Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp.

6–20, 2021

Inhabiting Mourning: Spectral

Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial
Executions (False Positives)
in Colombia
JUAN PABLO ARANGUREN ROMERO,
JUAN NICOLÁS CARDONA SANTOFIMIO, AND
JUAN ÁNGEL AGUDELO HERNÁNDEZ
Universidad de Los Andes Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Bogotá,
Colombia

In this article we analyse various forms of emotional management of

mourning in the experiences of six female relatives of victims of extraju-
dicial executions in Colombia. Referencing the concept of the ‘spectral’,
we discuss the ways in which family members establish ways of living
with mourning that emphasise the impossibility of achieving closure, and
explore the ways in which they keep the wounds of their suffering open
as a means of organising themselves politically, in pursuit of justice. The
article suggests an alternative to a teleology of closure, suggesting that, in
contexts of impunity such as the one prevailing in Colombia, mourning
becomes a scenario of habitability.

Keywords: dreams, emotional management, extrajudicial executions,

ghosts, mourning, resentment, spectres.

False Positives and Double Disappearances

Between 2002 and 2010, some 3,500 civilians were murdered by state agents and
reported as guerrilla deaths in combat (Coordinación Colombia – Europa – Estados
Unidos, Colombia – Europe – United States Coordination, 2012). By 2008, this prac-
tice had come to be known as the phenomenon of ‘false positives’. In other words, these
deaths in combat were no such thing.
The point at which the term ‘false positive’ was first used by the Colombian military
is not entirely clear, as it is not commonly used by similar institutions in other parts of
the world, having been, in fact, much more commonly employed in the field of com-
puting to signify the erroneous identification of a benign file as infected by anti-virus
software or, in medicine, the identification of an infection where none exists. Whatever
its origins, the term entered common parlance and has even been used to describe the

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 Spectral Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial Executions

use of false witnesses in legal proceedings. However, in cases involving the disappearance
and murder of civilians by members of the Armed Forces, the legal term employed is that
of ‘extrajudicial execution’. The term appears in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Con-
ventions, which prohibit the execution of persons without prior judgment by a court
(International Committee of the Red Cross, 1995). Criticisms of the use of the term
include the argument that the death penalty does not exist in Colombia and that it is
impossible, therefore, for any execution to be legally sanctioned. Similarly, the language
used by victims’ and human rights organisations is at times ambiguous and, in some
cases, paradoxical, in that they sometimes refer to ‘so-called false positives’ while vic-
tims’ organisations might describe their members as family members of ‘false positives’.
Possibly a more appropriate term would be ‘deaths illegally presented by state agents as
having occurred in combat’. This is indeed the way the phenomenon has been described
by the Fiscalía General de la Nation (National Prosecuting Authorities).
Although the Colombian authorities systematically deny that the country’s Armed
Forces have been responsible for ‘false positives’, and the phenomenon has not been
fully documented or classified, some investigations by human rights and victims’
organisations estimate that there may have been as many as 10,000 victims (Rojas and
Benavides, 2017). Its frequency shows that it was a common practice of the Armed
Forces, to the extent that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Com-
missioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), one-third of the deaths in combat reported by
the army in 2006 and 2007 were ‘false positives’ (OHCHR, 2015). The large number
of cases may be explained, in part, by the implementation of the policy of seguridad
democrática (democratic security), during the two presidential terms of Álvaro Uribe
Vélez (2002–2010), which offered financial incentives to civilians who provided infor-
mation on the insurgent groups and to members of the military who killed guerrilla
fighters in combat (Cárdenas and Villa, 2013). As documented by the Centro Nacional
de Memoria Histórica (CNMH, National Centre for Historical Memory), this incen-
tives policy became corrupted, leading to the provision of false information and to the
murder of civilians and of defenceless combatants (CNMH, 2016).
Although the ways in which the crime was committed varied, a significant percentage
followed a similar pattern, as Philip Alston (2010), the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-
judicial Executions, indicated in his report on Colombia, published on 31 March 2010.
The practice started with a ‘recruiter’ (a civilian, a combatant from an illegal armed
group or a former soldier) who persuaded their civilian victims to go to an isolated
place on the promise of a job or a way of getting ‘easy money’. In other cases, the vic-
tims were kidnapped, seized, or abducted from their homes or at a military checkpoint
on a highway. When they arrived at the isolated location, the victims were murdered by
members of the Armed Forces, who arranged a scene to make it look as though the death
had occurred in combat: weapons were placed in the hands of the victims, their fingers
were manipulated to fire them, and their clothes and footwear were exchanged for items
typically used by members of insurgent groups. Subsequently, the victims were presented
by the soldiers as criminals who had died in combat; in many cases, they were buried
as NNs (Ningún Nombre, or John Doe) without ever having been identified – even, on
some occasions, in mass graves (Alston, 2010).
As has been documented, and as the statements of members of the Armed Forces con-
victed of these crimes have confirmed, a significant percentage of victims were forcibly
disappeared before being killed (Mellizo, 2012; CNMH, 2016). In fact, it was as a result
of allegations made by sixteen mothers from the municipality of Soacha that their chil-
dren had been disappeared between January and March 2008 that the public first became
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 Juan Pablo Aranguren Romero et al.

aware of the question of ‘false positives’ (Fundación Educación y Desarrollo, FEDES,

Education and Development Foundation, 2010; Mellizo, 2012). However, as Alston
(2010) points out, focusing on the Soacha ‘false positives’ creates the misapprehension
that they were an isolated, geographically circumscribed, phenomenon, when in fact the
practice was systematic and occurred across large swathes of the national territory.
However, the Soacha cases did show that the acts of disappearance that preceded
the murders occurred in low income, socially marginalised, zones. The municipality of
Soacha borders on Bogotá and, since the 1990s, has been home to a significant number
of people displaced by the armed conflict (35 percent of its overall population), who live
in circumstances of extreme poverty. Across the country recruiters arrived in places like
Soacha to select the people who would be handed over to the army and subsequently
murdered and reported as guerrilla fighters killed in combat. In court, Alexander Car-
retero Díaz, one of the recruiters who is currently serving a 44-year prison sentence for
the forced disappearance of fourteen people, testified that ‘We chose the trashiest people
we could find – people wandering the streets who were prepared to go anywhere to earn
a bit of cash doing strange things’ (Izagirre, 2014).
The focus of the executions reveals, then, a form of management of lives and deaths
that comfortably runs through social imaginaries in the midst of the Colombian war
context: marginalised lives can be disposed of, quite literally, as cannon fodder. Thus,
given that the extrajudicial executions in Colombia were carried out in response to a
perverse need to demonstrate that the Armed Forces were capable of winning the war
against the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Colombian Revolu-
tionary Armed Force) guerrilla group, in practice it did not, in the end, matter whether
the dead were guerrilla fighters or not. It was a question of winning the war, at least on
the battleground of statistics. The lives of insurgents, stripped by the logic of the con-
flict of their humanity, and painted with the brush of terrorism, were easily portrayed as
meriting no mourning, or, in the terms of Judith Butler, as living precarious lives (Butler,
2010). They were the dead for whom it was not worth grieving, or even, in the argot of
those who defended the prevailing security policies, good deaths, a cause for celebration.
The ‘false positives’ became a producer of deaths that no one would mourn, that would
not represent a loss to the social landscape. They targeted the lives of marginal people,
on the assumption that – as with the guerrilla fighters – because of their circumstances
they barely merited dignity. To some degree, they targeted a population that already
inhabited the terreno de la desaparición social, or landscape of social disappearance
(Gatti, 2017), and turned them into victims of a second disappearance: a body with no
name, an identity without a body.
Nevertheless, it has been the families’ tireless search and conjuring up of ghosts that
has rendered this double disappearance tolerable. It was their testimonies that led to
the questioning of the official version, according to which their relatives had died in
combat, and to the opening of investigations that have led to the imprisonment of some
of the soldiers involved and the ongoing investigation of others (Jurisdiction Especial
para la Paz, 2019). From the marginalised spaces which they and their disappeared and
murdered sons inhabited, family members ended up battling the military high command,
the Ministry of Defence and the President of the Republic in pursuit of justice, dignity
and truth. They ended up exposing what Martín-Baró (1983) has called the institutional
lies that had been told about governmental policy, security and defence in the country.
Thus, the struggle of several of the family members has focused on arguing that their
cases should never be closed. Even though many of them have recovered the bodies
of their sons and although some members of the military have been arrested or faced
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 Spectral Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial Executions

investigation, they continue to demand not only the trial of those responsible but also,
fundamentally, the reinstatement of the dignity of the individuals who were murdered.
The purpose of this article is to trace the ways in which the impossibility of closure
in the case of the ‘false positives’ is linked with the particular way in which some family
members dealt with their mourning in the context of the current ‘transitional’ phase in
which Colombia finds itself.
In-depth interviews were conducted with six women from the families of individuals
who had been disappeared, executed and falsely reported as having been killed in
combat. These conversations took place in their homes in 2018. The focus of the
interviews was on the emotional management of absence and the participants pro-
vided informed consent to being interviewed and their voices being recorded. All the
recordings were subsequently shared and discussed with the participants. For reasons
of security, some names have been changed at the express request of the interviewees,
but several expressed their belief that it was important for their names to appear in
public, as one of their principal motivations is to gain recognition for their cases and
raise awareness levels.
The disappearances of their relatives took place in Medellín (1), Bogotá (4), and
Cúcuta (1), between 2004 and 2008; their bodies were found between 2004 and 2010.
All interviewees participate, or have participated, in organisations set up by the mothers
of victims of extrajudicial executions, which recently came together to create Madres
de Falsos Positivos (MAFAPO, Mothers of False Positives) and which today, though the
name has been preserved, refers only to mothers of victims of extrajudicial executions
from Soacha and Bogotá. Five of the interviewees are mothers of victims of disappear-
ance and murder, while one is a sister.
This article thus seeks to trace the forms of emotional management of the mourn-
ing of the interviewed family members of extrajudicial executions. Our argument is
that, given that these cases involved forced disappearance, a sordid death, perpetrated
on the assumption that the lives of the victims had also been sordid or unworthy of
mourning, led their relatives to broaden the affective and representational aspects of
their suffering. We suggest that in these cases, the emotional management of mourning
involves figures that are either ‘unauthorised’ according to a certain set of assumptions
about what mourning ‘should’ entail and that have therefore been relegated to what
Gergen (2006) describes as models of deficitarios (deficiency) and trastornológicos (dis-
orders) employed by the ‘psych’ sciences, or that have been described as problematic,
dangerous or even disrespectful when compared to the reconciliadores (reconciliatory)
or transitológicos (transitional) approaches considered proper to ‘post-conflict’ situa-
tions (Kancyper, 2010; Ramírez, 2016). Our approach involves tracing the mourning
process caused by the absence/presence of their relatives by paying attention to spectral,
or ghostly, figures and to the emotion of resentment in which, we argue, absence affirms
its fugacity and closure is exemplified by its very impossibility.
Thus, in the first place, the article discusses the relevance of the spectral figure
and of resentment for analysing the emotional management of absence. By spectral
figures we mean ways in which the absent person becomes present: appearances that
haunt those left behind and demand attention, as with the figure of the ghost in liter-
ature, but that demand a rupture with the hegemony of the visual that dominates the
concept of the spectre (Gordon, 2008; Peeren, 2014; Tello, 2016). By ‘the emotional
management of absence’ we mean the collection of everyday practices through which
emotions linked to loss, the process of searching, memory, and relations with the state
are expressed.
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The following sections illustrate how the spectral is (de)materialised in figures that
circulate both in the realm of the oneiric and in waking life. We argue that spectral figures
are manifested simultaneously but in two different ways: on the one hand, by invocation:
that is, as a call to presence – as a way in which the women interviewed seek to establish
an emotional connection with the fact of absence; on the other, as haunting: that is, an
insidious affective experience that stalks the women incessantly, obsessively, demanding
action from them. Resentment, then, is postulated as one of the ways in which hounding
by ghosts may be experienced by the living, and as an emotional charge rooted in the
social impossibility of processing the damage suffered, given the prevailing, systematic
impunity that consigns such cases to oblivion. It is also, therefore, an expression of an
untimely demand for justice and truth.

From the Psychologisation of Mourning to Spectral Figures

The psychologisation of the experience of mourning has had the effect of distorting
the emergence of ghosts and of silencing apparitions. Thus, although in Mourning and
Melancholia Freud [1917] (2005) had already emphasised the mnemic function per-
formed by spectral figures in mourning processes – as manifestations of an ambivalent
struggle involving a libidinal disengagement from the object – some other approaches
have preferred to focus on the concept of the ‘reality testing’ and, building on this, to
trace an inflexible model to which the mourning process should conform. In effect, in
Colombia the hegemonic interpretations of ‘work of mourning’ have portrayed it as a
teleological process ending in closure, presenting the spectral aspect as a phenomenon
of little importance for social research into the ways people deal with loss in situations
of armed conflict (Aguilera, 2003; Giraldo, Gómez and Maestre, 2008; Díaz, 2008).
As such, and as revealed in De la Vina’s summary (2018), the spectral has been
classified as morbid, anecdotal, pathological or, at best, reduced to cultural relativism.
This has limited analysis of situations in which ghosts appear and of their manifestation
in objects, dreams, voices, sounds, whispers and images. However, critical approaches
to what has come to be called ‘work of mourning’ have proposed other conceptions
of the emotional management of loss that have stressed the significance of the ghostly
figure (Agamben, 1993; Davies, 2007; Gordon 2008; Allouch, 2011; Peeren, 2014).
Peeren (2014), for example, criticises the ordinary Freudian interpretations of mourning
that have been applied to the case of the disappeared, as these argue for the impossibility
of confirming loss, and the remaining possibility that relatives will return. Peeren argues
that this suggests that the emotional reaction to a case of disappearance is closest to
melancholia, as an ‘unknown loss’ has occurred and it is not a question so much of not
knowing what has been lost, but of not knowing whether what has been lost has been
lost irredeemably, such that ‘the lack of such an ending no longer signifies mourning
gone awry. Instead, the conversation with the dead or missing may continue forever,
their messages in perpetual translation and their ghosts haunting in ever-changing ways’
(Peeren, 2014: 156).
Giorgio Agamben (1993) had already underlined the lack of differentiation between
mourning and melancholy in the concept of ‘melancholic mourning’. This is how during
work of mourning for an ambiguous object that is not clearly lost, melancholy becomes
fertile ground for creating ghosts, as part of the interminable efforts of the subject to
give meaning to their strange loss. In addition, Allouch’s (2011) interpretation of Lacan
suggests that mourning is not a question of the libidinal recuperation of the lost object
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 Spectral Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial Executions

but of creating a new subjectivity capable of producing a novel relationship with it.
For Allouch, the lost object is always irreplaceable – it is an object with absolutely no
correspondence – that punctures the Real. Dealing with the resulting emptiness causes
anguish, for which reason the subject feels compelled to seal the hole left by the loss.
Nevertheless, given its ambiguous and liminal nature, rather than closing the hole, the
spectre only serves to emphasise it.
The emergence of spectral figures as contributors to understanding tragic processes
has become particularly significant in Latin America over the last two decades, in par-
ticular in studies of contexts of political violence, as they have demonstrated their use-
fulness for analysing the political and emotional dimensions of forced disappearance or
of violent deaths (Robben, 2004; Cecconi, 2013; Tello, 2016; Mahlke, 2017; Delacroix,
2018; Mandolessi, 2018). In this connection, Robben (2004) shows how, in the case
of the exhumation of mass graves in Argentina, in which the detained and disappeared
were buried during the dictatorship, spectral figures have the function of keeping open
the wounds caused by state terror. The decision of some of the Mothers of Plaza de
Mayo to refuse to allow mass graves to be exhumed was shot through with the need to
preserve the distressing ghostly status of their children and thereby to continue inhabit-
ing the uncertainty of an ‘inhibited’ state of mourning. In this case, exhumations would
have confined the ghosts to the land of the dead, breaking any kind of agency they might
have been able to exercise over the daily lives of the living. Therefore, ‘inhibited’ mourn-
ing for these ghostly entities should be seen as an attempt to resist processes of national
reconciliation and forgetting (Robben, 2004).
As in the case of ghostly apparitions, resentment has been subjected to a process of
psycho-pathologisation that has led to the elaboration of approaches that seek to pre-
dict, manage and eliminate it through the pursuit of therapies focused on forgiveness
and compassion (Ball, 1964; Mullet et al., 2005; Oatley, 2009; Kancyper, 2010; Wilson
and Darren, 2011; An-Na′ im, 2012). Critiquing these positions, authors such as Fassin
(2013), Brudholm (2006) and Žižek (2009) maintain that resentment is a kind of emo-
tion that is rooted in the existential condition of being a victim of structured political
violence occurring in a context of impunity. Thus, resentment is shown to be linked to
the emergence of spectral figures, inasmuch as they highlight the impossibility of achiev-
ing a longed-for closure, in this case through narratives of forgiveness and reconciliation
(Castillejo, 2007; Ramírez, 2016).
Pursuing this analytical approach to the spectral, we propose an examination of
the experiences of the interviewed relatives of the extrajudicial executions in Colom-
bia, interlacing the links that the ghosts establish with the daily life and the role that
they play in the forms of the emotional management of mourning in the middle of the
Colombian armed conflict and of an emergent post-conflict.

Dreams: Scenarios of Appearance and Communication with Ghosts

Faced with the disappearances, murders, undignified deaths and impunity that charac-
terise extrajudicial murders in Colombia, for the majority of the women interviewed the
discovery of the bodies of their children, the actions of mourning and funeral rites do
not allow for the possibility of closure or passage through the ‘work of mourning’. On
the contrary, many of them have opted to inhabit their grief permanently, to make it the
repository of their struggles for justice, thereby opening up the possibility for spectres
to emerge, and to proclaim the unresolved crime. This habitability of grief is expressed

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Figure 1. From mourning to struggle. Juan Nicolás Cardona (2018). Several of the mothers
organized a mobilisation in October 2018 towards Ocaña (Norte de Santander) to
commemorate ten years of false positives. One of the relatives shows one of the t-shirts
they used in another mobilisation in September 2018, with the slogan ‘From mourning
to struggle’.

very well in what the mothers themselves, in a demonstration in Cali in 2018, called
‘mourning as resistance’ and which they articulated with the rallying cry del luto a la
lucha (from mourning to struggle) (Figure 1).
There are at least two elements that might explain this persistence: firstly, the fact that
those primarily responsible for them have yet to tell the whole truth about these cases;
and second, that these executions have not generated outrage, mass mobilisation or out-
right rejection in Colombian society. These two factors coincided in the fact that the
phenomenon known as ‘false positives’ would come to be seen as the sordid underbelly
of a collection of practices that, in the first decade of the twentieth century, a significant
percentage of the Colombian population believed were leading to the total or partial vic-
tory of the Armed Forces over the FARC – practices, indeed, that the women themselves
had not questioned before their own sons were disappeared and murdered:

My son has taught me a lot of things that I did not learn when I was young,
because I did not take any notice of them. Because you’d hear on the news
‘such and such a number of guerrillas were killed’ and you’d think, ‘hmm
they’re giving the guerrillas a hard time’. But no, that wasn’t true. If you
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 Spectral Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial Executions

put yourself in these shoes you see that everything they say is lies. When I
saw the news, I understood the truth of the matter and I said, ‘Hey look at
that – they’re telling so many lies’. When they say ‘died in combat’, it’s not
true, it’s not in combat. (interview with Ana, 2018)
In this way, for some of the mothers interviewed, political action is focused funda-
mentally on the search for truth, which emerges from their interaction with a spectral
mandate that comes from their murdered son: ‘He’s not with us, but I speak for him
[ … ] “right mom, I’m not there, but you are, so that you can carry on, to make sure
there’s justice, so that people know the truth”’ (interview with Lucía, 2018).
This communication with ghosts, then, is revealed to be a deciding factor in the lives
of the women interviewed. This was the case, for example, for Lucía, whose son was
disappeared for four years before he was found as an NN, described as having been
killed in combat. Her apparitions are very demanding, they provide comfort, facilitate
farewells, highlight unpaid debts or are simply frightening. In the cases documented
here, the different ways in which the spectres appear indicate an ambiguous being, who
suffers because of the disgrace of ‘having lost the ability to die but, at the same time,
because they remain in a place where death is still possible’ (Ludueña, 2010: 153).
These apparitions have circulated with relative ease in the territory of the oneiric.
Indeed, for the Greeks, dreams were among the most significant scenarios for the
apparition of ghosts, as this was where words were exchanged with the gods, with
ghosts and with distant friends (Dodds, 1951). For this reason, the Greeks spoke of
seeing dreams rather than having them, thereby suggesting that they thought the oneiric
experience consisted of a series of visions of external objects ranged before them rather
than of purely mental projections (Dodds, 1951). This is true also, for example, of the
Torajan people of Indonesia (Hollan, 1989 and 1995), among the Bumbita Arapesh of
New Guinea (Leavitt, 1995), the Maya Yucatecas (Woodrick, 1995) and the Emberá in
Colombia (Losonczy, 2016).
The presence of the dead in dreams has been categorically denied – deliberately
removed even – from the mourning process. As shown by Mogenson (1990), biologistic
and psychologistic reductionism ended up distorting oneiric content, portraying them
as representing nothing more than internal mechanisms, without suspecting the degree
to which the presence of the dead in dreams might suggest the presence of an entity
with a certain degree of autonomy: that is, of beings who are, independently of the
people who dream them. Indeed, a large part of the psychological literature maintains
that communications with the dead in dreams are an indication that the grieving party
is experiencing difficulties in accepting the reality of their loss (Epstein, 2006).
However, other approaches have insisted that the dead can be autonomous protago-
nists capable of influencing the world of the living, as they exert a decisive influence on
the bereaved during their mourning process (Becker and Knudson, 2003). In particular,
in contexts of political violence and war, such as Cambodia (Hinton et al., 2013), Peru
(Cecconi, 2013; Delacroix, 2018) and Guatemala (Garrard-Burnett, 2015), different
studies have shown how dreams frequently reveal that the dead demand justice, ask for
their bodies to be found, or even provide clues about how their deaths occurred, espe-
cially when it is proving difficult to mourn or to arrange funerals, or during processes
of exhumation.
We also found that the narratives of the mothers interviewed operate as tools for
communicating with their family members, enabling them to organise their pursuit of
justice. This is what Beatriz told us as she spoke about the early stages of the investigation
into the disappearance in 2004 of her son Weimar. He was murdered and his death

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reported as that of a guerrilla fighter killed in combat with the army in a part of southern
Bogotá bordering on Soacha just four hours after he went missing:
I do not know if you are going to call me crazy or what, but one day I
dreamed of him and the big question I asked him was, ‘My darling, tell me!
Who did this to you?’ He said, ‘Mom, ask the mayor’. I’ve got six notebooks
in a memory stick where it says, ‘in 2004, there were self-defence [paramil-
itary] groups working with the police, the army and the mayor of Soacha’.
And I said to myself, ‘Should I take any notice of this dream? Should I
call the public prosecutor?’ No one can take away the idea that [Weimar]
came to me in a dream, giving me information, helping me! (interview with
Beatriz, 2018)

In other cases, these conversations led to journeys, enquiries and consultations, such as
the one that motivated Lucía to travel to a cemetery in a town a considerable distance
from Bogotá in search of her disappeared son: ‘I saw this in my dreams, so I saw this
place when they took him away and he said, “mom, don’t leave me here”’ (interview
with Lucía, 2018).
However, oneiric communications do not always take the form of clear demands,
but might also include enigmas, riddles or doubts. This is what Soraida describes for her
conversations with her son Matías, a young man who had hoped to begin a career in
the military and, when he met his ‘recruiter’, was taken to a remote part of the country,
murdered, and reported as an NN killed in combat by members of the army:

I did see my son, standing up, clinging to a cupboard, but in a dream. And
yes! – I say it was him because I’ve got a curtain in my room and it was
two in the morning and when I woke up the curtain was doing this [she
makes a wave-like movement with her hand]. [ … ] But what was he trying
to say? Why did he do that? Why did he do that three times? (interview
with Soraida, 2018)

Furthermore, it may also be in dreams that a spectre’s demands – which may be explicit
or enigmatic – are also resolved. This is what Jacqueline describes. After finding the
body of her brother she had a conversation in a dream in which his ghost confirmed
that her search had been effective:

One night, after the funeral, I dreamed of him. I was upstairs in my house
and there was a knocking at the door. I went downstairs, and it was him,
dying of laughter. He said: ‘I really made you guys cry with those photos,
didn’t I?’ That was all. I’ve never dreamed of him again. (interview with
Jacqueline, 2018)

While the way families experience the meetings and conversations conducted through
dreams differ, they share one significant thing in common. Regardless of whether the
ghost’s message is clear or mysterious, its presence and its voice indicate that something
is crying out for resolution, or, as Gordon (2008) might put it, there is: ‘something to be
done’. Thus, the oneiric space is revealed as a significant space of interlocution with the
absent, which fulfils not only a psychological function at the level of the emotions, but
also, in an unprecedented way, is articulated in a practical manner with search processes
and political mobilisation.
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Invoking the Ghost

Just as the family members say they communicate with their absent relatives in dreams,
on other occasions they interact with the spectres while awake. In this instance, the
meetings that take place in the intimacy of the oneiric sphere happen also in waking life
and are expressed in the testimonials of the women as a desire to speak with the ghost
and in their attempts to do so in different ways. We interpret this as an act of invocation:
a call for the absent to become present.
Derrida (2006) said that if talk turns to ghosts, it is in the name of justice. This is
a reason to explain the need to invoke spectres in the cases documented here. As Lucía
says: ‘It is making memories so that they can be there, so that they can accompany us, to
feel their presence. [ … ] And he’s there saying, “mom, see to it that there’s justice, that
the truth comes out, and make sure that the people responsible for what they did to me
and to you pay for it”’ (interview with Lucía, 2018). This, then, is why the demands for
justice are intertwined with the process of learning to live with ghosts.
Doris, one of the mothers who has not yet been able to exhume the body of her son,
Óscar – reported as killed in combat with troops from the Batallón de Artillería No. 2
La Popa, in Copey, Department of Cesar – believes he should remain present, because
his body has not been found and because justice has not been done. So Doris invokes
the presence of her son so that he can indicate the section of the mass grave in which
his body lies: ‘When we arrived, I called out to him in a loud voice because I wanted to
be sure he was there: “Son! Your mom’s here! I’ve come for you!” When I looked far
into the distance, into the clouds … he was there’ (interview with Doris, 2018). This
is similar to what Beatriz tells us when she says: ‘For example, I call him when I go
someplace: “Son, help me find the right words, help me understand, help me make sure
that they’ll understand what I have to say”’ (interview with Beatriz, 2018). Or as Lucía
says: ‘I ask my son please to give me a sign, even if it’s only in a dream, but please help
me [ … ], tell me what happened, what it was. How I wish for him to talk to me or for
him to appear’ (interview with Lucía, 2018).
On other occasions, the need to invoke a relative is combined with the preservation of
their belongings or garments: their clothing, work tools, daily objects or photographs,
all of them zealously guarded like relics. In other words, they are kept as pieces with
sacred meaning, but also as vestiges of the past:

I keep these things because he left, he is not here, or he is here – his spirit is
still here. So, for me, these things are so meaningful because I feel that with
everything I touch that was his, that I pick up, that he is there. I think he’d
say to me: ‘Mom, look after it, keep it’. He always said to me ‘Mom, don’t
throw anything away’. (interview with Lucía, 2018)

The aura of the object, that is, the ‘strange weave of space and time: the unique
appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be’ (Benjamin, 1972:
20), confirms that the spectral presence constitutes a scenario of interlocution with
the absence present. Like those photographs that are perceived as more than a mere
record, the fleeting expression of the human face in in the photo is a sign, a hint of the
survival of the aura, that seems to confirm the presence of the spectral (Benjamin, 1972;
Didi-Huberman, 2009):

So, that day I looked at the photo and I saw that his eyes were wide open,
and he said to me, ‘mom, look for me – please don’t let me stay lost!’ When
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Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 40, No. 1 15
 Juan Pablo Aranguren Romero et al.

I found, him I looked at the photo and I saw his eyes were smiling now. He
said, ‘you’ve found me’. So, that sense of relief he felt: I felt it too. (interview
with Ana, 2018)

But the image is not registered only on paper. It is also literally – as in the case of Doris,
who had her son’s face tattooed on her right arm – written on the body. In this case the
image does not function merely as a memory, but also as a potential scenario of conversa-
tion with the absent person, and a catalyst of power and courage for the search process:

But it has empowered me: I’ve gained an energy that even I am surprised
by. He, who is always here in my heart, and is tattooed here on my arm,
lives with me and accompanies me, and I feel him with me, always. So, I
know that they cannot take this memory away from us. (interview with
Doris, 2018)

Thus, by maintaining this link through objects and images with spectral power it
becomes possible to invoke the relation with the missing person in the scenario of
public denunciation. Lucía explains how, every time she appears in a theatre piece to
tell his story, she speaks to his t-shirt, as if they were performing together:

For me, it’s very important to have it with me, because I go out and I go out
with Javier. And I always say, ‘son, we’re going to such and such a place,
we’re going to speak at an event’. I talk to him, and holding [the shirt] in
my hands is to feel this presence, to feel Javier is there, that it speaks when
I unfold it. (interview with Lucía, 2018)

In part this has been possible because the family members of the ‘false positives’ have
worked with different artistic projects that have made available forms of language sim-
ilar to other narratives that, to some degree, have recognised the spectral nature of
their memories and experiences. However, these ghostly figures not only take on mate-
rial form in the stories and objects that incarnate their apparitions in the daily lives
of the relatives of the murdered youths, they do so also as a result of the powerful
emotional forces they exert over them, that lead them to act side by side with the
ghost. As we shall see, part of this strength is powerfully linked to the ethical need
for resentment.

No Closure: The Ethical Need for Resentment

In the case of the family members of ‘false positives’ documented in this paper, the spec-
tral figures become material not only in conversations with their absent relatives, but
also in the emotional burden that is made explicit in the resentful demands that lead
them to mobilise alongside the ghost.
We argue that for the relatives of cases of ‘false positives’ we interviewed, the
presence of ghosts functions as a part of a political and emotional mobilisation that
seeks justice and that is expressed through resentment. In this way, by feeling and then
re-feeling the original insult, accentuated by spectres that emphasise their absence,
the present of the subject is permeated by a living past that returns uncomfortably to
demand something of them. As Soraida expressed, ‘resentment is an anger that … well,

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16 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 40, No. 1
 Spectral Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial Executions

how can I get rid of it? It’s drowning me, killing me [and] then it comes back again!’
(interview with Soraida, 2018).
Specifically, in these cases of family members of victims of extrajudicial executions,
resentment is crossed with a fractured relationship with the Colombian state, which
loses its status as the ‘regulatory third party’ of subjective and social disturbances and
assumes that of guarantor of violence and impunity (Zorio, 2011):

Your dignity is dragged across the floor. And in this struggle the thing is that
I’m with the other mothers: I want to protect the good name of my son, and
his dignity and the dignity of his family. Because we all fell. I mean, all of us
have been dragged through the dirt by the state. Bottom line: they destroyed
my family. (interview with Beatriz, 2018)

More than a subjective condition, being overwhelmed by resentment is an experience

that expresses the defiant dislocation of subjects from the social structures they inhabit.
It emerges, therefore, as an affective expression that keeps the wound open, and that
stands side by side with the spectre that is demanding justice, truth and memory:

‘Do this mom, help me make sure people know what happened’. I know my
son is also crying out for the truth to be known, just like we are. (interview
with Beatriz, 2018)

As Jean Améry (2013) has argued, resentment is not born in the act of aggression itself,
but in the scenarios that occur in a historical context of progress that invites people to
overcome the conflicts of the past. In the Colombian context, where the family members
of the victims of ‘false positives’ have been compelled to insist on preserving the memory
of their disappeared in the face of the ‘official version’, which has portrayed their lives as
being unworthy of mourning, resentment galvanises action. Doris stresses the following:

So, you turn this resentment into pride: ‘My son was a wonderful person’,
and you express it like this! [she sticks her chest out]. You start exposing
this resentment that you carried inside of you, like this: if you want to know
who my son was, well, I’ll tell you who he was! (interview with Doris, 2018)

Thus it is that resentment and communication with the spectres in these cases end up
becoming means of besieging those sectors of Colombian society that take refuge in
the demise of impunity. Spectral figures and resentful emotions announce that processes
that have been declared ‘closed’ remain open, that the healed wound, the conflict over-
come, the mourning over, and the identity reconstituted are fractured by the capacity of
ghosts that were created by state violence in Colombia. So, given that impunity illustrates
the impertinence of closure, these mothers are compelled to manage their experience of
mourning as a scenario of habitability.

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Interviews
Castillo, Jacqueline (2018) Hermana de Jaime, street dweller killed by the Colombian army.
27 April, Bogotá.
Lucía, Pseudonym (2018) Mother of Javier, young man killed by the Colombian army. 5 July,
16 July, 24 July, 29 August, Bogotá.
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April, Bogotá.
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April, Bogotá.
Páez, Ana (2018) Mother of Eduardo, young man killed by the Colombian army. 8 August,
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Tejada, Doris (2018) Mother of Oscar, young man killed by the Colombian army. 27 March,
Bogotá.

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