 Hello everybody good afternoon and welcome. I'm Susan Collins the Joan and Sanford Wildein here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and it's really a delight to welcome you here for the first policy talks at the Ford School Lecture for this which is our 100th year. We are very honored to be joined today by Alejandro Castillo Cuellar and it's a great pleasure for us to have him here. He has traveled from his post as the chair of the Department of Anthropology at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia to deliver today's lecture. And Benvenido, an honor. My Spanish used to be better I must say and so excuse my mispronunciations if so but we're delighted to have you here. Well I'll have the opportunity to introduce Alejandro more fully in just a moment but I did want to just give a couple of minutes on how special it is and how remarkable it is to have him here in particular for this first policy talks during our centennial year. For the past 100 years our school has trained students to train to study local as well as global issues and as you may not know our first international students matriculated in 1925. One of them was from the Philippines and two of them were from China. Sometimes I do wonder as we think a lot about our community now today I do wonder what their experience was like and how they felt being part of our very closely connected small community as few of the very small international student group but they did come and they studied and they graduated and I hope they made some wonderful friendships along the way after they graduated they went back to their home countries to serve the public. One of them went on to represent his district in the national legislature another one served as a mayor of a vibrant economic trading port. Well these days as you can see we're much much more diverse and we're really proud of our diversity. Our public policy students hail from 14 different nations at the moment and they enrich our program in so many ways with their perspectives their personal experiences their passions and all that they bring to the Ford School. About a quarter of Ford School students intern outside of the United States each year and about another 20 percent intern with a U.S. based organization that deals with international issues and I can say that it is in many ways truly a much much more global community and I hope a more welcoming community with far more understanding of international issues and a deep thirst to understand those issues better and so we've really been enthusiastically awaiting Alejandro's visit and this lecture this afternoon. I should mention that his visit would not have been possible without the tireless work of our friend and colleague is your Henry who is here with us in the front who was an eminent human rights scholar of course in his own right who came here to the Ford School and hence from South Africa and has been part of our community since 2007. I should also mention that today's policy talks is named for Joshua Rosenthal. Josh was a 1979 graduate of the University of Michigan. He spent his senior year here at our school before going on to earn a master's in public policy from Princeton. Josh was passionate about world affairs and he worked in the field of international finance. He died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th in 2001. Josh's mother Marilyn Rosenthal was a longtime Michigan faculty member and it was very important for her to shape positive meaning out of what happened on 9-11 and to honor her son's optimism about the world and his understanding of how mutual understandings dialogue and analysis can improve communities both in the United States and beyond our borders and that really was where this lecture series was born. Marilyn and others established the Josh Rosenthal Education Fund which enables the Ford School to encourage new and deeper understandings of international issues. I know that Josh's aunt Harriet Berg is here in the audience today and we're delighted to have her with us and Josh's cousin Suzanne Waller is watching the event via live web stream. So we're very grateful for your family's ongoing support and it's really truly an inspiration for us. Thank you very much. Marilyn Rosenthal died in 2007 but I know she would have been so pleased to see the Ford School Welcome World Renowned International Human Rights Scholar Alejandro Cassiano Cuellar. Referring to him as world renowned is not just honorific. He has taught in many prominent universities in the United States, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Latin America and in Africa and so has really been engaged in communities all over the world. In 2006 he was awarded the Stanley Diamond Memorial Award in Social Sciences and in 2010 the Angel Escobar Foundation Award in the Social Sciences. His research interests focus on the anthropology of violence and his expertise in this difficult area has been sought by several world governments. In 2002 he was a consultant to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in 2010 to the Colombian National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation and the Historical Memory Group. He was also charged with the task of writing the official proposals on behalf of the National Conference of Victims of Force Disappearances to the Peace Processes in Havana and his extraordinary work with communities testimonies to violence in Colombia and abroad inform the lecture that we will hear today. He expressed his eagerness to take questions from the audience following his remarks and at around 440 our staff will be walking through the aisles to collect the cards. I hope that all of you received a card and encourage you to put questions that you have for Alejandro to be picked up there. Yizir Henry will select questions along with two of our students Patricia Padilla and Juliana Pinot. So welcome to them as well. Both Patricia and Juliana have lived and studied in Colombia which is our speaker's home and will help to facilitate the Q&A session. If you're watching online please submit your questions via Twitter and use the hashtag policy talks. And so with no further ado please join me in welcoming Alejandro to the podium. Well good evening to everyone. I want to thank first of all I want to thank the organizers, Dean Collins, my colleague and friend Yizir Henry whom I know for some time now and I'm happy to as we say recognize and acknowledge this friendship of intellectual character as well. And the school in general for the opportunity to talk and to be honored to be here as well. It's been a while since I haven't since I spoke English last time so please excuse my, yeah, my accent. I mean I'm not anymore ashamed of my accent but sometimes I just. So for today I had this kind of question. I was thinking what could I bring to this table when I have, when the problems in Colombia can be so complex and the histories can be so interesting as well. I understand that not everybody here is an expert in this country so I decided basically to write something that I brought to make it easier for me to develop myself in the argument that I want to make and basically has to do with the world that I have been doing with organizations around the country. Thinking in now in the country there is an interest in organizing a truth commission and my sense is based on the experiences that I have had in other parts of the world. A truth commission would require certain, I would say certain changes, certain new types of investigations, certain concepts. So what I brought was the idea of developing the concept at least of historical injury, something that I think should be included in this commission if it happens in the end. So what I will read basically the text is a rather short text I hope and I will take, we will take questions I will do something later on. So the text is called, I have to take off my glasses by the way, the text is called on the politics of historical injuries, Colombia's struggle for peace and memory. In this lecture, my voice operates as a resonance device. My intention today is to pose a question as I express a kind of skepticism that I have come to nurture with others, intellectuals, survivors and activists in many places. I speak not only as a scholar but also as someone whose family ties and life has been entwined perhaps in small ways with the history and politics of my country. In this lecture I would like to provide a few thoughts on the importance not only in Colombia but in other national cities as well of dealing with the structural forms of violence, political conflict and chronic inequality in times of transitions. I will do so by, I will do so using a number of vignettes and excerpts from my ethnographic notes in Colombia. In trying to explore these broad topics in recent years, my work has concentrated on the social interactions that emerge as a result of the implementation of a series of laws in the country, particularly the Ley de Justiciae Paz or Peace and Justice Act and the Victims Law, the Ley de Victimas. Broadly speaking, my perspective on these legal instances is based on the idea that they create very concrete realms of everyday life that frame and define the meanings of harm, of collective pain of the past, and I would even say of the future as well. In this regard, we're looking at the workings of certain institutional practices. This every day oscillates between highly ritualized and technical series of procedures implemented by bureaucracies and more informal social spaces where historical narratives are produced, legitimated and circulated through different channels and technologies of reproduction. In the following five vignettes, I want to delve into the connections between violence and temporality and into what is unsaid, render structurally unspoken or unintelligible in these spaces of the law. But before I turn to them, allow me a brief detour to situate myself. First vignette and I will just, every time I will, every vignette has a title, so I will also of course read it. First vignette, fracture and continuity. The ways in which societies have experienced different forms of violence has been at the forefront of a number of academic and political debates in recent decades. The idea of transitional justice and the complex network of legal and extralegal mechanisms for dealing with the causes and effects of human rights violations is based on at least two basic assumptions from my point of view. On the one hand, it is grounded in the promise and the prospect of what I called an imagined new nation. And secondly, it is also grounded in the very possibility of assigning violence a place behind, relegating it to the reclusion of the past. In other words, as societies move forward, violence is left behind. This liminal space where societies seem to break time between the old and the new is a kind of betweenness. In a kind of betweenness is where the social imagination of the future begins to take shape. However, in countries where political conflict, a structural and longstanding economic inequalities have determined people's life, this promise poses a series of critical questions. Is it possible to think of transitions as a kind of quote unquote continuity with the past rather than the rupture in which they are often presented? How can these continuities be identified and how do they determine the fate of politics in the present? In other words, how can chronic hunger or historical injustices be healed if that is possible? In this sense, critics of these transitional paradigm have pointed out the difficulties of conceiving the prospect of a post-violence future in countries where political and economic hegemonies have been and continue to be historically rooted. How can a sustainable peace be accomplished if, as in Colombia, the historical and structural causes of internal conflict remain unresolved? Could this situation constitute the seedbed for future conflicts? It seems to me that the it seems to me that identifying these tensions is essential not only to understanding the possibilities of a long-term peace but also to grasping how individuals and broader communities interconnect larger historical processes and personal experiences in an effort to create a future. As an anthropologist, I explored these questions in Colombia from the perspectives of the daily workings of this paradigm and these mechanisms. In fact, I studied the social spaces and their legal, geographic, productive and even sensory devices that come as a product of the application of what I call, generically speaking, laws of national unity and reconciliation. These social spaces are characterized by a series of ensemble of institutional practices, expert knowledge and global discourses that interact in a particular social world, in a particular social and historical context to deal with gross violations of human rights. I compound all of these issues under the idea of transitional scenario. It is precisely the tensions between fracture and continuity and the technological process through which the old and the new emerge in a particular juncture that interests me the most. In these spaces, certain experiences of victimhood, of survival, become unintelligible by the current institutional discourses. This is what I would like to highlight today. As I speak with victims around the country as part of my work, I realize that when facing the unimaginable tomorrow, sorry for the complication here, as a society, we have it a kind of illusion. When I say illusion, I mean the following. In English, the etymology of the noun illusion evokes, evokes, deceit, deception, due to a fantastic plan or desire, a false perception or a trick of the senses, hence the term illusionist, someone who performs a trick to devise the eye. However, in other languages like Spanish or Italian or French, illusion, when used as a verb, ilusionarse would say in Spanish, singular or ilusionarnos, plural, also evokes the act of building one's hopes up or entertaining or harboring expectations and getting excited about something like a future plan, a project, a new situation. Depending on the narrative context of a particular turn of phrases, its meaning is closer to the idea of an expectation created by the prospect of new possibilities and realities. It revolves more around the prospect of forward-looking perspective rather than the deceitful phantom-like aspect of an illusion. Here, I retain both of these connotations, blending the Latin etymologies, the ambiguities and the simultaneous sense of fracture and continuity associated with these uses in other languages. Now, it seems to me that in Colombia, as the negotiation process advances in Havana, we face the possibility of ilusionarnos, as the discussion of historical reconstruction and memory is seen on the negotiating table at this point. The process seems to be moving forward. In fact, a truth commission investigated not only the fate of the disappear and the assassinated, but also the historical responsibility of the state or guerrillas will be the most likely future scenario. And I hope so. However, in this context, I am more interested in highlighting how certain victims, forms of victimhood, problematize the dividing line of the old and the new, one of the illusions in times of transitions. I will do so then now in the following two sections or vignettes. First, I want to recall the story of an indigenous woman and acknowledge the possibility of rethinking the connections between violence and temporality. Secondly, I will explore how structural forgetfulness was inscribed on the procedures of the justice and peace process. Now, an excerpt from the field notes I took in Colombia in order to develop the idea of historical injuries. Second vignette. The Ethics of Listening. Julia's story. I gather fragments of her life during a series of interviews and conversations I conducted between 2001 and 2013 as part of a larger research project on the impacts of the Justice and Peace Act. I want to unravel, as I listen to bits and pieces of her life, the semantic density of the words used by this indigenous woman in order to highlight the existence of forms of violence that lie beyond the conceptual architectures put in place by official truth seeking mechanisms. In general, I am concerned with the ways violence is mediated through language, not only the mediations embodied by a survivor's testimony, but also the mediations established by the institutional procedures. The conversation in question echoes other voices and other encounters I have had in recent years with people who have shared their experiences of terror with me. She has allowed me to relate her story today, and I open quote in this case. Julia is a married woman. She initially had two children, Paula and Leon, who is 15 years old and suffers from leukemia. Several years ago, when she was 27, Julia and her daughter Paula, who was only five years old at the time, were raped by paramilitaries somewhere in the southern parts of the country. Julia became pregnant as a result of the rape and was so desperate that she thought of having an abortion at one point, but eventually she gave birth to a baby girl who is now nine years old, who re- sorry, nine years old. As could be expected, Julia feels all kinds of ambiguities with regards to the child who reminds her of the reviews she suffered. Life and death coexist together for Julia since Clara's birth, for the baby was in more than one sense an unwanted human being. On the other hand, her son had an incurable disease. In a different way, life and death also coexisted in his body. Julia ran away after the rapist threatened her when she took the case to the police before she knew she was pregnant, a decision which turned out to be a fatal mistake. She later abandoned her husband and was forced to move to the dusty southern outskirts of Bogota's endless localities, slum neighborhoods, that feel the hilly landscape barely observable from the privileged parts of the city sometimes. She still lives there in a tiny hidden away space and feeds her children by selling cigarettes on an urban bus at 10 U.S. cents apiece. Her husband eventually found her and discovered that she had given birth to a child who he embraced in times of one of his own. However, Julia still lives today in abject chronic poverty. One day, a close friend of Julia told me laconically, and I open quotes, the problem in Colombia paradoxically is that the state has no way to repair this woman's life. There is no mechanism to repair this person's life, end quote. Last time I asked about Julia, a neighbor told me her sick youngster was into drugs and gangs. It seems she decided to run away, it's sorry, it seems she decided to return to the south, but it looks like she hasn't been able to, the woman said. Third vignette, violence and temporality. Julia's history is indeed a series of profound tragic events. Her experience is an example of sexualized power exerted over an indigenous woman by main carrying guns, an example of her body quite literally taken as a territory of war, and her personal subjectivity as a battle trophy in the context of so-called armed conflict. Of course, there are institutional programs devised to accompany rape victims. However, her situation is, as an indigenous leader once told me, more broadly, the product of a larger history are wider temporality that exceeds current debates and technocratic approaches to memory, to reparations and justice. Hers is the story of the exclusion and historical inequality of indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in this country. Her body is a repository of this palimpsest. Inequality is the product of economic exploitation and exploitation of difference too. Julia inhabits a form of victimization that however immediate and concrete falls beyond the legal epistemologies that inform and even determine the debates in Colombia on the nature of violence itself. Her experience speaks more to forms of violence that are not perceived as such and therefore cannot be repaired either because they are situated by the current political establishment in a remote neutralized past or because they are softly dressed in the robes of national unity and reconciliation that force a society to look to the future quote unquote to return to turn the page quote unquote and to leave the past behind quote unquote. However bodies and subjectivities emaciated by the daily carvings of permanent and systemic need reminds us of an ever-present past. In short her story is that of an is that of an indigenous woman living in a situation of chronic misery embodying chronic silence I would say. In part the tragedy was not only the sexual abuse with all the destruction that this conveys of course but also the structural conditions that allow the abuse to happen in the first place as well. Rape has been historically chronic. The kind of violence she embodies are so multifarious localized in a set of multiple spaces geographical bodily imaginary existential and sensorial and temporalities simultaneously in the historical colonial past and the ever-present past that in Colombia the state employing the current discourse on healing does not know how to repair. That was a long phrase. In the end how is chronic hunger repaired? Yes, thank you. Thank you. In the end how is chronic hunger repaired? In other words how can the violence of structures I'm sorry how can the violence that structures every day or the every day almost to the point of being render invisible be healed? Furthermore is it possible to conceive of a violence that simultaneously structures and de-structures the realm of the everyday existence? Might it be possible to speak of harm as an accumulative phenomenon over the course of centuries for example? A kind of existential palimpsest in which layers of collective suffering entwine? In this context and from the viewpoint of historically destitute communities in Colombia or South Africa or Central America for whom violence is grounded in longer temporalities in a certain register do not necessarily experience transitions as ruptures. In fact for them it represents a different chapter in the history of violence of civilization in which land expropriation culture and illiterate genocide by different mechanisms and the theft of wealth and strategic resources speak of a continuum the rudder than a cleavage. To what extent do these injuries also become historical erasures? How do they both play out in the politics of the present? Fourth vignette. Biocracy and testimony. Now how are these historical silences produced in the present? How do they become institutionalized even when truth-seeking mechanisms like the ones triggered by the Ley de Justicia Pazol or Justice and Peace Law are implemented? Let me now turn to the technical certification of harm in Colombia as a way to delve further ethnographically into the previous questions. In 2005 the Law 975 or the Law of Justice and Peace Law the legal framework in charge of administering the demobilization of members of paramilitary groups was implemented. I am not interested in commenting on such a complex process at this point except to say that according to the law members of paramilitary groups would obtain quote legal benefits or reduce sentences in exchange for admitting their criminal acts. At the beginning of the Justice and Peace process the admission the these admissions were rendered by way of a procedure known as free depositions or more literally free versions versiones libres in Spanish in which paramilitaries tell the national prosecuting authority their versions of events mainly all types of criminal acts in the end the voice of perpetrators played center stage and in some cases trigger low level corroboration mechanisms. As a scholar I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to observe one of the procedures established by the law one in particular a special investigation commission consisting of a team of forensic investigators criminal profilers topographers represent this from the fiscalia or national prosecution authority lawyers army special forces officers from the national penitentiary institute and one paramilitary commander whose code name was alpha. I was an observer playing the role of a forensic historiographer as I turned my own involvement there the purpose of those or those 15 day long traveling commission which due to serious security risks took almost one year to organize was to cut across the southern state of meta from the city of Villavicencio to Puerto Gaetan and Mapiripan small town in the south of the country in order to locate mass graves to reconstruct the region's historical memory and to certify the impact of this paramilitarism. I call this process peripatetic memorialization by the way logistically speaking the commission organized several micro itineraries within the overall activities in the region in order to gather stories of war from different communities. These stories were intended to legally certify the occurrence of violent and criminal incidents and their effects on people's life. A protocol was used to collect information about specific cases. During these encounters communities were asked to give detailed accounts of events such as the murder of a family member. However, what is interesting about this process is that it resembled a surgical procedure that allowed some forms of violence to emerge while others disappear. It implanted in a way a structural forgetfulness. In other words what happens when testimonies cannot be easily classified according to the illegal categories established by the justice and peace law? Let me tell you the story of one of such forensic encounters when the Fiscalía or the Tristic Attorney visited the Huacoyo indigenous community as it would help to illustrate this erasure. One afternoon a representative of the Fiscalía came to the resguardo a special autonomous political and administrative unit recognized by the state and asked for a certain family in order to inquire into the circumstances of their son's death more than a decade ago. To begin the Fiscalía people had to adapt to the collective performance of this telling whereas they had been expecting a semi-legal face-to-face question and answer interview. The old man who was the authority figure within the family group spoke while the other members listened and assented. There was a certain social division of speaking in place in the telling process that the investigators didn't seem to recognize. Thus, a kind of silence was installed during the procedure itself as officially recorded on video, audio, and the protocol reflecting the person's perspective of history. This was accentuated when the man was asked to speak in general of the history of violence. The interviewers had the circumstances of his son's killing in their mind but he centered their narrative on apparently unrelated anecdotal information. The investigating team was not used to such extended narratives since they were trained to listen to something entirely different. The three-hour tour de force carried out in a barely audible Spanish rather than in the community's own Piapoco or Siquani languages tells the story of a systematic displacement and persecutions that they have endured since the time of their grandparents generations before the events they are asked to describe. From the very beginning his history deviated from the legal categories inherent to the Fiscalías investigation. Its historical depth had nothing to do with the time and the space coordinates implicit in a criminal investigation these narratives could not be easily translated into standard formats designed for collecting information. From the viewpoint of the officials the witness quote unquote spoke too much, a lot but not the way the interviewers needed to hear. They require concrete legal facts about the ways in which paramilitary operations, massacres and disappearances affected individuals and their communities. Contrary to what they expected of him the narrator jumped from one period to the next in a seemingly erratic way reaching back several decades and infusing the story he was telling with great authority. The elder was in fact a very skilled speaker. The community grouped around him as visitors coming from the surrounding area sat down to listen to what he had to say. Dozens of children hover all over the place as many men and women gathered to listen in a kind of collective ritual of mutual recognition. Surrounded by the most basic material conditions and obviously anemic children it is difficult not to see the evidence of chronic and historical poverty. Nevertheless for the prosecutor leading the inquiry commission this social setting was almost unintelligible. The elder's narrative did not speak of recent death murders of the odd displacements although they lurked there in the background. It dealt with historical persecution instead. In fact when I was looking around the compound I clearly saw the ever present traces of this history the dismal living conditions and the abandoned toilets that had been donated as acts of charity traces of so-called development projects and promises of a better world. Some officials however saw what they imagined to be the meaning of culture ancestral customs and even an expression of quote primitive nature of these communities in this particular social landscape. Later in the afternoon in order to speak with greater clarity about paramilitary violence it was necessary to look for a quote expert quote especially from within the community who could speak the language of justice and peace the language of the state and who will be able to render this testimony comprehensible to the legal bureaucrats. The story told by the old man was literally beyond the possibility of being put on record since he would not be tabulated and consequently could not be turned into evidence. It is a violence not certifiable. In the end the psychologists conducting the meeting scratched the following conclusion loosely on the protocol page after listening to another family member recounting the case a open quote again name of the victim Alfredo Ziquani date of event May 2003 type of event picked up by paramilitaries and killed end quotes the rest of the elder's story was legally irrelevant for the record let me say that I understand the importance of clarifying these events but it is also but it is also important to highlight the shortcomings the structural silences inherent to these procedures the investigative team require specific information and did everything in its power to cleanse the story and to cleanse the story and the history of allegedly unnecessary biographical narrative or apparently subjective information what were the connections what were the connections anyway one of them asked me between the persecutions and literal hunting of indigenous communities by large landowners seven decades ago with the murder of their sons few years ago the nature of the spoken word resulted on comprehensible utterances for the state bureaucrat it needed to be domesticated a word or two before I finish on this last term seems necessary domestication because I do speak of the domestication of testimonies as we know the verb domesticate has a double etymology as well again not only does it conjure up the idea of bringing under control or converting animals to domestic use by overpowering them but also to a custom to home life or to adapt to an environment the term evokes the possibility of rendering familiar or bringing home into the private family sphere that which is perceived as otherness power control and homeliness inhabit this term of course in latin domus and in greek doma that's the origin to domesticate is to render familiar one of the underlying argument is what I would is what I have just described I'm sorry one of the underlying arguments in what I have just described is that broadly speaking testimonies of victims of violence are brought by way of different mechanisms into the familiar world but also into domesticity in other words experiences and this is what I would like to stress I render intelligible by the workings of institutional language as power one way to bring them into confine to bring them into and confine them to the realm of domesticity is to install an epistemological silence around certain forms of violence that play out in play out in particular ways in specific historical experiences beyond the specificities of the meeting held during the time of the investigation the fact is that the justice and peace processes created concrete historically informed scenarios involving different actors there may well be a distance between the vision presented by public servants and the experiences of violence what I again call historic injuries expressed by an old indigenous man these experiences are explained by a younger generation of family members who have a greater understanding of the official internationalized language of truth justice and reparations despite the surgical extraction of testimony it still appears to float in the air with no greater meaning other than to illustrate the history of war what is clear is that a new generation of leaders have emerged many of whom have already been targeted for persecution by the way who have understood and adapted strategically to the language of the state and final thoughts an exploration of the ways words and testimonies inhabit these frameworks requires an examination of how technical processes like the one mentioned above produce and reinforce a series of silences that paradoxically emerge at the very moment of their enunciation in language during testimony the semantic density of what is narrated is subject to discursive pressures and theoretically and the theoretical limitations that defined the nature of the word and what is intended to convey in these pages I have attempted to understand the pressure by which the truth of the other the violence imposed on a woman's body or the language of a man's words are trapped in epistemic violence again although these lines along these lines I have not only dealt with the what is frequently uttered or testified in the context of transitional scenarios but also connected to the kinds of absences unspoken and uncanny that elude the currently hegemonic tropes of trauma and human rights silence is in its own right an articulation of experience and as such it requires a particular form of calibration sensibility and engagement from the listener perhaps even an ethics of listening in trying to grasp the multiple dimensions of harm through different mechanisms certain languages of pain and suffering instituted by state sponsor laws and their daily workings may fail to render intelligible the structural and the historical dimensions of harm that are at the root of conflict itself this implies a series of data collecting practices in which words and testimonies are inscribed and framed as explained earlier it is through this domestication that the word of the other is in a way made familiar when concrete forms of violence are left out of the archive in its traditional sense or fall beyond the contours defined by what I have referred to transitional scenario spaces where concepts of victimhood history and memory are negotiated the questions regarding sustainability of peace following internal conflicts emerge to what extent are they likely to be reasons for future confrontation the seeds for future violence peace is not only laying down arms it's also taking this temporal scale these violence of structures of inequality into consideration to move forward at a different society or to a different society let me close now with a quote from the latest meeting of the indigenous leaders in Colombia some time ago and I quote the taita in this regard if national and local governments are genuinely interested in contributing by providing fair and constructive reparation they must begin to recognize that the injury caused to the aboriginal peoples has occurred over a long period of time and that it is not enough to simply count the number of recent victims or to quantify the cash payments that have been that have been offered in compensation for the material damaged cost and I want to thank you that would be all so how should we proceed now hello can everybody hear me I'm Juliana Pino I'm a dual degree student obtaining my masters of public policy in the Ford school and my master of science and natural resources and environment the first question asks la ley de justicia y paz what exactly does it do the lay of wow interesting question maybe one should say what it doesn't do or what it did it didn't do it was meant of course to be the process through which paramilitaries were going to demobilize and in the end I mean there has been in Colombia of course a debate as to whether that is true or not but it was supposed to produce on the one hand to administer this demobilization and on the other hand to sort of clarify through the process itself which included of course the foundation of the national commission for reparation and other institutions it was meant to clarify 30 years of paramilitarism and in fact to some extent it did it did because as far as I can tell the national prosecution authority has 7,000 DVDs recording paramilitaries speaking of their deeds that is so much information that I think is almost impossible to administer but yet in the end despite that the Justizipas law didn't actually make the connection between the responsibility of officials in the state and paramilitaries themselves so in a way it's perceived also like an impunity law for many I mean for certain organizations in the country so I think in some ways it for me personally it's a revisionist law because in the end the whole architecture of the law impeded the paramilitary forces to be accused of violations of human rights so in a way it is a revisionist law so that's why I say instead of saying what it did because it did some things of course I wonder what it didn't do in the end and it didn't do is clarify a lot of things of 30 or something more years of paramilitarism and the connection with the state as well that's a complicated topic I have to say Alejandro thank you very much for your lecture my name is Patricia Padilla I'm a second year student of the master in public policy and our second question is what is the role that drug trafficking is playing in the current peace process and especially what is the role that it will take in a long term sustainable peace well the role of the drug trafficking in the current peace process I have no idea I mean the peace process is supposed to break precisely to I mean to take up the issue of drug trafficking in fact one of the first as we say puntos one of the first issues that were discussed in Cuba had to do with the idea of illegal agriculture and the cultivation of drugs in general and that has to be seen I mean there is not much information about that because the process has kept much of the much of the conversations in reality hidden from the public view and I have no access to that but certainly from my point of view the demobilization of the FARC would imply the necessity of restructuring what happens in the in the countryside and most likely they will be working as I guess as kind of law enforcement people if that at the end works out if I mean that's the idea in the in any case so it's difficult to say because it also has to also has to do with the reconstitution of the land owning has to be also with the idea of what is what is agriculture in the future of Colombia what would be the role of a different set of activities in the countryside and that set of activities would be part of the I guess of the of the tensions connected to the drug trafficking and so on to be in a more sort of pessimistic I think I find it very difficult to to break out somehow to de-structure the connections with the drug trafficking in general because it's it's just a new kind of new structures on in place now and we'll see what happens after the process if that ends up and somebody was asking me yesterday if I was positive or with regard to the process and I always say that after 75,000 people disappear 50 years of work I mean the least I can do is be positive of course I try to thank you the next question reads what do you think the effect of the vote in December regarding amnesty for the perpetrators will be on the memory of the victims the vote on the can you explain that question I don't understand so the person who asked this question is in the room I don't know who's here can I clarify thank you the vote in December oh okay what you the law just some piece I don't know I don't know there is to be after the process is finished some people say one year I mean being optimistic optimistic some people say one year after the process is being finished I mean the dialogue in Havana and they come to the conclusion to these points in particular I mean there are several points that they are debating in Cuba right now after that happens there would be a national let's say vote or a national process through which the through which the negotiations in Cuba would be formalized let's say I don't know if that is what you mean I don't I don't recall any voting in December this year to be honest I mean for in regard to the justice and peace law I don't know I apologize I have no idea thank you the next question is Issa Mandela like approach to reconciliation possible or desirable for Colombia in regards to South Africa although I live there for a while too that's an interesting question I would say that the difference between I mean in Colombia there is now two currents one is a public current if I can use that term which is let's say interested in peace interested in finishing conflict and there is also a counter current who is more interested in war who is people who is willing to go back precisely to the years of massacres and so on and I think that in some ways and I say this very respectfully especially for the government I think we still lack the political leadership that is able to move even the people who is against this process to move it even further forward I think we lack in some ways the leadership of somebody like Nelson Mandela who was able to and who did it of course who was able to put us to put it in a light way to put the country on his back and move it forward I think we don't have that leadership yet I think we have a lot of I mean Colombia now it's a very particular country you live there in my case personally and you have this sense of everything is cool everything is moving forward everything is fine and at the same time you feel that something is going on underneath that you don't really understand what it is and are the currents of war indeed and I happen to inhabit in the middle of that so for me it's kind of an uncomplicated issue but I you know in the question with regards to Mandela I just think I mean these are different contexts different histories different conceptions of violence as well one thing is paramilitarism in collusion with the state one is natural resources petroleum gold and something else South Africa racism although they might be connected in some ways so I would say they are two different contexts however we lack now I think a more kind of a personal leadership that moves the country forward and in some ways make us believe that reconciliation is something in fact possible thank you the next question asks is peace possible in Colombia and what will be necessary for this possibility in Colombia again that was a question that I somebody raised yesterday and has two answers for me one is that I hope that you know arms may may be laid down that would be peace in some ways of course it's better to not to have arms instead of having them although I don't think necessarily that by demobilizing guerrillas is going to be a laying down of arms the other one the other topic is that peace is not only guns and bullets peace is also his justice social justice and I wonder if after this process ends we will have a measure of social justice even in 10 years or so and in that point I tend to be rather pessimistic I have to say so it has a double double H to the question the next question came from Twitter and it reads is domestication a valid argument for leaders who abuse their power is domestication I have no idea this is another topic is domestication a valid argument for leaders who abuse their power I don't really understand to the next Alejandro the next question reads what would you recommend as an alternative process of capturing and preserving information about historical injustice and quote illusions about the future that is less prone to silencing those historical injustices that is what I'm sorry that is less prone to silencing the historical injustices well I think in general I believe that the country still has to go a long process of historical reconstruction and in fact I'm writing right now piece of paper an article which is going to be published in Argentina next month on the idea of a truth commission in Colombia I have been a critical I have been a let's say a critic rather of certain mechanisms but I understand that there is a necessity to do that now and the only way perhaps it's to imagine a different kind of investigation commission that includes precisely these kinds of topics these kinds of conceptions of harm these kinds of conceptions of violence etc etc in a different way so it's still my sense is that despite the fact that we have had over the last years quite a lot of initiatives related to history and memory it seems to me that we still have to grapple with quite a lot of events and deeds in the last decades that have happened in the last decades I mean there is a need for historical clarification and that has to be a larger debate that the one we have right now which is very institutionalized Thank you. The next question says does the lady who's DC pass take away responsibility from the state and the military how can the military and the state state make reparations for their role sponsoring and assisting in paramilitary activity That's also a complicated question I have connections with the military people as well and I have had this conversation with some of them one of them in fact is director of the historical memory unit in the armed forces and in the last conversation I told him that the military in general and the state of course in some ways have to face what had happened over the last 44 decades that it is impossible that a country moves forward only supposing that the only responsible of conflict and war is only one of the sites conflict in itself requires many sites or not I don't know if required but has different sites and I think they have to be of course they have to deal with that the problem is that the justice and peace law precisely exonerated the state and the military of the process that's why I say it is a revisionist law and this is a very polemic argument in Colombia to say that the peace and justice law is a revisionist one so it is a revisionist law because in the structure the state appears as an administrator of justice and not as a perpetrator let's say I don't like to use that word but not as a perpetrator and in that sense if we move forward the the army would have to face exactly what has happened in the last four decades or so it makes no sense to remain only as a force of peace which is not necessarily true thank you the next question reads how do you maintain the integrity of an experience with the limitations of language voice and listening these testimonies become surgically removed and exploited as examples as a type of epistemic violence for use by the state well I have to say that in that in that way my relationship with the people and the communities that I work it's a it's a relationship of collaboration it's a relationship that it has taken a long time to be built I have seen other colleagues and other people in other places of the world having perhaps interest in testimonies and interest in the integrity even in good faith of course on the integrity of people but what happens is that sometimes and this is a very personal perspective what happens is that sometimes we put in the in front our interest as scholars with a particular rhythm of life we put that in front and we leave behind the life and the integrity of the life of these people so and that happened to me especially specifically especially in Colombia a few years ago and South Africa and I do believe that as a researcher of these topics one has to create longer relationships and collaborative relationships as well is the only way I think in my personal view that the integrity of people can actually be sustained otherwise I say and we have spoken of this how academics with all due respect can become also extractors of information be that testimonies be that I don't know other kinds of information and communities can actually be very sensitive to that and unless one changes those practices in the way we research we tend to I don't know retraumatize we can use that term retraumatize the people that we are working with so in a way I'm an advocate if I can say that I don't never use that word in this in this way wow I can be an advocate of a more collaborative approach to the story of violence and victim hope in general the next question says what can we make to make information more reachable for individuals in Colombia so they can be more engaged on building the through well that's complex the the the pages that I read I'll tell you how I got there I was one day walking into the district's attorney's office in one of the free depositions that I mentioned in the text and I was trying to listen to one of those sessions because they were close to the public they were done literally in private although they appear in the lowest public spaces they weren't in order to go there you had to take you have to serve through the legal system and as you may know to to do that it can be quite a tricky issue so in the end in the end there is a lot of information but there is also a it's the usual the usual difficulties going through the legal systems and the processes and talking to the people so so a lot of a lot of Colombians actually criticize how that process was done how the peace and justice process was done because although it was presented as a public in fact it had too many rituals too many turns too many complications and it is indeed very difficult for someone who is not part of the story to try to get some information out of there as I say to get just one CD or one DVD from the district attorney is almost impossible you have to befriend with the with the district's attorney with the lawyers with the bureaucrats in the fiscal year and so on so I think in the future I guess that has to be somehow that has that material has to be has to circulate much more has to there has to be other mechanisms to do that but in in in the present also because what was testified but paramilitaries in some ways troubles steal a lot of people there there are still interest there are still financial economic political interest so the voices of these people can be very dangerous to circulate and some say even that that's why the main paramilitary leaders were extradited to the U.S. because they could speak about the connection between paramilitarism and politics and as they were extradited here that process of truth truth seeking was in a way broken down so yep thank you the next question reads doesn't extreme violence tend to make smaller crimes insignificant how can the justice and peace law differentiate these acts one of the complexities when I have to speak is to translate number one all the terminology the legal terminology and number two is to take a very broad topic and to put it into very small details the the the the irony of the peace of the justice and peace process I get confused now the irony of the justice and peace process is that it actually produce a lot of little crimes in fact the mass violations of human rights weren't taken into consideration seriously because as as the paramilitarist had the will to speak they would speak whatever they wanted and they would in any case they would never recognize their own violations of human rights so in the end it's thousands and thousands of gigabytes of little crimes of course many other massacres and so on they spoke about but the majority of the information is theft is lesser crimes not the crimes of humanity no one none of them I mean except for some cases would actually recognize the massivity of their of the of what they did so it's quite the opposite the next question is the recent presidential election show how divide the countries regarding the peace process as it is being currently conducted can the process of reconciliation be actually divisive I'm sorry say that again last part can the process of reconciliation be actually divisive divisive divisive yes I think so I think that in Colombia there is people there are people who still have a I mean after 50 years we can say that war is a good business and there are people who would be interested in continuing the situation maybe maybe because they were connected to the same war situation before and rather continue like that in order not to be judged for example or because in itself as I was saying war is a good business and therefore better it better that way I mean as long as it doesn't really take as long as it's as long as it's a good business there would be perceptions of of the of the process as something that is not positive but the reason why it's so divisive is because I think there hasn't been enough information in the end I mean so for some people exaggerating of course they would say that what is happening in Cuba is that they are breaking down you know you take this money I take this money I'm the government you are guerrillas I you know kind of a negotiation in the commercial sense perhaps so this is the this is the view of some people but I have to say that the people who views that conflict that particular process with the skepticism tend to be more to the right than to the left I have to say so whatever that means because that's kind of a tricky opposition of course so so it is divisive again coming back to the topic of before I think requires a kind of different leadership that moves skepticism in another different direction and that's that is what I think we're lacking now although I my sense is that the process has come to a point in which it's very difficult to turn back but you never know in 1992 we were talking yesterday we just hear the boy potag massacre in the middle of the processing in South Africa and how that massacre actually almost breaks that process and it didn't because somebody took the country in their hands and moved to another place so so yeah that's that's what I would say thank you the next question reads many of our students here at the Ford school will work in violent contexts and with victims people who have been harmed what lessons can you share with our students my god it's a simple question I know sorry well I don't know that's a that's a tough question and it's interesting to engagement I would say long long engagements the commitment to historical understanding the commitment that people we deal with people we don't deal with academia with numbers statistics policies policies is of core policies is people as well so I would I would place people before and I would try to to understand and that this the presence of the of of human beings informs the way I do my work informs the way I speak in public informs the risks that I take when I do speak in public not here but in other places and and I would put that in front I think that's the most important that's what I would that's what I teach my students as well and yeah people is first and then statistics later perhaps thank you the next question is how if at all does there exist solidarity among the indigenous communities in Colombia both intra and international and as an explanation the person say I'm imagining solidarity resistance to the silencing you discuss there are indeed social movements around indigenous communities Afro-Colombian communities they are in the end also they are also highly politicized they are broken down they have moved around I mean something that one has to take into consideration is that all the future development projects for example with regard to petroleum to gas to you know in strategic minerals many of them will be happening in indigenous territories so they in a way becoming kind of unnecessary in those territories also so there is a internal Pugna and internal conflict among indigenous communities to how to relate to those future processes how to relate to the so-called post-conflict economy which in the end is an economy in my sense I don't know this might be mistaken here but in the end is going to be an economy based on the expropriations of lands as well so there is resistance and there are a lot of communities who are in fact rethinking the connection with the state due precisely to that and I think there is a lot of work to be done in that particular topic and on the topic of how indigenous communities relate to the state in the context of a post-conflict economy and the post-conflict economy is an economy that is going to produce more poverty that's my sense and I find that profoundly ironical if that yeah I think we have time for two more questions and as you can see sorting out these questions is challenging in and of itself given your experience what do you see as the most formidable challenge to adapting truth and reconciliation commissions in context where there have been historical violence context for example like the US as well where there's a discussion and in many parts of the country on the possible application to questions of historical injustice reparations in the context of slavery reparations in the context of indigenous rights movements yeah is it adaptable can a truth commission be of value in addressing issues such as that and that's the second last question okay the I think it's an step forward instead of not having one let's say I speak from the perspective of someone who's living in at this particular time juncture in Colombia and I ask myself should we have a truth commission after years in case even myself is that case of criticizing this the the schemes the the structures the theoretical architectures of that and I have some work on that and you know facing the the future I think they are a step in the right direction what I what I am more skeptics is skeptic it's about the idea of the promise that by doing that we will have a better world I mean in some senses we will because it will be a mechanism to change at least some part of of of of the circumstances but to promise that that would be a radical change that to promise that we will like in South Africa many years ago that we will overcome historical inequality by applying TJ TJ or transitional justice mechanisms like a truth commission I think is an to be honest an exaggeration and it would have to be a TJ in fact transitional justice I don't like that I prefer rather transformative justice something more along the lines of what you're asking but I think to put that promise or to put that such an expectation of that on that promise I think is an exaggeration and it would require and this is what I'm writing now precisely as part of the peace process it would require a kind of reconceptualization of what truth and seeking processes really mean and there is a lot of debate there of course some would rather stick to the model to the official international model instead of going into the complicated topics of who is in power who is where our wealth how is wealth distributed how is it connected with the past and of course with the future in South Africa we knew perfectly that in the end the negotiation process was really about politics and you had I remember you had the expectation not you but South Africans I met had the expectation that by changing the structure of the state and by changing the political process of course issues of social justice would be resolved and now that I'm going to South Africa in November I'm quite interested to see how what happened and my sense is that it didn't really happen so yeah thank you and the last question is what would be the most important challenge of Colombia if the government signed the peace agreement with the FARC that's an interesting question too I often refer to the idea of what is most complicated for us and for societies that have been under under conflicts for many years is to imagine a society without conflict I was saying yesterday or maybe this morning to a group of students I was telling them that my second as a country as a nation my second my last name is political conflict whenever I speak I say I'm from Colombia and of course everybody knows political conflict drug drug dealers etc etc so in a way that term political conflict is now somehow engraved in our identity somehow we've been speaking of this topic for 50 years now it is impossible to think out of the idea of Colombia without a conflict so for me the challenge after that I mean we can speak of many other more pragmatical challenges of course but for me the real one but more philosophical if I may say that is the very conception of Colombia without conflict and that is so unimaginable that nobody really understands what we mean a society if the peace processes finally conclude the other is of course a certain idea of thinking that by signing all these things are going to disappear that poverty is going to disappear that violence is going to disappear that is not the case and it will not happen it's going to mutate it's going to be transformed again and that is going to be in a more pragmatical way the great challenge of that country I think so thank you so much Alejandro those were very candid and insightful comments I would also like to thank our audience for such a wide range of thoughtful questions both those who are here and those who sent via Twitter I'd like to encourage you to join us for future policy talks and in particular let me highlight our keynote event on October 31st as part of our centennial reunion we will be featuring Freakonomics author Steve Levitt you will need seating passes for that event and I encourage you to visit our newly designed web page both for information about the October 1st Steve Levitt event but also about other policy talks that are coming up and we do have a reception just outside of the great hall and I invite you to stay and continue the conversation but before we do that please join me in a final round of applause thank you so much Alejandro