Looking at Ourselves in a Broken Mirror: A Mosaic of Violence Against the Civilian Population in Colombia During the Internal Conflict. The State and Security Forces, 1958–2008

Abstract

Despite the abundance of literature in the field of violence studies in Colombia, there have been few efforts to systematically document violence against the civilian population, which is instead scattered across reports, resolutions, and a handful of academic publications. This article addresses that need by constructing a narrative composed of historical cases that capture the trends and specific characteristics of this violence across different periods, thereby organizing and making sense of it during the span from 1958 to 2008. The article emerged from a broader investigation into “false positives,” which aimed to contextualize this specific and recent form of violence within the longer historical context from which it stems. Thus, the article proposes that the most recent forms of violence against the civilian population are not merely circumstantial, and that any analytical frameworks constructed to analyze them cannot ignore this long-term history, as it is a social problem deeply rooted over time. The first part examines the war against the civilian population in a global context and its relationship to the Colombian case. The second part identifies the key actors and critical linkages in this historical violence. The third part presents a mosaic of cases that seek to construct a narrative of this violence. The methodology employed consisted of a historical-documentary analysis of a textual corpus comprising books, articles, and reports; the comparison of this content with other periodizations of the violence; and the systematic organization of a narrative within a specific periodization. The article provides insight into how the civilian population has become an increasingly specific military target.