Access and reuse of the moving images of the
Colombian armed conflict 1983-2013:
Broadcasting traces, online platforms
and the writing of history
Written by Luisa Fernanda Ordóñez Ortegón Email: luisafernanda2046@hotmail.com
Student Number 10619925 Supervisor: Manon Parry
Date of Completion: August 25 of 2014
Masters in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Department of Media Studies
Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam
Table of contents Pages
1. Introduction ………...3-6
2. The Colombian Armed Conflict 1983-2013: Key Issues and Conceptual Framework…...7-22
2.1. Audiovisual Records and the History of the Conflict……….7 2.2. State of the Art and Conceptual Framework………. 11 3. Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer: Historical Value of Broadcasting
Material from the 1980s…... 23-41 3.1. The Audiovisual Records of the Palace of Justice Siege (1985)………… …27 3.2. The Training of Paramilitary Forces by Yair Klein (1987) ………...34
3.3. The Assassination of Presidential Candidate Luis Carlos Galan (1989)...38
4. The Recent History of the Conflict in Moving Images: Online Accessibility in Official Institutions, Victims’ Organizations and Illegal Groups…………..……… 42-58
4.1. The Historical Memory in an Institutional Framework………..44
4.2. The Video Production of the FARC in the context of the La Havana talks...54
5. Conclusions……….………59
Access and reuse of the moving images of the Colombian armed conflict 1983-2013: Broadcasting traces, online platforms and the writing of history
By Luisa Fernanda Ordóñez Ortegón 1. Introduction
To document and to narrate the history of the Colombian armed conflict1 through its audiovisual sources is not an easy task. For more than sixty years, the country has been immersed in a spiral of violence that turns into a more complex stage as time goes on. Simultaneously to this situation, a huge volume of moving images such as broadcasting material, fiction and documentary films, artworks and video records has been produced. The conflict is still an ongoing process with no visible solution in the short term. The
practice of archiving its audiovisual records represents a huge challenge to the writing and interpretation of its contemporary history, due to the many actors and the subsequent many versions of the events intertwined in the course of the decades. Thousands of moving images of diverse origin and with multiple motivations have been produced in this context, and in this particular case, the location and availability of this material is not exclusive to audiovisual and archival institutions. In this process, victims' organizations, official institutions, broadcasting channels, legal and illegal organizations, and even the general public, have been producers as well as users of audiovisual sources. However, in most cases, there's no clear information about how and by whom this material is
managed, if there are ethical dilemmas or principles behind the idea of making the content accessible, and if the presentation of these moving images through broadcasting, media and online platforms is affecting the perception of which are the key events and who are the main actors of the recent history of the conflict.
My argument is that, in the Colombian case, the practices of access and reuse of 1The definition of the Colombian violence as political violence, an armed conflict, a civil war or a war, has
been a large subject of analysis and profuse production of scholarly literature. Here, the work of Daniel Pècaut, Gonzalo Sánchez, Alfredo Molano, María Victoria Uribe, Marco Palacios, Eduardo Posada Carbó, among many others, has helped to build a solid historical and conceptual framework to understand its complexity and dynamics. However, the authors' consensus, rather than assigning an exclusive and fixed definition to the process, is “to describe its presence as a phenomenon. Most of the works about the subject in the country don't say what violence is, but how it is manifested, and over all, what can explain it” (Blair, 2009:21).
For the purposes of my thesis, I will use the concept of armed conflict as the frame of reference to describe the series of events and multiplicity of actors that belong to the case studies. Currently, it is the most used definition to refer to the Colombian situation in the press, as in most of academic literature and in all of the reports produced by the National Centre for Historical Memory, one of the case studies of the present text. A further explanation of the periodization and key issues to understand the dynamics of the conflict is included in the first chapter of the thesis.
moving images of the conflict in the last thirty years play an important role in the definition of audiovisual records as valid sources for the writing of history. Here, the archival work is not only a matter of conserving the materiality of a document, it is also a struggle to make sure that the audiovisual record can be valuable as a historical source, visible and
recognizable as such, this struggle takes place inside and outside the institutional framework. Therefore, it is in the users as well as in the producers of content where the interpretation of contemporary history is at stake.
My selection of the period that goes from 1983 to 2013, aims to highlight two critical moments in the country's history that also coincide with radical changes in audiovisual technologies. The video revolution of the 1980s collided with one of its highest peaks of violence, where the role of television and broadcasting news was just as crucial to the understanding and public awareness of many key processes, such as the insertion of drug trafficking or the rise of paramilitarism in the political and daily life scenario.
In the last decade, the advent of internet platforms as the preferred sources to present digital moving images has changed how historical sources are being accessed, used and valued by the users. Here, the picture of the violence processes in the last ten years is rather complex, because it includes a process of transition from a government that denied the existence of an armed conflict (Alvaro Uribe Vélez between 2002 and 2010), to a government that has built a legal framework for peace and victims recognition (Juan Manuel Santos 2010-2018)2. In this period, many institutions whose main goal is to help in the construction of historical memory, have produced and encouraged the victims of the conflict to produce their own audiovisual interpretations of the recent past of the country. Therefore, the methodology for this research has two components that refer to two historical moments. First, as an exercise of media archaeology, there will be a thorough description of the past and present of three audiovisual traces from broadcasting news (originally videotaped) whose content has a major role in the interpretation of key historical events of the 1980s. Their preservation and accessibility today in the hands of
broadcasting channels, and the use of some of this material in the production of
audiovisual content (as television series produced by broadcasting channels, journalist reports, documentaries and artworks), will be analyzed to determine the value of the traces as decisive sources for the writing of the conflict's history.
The second component will focus on the study of the available content and tools for online accessibility to this type of material in official, independent and illegal organizations that hold audiovisual material that documents the conflict. My case studies are first, the
2 The implications of this government transition for the purposes of this text, will be explained in chapter one.
National Centre for Historical Memory and some of the victims' organizations that the institution sponsors, and second, the FARC webpage pazfarc-ep.org, created in the context of the current peace talks with the government in La Havana, Cuba.
The selection of the case studies and the two moments of analysis is an attempt to portray the multiplicity of facts that might interfere in the process of producing and
archiving audiovisual content related to the conflict. When the history of a country is defined by more than one traumatic event, the ethics, politics and policies that frame the archival practice are marked by the struggle for truth and reconciliation. According to Gonzalo Sánchez, director of the National Centre for Historical Memory, at this moment “the country is still trying to build a legitimate memory, not a consensus, that incorporates the differences, contradictions, postures and responsibilities and therefore, recognizes the victims (Sánchez,2013: 26)”.
Here, audiovisual collections play a paramount role in the definition of victims and perpetrators, official and unofficial histories. The material that is broadcast, or made available through digital technologies, might be manipulated, modified or shaped with the purpose of legitimizing one version of the history above others. Thus, the stakes of preserving it and making it accessible are extremely high, because the claims of certain actors of the conflict might interfere in the definition of policies and strategies through the archival processes.
This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is an outline of relevant issues that help to understand the link between the writing of the present history of the conflict, and the production and archiving of audiovisual content. Based on the early stage of scholarly production on the subject, this section suggests a conceptual framework of analysis that considers potential theoretical sources that might relate to the Colombian case from the field of archival theory, media archaeology, Human Rights archiving, cultural and film studies. Hence, it proposes three ways to approach to this specific example. First, the relation of Archival theory with traumatic memories and the writing of history, second, the connection between audiovisual production, the performance of violence and media
witnessing, and finally, the idea of the archive as a space of dispute.
The second chapter focuses on the historical value of three audiovisual traces from the 1980s. These records, originally broadcast on national television, are key documents in the current understanding of the conflict's history, due to the shocking power of their content, and the truths that they have revealed in the following years. The moving images in the audiovisual records of the Palace of Justice siege (1985), the training of paramilitary
candidate Luis Carlos Galán (1989), unfold the portrayal of a collapsing society. These
images have been reused for broadcasting, and presented in different contexts of interpretation as documentary films, fiction series, artworks and journalist books. In this chapter, there is a special attention to the reuse and presentation of this material as an archival source for the writing of history in the last decade.
The third chapter consists of an analysis of the archival practices and collection
management of audiovisual productions related to the conflict in the last thirty years, in a selected group of organizations that work inside or outside the institutional framework. Focusing on the strategies of presentation of moving images through online platforms, this section aims to evaluate how the accessibility and manipulation of content plays a
paramount role in the perception of the current state of the conflict.
The conclusion of the thesis, aims to incorporate the Colombian case in the debate of audiovisual archiving in Human Rights cases, especially in the theoretical and historical studies that approach to the link between audiovisual archives of traumatic memories and the writing of history.
2. The Colombian armed conflict 1983-2013: Key issues and conceptual framework for audiovisual archives and the writing of history
The present chapter is an attempt to outline key issues to understand the recent history of the conflict, and the role that audiovisual records have in the writing of this history. Specifically, my purpose is to portray the current situation of archival practices and strategies of presentation, access and reuse of moving images in Colombia, to analyze the impact that these practices have on academic historical scholarship. Then, after a
description of the current state of the art on the subject, I suggest a conceptual framework of analysis for the Colombian case that engages with archival theory, media archaeology, Human Rights archiving, cultural and film studies.
2.1.
Audiovisual Records and the History of the Conflict
Trying to explain the dynamics of the Colombian armed conflict in a brief overview is not an easy task. Unfortunately, violence has become a structural component of daily life for every Colombian citizen, and for most people, there's no memory of a peaceful past in their lives. On the contrary, for everybody there's always at least one time in which their personal story has crossed the path of the conflict, even tangentially.
Despite the fact that the struggle for the control over the land tenure system is the origin and the central cause of it all, there are multiple elements involved in the process. Depending on the time period, the history of the conflict has been classified in different periods or stages by the experts on the subject (Sánchez, 2003) (Pizarro, 2001), (Medina, 1999), (Pècaut, 2006 and 1987) (Palacios, 1995). Here, I take the periodization proposed by art historian Alvaro Medina (Medina, 1999), according to whom the history of the conflict can be divided in three stages.
The first one, is a period known as La Violencia, (The Violence, with capital letters), and it covers the decade of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1960s. This period consisted of a cruel fight between two parties, the liberal and the conservative, for the control of the political power in the country. La Violencia unleashed a major political and social crisis in Colombia, where the fight of peasants and political leaders, left thousands of victims (Sánchez, 2007). A phase of revolutionary violence followed, from the1960s until the late 1970s, where the guerrillas such as the FARC and the ELN3 emerged in the political 3The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia/ Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- FARC, and
the Ejército de Liberación Nacional/ National Liberation Army-ELN, were founded in 1963 and 1964, respectively. Even when the creation of both guerrillas corresponds to the dynamics of the Cold War period and to the influence of communist ideology in Latin America, the first one has mainly a peasant origin, where
scenario within the framework of the Cold War. The third one is a period of narcotic
violence in the 1980s and 1990s, in which the impact of drug trafficking and the rise of
paramilitary groups created a peak of violence without precedent in the country's history. In this period, the massacres, persecution of political opponents, and attacks on civilians by guerrillas, paramilitary groups and drug lords were part of the daily life of every
Colombian.
In the twenty first century, there are some splinters left from the previous stages. This period (still unnamed) is characterized by the validation of paramilitarism by the state structure in the 1990s and early 2000s, and a subsequent influence of this phenomenon in political life with the justification of defeating the guerrillas. In the last years, with the demobilization of the paramilitary groups4, the promulgation of the Ley de Justicia y Paz/ Law for Justice and Peace (2005)5, the Ley de Víctimas y restitución de tierras (2011)6, and the current peace dialogues with the FARC7, several groups in society have started to speak about the post-conflict (Rettberg, 2002) (Sánchez,2013). However, the sequels of violence in the last thirty years are still present in Colombia's current reality, many
most of their founding members participated or were victims of the former period of La Violencia. The second one, on the other hand, had a strong influence of the Liberation Theology.
However, it is important to point out that the role that the guerrillas had in the political scenario in the sixties is completely different that the one that they play today. Their ideological discourse has had major fractures since the fall of communism and, for the Colombian case, the insertion of guerrillas in the business of drug trafficking, and the constant attacks to civilians in their aim to control the territory, has put them of the international spot as terrorist organizations.
4 The government of Alvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010), promoted a process of demobilization and amnesty to paramilitary groups, mainly the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC)/ United Self Defense Forces of Colombia. In the same context, Uribe Vélez denied the existence of an armed conflict in Colombia, with the aim to declare the guerrillas as terrorist groups. Uribe's government was characterized by a political discourse that was based in political polarization and the justification of war, in synchronicity with the American discourse after the events of 9/11. In this process, many civilians were victims of the crossfire between the army, the paramilitary groups (that in many cases supported the army's actions), and the guerrillas.
5 As a consequence of the process of paramilitary demobilization, the government of Uribe Vélez promulgated the Ley de Justicia y Paz, or Law on Justice and Peace (Law 975 of 2005). This law gave the possibility to the surviving victims of paramilitary crimes, to start a process of truth, justice and reparation, through facing the testimonies of many paramilitary leaders. Some of these testimonies, entitled “versiones libres”/free versions, were recorded by cameras and audio records, and some excerpts are available in YouTube channels, or have been part of documentary films, as in Impunity (Holman Morris, 2010). However, the consequences of this process are polemic; many leaders of the AUC have been extradited to the United States without telling the whole truth about their actions.
6 The Ley de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras/ Victims and Land Restitution Law (Law 1448 of 2011), was promulgated in the government of current president Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018). This law brings back the concept of the armed conflict to define the Colombian situation, with the aim of recognizing the different actors in the violence scenario, and to concede the victims the legal framework to claim Human Rights Violations. This law considers the victims of the conflict from January 1st from 1985, hence, the chronological period and consequences of the application of this law are quite accurate for the periodization chosen in this thesis.
7 Since 2012, the government of Juan Manuel Santos started a process of peace dialogues with the FARC. To date, there are no major conclusions and resolutions in this context, and the FARC has not ceased fire. Nonetheless, it is important to point out how Santos' political discourse collides with the previous government, in the shift from the denial of the conflict to the promulgation of a full legal framework to recognize the conflict and the victims.
demobilized paramilitary leaders have created new criminal bands, the FARC hasn't ceased fire, and some political institutions are still affected by extreme polarization of ideas, and corruption. Besides, drug trafficking continues to shape the conflict. In the middle of it all, the civilian population, and among them groups of indigenous people, African descendants, peasants, women and children, have paid the highest price as victims8.
The historical discourse of the conflict has been written according to this complex reality. Layers and layers of events, agents and versions of history collide in the struggle for truth and reconciliation in the current processes of building a national historical
memory. Many stories are yet to be told, and thousands of events do not yet have a legal closure. Concerning this situation, it is important to ask the role that audiovisual sources have in the writing of Colombian history, and how archival practices of access and reuse of audiovisual material might affect or contribute to this process. So far, there's an incipient bibliography on the subject, as well as an incipient conceptual framework of analysis.
To depict the audiovisual map of memories of the last thirty years of the conflict is to try to put together a complex puzzle. The two moments that are central to my analysis (the 1980s and the present decade), are deeply intertwined, because the resonances of the violence of the earlier time are still perceptible in the present. Particularly when focusing on the 1980s, the archives of the rise of drug trafficking, peace processes, paramilitary massacres, the guerrillas’ violence, the testimonies of victims and perpetrators, are spread in public and private institutions that use the audiovisual records for different purposes. For this decade, which was one of the most critical periods in the country's history, the memory is fragile, because the original analogue video carriers on which the events were recorded are subject to rapid decay. The content of many records is an evidence of traumatic
episodes that changed the course of Colombia's present. Most of those traces, recorded in analogue video, are placed in the archives of private broadcasting channels (some of them already out of business), but they're not classified as specific audiovisual collections. On account of this, their visibility and accessibility is tied to political agendas, legal processes, and the deliberate forgetfulness and the supression of memories that is an unfortunate characteristic of Colombia's society.
8 According to the general report ¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de Guerra y Dignidad (NCHM, 2013) written by the National Centre for Historical Memory, in the frame of the conflict between 1958 and 2012, 220.000 people were killed (81, 5% were civilians, 18, 5% combatants), and 4.744.046 people have been displaced from their homes. 25.007 persons are declared missing, 27.023 have been kidnapped, and 1982 massacres have been committed (58, 9% by the paramilitaries, 17, 3 % by the guerrillas, and 7, 9% by the army).
When it comes to knowing when, where and who is in charge of the audiovisual records of the conflict, the answers are blurry, because in many cases the records don't have a defined space in cultural institutions. Some film footage and video excerpts from every stage of the conflict are placed at the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano (the national institution that has the legal responsibility to store the audiovisual heritage of the country). Forgotten pieces of analogue tapes lie in the archives of broadcasting
channels or private collections, and the National Centre for Historical Memory is starting to build a Human Rights archival policy since 2013, to accomplish its legal duty of memory and reparation. Thus, at this moment it is barely possible to give an account of how many audiovisual traces of the last thirty years of the conflict exist, which periods are more documented than others, and which records have been erased or destroyed for good.
In contrast, due to the fact that the conflict is the quintessential topic to understand Colombia's history, the written sources on the subject are profuse, including the published sources from the press, written testimonies and research on several case studies.
According to media scholar Juana Suárez, “a panoramic view on the academic
bibliography about Colombia, makes clear that, regardless of the discipline of the field of study, violence is the axis that articulates any reflection on the Colombian nation, an extremely wide concept itself” (Suárez, 2010,21). However, despite the large corpus of academic scholarship on the subject, the role that audiovisual records have in the writing of history is barely addressed. Then, it is important for the present case to outline a preliminary state of the art of academic works that use moving images as historical sources.
2.2.
Scholarship on the relationship of the history of the conflict to its moving images has been mainly written from the fields of film studies and art history. The literature that exists today reflects more on the content of specific audiovisual products (mainly films or
artworks), than on the consequences of the presentation and accessibility of this production for the general perception of the conflict. Furthermore, subjects such as television series, broadcasting news, government propaganda and video testimonies of victims and perpetrators (in most cases legal documents as well as audiovisual evidence) have played a marginal role in the general overview of the link between visual culture and the writing of history. At the end of the list, audiovisual archiving is, at this moment, a pending subject of analysis.
In the case of film studies, the published works cover a range of several articles and books with the conflict as a central topic. Among them, it is possible to highlight texts as
Cine y violencia en Colombia/ Film and Violence in Colombia (Pulecio, 1999) by Enrique
Pulecio, written for the catalogue of the 1998 exhibition Art and Violence in Colombia from
1948, Nación y Melancolía: Narrativas de la violencia colombiana 1995-2005/ Nation and Melancholia: Narratives of the Colombian Violence 1995-2005 (Jaramillo, 2006) by
Alejandra Jaramillo, Cine y violencia en Colombia, claves para la construcción de un
discurso fílmico/ Film and violence in Colombia, keys to the construction of a filmic discourse, written by Juana Suárez and included in her book Cinembargo Colombia: Ensayos críticos sobre cine y cultura/ Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Film and Culture (Suárez,2009) and El cine urbano y la tercera violencia colombiana/ Urban Film and the Third Colombian Violence, written by Geoffrey Kantaris.
Recently, Juana Suárez published Sitios de contienda. Producción cultural
colombiana y el discurso de la violencia/ Sites of Contention. Colombian Cultural Production and the Discourse on Violence. In this text, the author gives a panoramic
approach to the problem of violence in film, visual arts, and music, dance and museum practices from 1980 to 2005. Suarez' work is perhaps the most complete analysis on the representation of violence in Colombian cinema written in the last years, allowing the reader to understand the strong link that exists between the discourse of the conflict and the history of national cinema.
On the other hand, in the field of art history and visual culture, recent works as
Performance of Violence and Political Contestations through Images of the Colombian Conflict (Salamanca,2013) written by Claudia Salamanca, El escudo de Atenea: Cultura visual y guerra en Colombia/ Athene's Shield: Visual Culture and War in Colombia (Yepes,
2014) , written by Ruben Yepes, and Claudia Gordillo's Seguridad Mediática: La
propaganda militarista en la Colombia contemporánea/ Media Security: Military
Propaganda in Contemporary Colombia (Gordillo, 2014), are different approaches to the
role that audiovisual production on the conflict has in the awareness on its contemporary history.
Salamanca's work, a doctoral dissertation, is a theoretical exploration on the performative characteristics of the content of selected video traces (for instance,
audiovisual records of people kidnapped by the guerrilla presented as proof of life) and artworks that include or dialogue with moving images of the conflict. Here, the author studies the space of visuality and framing of those images through the use of video technologies, depending on its source of production (official, by the perpetrators, or the victims).
In Ruben Yepes' article, there is a proposal for “a conceptual framework with the purpose of understanding the role of visual culture in the construction of the historical memory of the armed conflict and the transcending of its legacy of violence, suffering and horror” (Yepes, 2014). Yepes uses a set of examples from Colombia's contemporary art and film, to underline the capacities that visual culture has in the writing of history. In this context, he suggests a theoretical framework using the concepts mediation, ecology of
images and visual event. His work connects with a conceptual background from
philosophy and cultural studies. Then, despite the highlights on the power of moving images in the construction of historical memory, there are no remarks related to the strategies of presentation of these images.
In contrast, the book Seguridad Mediática (Gordillo, 2014), written by Claudia Gordillo, is a thorough study on the strategies of presentation of propaganda images from the army during the government of Alvaro Uribe Velez (2002-2010). In her book, Gordillo presents a set of official audiovisual pieces, with the aim of analyzing their impact in the naturalization of the discourse of the soldier as a hero in the war against terrorism9. This text features the power that media (specifically television and cinema) had in the general perception of the public about the recent processes of violence, in a context where the enunciation of the armed conflict was denied.
The author's research results can be accessed in two ways. Besides the publication
9The political discourse of the war against terrorism, enhanced by United States' foreign policy after the events of 9/11, was used during the government of Alvaro Uribe Vélez as a strategy to fight the guerrillas, marked as terrorist organizations in the international scenario. This discourse served as a tool to deny the enunciation of Colombia's process as an armed conflict and a historical process of long duration, by pointing to the guerrillas as the one and only enemy of the society. In this sense, the army was presented as the heroic group that was going to bring peace back to the country.
of the book, she coproduced the documentary Apuntando al corazón/Pointing to the
Heart10(Gordillo-Bruno, 2014), where the audiovisual pieces analyzed in the book are edited in dialogue with comments of experts from the field of strategic communication, media studies and visual culture. Gordillo's work engages a wide audience beyond academia, with the goal of enhancing the role that moving images have in the contemporary history of the conflict.
From the field of visual anthropology and sociology, Alejandro Castillejo's Tras los
rastros del cuerpo:Instantáneas del proceso de Justicia y Paz en Colombia/ Behind Body Traces:Snapshots of the Process of Justice and Peace in Colombia (Castillejo, 2010), is a
study on the social scenarios of confrontation between the perpetrators and the victims in the context of the paramilitary demobilization in 2005. Castillejo analyzes the implications of the uses of the camera as a mediation device, during the legal processes where the perpetrators' testimony was transmitted to the victims in a closed-circuit television camera.
Finally, it is important to cite the work of Camilo Aguilera and Gerylee Polanco
Rostros sin rastros: Televisión, memoria e identidad/ Faces and Traces: Television, Memory and Identity (Aguilera-Polanco, 2009), this book is perhaps the only work written
on the specific topic of audiovisual archives in Colombia. It is the product of a research project of intervention, restoration and classification of the audiovisual collection of the documentary television series Rostros y Rastros, broadcast in a regional channel between 1988 and 2000. This series covered a wide range of topics to document the reality of the people of the south west of Colombia, and particularly of the city of Cali, but the conflict wasn't the central topic of audiovisual production. However, the authors' reflection of the importance of audiovisual archives to the construction of historical memory, and their special attention to the preservation of analogue video material from a television series, is a major contribution to the field of archives and presentation of moving images in
Colombia.
The previous background is significative, but relates tangentially to the archival practices on the moving images of the conflict as a subject of analysis. In fact, due to the heterogeneity of audiovisual sources (as documentaries, broadcasting material, artworks, fiction films and TV series, government propaganda, and other related documents
produced by victims and perpetrators) and the fragility of its content, the topic of
audiovisual archiving and the writing of history situates in the border of many disciplines, as archival theory, Human Rights, media archaeology, media history, film and cultural studies. Thus, for the Colombian case, the concepts and epistemological tools of analysis
may vary due to the complexity of the process, the nature of the sources and the historical period of study.
Hence, it is important to suggest a basic conceptual framework that helps to frame the connection between the archival practices of access, reuse and presentation of moving images, and the writing of the present history of the conflict. In this sense, it might be possible to say that the Colombian case might be affected by at least, three transversal subjects: The relation of Archival theory with traumatic memories and the writing of history, the connection between audiovisual production, the performance of violence and media
witnessing, and finally, the idea of the archive as a space of dispute.
Archival theory, traumatic memories and the writing of history:
In archival theory, Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (Derrida, 1995), constitutes a seminal work for the analysis of the role that archives have in the construction of historical memory in contemporary societies. For the case of the audiovisual archives of the
Colombian armed conflict, Derrida's description of the archive as a place that exists in a location, that is a product of the past and the summary of interpreted facts in the present, has to be revised. First, by evaluating the limits of the idea of the archive as an
institution, and second, by exploring the implications that the author's definition of archiving as a work of mourning have in the context of an ongoing armed conflict. This revision responds to the particular dynamics of the Colombian case, and to the
repercussions that it has in the production and archiving of audiovisual content. As many actors are involved in the process, it is difficult to produce a master (official) narrative that unifies one single version of its history. Here, loss, trauma, memory and forgetting become the frame of reference for the production and accessibility of content, as well as for the design of archival policies.
Derrida's definition of the archive as an institution, relates to the transition of a documental corpus from the private to the public sphere. Here, the consignation of
documents in a centralized repository enhances what he calls the archontic principle of the
archive:
By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to
deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. It is not only the traditional consignatio, that is, the written proof, but what all consignatio begins by presupposing. Consignation aims
to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate
(secernere),or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together. (Derrida 1995, 10).
In the Colombian case, the idea of a concentrated and systematized collection of audiovisual records of the conflict is in an early stage, thus, it is difficult to say that a single archival corpus on the subject exists. Moreover, it is equally difficult to assume that the notion of the audiovisual archive is completely established in the institutional framework. On the contrary, its enunciation as a potential repository of national memory is a recent phenomenon. The Archivo General the la Nación/ National General Archive, which holds mostly written primary sources of the country since the Colony, was created in 1989, the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, in charge of the presentation of Colombia's film heritage, in 1986. Furthermore, the process of definition of a public policy on the archives of the conflict, started just in 2013, and it's currently in the hands of the National Centre for Historical Memory11.
In this scenario, the strategies for conservation and presentation of the moving images of the conflict remain unclear. The weak recognition of the archive as a major institution in the writing of historical memory, and the marginal role that audiovisual records of the conflict play in this definition, collides with the profuse and heterogeneous
production of records that exist on the subject. While some audiovisual traces of
contemporary violence are traceable in official institutions or broadcasting archives, their visibility is limited by the strategies of contextualization and in accessibility of the material therein. The contemporary production of audiovisual content by official and non-official organizations, victims, perpetrators and the general public, and the access to sources from the past on online platforms as YouTube, also presents a challenge to the definition of the archive as a fixed and synchronized repository in Derrida's terms.
Moreover, in the Colombia case studies it is clear that the network of the archive has expanded beyond the limits of the physical institutions. For instance, the National Centre for Historical Memory sponsors victims' organizations to produce audiovisual 11The National Centre for Historical Memory (Formerly Group for Historical Memory) is a public institution
created with the aim of helping to reconstruct and clarify the memories of the armed conflict, and to
accompany the victims in this process. Its functioning is attached to the promulgation of the Law for Justice and Peace (2005) and the Law for Victims and Land Restitution (2011), both products of specific political agendas of the last two governments. Since 2008, the public visibility of the NCHM is connected to the publication of several reports that document tragic events (mostly massacres committed by paramilitaries) in the last thirty years of Colombian History.
content, which they make available through their own webpages and on YouTube channels. This is presented by the victims and the institutions as a way to confront the past, by producing their own memories on the conflict and the traumatic events that
affected them. The recorded testimonies and use of archival material, usually edited in the form of documentaries, demonstrate how, “archives are not only about memory, but about a work of the imagination” (Appadurai 2003, 24), where the civilians expose their own version of the history.
Audiovisual content produced by illegal organizations, such as the FARC, is also available on online platforms. Although the use and enunciation of the archive as a concept is in this case, questionable, the fact that this organization (that plays the role of one of Colombia's major perpetrators in the history of the conflict) produces, selects and uploads audiovisual material, reveals the complexity of a panorama where there might be many competing versions of a single story. Thus, when the historical actors themselves, in official and non-official sources, take part in writing the contemporary history of an ongoing traumatic event, the chances of an archive playing the role of a unique authority in the writing of history are uncertain. A more representative history depends on the participation of a broad network of actors and witnesses.
Then, in the particular scenario of the Colombian conflict, where there's a constant cohabitation of traumatic memories and forgetfulness, the definition of policies and
strategies of access and reuse of audiovisual records, represents a stake in making the history public through archival practices, because many of these documents are still classified information, or potential evidences for legal processes. Also, this definition is tied to the institutional (or non-institutional) framework in which the material is made
accessible, and moreover, in the selection of the traces that are considered essential documents for the recent history. Here, the idea of the archive as an institution, “must include a theory of this institutionalization, that is to say, at once of the law which begins by inscribing itself there, and on the right which authorizes it”( Derrida 1995,10). When the scope of the archive surpasses the institutional borders, the center of the problem is the authority that the audiovisual records of the conflict have in the writing of history, through the impact that the strategies of access and reuse to audiovisual collections might have in the public awareness of contemporary violence.
Nowadays, the production of audiovisual documents is so profuse, and the access to the material is so unlimited, that the boundaries that allow a user of content to
As institutionally-based collections intermingle with user-built collections, those stewardship activities that that defined the identities of the archives, libraries and museums may no longer be seen as the unique realm for cultural institutions. Thus, the curatorial or archival authority with which cultural heritage institutions are invested may diminish to the point where society may question the need for such entities to perform such work. (Gracy 2007,186)
Then, for this case, the value of an historical source is not only determined by scholars or by an institutional background, but by the users of this content in defining their own history.
In addition to the previous point, it is also important to pay special attention to the definition of the work of archiving as a work of mourning, also posed by Derrida. According to this author, the expression of mourning is inherent to any archival work, because
dealing with memory means that the archivist is facing the left traces of a forgotten past. To mourn is, for an archivist, to deal with the story of the absence that the documents can tell, an interpretation of what has been lost:
[…] the archive […] produces memory, but produces forgetting at the same time. And when we write, when we archive, when we trace, when we leave a trace behind us […], the trace is at the same time the memory, the archive and the erasure, the repression, the forgetting of what it is supposed to keep safe: That's why, for all of these reasons, the work of the archivist is not simply a work of memory. It is a work of mourning. (Derrida 2002, 54)
In the Colombian case, this work of mourning can be accentuated by the archivist's reaction to loss that is inherent to the traumatic memories that the conflict has created. This natural condition of mourning is enhanced by the power of the images produced in the last three decades of violence. An archivist (when the archive exists), has to deal with the omnipresence of traumatic records of events that flash constantly through a multiplicity of moving images from broadcasting news, films, artworks, and other related video
productions . The task of selecting these moving images to be classified, categorized, organized and accessible to the general public, demands a work of contextualization and awareness of what the images represent and how, for instance, an internet user or a television spectator might interpret them.
In the following pages, the case studies help to depict a portrait of how this work of mourning is manifest or invisible in audiovisual archival practices and policies, and how this condition interferes with the selection criteria of the moving images that are presented by different agents through online platforms. For example, in the case of victim's
archiving of content cannot be separated from the process of mourning. By producing their own audiovisual narratives, the documentaries and recorded testimonies that relate to traumatic events, as massacres or guerrillas occupations have become a possibility for the communities to activate memories that have been repressed, as well as a way of dealing with loss.
Also, the audiovisual presentation of the victim's memories to claim a part in the conflict's history, and the open accessibility of this material, is an invitation to other civilians to bear witness of their tragedy. According to Wendy Hesford, “within the context of
Human Rights documentaries, victim's testimonies bear witness to incommensurable events, and also function rhetorically as empathetic markers in an effort to create the viewer as witness” (Hesford 2004, 103) . In this example, the production of documentary narratives opens a framework where the audiovisual sources, recorded, made available and stored by the victims' organizations, have an active role in their process of mourning, as well as in the construction of historical memory. Their work is an act of remembering while facing the trauma and transforming their testimony in a historical narrative. It “is not simply the act of evoking an event, but rather of being able to form significant narrative sequences. Remembering, therefore, is not an aspect of reproduction, but rather of construction” (National Centre for Historical Memory 2013, 19).
Audiovisual Production, the Performance of Violence and Media Witnessing:
The production of audiovisual content with the conflict as a central subject is a constant in the Colombian case. From the over-exposed images of horror via broadcasting channels during the news, to visual arts and film and TV series production, violence is presented, witnessed, and experienced on a daily basis by the general public. Hence, the work of media and audiovisual archiving in presenting these moving images affects the scope of visibility of the crisis (by the production and selection of material), and the users' access and interpretation of the content (in the access, use and reuse of the sources).The huge volume of audiovisual sources related to the subject, opens the question of how the performance of violence (Oppenheimer, 2012) has a meaningful impact on the perception of critical events and political actors involved in the process, in the definition and
characteristics of victims and perpetrators, and on the ways users, as spectators of the crisis, bear witness to or ignore the situation.
For instance, according to Claudia Gordillo's study on the military propaganda in the government of Alvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) ( Gordillo, 2014), the performance of violence was translated into an audiovisual narrative that justified the war on terrorism as a
political discourse, by portraying the militaries as heroes in high budget productions and cinematographic scenarios. These images, transmitted in national television and in movie previews, altered the perception of the general public by creating a simulation of security, while at the same time the negative outcome of the conflict (denied at that time) was persistent in many rural areas.
In this case, the act of witnessing in media does not relate exclusively to facing a tragic event or to access the recorded testimony of a victim. The previous example shows how “in many zones of political emergency, the normalization and routinization of violence was accompanied by structures of deniability built on the very strategy of violent
enactment. In other words, political terror not only attacks the witness but also the cultural capacity and resources needed to bear witness” (Feldman 2004,172). In Colombia, the governmental propaganda of Uribe's government restricted the possibility of critical
thinking in the eyes of the spectators by imposing the representation of a unique narrative of the present history: first, by denying the existence of the conflict, and second, by
creating a fake perception of security. In those years “the media agenda of the country was established by the government and the role of mass media was to replicate, not to inform or to be critical” (Gordillo 2014, 48).
However, the case of the military propaganda represents one layer among the multiple narratives that claim a place in the history of the Conflict. Thus, the levels of visibility of audiovisual content vary depending of its producer. While the recent
broadcasting material circulates on a daily basis through different audiovisual platforms (such as YouTube channels, broadcasting webpages, and television), art and film on the conflict history is less accessible, and requires a previous knowledge of the artist,
filmmaker or on a specific event to reach the material through web search. On the other hand, the official production of historical memory, that increased after the promulgation of the Ley de víctimas y restitución de tierras / Law for Victims and Land Restitution in 2011, is accessible through governmental, NGO's and organizations of victim's webpages. Finally, the videos that the FARC has made as announcements or statements are available through different YouTube channels that are connected with this illegal organization.
These sources play an important part in the presentation of historical events, and in the performance of violence in the Colombian context. They help to shape the user's perception as a spectator or a witness, sometimes by enhancing a position of
passiveness, where the suffering is distant or just accessible through the mediation of the screen (in the news programs or TV series), or in other cases, by an active dialogue
between the act of seeing and the act of reproducing the images. This situation is defined by Frost and Pinchevski(2014) as media witnessing,
A new configuration of mediation, representation and experience that is involved in the transformation of our sense of historical significance. It refers to the witnessing performed in, by and through the media: the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media
themselves bearing witnesses, and the position of media audiences as witnesses to depicted events (Frost,-Pinchevski, 2014:1)
Furthermore, for the case of television, Thomas Elsaesser states that,
Much of what we regard as history over the past thirty years of so, we have witnessed in very nearly real time on television. Such witnessing of events, remote in location and close in time only through the media temporality of real time or online, profoundly changes the roles and scenarios of
spectatorship, redefining what it means to be an actor, a bystander, a participant, a witness, a victim or a survivor ( Elsaesser 2008,409).
A comprehensive outline on this concept will be depicted in the case studies that are subject to the present analysis both in the level of broadcasting material and television spectatorship in the 1980s, as well as in the level of internet access in the present century. Archive as a Space of Dispute:
The description of the two previous subjects reveals how the Colombian case is affected by many tensions, especially when the role of audiovisual sources in archival practices is under examination. These tensions where trauma, memory and history cross the borders of the institutional framework of the archive, and the role of the media has taken the task of the writing of history, are described in Thomas Elsaesser's History,
Media and Memory: Three Discourses in Dispute (Elsaesser, 2008). In this article,
Elsaesser highlights how these three subjects “are a battlefield of contested claims: over knowledge and identity, over agency and accountability, over how events are transmitted, recorded or written up, but also how they are being judged and used to justify causes, to empower groups or de-legitimate policies” (Elsaesser, 2008:396). According to this statement, I would like to propose the idea that, for the Colombian conflict, the archive constitutes a potential scenario in which this battlefield takes place. Thus, the audiovisual archive of the conflict is a space of dispute for the vindication of memories and the writing of history. The ways of how it is made visible, and how the selection of materials is
accessible and explained to the general public, might have an influence in their interpretation of contemporary history.
As explained before, these audiovisual records don't belong to a single institution or to a single project that centralizes the material. Instead, on account of the different actors
in the process, the diverse nature of the organizations that hold it, and the instability of the political situation in the last thirty years, the authority of the archive is always at stake. In my thesis, the selection of case studies reflects how in broadcasting sources and internet platforms, the accessibility to the archives and the presentation of moving images is also a claim for a place in the writing of history.
The frame of reference of this archive, then, is heterogeneous. For the case of the National Centre for Historical Memory and the victims’ organizations, the enunciation of the documental corpus as a Human Rights archive gives them a status of legal authority. However, whereas the official institution preserves originals and copies of the records produced by themselves and by the victims, it is not in their policy to centralize the information. On the contrary, “the national policy states the idea that this heritage can be settled -among others- in public institutions, organizations of the civil society and special organizations whose aim is to research the past” (National Centre for Historical Memory, 2013).
The de-centralization of the sources might represent an advantage for the society, who has the power of presenting and archiving the records of their own interpretation of the history, or it can be a risk, for the same reason. The production and storage of content in this case, mainly related to traumatic events, is an advantage when it stands for the construction of knowledge in the scheme of historical memory, where the work of victims organizations in producing and presenting their own narratives of the conflict establishes ‘other epistemologies, in the relation of knowing and not knowing, of amnesiac forgetting and mimetic enactment. By these very tokens, the traumatic event is thus both the extreme limit as well as the zero degree of what cultural memory is concerned with’ (Elsaesser 2008, 404). However, in this very statement, there's a huge risk for the victims in facing their perpetrators who, in many cases, still cohabit with them in the same location where the archives are placed.
Equally important is the case of broadcasting archives. In Colombia, many of the key events of recent history have been videotaped or recorded, and televised. As it will be explained in chapter three, some of these traces have been lost for decades, and then reappeared in the public scope to confront, reveal or document an unsolved issue of the past. In the last years, the production of television series by broadcasting channels has involved the use of archival material to represent the history of the conflict, with a particular emphasis in the 1980s. Then, the broadcasting archive has served as a tool to re-activate audiovisual records and to question the outcome of many historical events, even when the commercial purpose of television prevails over the ethics of the presentation of an
accurate portrait of history.
In conclusion, the act of enunciation of the existence of an audiovisual archive of the conflict requires formulating questions whose answer demands a thorough
evaluation.The archive of the conflict according to whom? Who has the authority to
produce and store audiovisual records of the conflict and why? How the many versions of history are translated into, maybe many versions of the archive or vice versa? In the following pages, the case studies that are subject to examination are a description of how these questions interact with each other, how different versions of history are in dispute, and how the idea of an official archive of the conflict in the ongoing process is a potential scenario of dispute for the construction of historical memory.
3. Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer 12: Historical value of 12 ‘Gloomy Premonitions of what must come to pass’ is an engraving made by Francisco de Goya in 1814.
This image is the first of the series ‘The Disasters of War’, which portrays the suffering of Spanish people during Napoleon's occupation. It acts as a prelude of the upcoming tragedy, and as a reflection of the abandonment that the country experienced during the French invasion. The choice of title for this chapter as a reference to Goya's work, is an attempt to accentuate the historical value of three records which content is
broadcasting material from the 1980s.
The introduction of video technologies in television broadcasting in Colombia since the early 1980s, coincides with a period in which the intensity of the conflict rose in
unprecedented ways. Those were the times when drug trafficking, paramilitarism, political polarization and unsuccessful peace processes summed together in one of the most critical points in the country's history. In that decade, the role of media, especially of television and radio, was crucial in transmitting the breaking news, such as the multiple attacks from the guerrillas on government infrastructure, the emergence of drug lords and their terrorist war against civilians,, the rise and spread of paramilitary groups in different regions, assassinations of political leaders from the opposition; judges; one minister of justice; and three presidential candidates. For many of these events, there is an
audiovisual trace that constitutes irrefutable evidence of tragedy.
This chapter argues the historical value of three audiovisual sources from broadcasting material, that document crucial events of the decade: The audiovisual
records of the palace of justice siege (1985), the training of paramilitary forces by Israeli mercenary Yair Klein (1987), and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán (1989). These records are both snapshots of a painful past, and clues to understand
the outcome of the conflict in the next three decades, because they summarize the agents in the political struggle and the role of media in the public awareness of the situation. They contain crucial information to understand the radical changes that those events represent in the country's history, then and now.
In this section, my aim is to highlight the role that broadcasting sources have in the archival practices of access and reuse, when moving images are presented as part of a historical context. After a description of the content of the records, I will evaluate the implications of their use in audiovisual production in recent years, as documentary films, television series, artworks and journalist reports. To understand the value of these records as historical documents is also a proposal for an archaeology of the audiovisual sources of the conflict in broadcasting archives, a task that is still pending for historians and media scholars in Colombia.
Yet, it is important to point out that the success of this task depends on the
possibilities of access to the sources, and to the state of preservation of the material. For the case of the 1980s carriers, “the history of archived television programming has been a case of accidental preservation”(O'Dwyer 2008, 258). In Colombia, as in many other
both a symptom of the critical conditions of the conflict in the 1980s, and a premonition of the rising of new phenomenon in the following years.
countries, the commercial vocation of broadcasting channels prevailed over the urgency of preserving television heritage, and many tapes have been erased, discarded or used to record new content over older programs. Moreover, when referencing the advent of the video technologies and portable cameras at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the picture of the preservation strategies of the recorded material during the next decades turns blurred. Storage with the goal of conservation wasn't considered a priority to production companies; also, the video carriers on which the programs were recorded were characterized by its instability. In this decade, “three quarter inch U-Matic videotape, long a staple of broadcasting for its economical and portable nature, was used in
thousands of TV stations”(Compton 2007, 130). However, “these tapes are now one of the most ubiquitous and simultaneously most endangered broadcast formats in archives due to its inherent fragility- they were never designed to be stored long term”(Compton 2007, 130). In Colombia, most of the audiovisual production of the 1980s was recorded on U-Matic tapes, hence, the sources for the history of television regarding to this period might be defined more around gaps and voids, than to a full portrait of the broadcast material from the decade.
By that time, the national television network was divided into three channels owned by the government (Cadena 1, 2 and 3), and the programming was based on a system of agreements that allowed production companies to broadcast. Many of those companies ran their own news programs (approximately thirteen), and broadcast the shocking news that defined the course of the events of the country during the eighties. Simultaneously to this process, in 1984 the government authorized the creation of regional channels, many of them still functioning today. This has allowed the production of content from diverse nature and with different perspectives compared to the national broadcasting network. Today, the country has eight regional channels, including Telepacífico (in the south west), Telecaribe (in the north coast), Teleantioquia (in the north Andes), and Canal Capital (in Bogotá, the capital city), among others. All of these channels have their own broadcasting archive.
In 1998, the national broadcasting system changed dramatically when the
government authorized the creation of two private channels, Caracol and RCN Television, owned by the two major economic groups from the country. As a consequence of this action, many small production companies that had been working since the eighties ceased to exist, and as the private channels started to have the highest levels of ratings, the national public channels, now named Canal Uno, Canal Institucional and Señal Colombia, began to play a marginal role in television culture.
From then on, the whereabouts of the broadcasting archives of former news
programs are not entirely clear, and some of the material from small production companies is considered missing at this point. However, there's an important part placed in different locations and already digitized. For instance, Caracol Television holds the archive of the Noticiero Nacional, one of the most viewed news programs in the 1980s, and Programar Television, a former production company that kept working for public television in the next decades, has the records of seven different news programs13. Finally, the archive of journalist Jorge Enrique Pulido and his news program Mundo Visión14, which is a private archive, is now managed by the Cinemateca Distrital de Bogotá/ Bogotá's Cinematheque, a public institution. Brief excerpts of the material of Programar Television and Jorge Enrique Pulido are available online, the first one has a Youtube channel that contains excerpts from ten records with a length of less than two minutes, and in the webpage
http://www.jorgeenriquepulido.com there is a succinct description of the life and work of the journalist.
In the case of Caracol Television, the archival material from the eighties, formerly recorded in U-Matic,is now digitized and stored in the archive's facilities. According to Marta Elena Restrepo15, director of this archive, the records related to the conflict are not part of a specific audiovisual collection.
In all of the referenced archives, with the exception of Canal Caracol and Canal Capital (which in the last five years have produced TV series related to the history of the 1980s), there is no clear strategy for the presentation of the moving images of the conflict. In many cases, the channel's work is limited to uploading short excerpts of the records in YouTube channels or on their webpage, often without a thorough description of the piece. Furthermore, sometimes it is not the broadcaster in charge, or concerned about uploading the material. For example, many records of the conflict are available today on YouTube thanks to the work of private (and mostly anonymous) users, who somehow have access to the digitized records; however, they don't include a description or a contextualization of the source. In this sense, despite that the technological advent of digital formats has allowed open access to the material, the lack of context doesn't help to understand their value as historical documents, and “without knowledge about who created a document,
13 According to the webpage of the production company, they hold material from seven news programs produced in the last thirty years: Noticiero de las 7, En vivo 9:30, Noticiero Nacional, Hora Cero, TV Hoy, Uninoticias, and Noticias Uno.
14 Jorge Enrique Pulido was a renowned Colombian journalist in the eighties. He was killed in November of 1989 while he was going to work. Pulido had his own production company (JEP Television), and
produced several programmes denouncing the sequels of drug trafficking in Colombian society. 15 I contacted Restrepo via e-mail on May 6 of 2014, where she answered some questions about the
when and for what purpose, the document becomes meaningless” (Noordegraaf 2010,108).
In the digital era, the television archives of the conflict are a space of dispute for the interpretation of the country's past and present. When they re-activate the memories of traumatic events by making the content public once again, the understanding of history by the general audience is extremely tied to their strategies of contextualization, or to the lack of them.
The analysis of the following examples is an effort to outline the features of key audiovisual traces to understand the Colombian conflict in the 1980s, with the purpose of claiming a place for broadcasting material as an essential document for the writing of history. Originally recorded in analogue video technologies, their current digitization, open accessibility and use in the production of new content in the last decade, represents a challenge to broadcasting archives in framing the material and making it available.
3.1.
Image 1: Screenshot from the journalist report presented by Noticias Uno in 2007. Magistrate Uran comes out alive from the palace of Justice.
On the 6th of November of 1985, the M-1916 (a former guerrilla group of urban and middle class background) occupied the palace of Justice with the aim of calling for a public trial to President Belisario Betancur. The trial, according to the M-19, was necessary because Betancur did not keep the agreements of the peace dialogues that took place between the government and the guerrillas in 198417. As a response to the guerrillas' occupation of the palace, the government answered with a refusal to negotiate and total silence, while at the same time the army led an offensive attack on the building. During twenty eight hours, hundreds of civilians, along with magistrates and workers from the judicial branch, became victims of the crossfire between the militaries and the guerrillas. The event was transmitted by radio on different stations (sometimes the hostages called the radio stations to ask the army to cease fire)18, and broadcast live in the news of the two main broadcasting channels (Cadena 1 and Cadena 2).
The Palace of Justice Siege is renowned in Colombia as one of the most tragic episodes of its recent history and, one of the unresolved truths of the conflict in the last
16 The M-19 (meaning Movimiento 19 de abril/ 19 of April Movement) was a guerrilla group founded on April 19 of 1970. Unlike the FARC or the ELN, its origin is not rural but urban, and its founder members were from the middle class. The M-19 had a particular way of operating, besides the irregular war, the group became famous for its actions, as stealing the sword of Simon Bolivar after a media campaign in newspaper promoting the group (when no one knew what M-19 meant), taking milk trucks from big companies to give milk to poor people, or interfering the signal of the broadcasting of presidential speeches to replace them with their own announcements.
17 In 1984, the government of Belisario Betancur started two processes of dialogues with the guerrillas. One with the FARC, which led to the La Uribe agreement and the foundation of the Unión Patriótica-UP. The other, with the M-19, where in the Corinto agreement, there was a pact of ceasing fire between the government and the M-19. However, the army disregarded the pact and attacked a group of guerrilla soldiers, due to this situation, the M-19 decided to take the palace of Justice.
18 The radio broadcasting of the siege is one of the most important documents to understand the scale of the tragedy. In the two main radio stations (Caracol and RCN), the audience followed, not only every stage of the siege, but also listened to the hostages calling the journalists to claim the government the cease of fire. The most shocking episode of this broadcasting happened when Alfonso Reyes Echandía, the president of the Supreme Court, called Caracol Radio and, while asking for help, a bullet killed him. According to the investigations and the final report of the Truth Commission, the bullet came from a gun of the army.
thirty years. Although many books, journalist reports and legal documents on the subject have been published (Behar, 1988) (Plazas Vega, 2000) (Maya-Petro,2006), there is no consensus on the different versions (from the guerrillas, the army and the civilian
witnesses) about what happened in the twenty eight hours of the siege. For more than twenty years, the circumstances in which fifteen magistrates and dozens of workers were killed, and how twelve persons are still declared missing, was unclear. In fact, it wasn't until 2005 when three former magistrates, sponsored by the International Centre for Transitional Justice, the European Commission, the Ford Foundation and the Supreme Court of Justice, decided to create the Comisión de la Verdad/ Truth Commission on the facts of the Justice Palace to clear up the truth19. It is also in the last decade that the broadcasting sources on the siege, recorded by different cameras from almost every news program at the time, started to be valued as key documents for legal processes, and included in the production of new content reflecting on the meaning of the event for the country's history.
Image 2: Screenshot of a tank entering the palace. Image 3: Screenshot of the palace in flames.
Video Source: Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano. Video Source: Programar Television
The content of these recordings holds powerful and shocking images. When broadcast live, the Colombian TV spectators saw a military tank going through the main entrance of the palace in daylight, dozens of pedestrians running and hiding from the crossfire in the streets, and finally, the building bursting into flames (this last image was recorded by the Spanish television). However, it is in the sequences of images of the hostages being released, where the big dispute for the truth takes place. In those images, some of them were seen coming out alive from the palace, but after the end of the siege they were found
19 According to the final report of the Commission, its creation responds to “ the evidence of an incomplete truth, of impunity and to an express or tacit, but generalized, silence pact about what happened” ( Gallejo, Jorge: 2010, 20)
