Necroscapes The Political Life of Mutilated and Errant Bodies in The Rivers of Colombia

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies
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ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20
Necroscapes: The Political Life of Mutilated and

Errant Bodies in the Rivers of Colombia
Ana Guglielmucci
To cite this article: Ana Guglielmucci (2020) Necroscapes: The Political Life of Mutilated and
Errant Bodies in the Rivers of Colombia , Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 29:4, 555-580,
DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2021.1885356
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.1885356
Published online: 24 Mar 2021.
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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2020
Vol. 29, No. 4, 555–580, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.1885356
Ana Guglielmucci
NECROSCAPES: THE POLITICAL LIFE OF

MUTILATED AND ERRANT BODIES IN THE
RIVERS OF COLOMBIA
Different narratives in Colombia show how the apparition of mutilated and

unidentified corpses in rivers – as an outcome of decades of war and violence – has
reorganised national geography, as well as the affective relationships with space and
death. Based on literary sources and testimonies, this article analyses how the presence
of human remains has affected the ways of life in territories marked by necropolitics,
transforming the perception of the threshold between life and death, and the conditions
of existence of those involved. First, the article explores how the inhabitants of places
located on the banks of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers have elaborated their
interactions with the remains that appear on the rivers, and how these interactions
produce frictions with expert knowledge and practices such as forensic practices.
Secondly, the article describes how through different material and aesthetic mediations
these banished corpses have been inscribed in the texture of everyday life. These
material and aesthetic mediations include the choosing of animas of “NN” corpses
(unidentified) in Puerto Berrıo or the construction of a Park-Monument in Trujillo to
keep the remains of corpses that have been identified there.
Keywords: Necrolandscape; corpses; Colombia; rivers
Introduction
“The corpse is not always the end of the story ( … ) a corpse still holds
the power to stir up more death”
Stepputat (2014, 163).
Over the last six decades, testimonies, institutional reports, newspaper chronicles,
films, narratives, and artworks, like those of Juan Manuel Echavarrıa,1 have made
repeated reference to the apparition of human remains and mutilated bodies in the
rivers of Colombia.2 Recently, a photograph by Manuel Saldarriaga that circulated
in the news media featured a floating cadaver accompanied by a bird of prey pos-
ing peacefully on top of it. Through recourse to diverse narrative genres, many
people have described these kinds of spectacles in order to demonstrate how,
throughout the country, the presence of thousands of unburied and unmourned
bodies has affected the existence of the living.3 Novels like Adelaida Fernandez’s
# 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
556 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
Que me busquen en el rıo (Find Me in the River, 2006) and Alejandra Lopez’s El
vuelo del flamenco (The Flight of the Flamingo, 2017), short stories such as Jorge
Pardo’s “Sin nombres, sin rostros ni rastros” (Without Names, Faces, or Traces,
2011) and Hernando Vanegas’s “Un rıo lleno de cadaveres flotando” (A River Full
of Floating Cadavers), and chronicles such as those collected in Patricia Nieto’s Los
escogidos (The Chosen, 2012) reconstruct the ways in which the movement of
mutilated corpses on the Cauca and Magdalena Rivers has affected daily life in dif-
ferent riverside towns. In all of these cases, criminal gangs linked to drug traffick-
ing or to paramilitary, guerrilla, or government armed forces are responsible for
the presence of these cadavers. These stories narrate how the sudden appearance
of errant and unburied cadavers allowed fear and mistrust to seize control over the
lives of locals by affecting their relationships with other people and with the space
around them, by limiting their circles of trust, and by censuring their movements,
as well as their ways of speaking, looking, and dressing, along with their topics of
conversation. They also tell the story of how the river, which had once been a
place for recreation and physical activity, a refuge for furtive lovers, and a source
of work and nourishment, became the final resting place for human remains, that
is, an abandoned and feared place that locals considered a danger zone, a land of
death and otherness.
These narratives allude to how, due to the appearance of so many cadavers, peo-
ple were gripped by a fear that even affected their relationship with their physical
surroundings. Simultaneously, they also illustrate how these bodies inscribed them-
selves in the fabric of life, transforming daily activities and beliefs about death and
human remains. For example, these stories describe how fishermen or beachcomb-
ers came to rescue cadavers or how some peasants became gravediggers, devotees,
and guides for the suffering souls in purgatory. Simultaneously, these tales show
how the river became a privileged place among others to search for the disap-
peared and how many riverside townspeople rescued and adopted missing remains
as their own.
Alongside these published works, there also exist testimonies and stories – many
of them unpublished – written by people living in the riverside towns where ampu-
tated and putrefied cadavers have arrived, oftentimes tossed from different points on
the river. Take, for example, the case of a woman who lived in Guayabito, a neigh-
bourhood in the town of Cartago (in the northern sector of the Cauca River
Valley). She has written poems to the nameless and unburied dead tossed her way,
which she has seen pass by her innumerable times on the Cauca River: “It was an
atrocious situation. These bodies would come down the river in terrifying shape
( … ) The first one I saw did not have arms or legs. I thought that this was by
chance, but then the next day I saw another, and the following day, another ( … )
There were days when the river would bring four or five mutilated bodies”.4
The present essay attempts to respond to a question posed by such narratives
about the political life of (oftentimes unidentified) human remains and cadavers
which, for decades, have been tossed into, and emerge from, the rivers of
Colombia. It also aims to show how diverse vernacular practices, expert forms of
knowledge, and modes of aesthetic representation endow the apparition of these
corpses with meaning. Oftentimes, for riverside townspeople, these uprooted,
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 557
deterritorialised human remains signal a series of broader social processes, hav-

ing to do, for example, with everything from deforestation and social cleansing,
to massacres, disappearances, and the humiliation and intimidation of survivors.
The signs of these processes are these missing cadavers whose location often
remains unknown even to the perpetrators of the violence against them, since
the latter have left them afloat in a “liquid tomb” (Uribe 2013, 18). These
cadavers destabilise locals’ relations to the river and unsettle the border between
the living and the dead. Their unhinged, unstable, and disquieting presence tor-
ments and mobilises the living, pushing them to organise their activities, their
physical movement in space, and their affective and mortuary geographies
around the dead.
The present essay seeks to examine in greater detail and thus question some
prevailing presumptions in the existing literature on violence in Colombia. Such
studies have interrogated the murder and dehumanisation of the enemy as a mise-
en-scene (Uribe 2018; Blair 2004) and considered how the perpetrators of violence
have used the public mistreatment of the bodies of their victims in order to install
a “culture of terror” (Taussig 1987).5 However, few studies have focused on the
social and political treatment given by riverside townspeople to the mutilated
human remains that appear in their quotidian spaces.6 Until now, researchers have
approached this phenomenon from the perspective of the absence, rather than the
presence, of the bodies of the disappeared. In other words, past studies have
focused on the communal or familial practices and representations of what Panizo
(2005) calls “unattended death”, or on the transformation of mourning rituals in
the case of disappeared persons (Losonczy 2015).7
By contrast, the present essay aims to analyse the material and aesthetic modes,
that is, the modes of organising the sensible (Giorgi 2017, 250), by which human
remains are inscribed in the community of the living and of the dead.8 These
inscriptions become sites of dispute of contemporary sovereignty, understood as
the “power and capacity to dictate who lives and who must die”, or, in other
words, “to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is
not” (Mbembe 2019, 66, 80).9 Following Achille Mbembe’s argument in
Necropolitics (2019), if we consider that “to be sovereign is to exert one’s control
over mortality” and that “politics is a form of war”, we must ask “about the place
that is given to life, death and the human body (in particular when it is wounded
or slain)” (66).
In order to examine these modalities, let us characterise the forms through
which the inhabitants of Puerto Berrıo (Antioquia), Beltran and Marsella
(Risaralda), and Trujillo (Cauca River Valley) have interacted with “misplaced”
cadavers (Warren 1993, 31). With this phrase, I refer to corpses that have been
left by their murderers in what Pamela Colombo names as spaces of
“noninterment” (entrehumacion).10 In what follows, I will thus attempt to describe
how such interactions have helped to configure landscapes marked by the errant
and disturbing condition of these mutilated corpses.11 I will also propose a way of
approaching some linguistic images that operate as aesthetic, though not necessarily
aestheticising, mediations – images that aim to show and lend sense to apparitions
that might otherwise be perceived as cruel or irrational.
Necropower and landscape
In Colombia, whether one considers systematic and heteronomous acts of violence

or terrorist actions carried out by multiple armed actors,12 these actions have
marked the experience of many. The power that they exercise is the result of “a
patchwork of incomplete and overlapping rights to rule in which different de facto
juridical instances are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmet-
rical suzerainties, and enclaves abound” (Mbembe 2003, 31).13 These actions,
which have left a still-undetermined number of disappeared persons and largely
unidentified corpses exposed to the elements, have configured the conditions of
possibility of what I term “necroscapes”.
With the term “necroscapes” we aim to underscore the relationship between necro-
power and landscape, that is, the ways in which making die and letting live crosses the
political geography of Colombia by configuring spatialities, sovereignties, and corpo-
ralities. In this way, I attempt to mark a distinction between the concepts of
“necroscape” and “death landscape” or “deathscape” in the sense that the latter term
aims to give account of the positions and disputes over the places where the dead are
found. By contrast, I understand “necroscapes” to be shaped by necropower and by
social and political disputes about the space between life and death. They designate a
sphere in which human remains expose the relation between the wounds inflicted on
bodies, the dispossession of land, and the displacement of large populations by war
(Mu~noz 2016, 24). Simultaneously, necroscapes can also shape the emergent forms of
life in which these same remains become the material for new social, religious, polit-
ical, and spatial practices, as well as ecosystems.
The continuous presence of displaced cadavers, along with the constant, if latent
possibility of joining their ranks, has affected the development of culturally informed
practices. Through these practices, the living have been able to organise their own
interactions with these remains that pass through and disrupt the spaces of everyday
life. These cadavers appear as part of the local landscape – a being there – and, at the
same time, as part of a more extended situation – a being way over there – or what
Oslender (2018, 83) has called “a geography of terror”. According to Oslender, the
latter refers to a geography that can be understood to be the product of determinate
forms of sovereignty, the ultimate expression of which resides in the capacity to dic-
tate – as Mbembe argues – who may live and who should die.
Jill Casid has shown how, when faced with the prevailing regime of necropower,
one can even speak of a Necrocene. The latter refers to a historical configuration
in which the very notion of “death as extinction”, as “an abstract state”, or as
“opposed to life” has been transformed (Casid 2018, 238). Rather, according to
Casid, the Necrocene inscribes the notion of death as sensation, material presence,
and active process, by offering itself as a scene in which we find ourselves vulner-
able. In the author’s view, the Necrocene would render palpable “the presence of
death in life” by subjectivising us, no longer in the position of distant or mourning
witnesses, but rather as vulnerable and exposed mortals located between the killa-
ble and the dead (Casid 2018, 239). If this is the form in which necropower has
impacted the configuration of contemporary subjectivities, the present essay
attempts to interrogate how heterogeneous groups of people and institutions in
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 559
Colombia have articulated the space between the living and the dead publicly and
politically and how, through different material and aesthetic modalities, they dis-
pute what deserves to be recognised as life or even death. For many people in
Colombia, the presence of cadavers and remains that would normally be buried
has disordered traditional mourning practices and questioned their very conditions of
existence. The presence of mobile, nameless cadavers that move through life spaces
like rivers, which can become spaces of dispossession and extinction from one
moment to the next, speaks not only to the exhibition of mutilated bodies, but
rather, as Casid suggests, to the presence of death in life and the vulnerable condi-
tion of being killable. Simultaneously, their presence also displaces the social guar-
antees of death and institutionally sanctioned demise. In this way, the threshold
between life and death appears to be disturbed and thus to exhibit the political
space between one state of existence and another (Giorgi 2017).
Cadavers in dispute: vernacular and expert perspectives on death

and the dead
Following Achille Mbembe, in Colombia, the social relations of both production

and power could be said to constitute an economy of death (Mbembe 2003).14
Within this framework, the living have built a multitude of practices relevant to
the appearance of mutilated corpses. These decomposed, disruptive, threatening,
and contaminated corpses violate the quotidian spaces of life. As Marıa Victoria
Uribe (2004, 104) has suggested, such profoundly ambiguous bodily entities pos-
sess an enormous capacity for terrorising the living. Armed actors place these
bodies on display as a show of power; as a demonstration of the control that they
exercise over the territory and population qua economic resources, and as a dem-
onstration of the model of sovereignty that Mbembe theorises. Once again,
Mbembe helps us to describe these lifeless bodies, which can quickly be reduced
to mere skeletons by treating them as part of an undifferentiated generality:
“simple relics of an unburied pain; empty, meaningless corporalities; strange depos-
its plunged into a cruel stupor” (Mbembe 2019, 87).
Unidentified dead bodies can function to transmit messages of dominion over
the land, but they can also become the catalysts for collective forms of protest and
resistance. In Puerto Berrıo, residents consider these bodies as mediums for com-
municating with miraculous forces of the great beyond. In Trujillo, the towns-
people built ossuary monuments and thus demanded justice for the crimes
committed against the dead, the majority of whose perpetrators continue to live in
impunity. In Ituango, locals proffered the corpses as a reason for stopping the evic-
tions imposed by the construction of a hydroelectric plant by alleging that they
could not move until the corpses rescued from the river had been exhumed, iden-
tified, and buried in local cemeteries as “NN” (Espinosa 2018).
The living have developed a number of different vernacular practices in con-
fronting these mutilated remains. Some of these practices have tried to avoid the
remains, whether by prohibiting their recollection or by showing disgust in their
presence. By contrast, other practices have been characterised by the morbid
proximity and profanation of the remains, especially in those places where inhabi-
tants were forced to coexist with the decomposing cadavers arriving on the river.
In Beltran, for example, several forms of profanation have been recorded, espe-
cially there, where armed actors had a strong presence and residents were unable
to sustain the rescue and inhumation of the unidentified bodies that appeared on
the shores of the Cauca River.15
However, the majority of those who remain in the locales where these cadavers
have appeared undertake practices meant “to humanize the human beings who were
killed in the course of an armed conflict and condemned to being forgotten” (Uribe
2008, 172). In this way, the majority of such practitioners also attempt to deal with
the disruptive effects of the violent actions that penetrate their daily lives. In general,
these practices aim to give an almost sacred material and symbolic place to these
human remains and thus endow them with a purpose in the social life of their com-
munities. In the cases analysed here, different ways of manipulating, intervening,
naming, and relocating these mutilated and exiled corpses have made manifest the
symbolic intent of such practices. On occasion, completing such rituals has also
meant transgressing prohibitions on re-collecting dead bodies, prohibitions imposed
alternately by the perpetrators of these crimes and by state authorities trying to
regulate protocols regarding the treatment of the cadavers.
On one hand, many armed actors have prohibited riverside townspeople from
approaching or gathering bodies under the threat of death or retaliation – threats
on which they often act. On the other hand, in many cases, public institutions
have denied townspeople permission to rescue and handle the cadavers because
they consider that their intervention might negatively affect the medical-legal and
administrative treatment of the bodies. The latter is oriented towards the ordering,
classification, quantification, and identification of the cadavers. This is especially
true in the juridical and institutional context of Transitional Justice, whose mecha-
nisms are directed towards determining the precise fate of the disappeared and
providing reparations for their families.
From a forensic perspective, the rescue and re-interment of corpses in the
absence of certain protocols can have a negative impact by producing a “second
disappearance”. The latter refers not to the victim’s murder but rather to the loss
of any administrative record of the localisation of the remains or, in technical
terms, their “chain of custody”.16
In order to illustrate the tension among different vernacular and expert tactics con-
cerning the cadavers of unidentified persons found and rescued from the Magdalena
River, the principal waterway in Colombia, let us focus on the debates emerging from
Puerto Berrıo. The residents of this town have lived through processes of dispossession,
murder, and forced disappearance, among other forms of violence. There were periods
in which they experienced death daily and as an ongoing phenomenon – a horizon full of
possibility. The river became the war’s moving cemetery – a place where human
remains circulated and were perceived as more or less one’s own.
However, the cadavers that were rescued and interred as “NN” in the cemetery
were not always totally unknown. In the 1980s, according to a number of testimo-
nies and reports, like those of the CNMH (National Center for Historical
Memory, 2017), murder victims began to appear in urban areas, in the streets and
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 561
gutters and floating downstream in the rivers. No one claimed the bodies because
of the risk of becoming the next victim or being stigmatised because of the associ-
ation with death. As reported in the newspaper El Tiempo on 22 August 1983
(cited in CNMH 2017, 339–340):
During the first six and a half months of this year, in the urban and rural
perimeter of Puerto Berrıo, there have been more than 150 murders. To
be more precise, between 27 July and 13 August – in other words, in only
13 days – 28 people were buried in Puerto Berrıo. Nineteen cadavers were
recovered within the city limits of this Antioquia town. Eleven of the dead
were buried without any identification. They appear in the cemetery with
“NN” on their gravestones. Some were persons from the town and the
region, but no one dared to go to the amphitheater of the cemetery to
identify them. A warning remained on the gate of the graveyard for several
days reading: “Rats [informers] also die”, and for that reason people
preferred for the bodies to decompose and for the city to bury them than
to go there and risk their lives. Practically no one went to the wakes for
these corpses since it is well known in Puerto Berrıo and Magdalena those
who attend a wake might die the next day: “If someone cries or shows that
she is mourning, they kill her the same day”, one woman stated. The fact is
that in Puerto Berrıo there is no longer any fear. Terror reigns.
Despite the threats that different armed actors made against the townspeople of
Puerto Berrıo, some of them did dare to rescue and bury cadavers marked as “NN”
in the cemetery under the protection of the Catholic religion. Simultaneously, they
also began to dispute the right to choose the nameless or “NN” remains, as they call
them, since, according to Catholic tradition, these suffering souls can grant favours to
the living in exchange for the care and prayers provided them.17
Unidentified human remains became an object of mutual interest. Some people
began to fight over their care in order to demonstrate exemplary behaviour in this
life in the interest of a later divine judgement.18 The living adorn their niches or
tombs, make offerings, pray, and speak to the dead, thus making them into confi-
dants or even members of the family. In exchange, they ask them for protection,
favours, and miracles, for example, that the dead clue them in to the winning lot-
tery number. Sometimes, as the documentary Requiem NN shows,19 those choosing
(los escogientes) take photographs of their tombs in order to add them to an altar at
home, next to the photos of their own murdered or disappeared relatives. On All
Souls Day, devotees line up behind the animero, or guide for the souls in purga-
tory, crossing the town in the hopes of securing them eternal peace.
Drawing upon these beliefs and rituals, those choosing personify the unnamed
(NN) remains, associating them with a bodily image, gender, age, name, and per-
sonality; sanctifying them, assigning them a sacred place and divine agency. They
bring them into the present, lending their souls special earthly agency in the here and
now. At the same time, the suffering souls are pacified by the ones who choose,
curbing their supposed ability to transform life on earth or preventing them from
inflicting further violence in their search for revenge (Losonczy 2015, 465).
However, the rescue efforts of fishermen and the practices of choosing (escogencia)
the NN have generated a number of tensions between townspeople and authorities

– mayors and governors, local city agents, representatives of the Catholic Church,
members of the Cuerpo Tecnico de Investigacion de la Fiscalıa (Technical
Investigative Division of the Office of the Attorney General, CTI), and the
Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (National Institute of
Legal Medicine and Forensic Science, INMLyCF). According to the testimonies of
legal and forensic experts provided in the documentary Requiem NN, the gravedig-
ger should not allow those choosing to intervene into the cemetery’s niches by
removing or rearranging the structure of the tomb by moving marble grave stones
or ceramic angels, thus covering the official marks that identify the body’s loca-
tion. For the church parishioner, these rituals do not constitute “good manners”
since, in their view, the cemetery should not be painted with bright colours, as if
it were a circus, but instead “should be white, as it is a graveyard”. By contrast,
devotees of the souls in purgatory defend their actions by saying that if it weren’t
for them and for those who rescue the bodies from the river, the remains would
not even be there and that one of the reasons why government authorities have
banned them from recovering and burying them is that this would increase the sta-
tistics of violent crime in the town, which, in turn, would reflect negatively on
the offices of the mayor and the governor.20
From the perspective of the ones choosing, the medical-legal identification of
the remains (which is already rare) would seem not to be a priority.21 In their
view, the important thing is to grant the remains a new and generous identity and
to render that identity present, here and now. The name assigned to a corpse
may, at times, correspond to that of a family member who was also disappeared
or who suffered a violent death. For those choosing, the soul of the deceased is of
primordial importance. Though its past is unknown, the goal is to help this soul to
leave purgatory, to escape the “infernal abyss”, and arrive at a good destination.
Simultaneously the function of the suffering soul is to fulfil the requests of the per-
son who chose, to resolve this person’s earthly problems. It is for this reason that
those choosing go to the cemetery to visit the deceased whenever they can, letting
the dead know that he or she is there by knocking a few times on the tomb or, if
he or she cannot make the trip, by praying to the altar in their house. If the soul
fulfils the desires of their choosers, the latter will take charge of caring for it, by
celebrating its birthday, paying his passage to a final ossuary and thus ensuring that
the body does not end up in a common grave or in the general ossuary, where all
the different bodies tend to be jumbled up with one another.
For state agencies, like the Attorney General’s Office or the INMLyCF, or for
NGOs like Equitas, the identity assigned to the chosen body/soul, in the technical
language of such agencies, “the unidentified person or cadaver”, is irrelevant. By
contrast, their priority is to identify the body in medical-legal terms, in other
words, to establish a juridical-biological identification linked exclusively to that
body’s past, which requires that morgues and local cemeteries regulate their practi-
ces according to forensic norms and protocols. Experts consider that the lack of
organisation or rigour governing burial procedures in many local cemeteries,
including the practices of the devotees of Puerto Berrıo, is an obstacle and a chal-
lenge for the work of identification in this context.
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 563
One can immediately appreciate these different perspectives on the manipulation

of unidentified cadavers in the material and aesthetic inscription of the remains and
their disposition in the local cemetery, as well as in the rituals associated with
them. The administrator of the cemetery places the remains of the unidentified
cadavers, many of which have been recovered from the river, in niches painted
white with the letters “NN” in black. The INMLyCF tags the niches of unidentified
bodies with a metal pin containing a number corresponding to the file of the
cadaver that it is tracking. At the same time, those choosing the “NN” paint the
tombs with bright colours, thus covering the inscriptions of the cemetery adminis-
trator and the forensic experts. In this way, the cemetery can be considered a
space in which disputes over the disposition and belonging of unidentified remains
are made manifest. The bodies become a site for different practices and cosmovi-
sions concerning the threshold between life and death. In so doing, they reveal a
space of social and political mediations that is difficult to contain and where the
spectral and the liminal are the privileged ways of representing these deaths. These
apparitions are not identical to themselves; we might think of them, instead, as
akin to spectres or ghosts that can never be fully present. In this sense, the appar-
ition is not a being in itself but rather signals a relation to that which no longer is
or has not yet come to be (H€agglund 2008).
It is worth pointing out that many residents of Puerto Berrıo do not take earthly
but rather divine justice as their objective when endeavouring to relocate remains
in the local cemetery. Beyond merely pacifying the supposed quest for revenge –
and thus avoiding the reactivation of the cycle of violence – the practices of choos-
ing also allow them to approach the remains of the dead by attenuating the risk of
death threats in a context marked by the impunity of their perpetrators. The ano-
nymity of human remains makes their recuperation possible in that it allows rescu-
ers and devotees to dignify them without putting their own lives at risk: and this,
despite the fact these actors transgress the regulations of the state and Church, and
of armed actors.
Another, quite different perspective, is that of the functionaries of state and
humanitarian agencies and of forensic NGOs. If for devotees an “NN” corresponds to
a lost soul that possesses power and can be guided through different worlds, for state
agencies that conform to the processes of Transitional Justice, an unidentified cadaver
is the deictic marker of a violent disruption – and the result of a crime – between a
body and a legal-biological identity previously assigned and consecrated by the state
(Guglielmucci 2017). Noteworthy in this context is the fact that, from the perspective
of the experts, these bodies also remain in a limbo between life and death. However,
this is a legal, rather than religious, limbo, and thus amounts to a state that tends to
perpetuate both the crime and the impunity of the perpetrators.
Between these two different logics of perception and action, of know-how and
being in the space where unidentified corpses appear, it is as if the power of the
remains or of the body crack open. The perspective of those choosing and devoted
to the souls in purgatory underscores the power of making present (the appar-
ition); by contrast, that of the experts concerns the re-presentation of someone
absent (or who takes the place of someone else). In Puerto Berrıo, as in other
Colombian towns, just as Marin (1993) has observed in the case of religious
images, the mutilated and decomposed cadavers removed from the river appear to
contain two kinds of power: the power to re-present something that is absent and
the power to present something new, a religious apparition. On one hand, the
nameless cadaver represents the person constituted through that body, or what is
now a remnant of it. On the other hand, the human remains are the apparition of
something new that disturbs the threshold traced between the living and the dead
and that performs that liminal zone through recourse to the social, political, and
aesthetic mediations around it.
These mediations serve as a space for disputing the conditions of (re)existence,
not only of the dead, but also of the living. They open a space for the dignifying
and (re)humanisation of those vulnerable mortals left exposed between the killable
and the dead (Casid 2018). This is especially so in parts of Colombia where the
population has been subjected to forms of control, exploitation, and annihilation
by war machines that exercise the power to decide who is allowed to continue liv-
ing and who must die.
The displacement of the living and the dead: geographies of the search for and
inscription of the remains of the disappeared
Given the method, widespread among armed actors and delinquent gangs, of tossing
the cadavers of their murder victims into Colombia’s rivers, the search for the disap-
peared has also tended to follow the same rivers’ courses and topographical accidents
in order to understand where these bodies might run aground. This has been the case
for many families in Trujillo and its surrounding areas, which have stood at the epi-
centre of kidnappings and murders between the late 1990s and mid-2000s. Only a
few bodies were rescued on the coast close to the Cauca River, and their limbs were
often amputated, as was the case for Father Tibero Fernandez, who was tortured and
murdered on 17 April 1990. Some others were recovered more than one hundred kil-
ometres upstream, in the so-called refuge of Beltran, which used to be a peaceful fish-
ing village. These bodies were then interred as “NN” in the cemetery of Marsella, the
municipal capital, which, when it rains, can only be accessed from Beltran by Jeep or
mule. The location of the majority of the disappeared remains unknown. Together,
these facts are known as the Massacre of Trujillo. The Massacre does not refer to a sin-
gle event, but rather to a chain of connected facts that left 342 dead in the towns of
Trujillo, Riofrıo, Tulua, and Bolıvar in the northern Cauca River Valley. Aided by the
logistical support of the army and local police, the drug traffickers known as “Don
Diego” and “The Scorpion” exterminated the community organisations accused of ties
with insurgents (CNMH 2008).
Numerous stories, newspaper chronicles, and personally documented testimonies
register the threats and obstacles faced by those in Trujillo who searched for the
disappeared or recovered cadavers upstream on the shores of the Cauca River and
buried them as “NN” in the Marsella cemetery (Uribe 2011). The testimonies of
those years evoke “dump trucks full of cadavers” and “workdays of more than
24 hours of exhumations” that almost bankrupted the municipality of Marsella,
since the budget for law enforcement could not cover the cost of four or five
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 565
exhumations per day (A lvarez 2009). At the same time, the gravedigger at that
cemetery told the story of a woman who had been a public servant in the village:
Every month she would rescue the bodies of people who had drowned in
another part of the river or the murder victims that the paramilitary
troops tried to hide. It was like that until 2005, when [she] and her family
received a written death threat. A few days later, they burned her house
down. Now it is rumoured that the fishermen prefer not to rescue the
bodies, instead helping to move them by pushing them down the river
with their paddles. There are several reasons for this. When they report a
cadaver, they must go to Pereira and subject themselves to an
interrogation. They spend 24,000 on transportation just to make the trip,
when their weekly pay is about 60,000 pesos. (Calle 2013)
Another chronicle affirms: “The nonchalance with which the community of Beltran
had to face these final scenes was such that many beach combers made it into a busi-
ness. When relatives of the disappeared from the northern Cauca River Valley would
call to ask if they had seen a body with this or that characteristic pass by, the beach
combers asked for money in return and spent day and night on the rivers on the look-
out for passing bodies”.22 The circulation of cadavers on the rivers promoted the
development of new kinds of activities at the same time that it prompted people to
move to the riverside towns where the bodies would accumulate along with the trash
before being interred as “NN” in municipal cemeteries.
The errant cadavers and news about the sighting of human remains in certain
parts of the Cauca River propelled the movement of the living in order to identify
whether the bodies discovered were those of their loved ones:
Porfidio Antonio was already familiar with the town and its streets. He had
walked here three decades earlier on the way to the refuge of Beltran; he was
following in the footsteps of his brother Jose Norbey. Porfidio traversed the
shores of the Cauca River from La Virginia, in Risaralda, to Bolombolo, on
foot and penniless, for fifteen days, asking the fishermen and neighbours of
the small village if they had seen the cadaver of a thin white boy with dark
eyes float by. Finally, one day, Porfidio arrived in Marsella and went down to
Beltran, to that famous whirlpool where the cadavers that have been thrown
into the river would get trapped among the thickets of tree trunks and the
garbage that floats on the Cauca. He remembers that, there, an old man
offered him some fish stew but he was nauseated given that he had just seen a
dead body on the shore that did not belong to his brother. He also recalls that
they told him stories of the days when they rescued up to eighteen bodies
from the current.23
In earlier years, the gravedigger in Marsella would remove the cadavers’ clothes
in order to show them to those who arrived asking about the disappeared, but that
practice has since been banned by the Office of the Attorney General. “By order
of the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, since 1997,
maps have been made of the location of each body, with precise details of its
clothing and bodily characteristics, all with the goal of facilitating the localization of
corpses in the event that one of the many visitors who arrive constantly in Marsella in
the desperate hope of a recovering a body, might be permitted to mourn them.”24
Beginning with the work of some functionaries of Beltran and Marsella, together with
the search organised by relatives for kidnapped or murdered persons in the areas near
Trujillo, several years later, some institutions, including the INMLyCF and the NGO
Equitas, undertook the collective exhumation of cadavers that had been interred as
“NN” for the purposes of their forensic identification and return to relatives. By that
time, several events commemorating the dead had already been held on the shores of
the Cauca River. Two such initiatives, Magdalenas por el Cauca (Magdalenas on the
Cauca) and 327 alumbramientos por las huellas del olvido (327 Lights around the
Footsteps of Obscurity), were the work of plastic artists Gabriel Posada and Yorlady
Ruız Lopez. Magdalenas por el Cauca was an installation of giant rafts made of guadua, a
thick bamboo, that transported large sheets of canvas with the images of mothers look-
ing for disappeared children or spouses along the Cauca River. 327 alumbramientos con-
sisted of a prayer for the souls of the disappeared and an homage to the residents of
the community of Beltran, and was intended as a form of symbolic reparation for both
the deceased and the living who have to live with the corpses and who often helped to
rescue the cadavers.25
The bodies of those who were identified here and elsewhere were returned by
family members grouped in the Association of Relatives of the Victims of Trujillo
(AFAVIT) to their respective towns in order to be reinterred collectively in a sui
generis space that was created to house the remains of all of the murdered and dis-
appeared. According to Dominican nun Maritze Trigos, who has accompanied the
movement of these families since the beginning,
In 2002, when Monument Park to the victims of Trujillo was about to be

inaugurated, I scolded the families. I told them that the Park could not be
something that was merely symbolic since we knew where the dead were
buried. Let us go and bring them, I said ( … ) People were very afraid.
Little by little I was able to go with small groups, generally of women –
the men were afraid of being picked out. It was the women, widows, and
mothers who took the risk. We had to look for people who would help
us to remove the soil. We went to five or six small towns: Venecia,
Naranjal, Trujillo, Tulua and Salonica. Doing this, we exhumed 66 of
those who died during the period of the massacre. We made two different
pilgrimages, taking the remains of the victims to Monument Park, erected
on the outskirts of town.26
Monument Park is located in the highest part of the town. Despite perpetrators’
attempts to destroy it, passers-by cannot avert their gaze from it.27 The Park
includes the Ossuaries, the mausoleum in honour of Father Tiberio Fernandez, the
Tree of the Embrace, the mural titled La sombra del amor (The Shadow of Love),
the Chapel of the Embrace, the exhibition and assembly hall, the Path of Memory,
and the stations in honour of the episodes of violence in Latin America. The Path
of Memory was inaugurated in August 2014 with a national pilgrimage
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 567
Figure 1 ndez. Photograph by Ana

Ossuaries and the Mausoleum of Father Tiberio Ferna
Guglielmucci, 2018.
accompanied by religious congregations and activists from the Centre for Popular
Research and Education (CINEP) (Figure 1).28
Access to the Park is provided by a path leading from the meeting and interpret-
ation centre to the Mausoleum, located at the top of the hill, where the remains
of Father Tiberio lie. The path passes by the ossuaries, which contain the found
and identified remains of the victims of kidnapping and disappearance from the
region as well as the empty niches that carry the names of those whose cadavers
have still not been found.
In Trujillo – in contrast with Puerto Berrıo – there is no evidence of a cult to the
souls in purgatory, but Catholic dogma is also one of the strong pillars of the narra-
tives constructed about the “massacre”. The image of Father Tiberio can be found at
various locations in the Park, for example, in the representation of the naked crucified
body without feet, hands, or a head, and lacerated like a mutilated Jesus. For the
members of AFAVIT, “Tiberio is a martyr and in the interest of honouring his sacrifice
one must follow his example through commitment, whether to Catholic values, to the
community, or to the Association itself. His death is valued as virtue, which grants it a
different status” (Torres Cuenca 2017, 27). In the words of the AFAVIT members,
Christ’s martyrdom appears as the Park’s unifying thread, giving meaning to past and
present events and lending the community a sense of future.
The Park’s construction has been the product of many tenacious efforts in a con-
text that remains the same as the one in which the crimes were committed. These
efforts included searching every town along the course of the river and mobilising
state institutions in order to exhume, identify, and move the bodies, in procession,
to the place where their next of kin are located and giving them a new material
space where they can be remembered and honoured, while at the same time pro-
curing justice for the kidnapping, torture, murder, and disappearance of these peo-
ple. These efforts have made those associated with AFAVIT the targets of
violence. The Mural La sombra del amor (The Shadow of Love), by the artist
Hoshayar Rashee, tells the story of a series of niches containing stuffed animals,
cards, and other objects that people from all over the world had sent to AFAVIT
as a show of solidarity. The mural was shot at and, after its repair, it was set on
fire. In 2008, the tomb of Father Tiberio was desecrated and robbed. The mem-
bers of AFAVIT have been threatened and the mausoleum and mural have been
the object of frequent anonymous attacks.29 In 2013, Alba Mery Chilito, a leader
and one of the founders of the AFAVIT, was murdered; her case has still not been
resolved. She had lost four family members in the “Trujillo massacre” and was a
member of the cooperative of fruit growers in the same town. Following her
death, her family was forced to abandon the town (Figure 2).
The murder and disappearance of hundreds of Trujillo residents have affected the
configuration of what Das (2008) has called “the mourning community”, which, in
this case, is composed of the communal work of the search for, as well as the identifi-
cation, restitution, and reinterment of remains in a single new commemorative space
which is different from the local cemetery. Thanks to these practices, which involve
the displacement of participants through several different geographic regions, some
residents of and visitors to the city of Trujillo (like Sister Maritze or Father Javier
Giraldo of the CINEP) have disputed the necroscapes imposed by the hegemony of
armed actors. They have thus helped to configure new spaces made to memorialise
the dead and to demand justice for their kidnapping and murder. In the words of
Sister Maritze, who has accompanied AFAVIT in its work over the last decade, “We
do not bury them, we plant them so that memory can flourish”.30
The relations woven around these absent relatives and their found remains have
created a new communitarian space for political action in which the practices of
search, identification, and reinterment continue to represent a form of defiance
and, as we have seen, provoke new threats against their practitioners. These prac-
tices destabilise the necropolitics that armed actors have sought to exercise upon
the living and the territories that they inhabit through the bodies of the dead.
Through their own displacement in space, the survivors of “the massacre” have
been able to piece together mutilated and missing bodies by locating them in a
common, though not homogeneous, space. The Park inscribes the remains of the
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 569
Figure 2 Mural titled La sombra del amor (The Shadow of Love). Sister Maritze shows the
threatening graffiti marking it. Photograph by Ana Guglielmucci, 2018.
victims buried in it through a particular aesthetic and material logic. It treats the
remains of the disappeared and of the victims of murder differently from those of
Father Tiberio. While the former are located in niches, the remains of Father
Tiberio are contained in a separate mausoleum, an idyllic structure separated from
the rest of the niches that occupies a central role in the unifying narrative about
the facts of violence in the region.31 Through the mediation of their survivors,
cadavers that had been condemned to endless wandering by their aggressors have
been gathered and reinscribed in the same land from which they had been exiled.
Thus, despite continuous threats against it, this community of mourning disputes
forms of sovereignty, space, and corporality marked by the necropower and necro-
politics that shape the political geography of the region (Figure 3).
Disputes over the treatment and disposition of bodily remains have configured dif-
ferent necroscapes in Colombia. The mutilated and unburied body has long been used
by armed actors to fragment political and territorial ties – a form of dispossession of
the living. The reunification of these cadavers in a new place appears to be one of the
ways that the residents of Trujillo have found in order to articulate, experientially,
another kind of landscape and other forms of (re)existence in contexts in which killing
and letting live continue to be hegemonic forms of power, and where the threshold
between the living and the dead has been profoundly disturbed.
In Colombia, human remains reveal how the wounds inflicted on bodies are con-
nected to the forced displacement of populations and the dispossession of lands.
Figure 3 Ossuaries. Monument Park to the victims of Trujillo, Photograph by Ana

Guglielmucci, 2018.
Likewise, the practices developed by survivors in order to recover and return

those remains to the land serve not only to rescue them from the ostracism, indif-
ference, and oblivion imposed by the context of war (Uribe 2011), but also to dis-
pute the landscapes and forms of sovereignty defined by the logic of necropower.
Literary representations and geographic imaginaries
At the same time that the inhabitants of riverside communities have developed
diverse ways of interacting with the apparition of the cadavers of people whose
bodies have been mutilated and thrown into the river, local works of literature
and testimonio narrate these presences. The latter can transform the experience
one has of oneself, of others, and of the world. Different modes of storytelling
represent the tragedy of these apparitions and of the places where they occur.
Simultaneously, they also lend a particular meaning to the experiences of violence
that they represent.
Among vernacular literary texts, by which I refer to works that have not circu-
lated in the global or transnational market, several authors have attempted to show
the disturbance produced by the apparition and movement of mutilated bodies in
some of the country’s largest rivers.32 I am interested in two such texts, which
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 571
illustrate in different ways the changing relationship sustained between the commu-
nity, the river, and the movement of mutilated corpses.
Vanegas, for example, has written in “Un rıo lleno de cadaveres flotando” about
how the presence of unburied and errant cadavers affected both the Magdalena
River and the riverside townspeople, turning the former into a scene of death
(necrosando) and causing the latter to lose their sense of smell. Throughout his
story, the writer allows us to see how the perception of these remains defies a dis-
tanced, aerial view (as remote witnesses), as well as the order of visual representa-
tion. Rather, they affect human existence corporeally and ecosystemically. The
perception of these cadavers constitutes an experience that disturbs the senses in a
non-representational register. Instead, it “takes form through a kind of proximity
to the world” (Besse 2010, 6) through an olfactory and tactile, rather than pre-
dominantly visual, form of organisation:
The river was slowly becoming a scene of death [se fue necrosando] like a
“gangrene” and the fetidness characteristic of dead “crab” gave name to this
disease and announces an imminent death of the entire social fabric. People
looked on with fear at how everything smelled like “gangrene”, the houses,
the furniture, the bedding and clothing, the kitchen utensils, everything, and
they felt impotent, the terror had paralysed even the simplest men in the
town, the cold sweat pegged shirts to skin, hearts beat quickly, mouths were
always dry, the gaze wild, saddened ( … ) the dead kept coming down the
river ( … ) They were the ones to carry the guilt for the crimes and for the
enormous pestilence that caused the town to lose its sense of smell. Anosmia
was what the doctor said the name was. Cacosmia was more adequate,
according to Raul, who was an expert in the art of philology. But if one thing
is true it is that the pestilence was always there, always circling around in our
brains reminding us where it came from. (Vanegas n.d.)
If Vanegas’s story displays how the presence of these remains in the rivers of
Colombia has turned the sensorial, social and natural fabric into a scene of death,
Pardo’s story, titled “Sin nombres, sin rostros ni rastros”, shows, instead, how
those remains have become the anonymous embodiment of so many disappearan-
ces, thus expanding the lineage between the living and the dead through the spec-
tral adoptions of the “NN” (Martınez 2018). The story also shows us how the
river has become a place from which to imagine the fate of the disappeared:
Since they have disappeared my brothers, tonight I am waiting on the shore

for a cadaver to come down the river so that I can claim it as my corpse.
They’ve taken someone from all of us at the port, they have disappeared or
murdered one of ours, we are orphans, widows. So, every day we wait for
the dead to come on the turbulent waters, between the fences, in order to
make them our brothers, fathers, spouses, or children. We also adopt them
when they arrive decapitated, and we give them blue or green, or brown, or
black eyes, a big mouth, and dark, maroon hair. When they arrive without
arms or feet, we make them strong and agile so they can help us to farm and
fish. We all have our NN in the cemetery, we offer them prayers and wild
flowers so that they will help us to stay alive because the uniformed soldiers
come and break down our doors, to take our young and throw them in pieces
downstream so that in the other ports they will take them as their bodies, in
place of their relatives. (Pardo 2011, 317)
Together with its perception as a “death zone”, in Colombia the river has become
known as a “possible form, among others, of inscribing the existence of this uncertain
death” and of locating one of the possible paths of those whose whereabouts are
unknown (Colombo 2017, 251). This is a geographical imaginary composed of frag-
mentary information, facts that are denied or only half-known, information transmit-
ted orally, by word of mouth, by a few witnesses or by the very perpetrators who
have come forward in the Justice and Peace trials beginning in 2005. The presence of
these errant cadavers and the characterisation of the river as “an open-air cemetery” or
“a big common grave” has led practitioners to reconfigure both vernacular and expert
forms of knowledge in relation to the search for and identification of disappeared per-
sons and the treatment of their remains. As we have seen, the latter phenomenon has
created a series of tensions and conflicts among different actors about who has the
right – post mortem – to manipulate, name, identify, and relocate the unidentified
remains. Thus, diverse tactics and mourning rituals create a symbolic and physical lan-
guage capable of making sense of profoundly dehumanising acts which would other-
wise be “perceived as senseless” (Uribe 2011, 49).
The sudden appearance of cadavers has also fomented literary representations.
Whether in the form of fictional narrative or testimony, these texts demonstrate
the necessity, not only of making sense of otherwise senseless acts of violence, but
also of reconfiguring landscapes and local, regional, and national memory provoked
by a continuum of violence. As Benedict Anderson (1991) argues, literature has
proven an important source and resource for the construction of national imagined
communities. As Rory O’Bryen affirms in the Colombian case, in many works of
art and literature, “the Magdalena River retains an affectively loaded presence
( … ) and continues to perform a labor of figuration, albeit of the nation’s destiny
as a pipedream or curse” (2013, 227). Following O’Bryen’s argument, rivers are
frontier zones and contradictory figures insofar as they are able to unite or to sep-
arate, that is, to gather time and identity and the respective negation of each.
These affective and profoundly political figures can “shore up the biopolitical sover-
eignty of the state over the vital and affective processes from which it aims to sub-
tract its symbolic surplus-value” (O’Bryen 2013, 228). Alternatively, if works of
literature resist ceding to this pressure, they can also illustrate more expansive
notions of community.
Literary representations of violent occurrences – and, in this case, of the massive
presence of cadavers in Colombia’s rivers – have multiple political, juridical, aes-
thetic, and ethical consequences. According to Rueda, “the exploration of these
consequences [and] their presence and importance ( … ) constitutes an open field
for many necessary reflections on a period in which violence seems increasingly
incomprehensible, terrifying, or unapproachable”, but also at the same time recur-
rent and routine (2008, 358).33 It is precisely this confrontation with different
forms of death in life and with the nameless, unmourned dead that impels the
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 573
vernacular gaze inquiring into these experiences and opens the possibility of imag-
ining national communities in affective terms beyond those of mourning.
The images constructed by the narratives cited above allow us to see, among
other things, the sensorial effects produced by the display of mutilated corpses in
the spaces of life. They also contemplate different ways of weaving and unravelling
spaces of community, coexistence, and integration in their presence. In other
words, these stories construct a political space open to the living and the dead, as
well as the power to persist and (re)exist even in worlds of death defined by con-
temporary forms of necropower. In these narratives, the fictional representation of
the Cauca and Magdalena rivers cast a critical gaze, among other things, on forms
of sovereignty ruled by the power to kill and let live, the reconfiguration of polit-
ical territories and geographies, and the imagined destiny of Colombians, where
rivers have come to be seen as no longer providing vital and affective resources
but instead as moving, common graves for innumerable unburied corpses. Perhaps,
in Jens Andermann’s words, these stories reflect “a critique from the perspective
of landscape” that might allow for its “vindication over other, more conventional
ways of occupying and mutilating the land rather than inhabiting it” (Andermann
2018, 18).
Conclusions
Necropolitics materialises in different forms, and there are equally diverse ways in
which these materialisations can be identified and “read” as changing landscapes.
According to Oslender (2018), the power to decide on who should live or die
materialises itself in the production of “landscapes of fear” in routine social spaces
and in the embodied practices of everyday life – in one’s change of direction or in
certain sounds or smells.34 These landscapes of fear frequently manifest themselves
in the traces left behind, for example, in the schools, houses, or churches, in the
flattened fields, or in the memorials that are destroyed, shot at, burned, or tat-
tooed with threatening graffiti. These landscapes also take shape through empty (or
emptied) spaces created when the inhabitants of a town are forced to flee or to
abandon their life spaces out of fear of persecution, massacres, or targeted assassi-
nations. These landscapes express themselves through the presence of destroyed
and mutilated corpses, which serve to remind survivors that the landscape is the
result of past, present, and potential, future acts of violence.
In Colombia, an extended necropolitics has configured diverse landscapes of
fear, extensively portrayed through narratives that aim to trace the resonance of
mass violence across different human geographies. The testimonies recollected in
the present essay, however, do more than describe the experience of terror.
Confronted with the appearance of these cadavers, fishermen and beachcombers
began working as trackers, rescuers, and carriers; some functionaries transformed
their public jobs into forms of humanitarian work; many riverside townspeople
became choosers (escogientes) of the “NN” while others became guides for the souls
in purgatory (animeros); and the relatives of the murdered and disappeared became
activists and advocates for historical memory at the same time that they continue
to seek justice for the “Trujillo Massacre” and other mass crimes committed in
Colombia. Undoubtedly, errant cadavers have become a disturbing presence trans-
figuring social and spatial relations, as well as the genealogies traced among the liv-
ing and the dead. These bodies have transfigured the memory of the violence
reaped upon both the territory and population of Colombia, at the same time that
they have given rise to new strategies of popular sovereignty in a context marked
by necropolitics. With this, I wish to underscore that actions meant to sow fear
through the exhibition of corpses, or what I have called necroscapes, have
imprinted themselves on the imaginary and the practices of the residents of these
riverside towns, yet this phenomenon merits further investigation. We should not
assume that the only thing that it produces is a culture of terror. Rather, the
diverse practices and forms of representation studied here demonstrate the extent
to which the repeated appearance of these errant remains has been understood and
inscribed in the community of the living in equally diverse ways. These practices
encompass tactics, rituals, texts, and images that resist “the creation of death-worlds,
that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are
subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead”
(Mbembe 2019, 92). In their treatment of the bodily remains and of the threshold
between life and death, aesthetic practices and forms of representation symbolise
an important part of the extended armed conflict in Colombia, rather than its
denial, closure, or overcoming.
Translated by Karen Benezra
Notes
1. A number of Colombian visual artists have addressed the apparition of dead bodies in the
country’s rivers, among them Clemencia Echeverri’s Treno (Funeral Song, 2007) and Juan
Manuel Echevarrıa’s Requiem NN (Requiem NN, 2006–2013) (Uribe 2013, 19). Echevarrıa’s
work was included in the exhibition titled Rıos y silencios (Rivers and Silences), which was
inaugurated in Bogota in 2017. The exhibition included many of this artist’s works, including
Guerra y paz (War and Peace, 2001), Bocas de ceniza (Mouths of Ash, 2003), La guerra que no
hemos visto (The War We Have Not Seen (2007–2009), Silencios (Silences, 2010–2018), and
>De que sirve una taza? (What’s a Cup for?, 2014). Rory O’Bryen (2008) provides further
explanation of the ways in which the theme of unburied bodies has been addressed in
literature, testimonio, and film in contemporary Colombia.
2. The Centro Nacional de Memoria Historica (National Center for Historical Memory,
CNMH) has reported more than 1,080 recovered bodies in at least 190 Colombian
rivers. These bodies belong to those who have been disappeared by armed actors,
generally in order to hide the evidence of their crimes. In 2018 the association of
journalists known as the Consejo de Redaccion (Editorial Council) and the Rutas del
Conflicto (Routes of Conflict) project presented the “Rıos de Vida y Muerte” (Rivers of
Life and Death) initiative, which is a digital tool for telling the stories of the victims of
forced disappearance in Colombian rivers. See http://rutasdelconflicto.com/rios-vida-
muerte/especial/mil-cuerpos.html.
3. The present article addresses a diverse range of registers and forms of representation as
they pertain to the apparition of unburied bodies in Colombia’s rivers. This does not
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 575
suppose treating the literary text or work of art as proof of social phenomena, but rather
as a particular way of understanding and processing the recurrent violence at stake in the
context I address.
4. See www.arcoiris.com.co/2014/05/el-lugar-a-donde-llegan-los-muertos-que-lleva-el-rio/.
5. Taussig uses the phrase “culture of terror” in order to analyse the role of terror as a
dissuasive pedagogical tool in Colombia. According to Taussig, the phrase describes
pathological forms of memory-making that take as their object the past suffering of the
victims in contexts ruled by the impunity of the perpetrators.
6. Uribe (2011) has done pioneering research on this topic. Undertaken in Puerto Berrıo,
Marsella, and Riohacha (Guajira), it addresses the humanising practices of some
communities in reincorporating into the social fabric the anonymous dead who would
otherwise be forgotten.
7. Losonczy points out that practices of terror in Colombia have become an obstacle for
“the social processes of mourning by making the latter as fragmentary, diffuse, endless,
and depersonalized as the violence itself” (2015, 463).
8. The present essay builds upon existing research into mass violence and human remains
(Ferrandiz and Robben 2015; Anstett and Dreyfus 2015; Dreyfus and Anstett 2016;
Garibian, Anstett and Dreyfus 2017) and the political life of dead bodies (Verdery 1999,
Robins 2015).
9. According to Mbembe (2003 and 2019), political regimes follow the scheme of “making
live and letting die”. This “necropower” is defined as a diffuse one. Insofar as it is not
limited to the state, it inserts the economy of death into relations of production
and power.
10. Colombo (2017, 63) understands this decontextualised exhibition of death in terms of
spaces in which bodies appear out of place and out of time and lacking any of the
references that might allow us “to understand the reason for this specific death”.
11. The fields of human geography and archaeology have shown increasing concern for the
role of cadavers in the constitution of societies and the way that both dead and living
bodies contribute to the production of contemporary space. Researchers have thus begun
to pay attention to the agency of cadavers (Crossland 2017; Moon 2013) and their role
in the constitution of different landscapes of death and of the dead (Kong 1999). Others
have even proposed the creation of an interdisciplinary field of study dedicated to “corpse
geographies” (Young and Light 2013).
12. Losonczy (2015, 462) signals that recent studies propose an understanding of the social
experience of the transformation of violence – whether sectorial, selective, or equipped
with a legitimising or radical discourse – into terror. The mechanisms of this
transformation include the “deterritorialization and ubiquity of violent actors and their
circulation in mobile networks that are impossible to locate or identify, which extend the
representation of vulnerability to all natural and social territories, including those of the
family and neighborhood” (Pecaut 1999).
13. Even though Mbembe discusses the sovereignty of African states, his characterisation is
applicable to the Colombian context as well. In his words, “the political economy of
statehood has dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Many
African states can no longer claim to hold a monopoly on violence or on the means of
coercion within their own territory. Nor can they claim a monopoly on territorial
boundaries. Coercion itself has become a market commodity” (2019, 84).
14. Mbembe’s analysis (2019) explores the implementation of necropolitical technologies
through illustrations that include US slave plantations, South African apartheid, and the
occupation of Palestine. However, they are applicable to other contexts, like those that
pertain to modern warfare in Latin America. In the Colombian case, counterinsurgency wars
and wars against “narcoterrorism”, together with economic development models based on
the extraction of natural resources, have served as catalysts for the expansion of “war
machines”, that is, widespread and polymorphous armed factions that take shape and disband
as circumstances demand and that are not always part of state-sponsored armies. The activity
of such militias is constant and profitable because it allows them to control areas with
valuable resources and because fighting generates debt which, in turn, proves lucrative for
private interests. Simultaneously, these groups have created a form of governmentality that
includes the administration of multitudes of people. In Mbembe’s words, “the extraction and
location of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to
immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people” (2019, 86). It also installs a division
of land that produces violence by displacing, segregating, and isolating populations and by
creating a state of siege that justifies necropolitical practices.
15. A woman who had been a teacher in the area around Beltran would go on to recount that she
had decided to leave the town due to the fear and uneasiness caused not only by her own
exposure to the corpses but also the reaction that they had solicited from her students:
“When the children saw the cadavers just lying there, all swollen and disfigured, they began
playing with them ( … ) they laughed while trying to use a stick take the panties off of a half-
naked woman ( … ) All of this degraded people. The place seemed like a ghost town ( … )
People stopped opening their windows because of the smell of death”. A psychologist
accompanying a journalist en route to document these cases also recounted that when they
went to ask the inhabitants of the town about the appearance of the cadavers, the majority
closed their doors, systematically refusing to speak to them (field notes, Cali, November
2018). With respect to this last case, Uribe writes, “such is the level of familiarity that these
children have with decomposed and mutilated corpses that they have invented a range of
macabre jokes that they use among themselves” (2011, 43).
16. Mercedes Palacio, the former coordinator of the Grupo de NN and Desaparecidos del
CTI de la Fiscalıa (The NN and Disappeared Group of the Technical Investigative
Division of the Office of the Attorney General), explained in a newspaper column that
when the forensic team went to a cemetery, and then to the corresponding tomb, in
order to exhume the body of a man, sometimes they would find the body of a woman
or just an empty ditch. In other cases, forensic scientists would find cadavers lying
together in a common grave, such that the remains of one body were mixed with those
of another or remained incomplete. See www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/de/
noticias/noticias-cmh/nn-rastros-silenciosos-del-conflicto.
17. Losonczy (2015) dates the origins of such practices of religious devotion to the
unidentified remains of the deceased, as well as their popular sanctification, as far back as
least 40 years ago, even in the Cementerio Central of Bogota.
18. According to popular Catholic beliefs, souls in purgatory are moved by charity and aid.
No form of earthly suffering can compare with theirs. From this perspective, God put in
the hands of the living the possibility of helping them, thus granting the living the power
to alleviate their suffering and even to liberate them. The souls in purgatory are infinitely
grateful for this help.
19. Requiem NN includes three works: a series of photographs, 12 videos titled Novenarios
en espera (Novenas in Waiting) and a 70-minute documentary. The photographs
follow those choosing the “NN” through a register that spans two or more moments.
Between one image and the next, the viewer is able to see how people have
A. GUGLIELMUCCI 577
intervened in the grave by adding elements such as plaques, inscriptions, and colour.
Novenarios en espera uses the same technique, but with moving images. The
documentary weaves together the practices of the those choosing with these
protagonists' life stories.
20. In the documentary Requiem NN, a firefighter relays that the rescue effort was also
reduced because upon registering the cadavers in Puerto Berrıo, the recovered bodies
raised the death rate in the city, which authorities viewed negatively: “Now, if you look
at the statistics, the Magdalena River is a normal source of water. There’s nothing going
on because no one is dumping the cadavers expelled by other cities”.
21. In Colombia, even if there exist norms and strict laws about exhumations, interment,
and the management of cemeteries, in practice, they tend not to be enforced. The lack
of records, the demarcation of graveyards and the enumeration of crypts, the absence of
health laws, and the mixing and incineration of bodies in common graves, together with
the fact that only 3% of cemeteries have a morgue, make this problem much worse.
Since 2011, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Equitas have worked on
training programmes for administrative authorities and gravediggers in order to establish
“best practices” in the storing of cadavers.
22. See www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/de/noticias/noticias-cmh/el-rio-alumbrado.
23. See https://colombiaplural.com/trujillo-busca-sus-muertos/.
24. See http://rutasdelconflicto.com/rios-vida-muerte/?q=node/56. By the end of 2016,
187 identified corpses had been turned in. In recognition of the work realised by the
gravedigger Narces Palacio in Marsella, Equitas grants the “Narces Seal” to those
cemeteries that have improved their management of unidentified cadavers.
25. See .www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/de/noticias/noticias-cmh/el-rio-alumbrado.
26. See https://colombiaplural.com/trujillo-busca-sus-muertos/.
27. Construction of the Park began in 1998 following a participative process oriented
towards the creation of architectural and social proposals led by the AFAVIT.
28. The Centre for Popular Research and Education (Centro de Investigacion y Educacion
Popular, CINEP) was founded in 1972 under the direction of the Society of Jesus in
Colombia. The Society undertakes research, produces systematic reports, and carries out
popular education projects meant to strengthen organisations and communities, placing
special emphasis on victims and on the excluded. www.cinep.org.co/Home2/institucion/
nosotros.html.
29. In 2014, vandals left the following message on the walls of the Park’s chapel: “Leave or
we will skewer you. Mother Fucking defenders”. The sign complements the threats made
against the most visible leaders of the organisation, who, in February, received calls
telling them, between giggles and jokes, “The massacre is just beginning”, “Go to hell”,
“Death to AFAVIT”, and “Heads will roll to the river”. See www.eltiempo.com/archivo/
documento/CMS-13751263.
30. Field notes, Trujillo, November 2018.
31. The façade of each niche specifies the status of the victim whose remains it contains. The
niches of the disappeared are designated as such with a yellow marble plaque. A white
marble plaque including the name of the victim identifies the niches of murder victims
who have been identified.
32. See Rueda (2009) for more information about works of Colombian literature circulating
internationally that concern the issue of violence.
33. With respect to the recurrence and abundance of writing about violence in Colombia,
whether locally or internationally, Rueda affirms that all such texts “demonstrate an attempt
to find in language social alternatives to the phenomena they discuss”. However, the author
also adds that the discourse around violence can be problematic “because it tends to overlap
with a territory in which silence reigns, where one finds victims produced by the very
phenomena they study” but also in which “that same silence can also be understood as a drive
that propels the desire to produce writing about this same topic” (2008, 358).
34. In Trujillo, a leader of the AFAVIT relayed that once, when the Cauca River overflowed
its shores and the alarms sounded to alert the nearby population, the townspeople
remained indoors because they confused the signal with the frequent curfews sounded by
the authorities allied with the drug traffickers. Because of this, many residents were
unable to remove their possessions in time and lost them.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful for the valuable comments that I received on the present essay
during the seminar “Nuevas Despariciones Nuevos Espacios” (New Disappearances
New Spaces) organised by David Casado-Neira, Gabriel Gatti, Pamela Colombo,
and Ivana Belen Ruiz at the Universidad del Paıs Vasco in January 2019.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Ana Guglielmucci http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7498-264X
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Ana Guglielmucci is a Professor in the Master Conflicto Memoria y Paz, Universidad

del Rosario and co-coordinates the virtual seminar “Espacio y memoria: pasados y
violencia polıtica en Ame rica Latina” in CLACSO, Department of Anthropology at the
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and a
senior researcher affiliated with the CONICET at the Institute of Anthropological
Sciences (UBA). She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Los Andes, El
Rosario, Tecnolo gica de Pereira, and Tadeo Lozano in Colombia. She has published the
books La consagracio n de la memoria. Una etnografıa acerca de la institucionalizacio
n del
recuerdo sobre el terrorismo de Estado en la Argentina (Antropofagia, 2013) and
Memorias desveladas. Practicas y representaciones colectivas sobre el encierro por razones
polıticas (Tientos, 2007), which has won an INCAA award to form the basis for a
documentary series for Argentine public TV in 2010. She has co-edited El proceso de paz
de Colombia en la encrucijada (Antropofagia, 2020), and Vivir para contarlo. Violencias y
memorias en America latina (Papeles al viento, 2015). She has also worked as an advisor
and manager in government projects (such as the Parque de la Memoria – Monumento
a las vıctimas del terrorismo de Estado and the conversion of former clandestine
detention centres in Spaces for memory and the promotion of human rights) in Buenos
Aires. She is currently researching the debates around museums and commemorations
dedicated to the representation of political violence and the role of artistic practices and
art in transitional justice processes in Colombia.

Necroscapes The Political Life of Mutilated and Errant Bodies in The Rivers of Colombia

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NECROSCAPES: THE POLITICAL LIFE OF

Different narratives in Colombia show how the apparition of mutilated and

Keywords: Necrolandscape; corpses; Colombia; rivers

deterritorialised human remains signal a series of broader social processes, hav-

Necropower and landscape

In Colombia, whether one considers systematic and heteronomous acts of violence

Cadavers in dispute: vernacular and expert perspectives on death

Following Achille Mbembe, in Colombia, the social relations of both production

the NN have generated a number of tensions between townspeople and authorities

One can immediately appreciate these different perspectives on the manipulation

In 2002, when Monument Park to the victims of Trujillo was about to be

Figure 1 ndez. Photograph by Ana

Figure 3 Ossuaries. Monument Park to the victims of Trujillo, Photograph by Ana

Likewise, the practices developed by survivors in order to recover and return

Literary representations and geographic imaginaries

Since they have disappeared my brothers, tonight I am waiting on the shore

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ana Guglielmucci http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7498-264X

lvarez, J. M. 2009. “El remanso de Beltran.” El Malpensante, no 95: 60–73.

Ana Guglielmucci is a Professor in the Master Conflicto Memoria y Paz, Universidad

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