuilding, and holis-
tically redirects the project of grassroots, bottom-up activity-
engaging with the local marginalized. Local decision-making pro-
cesses are allowed to determine basic political, economic, and
social developments in post-violence period. As such, emancipatory
peacebuilding is intimately interested in the ‘everyday’ needs
of a conflict-affected population . . . and the culturally adapted
152
Religious Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice from Below 153
provision of vital resources, political agency, and economic oppor-

tunity. . . . emancipatory peacebuilding allows local conditions and
capacities to determine what type of peace will emerge in a particular
context.
The model of emancipatory peacebuilding underlines narratives built at

the grassroots, which is a dimension that contributes to understanding
the role of social memory in social peace processes.
A sociological analysis of religious peacebuilding through the lenses
of emancipatory peacebuilding is more suitable for understanding the
strategies of religious peacebuilding implemented in Chocó, rather than
an explanation based on the idea of religious peacebuilding as part of
the elements of ‘soft’ power, as explained below. The approach of soft
power to religious peacebuilding sees religion as a supplement to the
good governance paradigm and liberal peacebuilding.
Religious peacebuilding
Religious peacebuilding and inter-faith dialogue has received increasing

attention in the field of transitional justice and reconciliation (Abu-
Nimer, 2013; Appleby, 2000; Lederach, 1997; Philpott, 2006). It is often
related to ‘soft’ power or the subjective aspects of peacebuilding, such as
perceptions, attitudes, emotions, and socio-psychological and spiritual
dimensions, which are particularly relevant for promoting reconcili-
ation and forgiveness (Hertog, 2010). Some scholars have considered
religious peacebuilding to be part of the so-called track II or non-
official diplomacy (Johnston and Sampson, 1994). Gopin (2000) and
Hertog (2010) have argued that ‘hard’ aspects of peacebuilding such
as restructuring economic, political and social programmes can work
synergistically with the ‘soft’ aspects of peacebuiliding.
However, neither the binary of hard/soft peacebuilding nor the con-
cept of synergistic model defined by Gopin (2000) is sufficient for socio-
logically explaining the diversity of strategies of religious peacebuilding,
even though they can be relevant theoretical resources from the practi-
tioners’ perspective. Understanding ‘religious peacebuilding as “soft,”
“kumbaya” extra-curricular activities in the otherwise brutal realities of
international and local real politics’ (Omer, 2012, p. 18) would sug-
gest that religion follows uncritically preconceived notions of peace
established by ‘hard’ politics, often based on a (neo)liberal model of
peacebuilding. In contrast to this view, the analysis of the case of Bojayá
reveals that religious actors are often involved with building peace
through the transformation of the conditions of exploitation and social

injustice that affect victims at the margins and whose needs are not com-
pletely addressed by top-down transitional justice mechanisms. Similar
cases are found across other places in Latin America and in places such
as Mozambique, Nigeria and Cambodia (Haynes, 2009).
Transitional justice from below and social memory
The study of the social construction of memory of atrocities compels us

to critically analyse claims supporting the exceptionalism of atrocities
and crimes against human rights and instead to observe how collective
rights have been affected, and how social, political and economic struc-
tures allow violence to continue (Chapman, 2009). The perspective of
transitional justice from below helps to compare memorialisation nar-
ratives focused on identifying perpetrators of abuses of human rights
against explanations of ‘broader social truths that allowed the violence
to happen in the first place’ (Chapman, 2009, p. 100). The empirical
research helps us to understand a broader concept of justice in which
economic and social abuses are taken into account as much as human
rights crimes (Diaz, 2007; Gonzalez, 2009; Van der Merwe et al., 2009).
Finally, from this perspective it is possible to analyse the strategies
employed by religious peacebuilders in Bojayá as a response to the real-
ity of victims and community, rather than only as a response to abstract
principles of a religious model, such as a theodicy.
The model of transitional justice from below emphasises certain
dimensions of transitional justice mechanisms that affect people at the
grassroots and that are often overlooked by official transitional jus-
tice mechanisms. In the case of social memorialization, this dimension
contributes to including some of the concerns of the population at
the grassroots, which are not only crimes against human rights but
also political, economic, social and cultural crimes that have affected
the local population. This dimension is less direct than crimes against
human rights but it could help to understand the conflict and sup-
port its social transformation in a better way. For instance, in the
case of Bojayá, the dimension from below includes the detrimental
role of transnational companies that affect the organisational processes
through the sabotage of their right to consulta previa. This does not mean
that top-down (neo)liberal projects of peacebuilding ignore victims’
voices; they include them but often they use victims’ voices in order
to support and legitimate their own political agendas, as was explained
in Chapter 5.
Victims’ voices often go through the prism of political interests that

use social memory for particular goals, such as the demonisation of the
enemy or the militarisation of key geographical regions as happened
in Bojayá. In addition, when official politics of memory have been
implemented without ensuring the accountability of perpetrators, as has
often happened in Latin America, the use of politics of memory ‘means
the institutionalisation of impunity, with detrimental consequences for
strengthening the rule of law’ (de Brito, 2001, p. 161). Contrary to this
situation, bottom-up initiatives of social memorialisation can help to
create ‘a sense of rights and entitlement among many formerly marginal
and victimised sectors of the population’ (Sieder, 2001, p. 163).
Against this background, grassroots religious actors have a relevant
role for invigorating the spectrum of narratives of social memory by
leading activities of social memorialisation that are in a close connection
with voices of the people at the grassroots. A case in point is COVIJUPA’s
work, which depends on the long-term trust that they have built with
the Afro-Colombian communities. The recovery of social memory of
atrocities can lead to healing and strengthening of the social fabric and
to including individual atrocious events such as massacres in a narra-
tive of widespread terror and violence with economic and humanitarian
consequences. Even though there are no major distinctions in the narra-
tives of social memory of the massacre of Bojayá developed by the local
church and the grassroots victims’ associations (ADOM and Comité Dos
De Mayo), there are some differences in regard to the mechanisms of
reparation that they consider appropriate for victims’ needs, which can
provoke friction between the local victims’ associations and the local
church.
Local friction: Grassroots church and victims’ associations
The actions of social memorialisation led by the Diocese of Quibdó

have aimed to broaden the understanding of the massacre of Bojayá
by including it in the larger narrative of widespread attacks against
Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities of Chocó, as explained
in Chapter 6. In this regard, Jesus Florez, who has been one of the main
promoters of several processes of memorialisation of the massacre in
the diocese, presented the tenth year commemoration of the massacre
organised at the National Museum of Colombia as follows:
In the first place, it is important to underline that this event is held

in memory of the 79 people of the black communities from Bojayá
that died in 2 May 2002, victims of the explosion of a bomb launched

by the FARC against the church of the town. [This occurred] during
the confrontations with paramilitary from the Elmer Cardenas Bloc
self-defence army in a context where despite the early warnings, the
official institutions did not react in an opportune manner to avoid
the massacre. We are holding this event also in memory of the seven
survivors who have passed away in the last ten years as a consequence
of cancer, due to the shards of the bomb according to the commu-
nity; and the thirteen people from the communities of Napipí, Puerto
Conto and Vigía del Fuerte, who lost their lives as a result of the vio-
lent events before and after the massacre in the church of Bojayá,
between 10 April and 6 May 2002. In addition, we remember hun-
dreds of victims from the black and indigenous communities in all
regions of the Atrato River who lost their lives. Those crimes are still
in impunity.
(Jesus Florez, speech at the Forum ‘Bojayá una
década después’ at the National Museum
Florez points at different types of violence where the massacre of Bojayá

was not the only atrocity remembered but atrocities that happened
before and after the massacre were included in a longer period of time.
In this sense, the processes of memorialisation led by the local church
have created a narrative that emphasizes the widespread and systematic
character of the violent acts that constitute a crime against humanity,
which goes beyond the claims of a narrative that fetishises the massacre
of Bojayá. As I explained in Chapter 5, The diocese’s narrative helps to
create a sense of ‘moral violation’ about something terrible that is still
happening in Chocó, in contrast to the narrative that is shared by the
wider audience that remembers a single event, a war crime that is unique
and atrocious.
However, the narratives developed by the local church have not been
completely successful in creating a psychological identification and cul-
tural extension between victims and the national audience due to the
social and cultural barriers between the urban mestizo majority and the
Afro-Colombian rural communities, which are reflected in notions such
as the invisibility and oblivion of Afro-Colombian victims. Neverthe-
less, the diocese has been able to lead works of memorialisation both at
a local and a national level through activities such as chapels of memory,
rituals and victims’ groups. In these activities, victims at the grassroots
have actively participated and often they have led some of these actions
of memorialisation as well. The diocese has connected local commu-

nities and national and international organisations through initiatives
such as campaigns of memorialisation at the National Museum, the
systematisation of the attacks against civilians in written reports, and
relations with international agencies such as the UN, ABColombia,
WOLA and UNHCHR.
Friction in the uses of social memory

Despite the fact that victims’ organisations and the local church share
a common narrative of the massacre, there is some conflict in regard
to victims’ views and the diocese’s perceptions of the uses of this social
memory. For the local church it is clear that social memory can con-
tribute to bringing justice to victims by revealing the truth about some
of the crimes committed in the past, particularly the relation of violence
to poverty and marginalisation. In this sense memory is understood as
a way of bringing justice from below and a mechanism to influence
changes in the legal arena. While for victims’ associations, social mem-
ory is considered to mainly be a mechanism to exercise pressure on
the local and national government for the implementation of focalised
social investment. These clashing views on the uses of social mem-
ory have generated some friction between the diocese and the victims’
organisations. Selimovic (2013) uses the concept of frictional process to
understand and analyse the encounter between different narratives and
actors at global/local interactions around post-conflict memorials. The
concept of frictional process is also useful to describe the process that
occurs at a local level between actors of the grassroots and civil society,
in this case the local church, victims and victims’ associations.
For instance, during the tenth year commemoration of the massacre
of Bojayá, there were several activities of memorialisation in Bellavista,
Quibdó and Bogotá. The church provided some support to activities
that took place in Bellavista but the work of the Social Pastoral Office
was concentrated on the event performed in Bogotá, at the National
Museum. This event saw the presence of scholars, media, civil society
and some government officers, and it was organised with support of
the GMH. In addition, at the 25th International Book Fair in Bogotá,
two books related to the case were presented: The dead don’t speak (Los(
Muertos no Hablan) by the Spanish journalist Paco Gomez, and I am
Atrato ((Atrato soy Yo) by Nevaldo Perea. The diocese sponsored travel
for a few leaders of the victims’ organisations from Bojayá and ethnic
organisations to Bogotá. However, some members of the victims’ asso-
ciations claimed that they did not consider such an event relevant and
most of the victims in Bellavista did not even know about the event
in Bogotá. Some members of the victims’ association preferred to focus
their efforts on the event in Bellavista, particularly in relation to the
possibility of having negotiations with the government. Victims’ leaders
were more concerned with achieving some concrete outcomes in negoti-
ations with the government for their social and economic welfare, rather
than demanding justice and truth at the event in Bogotá.24
At the local level, perceptions of the uses of social memory might dif-
fer as well. For example, both victims and the local church recognise
the importance of maintaining the old San Pablo Apostol church as a
memorial. However, the way this is achieved is interpreted in different
ways. Some of the local missionaries consider that the relocation of the
town of Bellavista obscures the possibility of recognising the old church
as a place of suffering for victims. The Augustine missionaries’ house
was the only building standing in old Bellavista for several years, besides
the old church, because the missionary women living in old Bellavista
considered that remaining in that place was a way of reclaiming the
place where the massacre occurred as a site of commemoration of suf-
fering and hope. According to Jacobs (2011, p. 164), who has conducted
research on Holocaust memorials and on Rwandan church sanctuaries:
In national sites of genocide commemoration thus function as sacred

spaces that engender deep feelings of grief and sorrow where the uni-
fying symbols are those of death, torture, extermination, massacre,
and rape. Thus, one might argue that what has been sacralised at
these monuments to genocide are despair and human suffering.
The old church is a place that invokes deep emotions for victims and
witnesses, similar to those reported by Jacobs. However, there has not
been an institutionalised response to deal with this as a place of mem-
ory. The church was rebuilt by the diocese and it is under the care of the
missionaries because the government has not given any attention to
the church in old Bellavista. Also, while the old church should become
a sanctuary according to local missionaries and victims, church author-
ities do not agree. Religious authorities consider that the requirements
for the consecration of a sanctuary are not met yet by the church of St
Pablo Apostol, such as continuous religious activities and being a large
centre of pilgrimage. It has been the Augustine missionary Sisters who
have taken on the task of staying in old Bellavista, guarding it as a place
of memory. This role has been controversial for some members of the
community.
Some victims in Bellavista do not believe that the Augustine Sisters

staying in old Bellavista was evidence of commitment to the people but
it was rather a sign of abandonment. Laura∗ , a woman inhabitant of
Bellavista, expresses her concern in regard to the Sisters’ decision:
If you are doing work that is for the people, you should stay with the
people and not the other way around. I respect the Sisters and I like
them, but I don’t like that part. You can imagine that we have been
here for nearly five years, and they are still over there. Why do they
have to be over there alone? When they offer workshops and things
like that, people have to go over there.
Since 2014 the Sisters have moved to new Bellavista and they continue
with their work of accompaniment from there.
Friction in the reparation claims

In general terms, there is a strong cooperation between the mission-
ary teams and the victims but a clash between the priorities of the local
church and the priorities of the victims’ associations is visible in terms of
the way the memorialisation and the reparation should occur. This clash
illustrates the relation between grassroots and civil society explained by
Brewer (2010). According to Brewer (2010, p. 54): ‘it is civil society that
has the organisational skill, resource capacity and international network
links to mediate grassroots private troubles and bring them to the pub-
lic sphere where they can be turned into public issues’. The diocese is
concerned with raising claims about justice, truth and non-repetition of
violence while victims at the grassroots are affected by their urgent sit-
uation of marginalisation, inequality and oppression that causes them
to focus on immediate policies of reparation. The victims’ associations
act as proto-civil society bringing the private interests of the victims to
the negotiation with the government, but they are still burdened by
the pressures of the grassroots; they lack a disposition for considering
reparation in terms of deepening democratic processes or considering
reinforcing the claims for truth and justice.
I explained in Chapter 6 that part of the agenda set by victims’ associ-
ations in Bojayá was oriented towards demanding that the government
fulfil their promises of reparation to the community, even though these
promises do not represent a complete vision of integral reparation for
the communities of the Middle Atrato. Lozano (2009) claims that the
official mechanisms of reparation implemented in the region are framed
by focalised social investment with little impact on the integral repara-

tion of victims. Policies of social investment are different from policies
of integral and collective reparation to ethnic minorities because they
do not address symbolic mechanisms of recognition of the suffering
occasioned to victims, oriented towards the rehabilitation of victims’
condition of active citizens and of reconciliation of victims with the
state (Uprimny and Saffon, 2009, p. 46).
In addition, there were many irregularities in the process of build-
ing the new town of Bellavista that would disqualify this project as a
policy of reparation. To begin with, there was no consensus about the
relocation of the town by its inhabitants:
The relocation was done because of a promise of the government.

When they did not attend to the displacement, they proposed to
relocate Bellavista instead. But you know how people are, some peo-
ple said yes, others said no. Then people said ‘we accept’ because they
[the government] said at some point that the decision needed to be
taken now. This means that people said yes because they [the gov-
ernment] said that they would not invest even one peso there [in old
Bellavista]. When they said they will not invest any money or things
there, we accepted because of all they had promised [hospital, school,
houses, etc.]. We’ll see.
(Marina∗ , interview, April 2012)
According to Lozano (2009), even though flooding was a real concern

for the communities of the middle Atrato, the relocation of Bellavista
was mainly motivated by a governmental strategy of social recuperation
of the territory. This strategy is framed by a policy of democratic security
of the national defence ministry that aims to:
achieve the recuperation of the territory through warranting the

legitimacy, governability, and presence of the state in strategic zones
of the national territory recuperated by the military forces and the
police, developing integral economic and social actions in order
to complement policies of defence and democratic security in the
framework of social recuperation of the territory.
(Lozano, 2009, p. 470)
Ten years after the massacre, the impact of these policies has created
division, dependency and marginalisation in the communities. Some
victims complain that some people who did not live in Bellavista
received houses, since part of the condition for receiving a house from
the government was that victims had to contribute with work or had to
pay somebody who would work helping to build the house:
Many children of people who died in the massacre did not receive
a house. For whom did they rebuild the town? Did they rebuild it
for the victims of Dos de Mayo, or did they rebuild it for other peo-
ple? Perhaps the money was invested in something else, and not in
victims’ reparation.
(Woman inhabitant of Bellavista, interviewed
by Lozano, 2009, p. 471)
Divisions in the community have deepened due to the implementa-

tion of those policies of reparation. Some victims from Bellavista prefer
to receive the focalised institutional aid of the government over not
receiving any help at all. In this sense, Marta∗ , a woman survivor of the
massacre of Bojayá, explains the priorities of the events organised by
the victims’ organisations; one of them is accountability in regard to
the works done in Bellavista:
We are talking about accountability because there were many things

that were not completed when the new town was finished. Those
things were on paper but they were not built [for instance]: the top
level hospital, but they half made a health centre instead.
(Marta Peña∗ , interview, April 2012)
The promised mechanisms of reparation were weak to begin with and

then they were not even completely carried out. Victims still consider
that these promises are part of their rights as victims and citizens that
need to be executed. While the church recognises that this is an impor-
tant aspect it also considers that it is necessary that victims broaden the
concept of their victim identity in order to avoid a beneficiary identity.
According to one of the missionary men, they considered it important:
To look for the truth of the events, in order to keep clarity about what
happened, this is a work of denunciation, memory that we have done
in order to reach justice, and therefore reparation. We are currently in
a similar stage than before, because sadly the aggressions against civil
population continue. We also continue a systematic work of memori-
alisation. This is ten, eight, twelve years after the acts [of violence] in
order to collect better and more information. And these are actions
that are done in the middle of the conflict.
This does not mean that victims at the grassroots do not consider claims
for truth and justice to be crucial in their process of reparation, but
their sense of urgency prioritises a solution to their present situation
of marginalisation and poverty, which is worsened by the continued
presence of armed actors. In this sense claims of truth, justice and guar-
antees of non-repetition become secondary. Karen∗ , a woman inhabitant
of Bellavista and survivor of the massacre, talks about the necessity for
victims’ to compromise their sense of vulnerability and learn to live with
the open possibility of violence:
Sandra: What are your expectations for the village? What kind of
things do you think they would need to change in order to help
to advance the situation of people?
Karen: One of the goals is permanent electricity; another one is that
people learn to live with the violence, because otherwise one is
going to be secluded all the time, thinking that something is going
to happen.
Sandra: Do you mean learning to live with the actors here?
Karen: Yes, indeed.
Sandra: So, how do you perceive people’s safety here?
Karen: One is always living with anxiety because people have not
learnt to live with that.
Karen’s claims are representative of some of the victims’ voices in the

community. Some victims consider that the guarantee of non-repetition
of violence is a right that is unlikely to be respected in the short-term
and therefore it is up to victims to accommodate their feelings of anx-
iety and learn to live with violence. This response resembles Prieto’s
(2012, p. 542) finding in his research with victims and ex-combatants
in Colombia: ‘It is also important to consider that supporting justice
does not necessarily entail thinking of it as a priority’.
However, contrary to Karen and other victims in the region, the
local church considers stopping the violence and guaranteeing its non-
repetition to be non-negotiable principles. The reason for that is that the
local church has the tools to push claims of truth, justice and guarantees
of non-repetition forward, thanks to its transnational connections and
the legitimisation of its work for human rights in the global civil society
(Bush, 2007). This view is shared by social leaders who work closely with
the diocese. For instance, Leyner Palacios:
How is it possible that Colombia reaches peace if the health, edu-

cation problems and the historical abandonment of the regions are
not overcome? How is it possible that mega-projects are still used as
a [development] model, even though it is necessary that people from
Chocó, Istmina, Guapí, Tumaco and the whole Pacific region have to
leave their territory in order to carry them out? Peace cannot be pos-
sible if they keep denying these rights. This is our call to the national
government, because although they can reach an agreement with an
armed actor, peace will be corrupted as long as it is not sustained in
the respect of the territory. The big challenge of the post-conflict is to
satisfy the needs that have been historically denied, which have been
the source of this war.
Transformative reparation and social memory
The metaphor of the local church serving as a bridge between grassroots

marginalised victims and the civil society is not really appropriate for
this case. Even though there are strong links of cooperation between
the victims’ organisations and the diocese, their goals are different and
sometimes complementary, which has led to some friction between
the local church and the victims’ organisations. This friction does not
impede the church’s continuing work with the victims at a local level
in the rural communities and in the shantytowns of Quibdó. In this
sense the voice of the local church in regard to the narration of the
social memory of violent pasts in the region can be differentiated from
the voice of the victims’ associations even though the local church still
represents some of the interests of victims at the grassroots.
The main concern that both local church and local organisations
share is the violation of the cultural, economic and ethnic rights of the
Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities over the territory due to
the presence of armed actors and transnational companies, such as min-
ing companies and oil palm farmers, which fraudulently take over the
land. This has led to a social and environmental crisis in the region. The
inclusion of this larger narrative of economic rights is part of a larger
movement in Colombian civil society that underlines the necessity to
include economic rights in the discourse of transformative reparation.
In this sense, some parallels could be drawn between the contribution

of reparations to emancipatory peacebuilding elaborated by Brett and
Malagon (2013, p. 4) in the case of the union movement, and the uses
of social memory for emancipatory peacebuilding:
reparations can contribute to emancipatory peacebuilding by

(1) addressing and redressing directly the structural causes of con-
flict and violence that precipitated victimisation, (2) addressing and
redressing a broad and integral human rights framework, and (3) pro-
moting the participation of victims in and their ownership of the
reparations process, leading to a ‘peace infrastructure’.
The emphasis of the local church’s support of claims of transformative

reparations and actions of social memorialisation that include the struc-
tural causes of the conflict, individual atrocities as part of crimes against
humanity, and including victims’ voice at the grassroots, constitutes
a contribution to a peacebuilding model that goes in line with the
emancipatory model of peacebuilding.
Civil concept: Transformative reparation

In Colombia as in other places around the world, the uses of social
memory as a strategy of denunciation and transformation of victims’
conditions of marginalisation, invisibility and violence are widespread.
Most of these initiatives have been born at the grassroots and many of
them have been led by religious actors (Briceño-Donn et al., 2009; GMH-
CNRR, 2013). Guarantees of cessation of violence and non-repetition
of violence are central in these claims. Thus, some of these narra-
tives revolve around ideas of cessation of violence committed by armed
actors, but also violence that is part of economic models that require the
land abandoned by forcefully displaced victims.
In this context, social memory can help to denounce the mechanisms
by which victims have been kept at the margins and in poverty even
before the events of direct violence have taken place. Social memory
can be a mechanism for supporting claims of transformative reparation
from the perspective of victims or ‘from below’. Transformative repara-
tions are understood not only as attempts to deal with victims’ suffering
occasioned by atrocities, but are perceived as an opportunity to
impulse a democratic transformation in societies, in order to over-

come situations of exclusion and inequality, which as in the
Colombian case could have supported the humanitarian crisis and

the disproportionate victimisation of the most vulnerable sectors
of society and that in any case are against the basic principles of
justice.
(Uprimny and Saffon, 2009, p. 34)
Following Uprimny and Saffon (2009), the role of social memory in the
construction of claims of transformative reparation resides in its capabil-
ity for broadening the understanding of the damage to victims, not only
in terms of atrocities but in terms of the patterns of social exclusion that
allowed them as well. These principles resonate with the understanding
of conflict as a set of actions of violence committed through guns and
economic measures. This is a perspective that is shared both by the local
church and the victims’ organisations. Thus, a narrative of the massacre
of Bojayá that includes the broader economic crimes against the terri-
torial rights of the communities has the function of transforming the
perception of suffering of the community from an isolated case in a
marginalised community to an extended criminal practice in time and
space to ethnic minorities in the Colombian territory, where poverty
and violence are two sides of the same coin. In this regard, Jesus Florez
claims that he has found in his missionary work with local communities
of Chocó that victims consider that:
If today we are talking about reparation, we should establish the dam-

age in the colonial time, so they won’t think that they are going to
take us back to the stage of exclusion that our territory was submitted
to. This was before the violent events that started only thirteen years
ago; this would mean forgetting that this was just a new expression of
this prolonged damage. No, if we talk about reparation, it is in order
to overcome our condition of being, for centuries: ‘the poorest region
of Colombia’.
(Florez, 2009, p. 249)
In this sense, Florez advocates the need for a transformative view on

reparation. It is not enough to bring the victim back to the state she
was in before the violence affected her, because her previous state
was of abandonment and poverty. However, as I explained before,
transformative reparation is different from focalised social investment
because the recognition of victims’ rights and dignity and the guaran-
tees of non-repetition need to be addressed as well.
Theological concepts: Social sin

The idea of transformative reparation is a civil concept that influences
the work of social memorialisation led by the diocese, but its work
should also be understood in connection with its pastoral plan and
theological influences. The narrative created by the diocese has been
supported in a long trajectory of accompaniment and in a theologi-
cal perspective on institutionalised violence and structural sin. Its long
presence in the region and support of organisational processes have
allowed the church to gain the trust of local communities. In that
way, the church has sustained an institutional presence that has pre-
ceded any other governmental or non-governmental institution. The
church has been able to build a network of information across the dif-
ferent communities, which include 124 Afro-Colombian communities
that are part of COCOMACIA and 247 indigenous councils that are part
of OREWA.
The work of the diocese has been inspired by the idea of structural
sin as has been stipulated in Medellin (1968) and Puebla (1979). The
following extract of Puebla has been quoted by Bishop Castaño’s ([1981]
2012d) document on Ecclesial Trends in Latin America:
From a faith perspective, we see the growing gap between the rich
and the poor as a scandal and a contradiction with being Christian.
The luxury of a few is an insult against the misery of the masses. This
is against the plan of the Creator and the honour that he deserves.
In this anguish and pain, the Church discerns a situation of social sin,
which is even graver because these are so-called Catholic countries
and they have the capacity to change.
(Puebla, 28)
This perspective allows the grassroots church to evoke the concept of

social sin and structural violence as methodological tools to understand
marginalisation and poverty in the form of causes and consequences of
the conflict. At the same time, this perspective allows it to understand
conflict as a mechanism of imposing an economy based on the indis-
criminate extraction of natural resources in Chocó. In this regard, its
narrative of social memory has been inspired by Puebla’s mandate: ‘We
are expending lots of energy to know and denounce the mechanisms
behind this poverty’ (Puebla, 1159).
The church supports the construction of social memory in order to
identify the mechanisms that create both poverty and violence as two
sides of the same coin. Furthermore, according to Levine (2012, p. 216):
As important as it is to name and identify injustice, more is at issue

here. Using the language of structural sin also signals an epistemo-
logical choice to view the harm caused from the standpoint of those
on the margins of power.
Thus, the work of the church in constructing a social memory of the vio-
lence in Chocó contributes to understanding victims’ suffering in their
everyday lives and questioning the mechanisms of reparation beyond
the focalised social policies implemented by the government. The role
of this narrative in the terrain of representations of the massacre helps
to bring attention towards the widespread violence in the region. The
works of memorialisation led by the grassroots church can help to trans-
form the perception of the past and include larger claims of economic
crimes and inequality. According to Fr Luis Carlos Hinojosa, director of
the Social Pastoral Office of the Diocese of Quibdó:
This is the real background in Chocó, just as in the rest of the country,
this type of economy, looting policies, dispossession of territories,
and the negation and systematic violation of Human Rights and the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, have led to a social and armed conflict
that drains the communities as much as it enriches companies and
private capitals, without any restriction, other than those imposed
by the global market. That is the reason why we have been insisting
that the situation of the communities of Atrato today is beyond the
outcomes and impacts of the massacre occurred in 2 May 2002 in
Bellavista.
(Fr Luis Carlos Hinojosa during the event
‘Bojayá: A decade later’ organised at the
National Museum, 27 April 2012)
The emphasis on social sin and structural violence has led the diocese
not only to document the abuses against human rights, as it does in
the magazine Voices of Black, Indigenous and Mestizo people ((Las Voces
del Pueblo Negro, Indígena y Mestizo) but to point at broader abuses and
inequalities that have provided fuel for the conflict as well. In this sense
it contributes to the public debate on transitional justice that poorly
addresses ‘structural violence, and in particular poverty-inequality and
social and criminal violence’ (Gready, 2010, p. 3).
The local church cannot be considered to be a transparent outlet
of victims’ voices, particularly not of victims’ organisations, but it can
make claims of truth and justice that would be too risky for victims at
the grassroots to do. In that sense the presence of the church enriches
the voices in civil society in a country that demands more integral
and bottom-up mechanisms of reparation, truth and justice. The local
church’s emphasis on social sin enables it to do a contextual read-
ing of the violence in the region. It locates the massacre and other
events of violence in the context of the history of marginalisation of
Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities. In addition, the church
creates a narrative based on evidence of the widespread attacks against
indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations that sees in the past of
slavery of the Afro-Colombian communities and exploitation and dec-
imation of indigenous communities a source for understanding the
experiences and marginalisation of these communities. In the Afro-
Colombian pastoral tradition, ‘memory is a deeply biblical category’ that
has a transcendental importance (Matogi, 2011, p. 73). In this sense,
the work of the diocese has been rooted in the cautious consideration
of the use of the past as pointers to the present and future struggle of
non-violent resistance.
Religious emotions and transitional justice from below
Another important aspect for understanding the influence of religion

in peacebuilding processes is to observe its contribution in the manage-
ment of victims’ emotions. The everyday life of victims is affected by
the implementation of mechanisms of transitional justice, furthermore,
the reintegration of members of illegal armed groups can generate feel-
ings of anxiety and fear (Prieto, 2012). Furthermore, when victims are
still confined to the margins of society and they cannot overcome their
conditions of poverty despite policies of reparation, feelings of impo-
tence, frustration or humiliation might arise. These were experiences
reported by victims during interviews and conversations; the corruption
of bureaucrats in charge of implementing the care of displaced victims
was a cause of anger and pessimism. This situation together with the
continuous presence of armed actors creates fear, which is a cause of the
displacement of entire communities.
In Chapter 6 it was observed that actions of memorialisation led by
the local church through groups of dance, theatre, traditional songs
and quilting could help victims to cope with their emotions of anxi-
ety and suffering. Adams (2013) found a similar outcome in the case
of the group of women arpilleras in Chile. These women’s quilting
groups helped them to ‘feel respected, appreciated, understood and sup-
ported’; and they helped them to release the tensions and deprivation
as lived in a situation of dictatorship (Adams, 2013, p. 262). In Chocó,

the participation of victims in these groups reinforced their dignity in
response to the humiliation that they have experienced. In the same
vein, the re-enactment of funerary rituals as a form of remembering
the victims who could not have a funeral is a form of reinstating their
dignity.
Dignity is frequently associated with the call for social justice (Misztal,
2012) and it also constitutes an existential emotion (Fierke, Forthcom-
ing). The idea of dignity has had a strong influence in the definition
of human rights and victims’ demands in post-atrocity settings. It is
also a principle with strong religious roots in the Abrahamic traditions
(Barilan, 2009; Kamali, 2002; Soulen and Woodhead, 2006). According
to the catechism of the Catholic Church (#1700), human dignity ‘is
rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God; it is fulfilled
in his vocation to divine beatitude’ (see Rom. 8:29).
The Catholic social teachings inform the option for the poor in the
defence of human dignity; in practice, local grassroots initiatives have
aimed to restore the social emotion of dignity through the process of
resistance and defence of victims’ rights. In other words, it is not the
religious influence that restores dignity but the process of resistance and
demands for social justice in themselves that restore victims’ dignity.
This is such as important principle that it was chosen as the slogan for
the tenth commemoration of the massacre: ‘Bojayá, the path towards
dignity’. The association between dignity and social justice aims to
evoke a change in the politics as usual, which means that welfare poli-
cies of the government should address an equal distribution of rights
and equal recognition of citizens; this change could eventually help the
black communities to escape their subaltern condition in a model of
official alterity (Rojas, 2004).
At this stage in Bojayá, the role of religion in the transformation of
victims’ emotions constitutes a tool to confront experiences of death
and pain. Religion can provide theodicies that help people to engage
with suffering by learning how to suffer (Das, 1997, p. 564). A case in
point is the performance of the Gualí described in Chapter 7, which
helps to deal with victims’ suffering at the same time that it reveals
that victims’ grief has not been overcome. There are also countless other
religious representations, such as religious festivals, pilgrimages and tra-
ditional healing practices, which provide strong symbolical, cultural and
religious resources to the communities.
In the case of the Gualí,í grief is presented as an open wound that
claims justice, while dance, jokes and songs implemented during this
ritual create an environment of festivity that helps to animate and ulti-

mately to encourage the work of political and social organisations of
victims. In that sense, optimism, happiness and dignity are positive
emotions that can help victims to face their past in the context of their
struggle for reparation, truth and justice.
The process by which positive emotions arise in situations of violence
and poverty has been described in Chapter 6 through the category of
ilusión. This process is part of the rationale behind the work of religious
peacebuilders in Chocó that underlines the necessity of creating hap-
piness, illusion and hope in the middle of conflict and poverty, not
as a form of denial but as a form of engaging in organisational ini-
tiatives. Following Blustein’s (2010) analysis, emotions that arise from
processes of commemoration of the massacre would constitute non-
retributive negative emotions. These emotions do not correspond to the
commonly viewed positive emotions associated with forgiveness and
reconciliation, because they speak about anger and pessimism, however,
their positive side-effect is that they can help to preserve memories of
wrongdoing without compromising victims’ dignity or duty to remem-
ber their loved ones. These mechanisms contribute to the management
of negative emotions of anger and grief in order to support actions of
social resistance.
Conclusion
The role of religion in the construction of social memory of the

violence in Chocó can be explained in terms of its contribution to
an emancipatory peacebuilding project. The focus of emancipatory
peacebuilding on the structural causes of violence provides a broad
view on crimes against human rights that include economic and eth-
nic crimes, such as cultural annihilation. This project is crucial for
understanding claims of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of
non-repetition of violence in a society where impunity is commonplace
and inequality, poverty and marginalisation have affected victims even
before the atrocious events. In this context, the promotion of bottom-
up locally based peacebuilding actions are congruent with the work
of religious peacebuilders at the grassroots in Chocó. Furthermore, the
inclusion of a notion of transformative reparation is relevant for victims
who were subjected to conditions of marginalisation and poverty even
before the atrocities occurred.
The work of the local church differs in terms of its priorities of repa-
ration from those of the victims’ organisations at the grassroots. This
differentiation can lead to friction in regard to how decisions are taken

about how to remember at a collective level. Nevertheless, the differ-
ent resulting narratives are complementary rather than contradictory.
The reason for this is that the church has the dispositions and privi-
leges of civil society that victims at the grassroots lack. The local church
can make claims of justice and truth with fewer risks than people at the
grassroots, and it does not have the same economic and social pressures
that people at the grassroots do.
Finally, religious peacebuilders can promote the transformation and
participation of victims in actions of resistance and commemoration by
recognising that emotions such as grief and despair have a place in their
actions of peacebuilding. Dignity is one of the positive emotions that
has resulted from the process of resistance and claims for social justice
and is perhaps more relevant than other positive emotions that inspire
forgiveness and reconciliation.
Conclusion
Religion in grassroots activities of social memorialisation in the

aftermath of the massacre of Bojayá has contributed to peacebuilding
in three dimensions: supporting the denunciation of continuous vio-
lence, creating a broad narrative that includes other types of wrongs
and atrocities, and managing victims’ emotions. These three aspects are
succinctly explained in the following paragraphs.
Religious management of victims’ emotions is not only a result of
providing beliefs that can create hope in an afterlife or compensate the
pains of those who suffer injustice. Emotion management or emotion
control has been a result of different initiatives of religious acom-
pañamiento that reinforce the bonds of social life and aim to bring life
back to normalcy, even when that means providing tools for distrac-
tion and the creation of ilusión. The local church has worked closely
with NGOs, victims and victims’ associations in denouncing continu-
ous and different forms of violence. These activities satisfy at some level
the needs of victims for the recognition of their dignity and allow them
to construct their own path towards truth recovery, justice and peace.
Further, the kind of narrative that the local church has contributed
to create, produces wide versions about past atrocities that not only
include crimes against human rights but economic, cultural, ethnic and
environmental crimes.
This type of social memory contributes to an emancipatory
peacebuilding model. It allows the depersonalisation of violence
through the inscription of violence in a context of systematic attacks
against Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities. In what fol-
lows, I explain how the issues of acompañamiento, memory, peace and
resistance are related.
172
Conclusion 173
Acompañamiento
In the words of one of the missionaries:
The religious accompaniment is the fuel of social processes and not

the other way around. The main thing is not the religious element,
but religion is a support and strength for the social processes. This
keeps the social processes going.
In theological terms this means that Jesus can only be found when
breaking the bread with the poor, living with them and living like them.
Accompaniment in terms of religious peacebuilding means the perma-
nent presence of religious actors with the people in the region, which
permits them to understand the extended consequences of the conflict
in the everyday life of victims. This experience is reflected in their initia-
tives of social memorialisation, such as the denunciation of the criminal
activity of transnational companies that illegally take over the land of
displaced communities. The resulting narratives make broad claims of
reparation that include structural problems that have allowed violence
to happen in the first place.
Acompañamiento has also influenced other fields, such as health and
development policy (Farmer, 2011): ‘To accompany someone is to go
somewhere with him or her, to break bread together (ad-cum-panis), to
be present on a journey with a beginning and an end’ (Ibid.). Accompa-
niment in terms of development means the long-term implementation
of policies destined to improve the welfare of the community, address-
ing structural problems. To include the dimension of accompaniment
to transitional justice means to be part of long-lasting processes that
take into account the needs of the victims from their perspective. This
includes the creation of narratives of social memorialisation that on
the one hand aim to find the truth about past atrocities and on the
other aim to support and understand the interests of the different
stakeholders.
Religious emotions and dignity

The initiatives of memorialisation studied in this book were led by reli-
gious actors or were supported in a religious context. However, it is not
easy to distinguish when these activities are supported by a religious
motivation or an ideological one. The problem of separating religious
and ideological motivations is often encountered in research on reli-
gious peacebuilding: ‘A statement about motivation that is not worded
religiously may still, from the speaker’s point of view, have a religious
basis’ (Cejka, 2003, p. 26). There is a certain kind of reductionism that
is established in the research for the sake of analysis. Some of the
missionaries interviewed do not find a contradiction between social
motivations, such as the defence of human rights, and religious ones,
such as the principle that life is sacred. For instance, in the case of the
experience of a missionary leading the work at the memory chapels, he
claims:
There are many internal discussions in the church. There are sectors
that want to put a barrier between the spiritual and the social. And
I think that is a mistake. The social and the spiritual are not exclusive.
The opposite of spiritual is the material, and the opposite of social is
the individual. Then, if somebody wants the church to make an indi-
vidualist spiritual support, then we are not related to such a concept
of spirituality, to that concept of religion . . . this is a pastoral work,
not only a social work . . . this has a spiritual dimension . . . the deci-
sive point here is the denunciation. Denunciation is an aspect of the
gospel, and of the Old Testament. That is the prophetic dimension of
the church.
This dual dimension is also practised by lay people. There are not
strong divisions between the religious and the ideological aspects of
their participation in initiatives of denunciation and defence of human
rights. Nevertheless, this book emphasises those aspects that can be
explained from a religious point of view, in order to highlight the reli-
gious dimension in the processes of social memorialisation. The decision
to focus on religious emotions rather than on theological teachings or
doctrine was because religious emotions are something that every mem-
ber can relate to. Particularly in a hierarchical institution such as the
Catholic Church, not everybody shares the same level of knowledge of
the religious tradition. However, people at every level can relate in a sim-
ilar way to feelings of pity, shame, happiness and pride, among others,
which are provided in a religious context. This book also explains the
relevance of the management of emotions in the transformation of con-
flict (see Brewer, 2010, pp. 121–139, on the need for positive emotions
in peacebuilding).
In this context, the priorities in the management of emotions by the
Diocese of Quibdó were not on forgiveness or reconciliation. This is sim-
ilar to Prieto’s (2012, p. 540) finding in his research on Colombia: ‘good
Conclusion 175
relations do not necessarily depend on external interventions or explicit

reconciliation ceremonies or rituals, nor do they need to be predicated
on notions of forgiveness or spiritual transformations’. This is also sus-
tained in a theological perspective by Comblin (2006), who argues that
models of reconciliation and peace that support social injustice are not
a valid Christian choice. In this sense, this book has found that for-
giveness and reconciliation are not always the main emotional response
expected in the emotional rules in a Christian context.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are commonplace in religious
peacebuilding and transitional justice literature; but this literature has
failed to address the role of other positive emotions in social peace
processes. This book underlined the importance of other religiously
inspired positive emotions such as optimism, happiness, ilusión and
dignity for transforming angry emotions that inspire violent acts or
fatalism (Blustein, 2010). In a similar vein, Gopin (2002) claims that
religion offers a relevant model for emotional training that should be
considered for meaningful peacebuilding.
Pessimism is hard to transform because it becomes a coping mecha-
nism for many victims. In the case of societies that have been in long
periods of violence, such as Colombia, there is a risk of normalisation of
violence (Taussig, 1989), which is an emotional response to prolonged
threat and suffering. This would mean that the possibility of judging cer-
tain events as good or bad becomes diminished by fatalistic emotions.
For instance, suffering the effects of corruption might generate weaker
negative emotional reactions when a person has suffered other more
direct forms of violence on the body, lost a loved one or suffered forced
displacement.
In this sense, initiatives of peacebuilding at a local level can benefit
from understanding how victims’ negative emotions can be transformed
into emotional reactions to injustice in a non-fatalistic way. Emotions
nurtured in a religious framework can generate an impact on non-
religious spheres in societies where religion plays an important role in
the culture of its citizens. It is important to not only understand the
theological roots that inspire peacebuilding actions but to identify the
‘religious emotionology’ and observe which religious emotions could be
conducive to transforming or defusing violent or angry emotions. In the
case of Bojayá, religious emotions help to inform the way conflict and
peace are morally perceived and to transform negative angry feelings
into negative or positive non-angry feelings.
For instance, the emotion of dignity is a paradigmatic emotion that
brings together the sense of worth in victims. It is associated with the
feeling of worth as a human being and it has deep emotive roots in social
identity (Davies, 2011, p. 91). Perhaps, ontologically, a person cannot be
stripped of her/his dignity; however, there are symbolical practices that
can be oriented towards dehumanisation of a person, such as extreme
acts of violence and sabotage of funerary rituals, as was explained above.
In an attempt to defend their dignity, Bojayá victims complain that ‘we
are Colombia too!’ requesting from the government an equal distribu-
tion of rights and equal recognition as citizens. In that sense, dignity is
created through the pursuit of social justice (Misztal, 2012). This makes
it possible to prepare a social peace process before the achievement of
political peace, this creates spaces for peace before the conflict is over.
This is a process that supports victims at the grassroots in their resis-
tance and defence of their territory, even though the killings have not
stopped yet.
Experiences of atrocity and suffering threatened victims’ dignities,
who have not found justice in the mechanisms of transitional justice
implemented by the government. Extreme humiliation impedes victims
to feel as part of humanity, sharing the same rights that other humans
have. Justice can be understood as the protection of human rights
and socio-economic distribution (Sen, 2009) but also has the notion
of human dignity at its roots (Wolterstorff, 1983; 2008). However, con-
trary to Wolterstorff’s theological arguments, this book has explored the
notion of dignity as an existential emotion with important social com-
ponents (Fierke, forthcoming). I have argued that the recognition of
victims’ dignity is a requirement for the creation of just conditions, but
political and social rhetoric used to exoticise or marginalize victims can
hinder the recognition of their dignity and therefore deter processes of
social justice.
Social memory, reparation and peace

The construction of a social identity around a heroic narrative of a trau-
matic event influences the construction of victimhood. Such narratives
run the risk of becoming the starter of a new cycle of violence. The
Colombian case does not escape the creation of such cycles of violence,
as revenge is one of the motives behind the recruitment of civilians into
armed groups. This book has argued that some processes of social memo-
rialisation can help to deter such kinds of cycles. A narrative of social
memory that instead of focusing on the single descriptions of atrocities
includes structural, economic and political causes of the conflict can pre-
vent the personalisation of violence. This means that instead of blaming
individual perpetrators for their participation in atrocities, victims can
Conclusion 177
identify the structural causes for the violence that has happened in
the region. This is one of the ways in which the construction of social
memory prior to a peace agreement can facilitate social peace processes.
In this case, the narrative of the widespread attacks against Afro-
Colombians and indigenous people can contribute to create bridges
between the suffering of victims of atrocities committed by the guer-
rilla and by the paramilitary. The identification of abuses against human
rights, but also of political, cultural and economic rights, reveals vio-
lence as part of mechanisms of oppression and exploitation, which are
related to the imposition of an economic model based on the indiscrim-
inate exploitation of the natural resources without respect to the rights
of the Afro-Colombian and indigenous inhabitants.
Contrary to other conflicts justified by ethnic, political or reli-
gious divisions, in Colombia there has been an absence of a ‘radical
division between victims on one side and perpetrators on another,
with “bystanders” playing the role of outside spectators’ (Prieto, 2012,
p. 545). In some cases, the creation of the label of victim has been
a result of the implementation of policies of transitional justice that
seek to benefit victims through strategies of reparation. These types of
policies of reparation often promote relations of dependence between
victims and the state. In cases in which policies of reparation are lim-
ited, weak or confused with focalised social attention, they can create
divisions in society. Appropriate narratives of social memory can help
to overcome such divisions.
Victims socially construct narratives of the massacre of Bojayá by
emphasising their own situation of abandonment and the unfulfilled
promises of reparation. Their narrative underlines that their suffering
continues in the present and is used as a marker of victims’ identity and
as a supporting pillar in the struggle for the recognition of their rights
as victims.
The type of reparation that is demanded at a local level depends upon
an exaltation of the massacre of Bojayá as an exceptional event, since
many of the governmental promises of improvement of the conditions
of life of the people from Bojayá were not fulfilled after the massacre.
However, other models, such as those based on visions of transformative
reparation, create a wider discourse that, even though it recognises the
massacre of Bojayá as exceptional and as a war crime; they also consider
it important to observe the economical interests behind the wider and
systematic violence against Afro-Colombian and indigenous population
for decades as a crime against humanity and not only as a context of
conflict.
In this regard, this book has underlined that localised processes of

social memorialisation are not isolated aspects of symbolical recognition
in a process of transitional justice, but they are also mechanisms used
to influence how reparation is produced, and to propose demands of
transformative reparation. In the case of Bojayá, it means that acts of
commemoration are also used as a space of struggle for the recognition
of victims’ rights.
Final remarks
This book has abandoned the view that privileges liberal models of
peacebuilding for studying religion in transitional societies. The reason
for this is that often measures of transitional justice implemented from
above clash against the interests and needs of victims at the grassroots.
For instance, in Colombia, the mechanisms of transitional justice have
failed to guarantee victims’ rights and to protect them from further
violence. Some religious actors have become critics of such processes
of transitional justice and have promoted alternative paths towards
peacebuilding.
The local church has intellectual, political, economic and social
resources in contrast to victims at the grassroots (Brewer, 2010). This
situation explains their different approaches to models of reparation.
Thus, the local church has been able to support demands that are in
line with a model of emancipatory peacebuilding and its demands for
democratic transformation, while victims at the grassroots are pressed
by their demands of surviving in a territory dominated by poverty and
conflict.
In the case of the Colombian Pacific region, the continuous conflict
creates a situation of tension and risk for those who are interested in
recovering the truth of what happened from the victims’ perspective.
The consequences of this situation are many. In the first place, the
conflict has pushed victims to an urgent situation of displacement or
threat of displacement that has caused them to focus their attention
on immediate measures for solving their situation, such as surviving in
the city. Therefore, victims are often more open to accepting dubious
conditions of reparation, for instance the relocation of the village, than
peacebuilding actors in civil society, like the Catholic Church. Second,
victims’ leaders are threatened by armed actors, but at the same time
they are required to engage in negotiations with the local and national
governments. They receive threats that are oriented towards silencing
their denunciations of the criminal actions of armed actors and their
alliances with political and economic actors. Third, the more privileged
Conclusion 179
position of the church allows it to create a narrative of social mem-

ory that is also a mechanism of denunciation of crimes occurring in the
present. However, members of the church can expose themselves to risk,
as the martyrdom of Yolanda Cerón, Jorge Luis Mazo, Iñigo Eguiluz and
Miguel Quiroga, among others, reveals.
In this context, symbolical actions of memorialisation, such as
marches, songs, dance, quilting and religious activities, allow people
to denounce criminal activities with less risk to the participants (see
also Riaño-Alcalá and Baines, 2011). It is possible that the attention to
bottom-up initiatives of transitional justice, such as those supported by
religious actors, can help to identify the most efficient mechanisms to
address victims’ needs at the grassroots and to differentiate between
mechanisms of social aid, transformative reparation and security poli-
cies, which can generate new sources of division in a society already
fragmented.
Notes
Introduction
1. One of the main points of contention about the massacre of Bojayá is the
number of victims. The most popular version claims that there were 119
dead civilians, however the official version by the Historical Memory Group
claims that 79 civilians were killed in the church, 13 people were killed
before and after the explosion and 6 people who were exposed to the explo-
sion died of cancer in a period of eight years after the massacre (GMH-CNRR,
2010, p. 26; 125–127).
2. I have not included the indigenous communities in this study because of
my lack of knowledge of the Embera language and other limitations in
time during fieldwork. Also, the term ‘community’ is used in this book fol-
lowing the Colombian legal definition for Afro-Colombian and indigenous
communities.
1 Social Memory in Post-Atrocity Contexts

3. Including social forgetting, see Connerton (2008).
3 The Conflict in Colombia and Chocó

4. The Plan Colombia is a project supported by the United States. According
to Veillette (2005, pp. 2–3): ‘It began in 2000, when Congress passed leg-
islation (P.L. 106–246) providing $1.3 billion for the region in interdiction
and development assistance. ACI funding for Plan Colombia from FY2000
through FY2005 totals approximately $2.8 billion. When FMF and DOD
assistance is included, the total level of U.S. support to Colombia is $4.5 bil-
lion. The Administration has requested congress to continue support for Plan
Colombia beyond FY2005 with an additional $463 million in ACI funds, and
$90 million in FMF requested for FY2006. ( . . . ) In 2002, the Administration
requested, and Congress approved, expanded authority to use U.S. coun-
ternarcotics funds for a unified campaign to fight both drug trafficking and
terrorist organizations in Colombia.’
5. Garcia-Godos, Andreas, and Lid (2010, p. 504) report that ‘The first demo-
bilisation took place on 25 November 2003 in a ceremony in Medellín in
which 868 paramilitary fighters from the Bloque Cacique Nutibara partici-
pated. On 16 August 2006, 743 members of the Frente Norte Medio Salaquí
laid down their weapons and became the last paramilitary faction of the
AUC to demobilise. Consequently, the process was not a one-off event but
180
Notes 181
one that lasted for three years before 37 paramilitary blocs or fronts, with a
total number of 31,671 combatants, had been demobilised. Of these, 2716
combatants are subject to the process of Law 975, including individuals who
had criminal proceedings opened against them or admitted involvement in
crimes once demobilised; these are known as postulados.’
4 Religious Peacebuilding in Chocó

6. In the construction of this definition I recognise the influence of the expla-
nation by Brewer, Higgins and Teeney (2011) of the four spaces in civil
society involved in the advocacy of peace.
7. According to research conducted by the Universidad San Buenaventura,
16.7% of Colombians are Evangelical Christians (Beltran, 2012, p. 209).
Protestant churches have actively engaged in works for peace in the last
decades, such as the Evangelical Council of Colombia (Consejo Evangélico de
Colombia, CEDECOL), which created a national network called the Com-
mission of Restoration, Life and Peace. This commission is comprised of
five regional commissions operating in 155 municipalities and involving
3,500 people (Esquivia and Gerlach, 2009, p. 299). There is also Justapaz, the
Colombian Mennonite Ministry for Justice, Peace and Nonviolent Action,
and the recently founded Sembrandopaz (Planting Peace), a regional inter-
denominational organisation that works with displaced communities in the
process of returning to their land and seeking reparation. There has been a
shift from a political apathetic tendency that had dominated the Pentecostal
scenario in Colombia (Moreno, 2005).
8. The name is taken from the biblical name Ruth. When Ruth decides to
go with her mother–in-law Nohemi, she tells her: ‘Please don’t tell me
to leave you and return home! I will go where you go, I will live where
you live; your people will be my people, your God will be my God.’ The
Catholic Church expresses her wish in accompanying the displaced people
of Colombia (Colombia Sala de Situació Humanitaria, 2013).
9. In theological terms, Goizueta (1995, p. 169) has explained accompaniment
as follows:
To love Jesus of Nazareth is to physically walk with him on the way

to Calvary, or to kiss his feet nailed to the cross; Jesus can no more be
accompanied in the abstract than human beings can. To sing to Mary is
to sing to this particular Mary. To accompany her is to walk beside her
in the Posadas as she seeks a room for shelter. To accompany la Soledad
is to physically kneel beside her and feel her loneliness with her; it is to
identify our sorrows with hers.
10. The pastoral plan is based on pastoral options; these are the guidelines and
priorities of their work. ‘A pastoral plan is simply a concrete Proposal of life
and action that the pastor of a Particular Church does in accordance to his
Presbitery and other close collaborators, in order to make present the King-
dom of God, the Good News of Jesus Christ, his project of Life. The Pastoral
Plan is, therefore, in its deepest nature, an Evangelising Project’ (Castaño
[1993] 2012c).
182 Notes
11. Father Gonzalo de la Torre is founder of the Biblical centre Camino and the
Claretian University Foundation in Quibdó.
12. OREWA is an association that brings together 80 per cent of the indigenous
groups in Chocó. They are conformed by five indigenous groups: Wounaan,
Embera Dobida, Katío, Chamí and Tule.
13. The Spanish concept opción preferencial por los pobres refers to a decision
to work with the marginal groups of society which is not optional but a
commitment and not preferential but a priority (Nickoloff, 1993).
14. It started as a diocesan pastoral initiative oriented towards the defence of
human rights in 1993. The committee became COVIJUPA (Life, Justice and
Peace Commission) in 1996 following a national strategy of the National
Secretary of Social Pastoral.
15. The CINEP (Popular Research and Education Centre) is a Jesuit-run think
tank which in turn takes its definition of victim from the United Nations and
the Colombian sentence of the Constitutional Court C-370. This definition
is the same as used in this book, as discussed in Chapter 2.
16. The use of Memory Chapels is analysed in more depth in the next chapter.
5 Multiple Memories of the Massacre of Bojayá

17. These labels have been revived during the last peace negotiations between
the FARC and the government in la Havana that started in 2013. For
instance, the General Attorney used the example of Bojayá to argue against
any possible amnesty or other legal benefits for the FARC (RCN Radio, 2013).
In a similar vein, Francisco Santos, ex-Vice President of Colombia, tweeted:
‘Eleven years ago the FARC little angels killed with a gas pipe 119 civil-
ians, 49 of them were children, refugee in the Church of Bojayá. Impunity?’
(PachoSantosC, 2013).
18. The Augustine missionary women moved to new Bellavista in 2014.
19. The complete video and lyrics of Mena’s song and other songs can be
found in the video installation of the artist Juan Manuel Echavarria Mouths
of Ash (2003–2004), available online at: http://jmechavarria.com/chapter_
bocasdeceniza.html (accessed 1 December 2014).
20. Presented and directed by the German artist Inge Kleutgens with the support
of the Diocese of Quibdó and the Association for Development Cooperation.
21. Contrary to audio-visual media in the national broadcast news, there are sev-
eral Colombian blogs that present an analysis of the news and research and
analyse current news in a historical perspective, such as LaSillaVacia.com,
PacificoColombia.org and Verdadabierta.com.
6 Religious Emotions and Social Memory after

the Massacre
22. For a discussion on the role of deception for self-wellness and social
coherence, see Rue (1994).
Notes 183
23. I take this example from Juergensmeyer’s (2003, p. 220) explanation that
‘religious concepts of cosmic war, however, are ultimately beyond historical
control, even though they are identified with this-worldly struggles’.
8 Religious Peacebuilding and Transitional

Justice from Below
24. However, victims have also visited Bogotá on several occasions and have led
several manifestations.
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Index
accompaniment, frictions, 157, 159–60

(acompañamiento), 64, 66, 67, funerary rituals, 137, 138, 145
76–8, 136, 173
ACIA, also COCOMACIA, 57 grassroots memorial, 148
alabaos, 99, 137–8 grief, 144–5, 148–51
Argentina, 18, 19 Gualí, chigualo, 137–8, 145–9
atrocity, 16, 18, 30, 37
happiness, 130–1
Base Ecclesial Communities, 55 hope, 133
humiliation, 130–1
carrier groups, 14–6, 86
conflict in Chocó, 53–5 illusion, ilusión, 129–33, 135
conflict in Colombia, 42–5 interpretative repertoire, 16, 85
COVIJUPA, 74–9 invisibility, 107
cultural annihilation, 140–1 of Afro-colombians, 107–8
of victims, 103, 106, 109–10
Democratic Security Policy, 46
dignity, 131–2, 169, 175–6 Law 70 (1993), 58, 60, 68, 82
disgust, 93–4 Liberation theology, 65–7
emancipatory peacebuilding, Mala muerte (bad death), 137, 143–4,

152–3 146
emotions massacre of Bojayá, Dos de Mayo
emotion management, 30, crime against humanity, 112–17
119 guerrilla version, 90–1
emotion norms (feeling rules), official version, 88–9
30, 35 paramilitary version, 91
and memory, 28 and reparation, 95
reappraisal, 31–2 represented in the arts, 100–1
and religion, 34–6; see also represented in the media, 101–7
religious emotions victims’ testimony, 86–8, 94, 121,
social emotions, 30 144
in societies in transition, 28 victims’ version, 92–100
victims’ emotions, 29–30 war crime, 110–12
ethnic organisations, 55, 82 mega-projects, 58
memory
FARC guerrillas, 43, 67 cognitive and conative memory,
in Chocó, 55 17–8
peace dialogue, 45–6, 48 cultural memory, 14
fear, 122, 168 and emotion, 18
focalised social investment, memory studies, 12–3
160 and peacebuilding, 85
forgiveness, 26, 37–9 politics of memory, 20
205
206 Index
memory – continued social forgetting, 25–6

and religion, 32 social sin, 166
social memory, 12–5, 85
and transitional justice, 18, 19 testimonies, 74–5
memory chapel, 76, 113–14 theodicy, 34–5, 154
transformative reparation, 164–6
paramilitary groups, 43–4 transitional justice
in Chocó, 68 from below, 154
reintegration, 47 in Colombia, 46–7
pastoral dialogues, 71–4 Historical Memory, 50–2
Plan Colombia, 45 Law of Justice and Peace (Law 975 of
post-demobilization armed groups, 47 2005), 47
Victims’ Law (Law
( 1448 of 2011),
reconciliation, 38 49–50
in Latin America, 65 trauma, 16
religious emotions, 36 social trauma, 17
and transitional justice, 168 traumatic memories, 17
religious peacebuilding, 37, 39–40, 62,
153 Uganda, 14, 33
in Colombia, 63–4
restorative justice, 38 victim, 75
Rwanda, 11, 24–5 risk, 104
victims’ workshops, 78–9, 122–9
sexual violence, 75–6 victimhood, 23–5
Sierra Leone, 40 violence, 81

Sandra Milena, Rios. Religion, Social Memory and Conflict. The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia

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Religion, Social Memory and Conﬂict

Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conﬂict

Series advisory board:

John D. Brewer, David Mitchell, Gerard Leavey

Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conﬂict

Sandra Milena Rios Oyola

ISBN 978-1-349-69023-7 ISBN 978-1-137-46184-1 (eBook)

List of Figures and Maps viii

Series Editor’s Introduction ix

1 Social Memory in Post-Atrocity Contexts 10

2 Religion, Emotions and Memory after Atrocity 28

3 The Conﬂict in Colombia and Chocó 42

4 Religious Peacebuilding in Chocó 62

5 Multiple Memories of the Massacre of Bojayá 85

6 Religious Emotions and Social Memory after the Massacre 119

7 Funerary Rituals as Resistance and Memorialisation 137

8 Religious Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice from Below 152

I.1 The Broken Christ of Bojayá 3

3.1 Location of Bojayá, Chocó, Colombia (Map by Jeff Levy,

‘Compromise’ is a much used but little understood term. There is a sense

therefore addresses itself to the meaning, manufacture and manage-

and in so doing, she also contributes to our understanding both of

at the Workshop on The Arts of Peacebuilding organized by the Centre

ACIA Atrato Integral Peasant Association (Asociación

ILO International Labour Organisation

Oh, Santo Cristo de Bojayá . . . Help us to awake our conscious-

Figure I.1 The Broken Christ of Bojayá

This book analyses these initiatives of social memorialisation as part of a

The unit of analysis

The structure of the book

The book aims to contribute to the debate on the uses of memory

About this research

This book is based on the research conducted for my doctoral disserta-

reports by regional, national and international organisations, such as

In June 2012 the government had visited Bellavista in order to develop

with victims, accounts of the massacre were more intense. In order to

In 1997, the paramilitary arrived, and well, we already know the

The recent so-called memory boom – the rise of interest in memory in

social memorialisation can become tools for peacebuilding, even when

Deﬁning social memory

The study of social memory is the study of a diverse range of objects,

ﬁeld that has observed some inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration

We can understand each memory as occurs in individual thought

Halbwachs considered that collective identity precedes collective mem-

Instead of describing this process as an action–reaction process, where

authorities and other transmitters that preserve the memory) to endure

Social memory: Carrier groups and interpretative repertoires

Social memory, representations and trauma

The horror produced by atrocity is unjustiﬁable and intolerable by def-

Between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered

In addition, Kleinman et al. (1997) have argued that suffering is socially

Memory politics and transitional justice: Voices

In the history of transitional justice different mechanisms have been

violation and injustice (Walker, 2010), which can be understood as a

According to Hayner (2010, p. 33), the ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial truth

There is an expectation that the emotional testimony of victims and

Some of the alleged beneﬁts of truth commissions and historical mem-

regional complexities of the conﬂict and the territorial inequalities in

Social memory and victimhood

Some authors have claimed that initiatives of social memorialisation can

Victims of crime means persons who, individually or collectively,

What could be appealing in being a victim? To tell the truth, there

Todorov argues that in the aftermath of conﬂict, bystanders can expe-