The Commissions for the Study of Violence in Colombia: An Analysis of the Official Devices and Narratives of the Past and Present of Violence

Abstract

Over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, Colombians witnessed three manifestations of violence, which are devastating not only because of the political dimensions they involved but also because of the magnitude of the social effects they have had on the population. The first manifestation, known simply as “The Violence” (La Violencia, 1946–1965), was an armed civil conflict that affected several regions of the country, pitting the two most traditional political subcultures (liberal and conservative) against each other.

This text gathers the key contributions of the PhD dissertation presented in July 2011 in FLACSO, Mexico. The title of the thesis was “The Commissions for the Study of Violence in Colombia. Narrative Accounts and Proposals of Temporal Meaning for Understanding Violence.” For an elaboration on the subject, see Jaramillo (2014).