Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia

María Victoria Uribe

In a series of very suggestive essays, Daniel Pécaut considers how representations of Colombian society as fragmented, heterogeneous, and precarious go hand in hand with the anguish produced by irruptions of an object that hinders socialization.1 This external something is violence, which Pécaut understands as a circumstantial default or excess of the social that deprives the latter of any type of internal unity. Colombia, a semiperipheral and violent country with one of the most durable democracies in Latin America, has tragically fulfilled Homi Bhabha’s definition of the nation: an idea whose potential resides precisely in its impossible unity as a symbolic force.2 Some of the most remarkable features of the Colombian case are the paradoxes and dilemmas that in its recent history accompany the relationships between war, nation, democracy, and the peaceful or violent appropriation of national territory.3 Throughout its turbulent history, Colombia has been unable to incorporate its territory within a unitary idea of the nation, and the state has failed to solve profound social inequalities and to gain national legitimacy. As a result, political factions have become violent adversaries seeking territorial control. Tragically, these confrontations have been advanced through the forceful expulsion of local inhabitants. Today, terror in Colombia is a contagious physical reality that has forced more than 2 million citizens to abandon their belongings and flee into urban slums amid terrible hardships.

In Colombia, violence does not follow linguistic, religious, or ethnic lines of difference. It is the slightest disparity between persons that acquires the greatest importance, what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.”4 In this essay, relying on the testimonies of survivors of violence, I would like to examine the figures of “the neighbor” and “the stranger” in two situations of extreme political polarization in Colombia: La Violencia of the 1950s and the generalized war waged today among the military, guerrillas, and paramilitaries.5 Both these periods have been characterized by widespread massacres that function as social symptoms of unsocializable violence.6 In these massacres, perpetrators carry out a series of semantic operations, permeated with enormous metaphorical force, that dehumanize the victims and their bodies. These technologies of terror seek to expel rural inhabitants from their homes in order to consolidate territorial control. Although massacres are a recurrent cultural practice, the specific alterities they are constructed around have varied from one period to the next.

During La Violencia (1946–64), neighbors used to sharing the same spaces and quotidian practices were transformed into strangers through the intervention of informants. At that time, families in the countryside were politically affiliated with one of the two political parties. This bipartisan polarization coincided with and reinforced the social isolation of rural communities. Internal division was fomented by inflammatory speeches from heads of state, politicians, village priests, electoral bosses, vote buyers, and community leaders belonging to the two parties. Nevertheless, it was an outburst of generalized violence that transformed neighbors into strangers and enemies, precipitating a war of extermination that spread throughout the country. During La Violencia, perpetrators and peasants became involved in a perverse logic. Bandoleros adopted the names and behavior of common birds of prey as well as the practices, strategies, and language used for hunting animals. In turn, peasants adopted the attitude of prey: meek, passive, and terrorized.

Colombia entered the twenty-first century immersed in an internal conflict whose political issues differ substantially from those of La Violencia but in which the battleground remains fundamentally rural. The countryside has been broken apart again by a generalized terror produced by guerrilla and paramilitary groups. This terror is not reducible to each side’s fantasies and has had deadly consequences for a largely nonpartisan civilian population. The obsession with manipulating the Other’s body characteristic of La Violencia has now been replaced by a faunalization that mimics the industrial slaughter of cattle, entailing a diminution of the meanings ascribed to the Other’s body. Acts of barbarity, shamelessly publicized in television news broadcasts and newspapers, have transformed Colombians into beings filled with fear: fear of war, of violence, of blood, of losing one’s own family, even of watching the news on television.

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Notes

I would like to thank anthropologists María Clemencia Ramírez, Patricia Tovar, and María Teresa Salcedo for their comments on the initial drafts of this essay and Mauricio Pardo for many stimulating discussions and his helpful final suggestions. I would also like to thank Santiago Giraldo for his comments and for translating the essay into English. I am especially grateful for the valuable criticisms and suggestions offered by the editorial committee of Public Culture, especially concerning identity and the use of sexual relations as a metaphor for political domination. The comments and suggestions I received from various colleagues helped reshape and enrich the arguments I present in this essay.

1. Daniel Pécaut, Orden y Violencia: Colombia 1930–1954 (Bogotá: CEREC, 1987).
2. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990).
3. Gonzalo Sánchez has thoroughly studied the relationship between democracy, nation, and war in Colombia. According to Sánchez, in nineteenth-century Colombia, war was the primary site of power relations: political leadership, presidential candidacies, and territorial controls. Adversaries sought not power or changes in the social system but bureaucratic participation and incorporation into the institutional apparatus. These wars ended in horizontal treaties; only one of them was won by rebels. The end of these civil wars—like the end of La Violencia—was sealed ritually, with amnesties that attempted to define the status of defeated rebels, who were eventually assassinated. See Gonzalo Sánchez, Ensayos de historia social y política del siglo XX (Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, 1985), and Gonzalo Sánchez, Guerra y política en la sociedad colombiana (Bogotá: El Ancora Editores, 1991).
4. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 72.
5. For more than fifteen years, I have been analyzing a recurring phenomenon in Colombia’s recent history: the collective assassination of unarmed and defenseless people. I studied 250 massacres carried out by Liberal and Conservative bandoleros during La Violencia with the hypothesis that these were sacrificial manifestations. I was able to identify a series of traits related to sacrifice, the specific clothes worn by perpetrators, and certain words and phrases—usually quite crude—used to dehumanize victims. See María Victoria Uribe, Matar, rematar y contramatar: Las masacres de La Violencia en el Tolima, 1948–1964 (Bogotá: CINEP, 1990).
6. By symptom, I mean a nonsymbolized traumatic return that irrupts in the social domain along with the impossibility of its socialization. This definition of symptom owes much to Slavoj Z? iz?ek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 11–13, 21, and his Mirando al Sesgo: Una introducción a Jacques Lacan a través de la cultura popular (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2000), 36, 71.