Violence as a symptom: The case of Colombia

Theoretical background

To begin, I would like to revisit the notion of the symptom that I explored in previous works, where, drawing on Lacan, I focused my analysis on massacres that have taken place in Colombia (Uribe, 2018a, 2018b, 2019). I referred to these massacres as reiterative events, steeped in unsymbolized content that recurs and re-presents itself in the physical manifestation of violence. Following Daniel Pécaut, I examined the period known as La Violencia (1948–1964), and approached violence as a phenomenon that is intrinsic to the social, as excess. At the same time, I considered the massacres, in all their atrocity, as symptoms that, paradoxically, both express this excess and resist its symbolization.

Here, I will explore this idea of the symptom by borrowing Didi-Huberman’s (2009: 249 ff., 282) concept of surviving time, which he applied to the study of images. Through this concept, I will examine a series of tropes that have been used in Colombia to represent a feared opponent or, alternatively, to conceal the identity of those who have annihilated and wished to annihilate this opponent. Here it is worth emphasizing the ambiguous role of these tropes, which by their very nature, are capable of simultaneously representing and concealing. When we observe them together, it becomes clear that, despite their differences, they betray a certain continuity, a shared state of latency—a desire of sorts to bring remnants of the past into the present.

The state of exception

Although Colombia is a democratic country with robust institutions, the state has never had full control over the national territory, nor has it ever held a monopoly on the use of force. For most of its history, it has had to engage in perpetual power struggles with armed groups of one kind or another. To redress this power deficit, various governments have drawn on the legal concept of the state of siege as a way of upholding public order at times when the situation threatened to breach the tolerable limits. As a result, Colombia has spent much of its history as a republic mired in prolonged states of exception. By its very nature, a state of exception dictates the boundary between normality and abnormality. It is a recourse used only in situations of abnormality, as it affords a series of provisions and powers that make a return to normality more difficult to achieve. Colombia’s relentless social and political tensions have led its governments to invoke two variants of the state of exception: the state of internal commotion and the state of siege. It is in this respect that we can refer to the use and abuse of a mechanism that sanctions the de facto suspension of constitutional rights, thus making the “abnormal” “normal” (Tobón-Tobón and Mendieta-González, 2017: 69 ff.). ¹ The outcome is that an instrument designed to be a temporary expedient for use in exceptional situations became, in practice, a habitual and normalized element of the exercise of political power (Tobón-Tobón and Mendieta-González, 2017: 72).

For Giorgio Agamben, a state of exception is a:

[N]o-man’s land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life [ . . . ]. Only if the veil covering this ambiguous zone is lifted will we be able to approach an understanding of the stakes involved in the difference—or the supposed difference—between the political and the juridical, and between law and the living being. (Agamben, 2005: 1–2)

Agamben (2005) had a particular interest in this question, and so the reader may find it useful to refer to some of his remarks on the drawn-out debate between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt over the concept of the state of exception, in which they engaged intermittently between 1925 and 1956 (p. 52 ff.).

In his essay Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin establishes a dialectic between the violence that imposes the rule of law and the violence that preserves it. Apart from these two forms, he also identifies a third form of violence that he calls “pure violence.” In Agamben’s terms, this “pure violence” has no essential nature of its own but is defined relationally, depending on external circumstances. Based on Agamben’s argument, we might conclude that Benjamin did not regard “pure violence” as necessarily positive or negative, but as defined by its position in relation to the vicious cycle linking violence and the rule of law. To Benjamin (1998), this third form is the same violence “that present-day law is seeking in all areas of activity to deny the individual [ . . . ] [and that] arouses even in defeat the sympathy of the masses against the law” (p. 231). Later, he proposes that “if violence were, as first appears, merely the means to secure directly whatever happens to be sought [ . . . ]. It would be entirely unsuitable as a basis for, or a modification to, relatively stable conditions” (Benjamin, 1998: 240). This kind of violence, then, makes no claim to be a foundation for the rule of law, nor to contribute to its preservation; it is an interstitial form.

The “pure violence” to which Benjamin refers is the same violence that Schmitt aims to assimilate into the juridical concept of the state of exception. It is interesting to note how this concept lends itself to very different interpretations. For Benjamin, it serves as an aid to understanding the kind of violence that exists outside the law, whereas for Schmitt it offers an opportunity to apprehend the anomie of violence, as conceived by Benjamin, and to inscribe it into the body of the law itself (Agamben, 2005: 54–55). Agamben (2005) proposes that “the state of exception is the device by means of which Schmitt responds to Benjamin’s affirmation of a wholly anomic human action” (p. 54). In making this response, Schmitt imbues this “pure violence” with a spectral character, which is the very quality that sets it apart. Agamben (2005) argues that, for the juridical order, it is imperative that this ambivalent space where human actions lose all grounding in the law be reclaimed, giving it some kind of presence, even a spectral one, within the law itself (p. 59).

Returning to the case of Colombia, and bearing in mind the proposals put forward by Benjamin, Schmitt, and Agamben, in this article, I will focus on the kind of violence that is meted out drop by drop, which in Colombia has proceeded in parallel with clashes between guerrilla fighters, paramilitaries, and government agents, but which differs from these examples by virtue of its spectral nature. I will also touch upon the “veil” that Agamben evokes in his analysis of the concept of the state of exception, as this veil is the locus from which the spectral violence that interests us here is exercised. The Colombian media has construed this veil as “dark forces” in order to obscure the identities of those responsible for targeted killings. This nebulous image has served as a screen for the various groups who murder their opponents from the shadows. We can therefore identify a link between the state of exception as a mechanism for suspending the usual laws and rights of citizens, the latent violence that operates outside of the law and emerges whenever the status quo is threatened, and certain tropes used to represent this violence.

“The basilisk” and “independent republics”: Two tropes from La Violencia

According to Pécaut, violence in Colombia is conceived not as the underside of order but as the inassimilable hinterland of the social, which must be brought under the aegis of the rule of law. In this respect, insurgents and marginalized individuals represent the limit of socialization and pose an obstacle to the unity of the social. Pécaut understands the limits of the social in Colombia as not only fragmented and heterogeneous, but as precarious, arguing that representations of the social are inextricably linked with the anxiety provoked when the social is encroached upon by an external force that resists any process of socialization. This external force is violence, which Pécaut defines as an inherent defect or excess of the social, which deprives it of any kind of internal unity (Pécaut, 1987).

Before addressing the first two tropes that interest me here, it is first necessary to outline the social and political context in which they arose. Following the 1948 riots known as the Bogotazo, fighting between Liberals and Conservatives spread across large areas of the country, shaping the contours of what is now referred to as La Violencia (1948–1964) (González, 2012: introduction). The main protagonists were rural Liberals, Conservatives, and communists and the Chulavitas, a political police force in league with the Conservative regime. The confrontation between these groups was characterized by brutal and inhuman procedures which, based on a peculiar anatomical conception of the human body, turned the bodies of supposed enemies into emblems of terror (see Uribe, 2018a, 2018b). This practice involved the use of a machete to cut the body in various ways, causing a profound alteration of human anatomy. These confrontations left behind severely mutilated bodies, burnt-out rural properties, stolen land and livestock, ruined towns and villages, and a mass exodus of peasants. What images have survived from La Violencia, this conflict that took the lives of at least 200,000 people? Photographs from the time show heaps of bodies, dismembered and decapitated corpses, castrated men, and disemboweled women. At a symbolic level, this abject carnage left an imprint of senselessness in the imaginary of the Colombian people.

“The basilisk” and “independent republics” are two tropes that emerged at the time of La Violencia. They highlight the fear and apprehension inspired in the Bogotá elite and other powerful groups by the uprising of the liberal masses during the Bogotazo, and by the liberal and communist guerrilla fighters who began to organize in rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s.

The term “basilisk” was first used in this context in 1949, when Conservative president Laureano Gómez, a fervent admirer of Francisco Franco, used it as a metaphor for the Liberal Party, which he despised. A basilisk is a mythical animal, half reptile, half cockerel, which the newspaper Voz Proletaria, from the Communist Party, soon dubbed “Laureano’s anti-communist chimera” (Semanario Voz, 2014). This trope was born when Laureano Gómez addressed the crowd of Conservative demonstrators that met him on his arrival into Medellín airport with the following words:

Our basilisk walks on feet of confusion and naiveté,

on legs of abuse and violence,

with an immense oligarchic stomach,

with a chest of rage,

with Masonic arms

and with a tiny communist head.

He went on to declare that:

[T]he little communist head isn’t yet visible, [it] moves darkly along in the same way Colombia is moving, until the moment arrives when the Curtain falls definitively and one nation after another succumbs to the most terrible destruction. (Quoted in Henderson, 1984: 135)

The trope of “the basilisk” allowed Laureano Gómez to caricature the Liberal Party in a way that channeled the hatred, apprehension, and scorn that he felt toward his political rival. It is a trope that both expresses and elicits hatred, and Gómez chose it because the basilisk, being made up of body parts belonging to different animals, enabled him to ascribe different meanings to each of these parts, building up a composite portrayal of the Liberal Party. But why did he allocate it a “tiny communist head”? We must bear in mind that this was the time of the Cold War—the age of the enemy within, who, according to the United States, threatened to seize control of the entire continent. The trope of the “basilisk” encapsulates this atavistic fear of communism that had Colombia’s elites and political class in its grip. The same fear that raised the specter of the basilisk also engendered the second trope that I will examine—a metaphor that conjured up a Manichaean vision of the political arena that allowed the two opposing political parties to be construed as antagonistic and irreconcilable communities.

In the mid-1960s, hostilities between Liberals and Conservatives began to fizzle out. There was now a new focus for civil unrest: clashes between nascent revolutionary groups (the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia [FARC] [“Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Army”], the Ejército de Liberación Nacional [ELN] [“National Liberation Army”], and the Ejército Popular de Liberación [ELP] [“Popular Liberation Army”], among others) and the military (see the report Basta Ya! Colombia: Memories of War and Dignity, National Center for Historical Memory [NCHM], 2013: chapter 1). The backdrop to these new tensions was the National Security Doctrine, a concept that shaped the United States’s foreign policy decisions in relation to the perceived role of Latin American armed forces in the context of the Cold War. This role was to uphold civil order and to quell any ideologies, organizations, or movements that might be inclined toward furthering or supporting communism.

The impact of these policies at the local level became apparent in 1964, when the Colombian military launched air strikes on the peasant community of Marquetalia, pretending to eliminate what was perceived as a dangerous threat for the Establishment. Survivors of the attack fled the region and took possession of large areas of jungle land, together with thousands of others who had been displaced by the violence. They were joined by agrarian leaders and communist peasants who had declined to demobilize during the amnesty declared by President Rojas Pinilla in 1953. ² The Bogotá elite, through Álvaro Gómez, the son of former Conservative president Laureano Gómez, dubbed these peasant communities “independent republics”; willing to fight to defend their new territories, they were seen as a threat to the stability of the nation (see González Arias, 1991).

This notion of “independent republics,” used by Álvaro Gómez to describe peasant communities in remote areas, had such tremendous evocative power that, 50 years later, former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez and a group of retired military officers would resurrect it to refer to the rural camps where former FARC combatants went to demobilize and disarm following the signing of the peace agreement in Havana in 2016. A letter signed by 28 former army officers warned that the secluded locations where the demobilized FARC combatants congregated could become permanently entrenched as “independent republics.” They maintained that “these could give rise to a dangerous situation, just as in the past, when they caused so much damage to our nation’s territorial integrity.” ³ Here, it is worth revisiting the idea expressed by both Agamben and Didi-Huberman that the past does not die or remain neatly cloistered in discrete periods. Rather, it lives on in the present in a diluted or “phantasmal” form, expressing itself through tropes that drift around like phantasms, waiting to be awakened by a new iteration of history.

So, we can read this trope of “independent republics” in two mutually contradictory ways. First, there is the meaning invoked by powerful groups during La Violencia, who used it to refer to the rural bands of armed peasants operating outside the limits of the rule of law. The second reading strikes us as paradoxical in that it was used by former military officers who opposed the Havana peace agreement to portray the spaces occupied by demobilized FARC members. Those critics maintained that bringing these ex-combatants into the legal order in accordance with the peace agreement, which took material form in the temporary camps set up for precisely this purpose, was tantamount to creating stateless spaces outside the scope of the rule of law.

Targeted killings: The shadow side of violence in Colombia

As briefly approached earlier on, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the Manichaean division between Liberals and Conservatives, which was a central motif of La Violencia, began to blur, and the social and political landscape was transformed as drug trafficking boomed and new paramilitary groups entered the fray. These two factors would fundamentally alter the dynamics of armed conflict in the country (González, 2012). Colombia was fated to remain in the grip of what Pécaut calls the coexistence of order and violence, ⁴ an oscillating pattern that, he argues, appears to be an inherent part of the fabric of the nation, since it persisted despite all of the peace talks, amnesties, and other efforts to reinforce democracy and heal division. The growth in drug trafficking and paramilitary activity, as well as the expansion of the FARC, subjected the Colombian people to an unprecedented level of violence. According to the Basta Ya report (NCHM, 2013), this violence peaked between 1996 and 2002, at least in quantitative terms: around seven million people were internally displaced, 83,000 fell victim to forced disappearance, and more than 200,000 were killed. Colombia became notorious for its mass killings, 60% of which were carried out by paramilitaries, but there were also thousands of disappearances, abductions, attacks on villages, urban terrorism, and other manifestations of violence. ⁵

In the 1980s and 1990s, as open warfare raged between guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and armed government agents, large numbers of civilians were murdered as part of the same outpouring of violence. In Colombia, targeted killings tend to happen in a quiet, perfunctory, and isolated way, in places far removed from major towns and cities, going unnoticed by the vast majority of the population (NCHM, 2013). These killings came to be attributed in the media to “dark forces.” This two words were essentially a media trope that circulated during this period as a mask for the retired army officers, paramilitaries, landowners, and right-wing politicians who, from the shadows, engaged in the assassination of intellectuals, members of the Patriotic Union party, opposition leaders, and human rights activists. ⁶ “Dark forces” is a euphemism that reveals as much as it conceals, simultaneously obscuring the masterminds of the killings and highlighting the opaque and sinister side of this spectral violence that threatened, displaced, and terrorized the population (NCHM, 2018). Over these two decades, the NCHM (2013) recorded the murders of 1227 community leaders, 1495 left-wing political activists, and numerous trade union leaders. Shielded by their anonymity, these “dark forces” sent thousands of threatening pamphlets and letters to anyone who was openly sympathetic to the left or had any sort of connection to rebel groups.

A symbolic threshold, marking the eruption of this spectral violence that, one by one, would claim the lives of thousands, was breached in April 1984 when two hit men on a motorcycle, members of the Medellín cartel, murdered Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, then Minister of Justice. This was the period of what is now called “narcoterrorism,” a term that reflects the way in which the government and the country’s elite portrayed this maelstrom of violence that left behind thousands of victims, including government ministers, public prosecutors, high court judges, magistrates, police officers, lawyers who defended political prisoners, journalists, politicians of all hues, university professors, and many more citizens. Over this harrowing period, no fewer than four presidential candidates from left-wing parties were shot dead. Between 1996 and 2005, guerrilla groups and paramilitaries engaged in bloody gunfights over territory, while regional struggles over military and political control gave rise to the worst slaughter the country had ever known and the breakdown of all moral codes of warfare (NCHM, 2013: 34).

The death threats of the “Black Eagles”

In 2016, following 4 years of dialogue in Havana, the government finally struck a peace agreement with the FARC, the oldest and most powerful of Colombia’s guerrilla groups. The decision to hold the peace talks outside of the country was an important factor in this success. However, as soon as the parties returned to Colombia, a series of obstacles appeared: the deal was rejected in a confirmatory referendum; supporters of the politics of former president Álvaro Uribe were fiercely opposed to the measures agreed, and Colombian society in general looked on the process with an apathetic indifference.

Once the FARC had left the battlefield, what was once a structured, hierarchical, and organized conflict splintered into a fragmented, selective violence embodied by both old and new actors who swept in to seize the territories abandoned by the FARC. Today, a number of regions remain in the hands of paramilitary forces, remnants of the now-defunct United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and other criminal groups, who have successfully tapped into the drug trafficking and illegal mining economies (NCHM, 2016). According to the NCHM, today’s criminal groups are an expression of a historical process that dates back many years and that has to do with the very configuration of the Colombian state and the way that the private use of force has been encouraged and incentivized. This situation has been compounded by the unprecedented expansion of the illegal economies on which impoverished communities in various regions depend (NCHM, 2016: 2013).

Since the peace agreement was signed, Colombia has been caught in a contradiction. On one hand, there has been a reduction in the recorded number of violent deaths linked to armed conflict; on the other, there has been a clear increase in violations of the right to life of civil society leaders and demobilized FARC members (Verdad Abierta, 2018a). Removing the FARC from the equation has led to a decline in direct, conspicuous clashes and to an overall drop in the number of victims. However, as has always been the case in Colombia, it is during periods of dialogue between guerrilla groups and the state, or in the midst of efforts to broaden political participation among movements whose vision deviates from the hegemonic model, that these spectral figures appear, acting from the shadows to kill off demobilized guerrilla fighters and political activists (Orozco Tascón, 2019).

This is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the peace agreement. What sets apart this latest expression of violence is that its aim, although it appears obscure and incomprehensible, corresponds to a premeditated strategy of extermination. Its targets include civil society leaders, ⁷ those who speak out against the usurpation of their lands, indigenous and Afro-Colombian leaders trying to defend their territories, and environmental activists and others who oppose the exploitative practices of multinational mining companies. ⁸ Post-agreement violence has killed women and men who show leadership in their communities, African-descendent and indigenous land activists, and peasants asserting their land rights. To assume a position of civil society leadership in Colombia today, to attempt to resist or challenge the status quo in the hope of bringing about change, is to place one’s life in jeopardy. As a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Christoph Harnisch observes:

The significant shift in Colombia in recent years is that armed conflict is no longer a national situation but a patchwork of microregional struggles, each with its own distinct dynamic. This is a much more complex picture that demands careful consideration of how best to protect civilian populations and dismantle illegal economies. This is the great challenge facing the Colombian state, regardless of who is in power. From an analytical perspective, the violence of the past was easier to grasp, since the FARC’s fronts, blocs, and commanders were all very well known. With the fragmentation we have seen in recent years, the groups involved are now much harder to classify. Very often, the civilian population will say that they have no idea who they are. This is a significant departure from the past. We are now moving into a very different kind of conflict (Oquendo, 2019)

Against this backdrop, the trope of the “Black Eagles” begins to take shape, a euphemism shrouding an assortment of extreme-right groups who, through pamphlets and anonymous letters, issue death threats to civil society leaders, journalists, land rights activists, and peasants pressing for the voluntary eradication of coca crops, some of whom have been murdered. To the “Black Eagles,” their victims are identified as “allies of the FARC.” While these kinds of targeted killings have always taken place in Colombia, their frequency greatly increased following the signing of the Havana agreement between the FARC and representatives of the Santos government. The “Black Eagles” is a trope that harks back to old aliases used by marauding criminal gangs during La Violencia (Uribe, 2018a, 2018b, 2019).

Newspapers speak of the phantasm behind the “Black Eagles,” giving them a spectral character, and maintaining that they have no clearly defined leaders, in the same sense as the paramilitary groups active during the darkest days of Colombia’s history (El Espectador, 2019). They are said to have no clear purpose and no unified purpose; as a result, they can be likened to a kind of phantasm that spreads fear in order to gain the upper hand in a particular struggle or to assert control over territories (Bolaños, 2018).

To give some idea of the nature of these threats, I will briefly describe a few individual cases, starting with the Afro-Colombian leader Francia Márquez. The “Black Eagles” gave her 72 hours to leave her land and cease her fierce campaign against illegal mining. Two months after being attacked by a group armed with grenades and other weapons, Márquez and her fellow leaders on the Community Council of La Toma received new threats declaring them military targets and demanding that they leave the area (Las2orillas, 2019). Another well-known case involves Gustavo Petro, a former left-wing candidate for the presidency, who made the following statement via his Twitter account:

The Black Eagles don’t threaten me, because the Black Eagles don’t exist. The death threats I receive, signed in the name of the Black Eagles, are the work of an extreme right embroiled in Uribismo, ⁹ both within the government and outside of it. ¹⁰

Claudia López, the Green Alliance senator, and recently elected mayor of Bogotá, echoed this sentiment: “[This is] the third time that I’ve received a death threat from the Black Eagles, who are a front for the extreme right.” ¹¹

Between 2010 and the end of June 2019, there were at least 3434 documented death threats. Commissioners at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have reported on the most frequently used methods to intimidate civil society leaders and human rights activists: telephone calls, obituaries, bouquets of flowers, notes left under doors, text and voice messages, and warnings delivered via third parties, among others. The spectral character of this violence is also reflected in statements made by government officials, who have insisted that the crimes perpetrated against civil society leaders are down to “extramarital affairs,” “drug problems,” or “boundary disputes.” Meanwhile, the mainstream press—in the hands of the country’s most powerful business conglomerates—simply repeats the statements made by military officers, further discrediting civil society leaders. According to Camilo Bonilla, the coordinator of the research branch of the Colombian Jurists’ Commission: “This kind of violence is however repetitive, continued, and unvarying. It is perpetrated methodically, one victim at a time” (Orozco Tascón, 2019), and is not, therefore, the random phenomenon that the government of President Iván Duque would have us believe. “This violence is neither arbitrary nor accidental, but is dealt out selectively, with precision” (Orozco Tascón, 2019).

Concluding remarks

Colombia, one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, has never experienced the kind of agrarian reform that might have led to a more equitable distribution of land, nor has it seen any serious attempts to bring about profound social change. Such attempts would pose a threat to the role and hegemonic position of the most powerful groups, who have no intention of losing their privileges (Uribe, 2019). In this article, I have argued that the violence afflicting Colombia has fallen into two main categories. The first is what we refer to as internal armed conflict. This kind of violence is clearly associated with certain periods in history; it is both quantifiable and verifiable and has left figures and statistics in its wake. The second kind of violence operates outside of the law, in Benjamin’s sense, which gives it a phantasmal character. This is the violence employed by powerful groups that work in the shadows, formed by retired military officers, landowners, land usurpers, and corrupt politicians. Its aim is to use direct means to secure a discretionary desire: that the Other should disappear. For this reason, not only is this residual, anomic violence entirely useless as a basis for constructing or modifying circumstances in a relatively stable manner, as Benjamin observes, but it has only ever reinforced the status quo. In Colombia, we see the fullest expression of Agamben’s argument that the juridical order has a need to reclaim this ambivalent space, where human actions lose their grounding in the law, giving it some kind of presence, even a spectral one, within the law itself.

For over 70 years, violence has been an almost permanent fact of life in Colombia, the corollary of an animosity that certain segments of society have found no other way to express. It might be conceived as a malaise that prevents the social sphere from achieving any kind of internal unity, presenting itself as a symptom of a deep-seated intolerance that is manifested through visual and aesthetic tropes charged with memory. The four tropes examined here represent some of the forms that this symptom can take, flaring and remitting like a chronic and incurable disease. As I have argued here, throughout Colombia’s recent history, there have been powerful groups working in the shadows who have used violence as a tool to neutralize any attempts to bring about social change. These groups have constructed spectral bodies as a means of concealing their true identities, allowing them to continue in their abominable mission: the cold-blooded murder of anyone who questions their privileges.