Álvaro Uribe before the Supreme Court in October 2019. Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)
The historical memory of a war can always be debated because there is always more evidence to be discovered, more voices to be heard, or more angles to be explored. Having the last word in a conflict that has lasted more than half a century is almost impossible. But the memorial fabric that Colombia has been weaving for more than a decade is locked in a long political war fought less over evidence and more over honor. A struggle that is intensifying between former President Álvaro Uribe’s right-wing party, the Democratic Center, and the new left-wing government of Gustavo Petro. The new battlefront arrives this month in the form of primers.
Uribismo this week presented a series of 15 pamphlets in response to the massive 800-page Findings and Recommendations report released in June by the Truth Commission, an institution that grew out of the 2016 Havana peace accords. The commission has interviewed almost 30,000 people and in its report condemned the violence of guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the state. The Petro government’s response was to commit to disseminating this report in all educational institutions across the country in the form of educational primers, an announcement that caused alarm among Uribism.
“They begin the unconstitutional and totalitarian indoctrination by forcing the truth of the left on our children,” said Senator Paloma Valencia of the Democratic Center. The counterbooks are “a first approximation that we’re taking to refute some of the things that we don’t think are entirely true,” explains Laura Medina, adviser to former President Uribe. They plan to send them this week to Education Minister Alejandro Gaviria, who suggested in August that he would consider the possibility of the “alternative primer” being presented to the country’s institutions if it meets strict standards. Medina of the Democratic Center explains: “Yes, we would be very interested in going into the schools and educating the children so that they too have this truth.”
The Democratic Center’s new counter-kartillas are 15 short texts that talk about the country, crime, and public politics, but constantly focus on attacking the point that has most disturbed Uribismo since the peace process: that public violence is equated with armed ones Groups. “The Havana Accords put our democratic forces on an equal footing with those who committed acts of terrorism,” reads the first introduction, authored by former President Uribe.
Uribe there insists that the false alarms — since extrajudicial executions carried out by the army are known to portray civilians as dead guerrillas — were not state policy, and he questions the innocence of the people murdered. “The armed forces circulate the private version, which they do not publicly support, that many false alarms have been raised about people being in illegal groups,” he writes. He then hypothesizes that the false alarms were a conspiracy by “malicious minds of those who should have enjoyed the tragedy that has discredited our government and armed forces”. Present a conspiracy with no supporting evidence.
The difficult thing about maintaining this position is that dozens of military personnel have publicly claimed that it was stimulus policies that led to the false alarms. In addition to the Truth Commission’s investigations, the Special Justices for Peace (JEP) Interim Court held public hearings this year in which dozens of soldiers admitted to killing civilians under a macabre stimulus policy; Searching multiple databases, the JEP estimated that 6,402 civilians were misrepresented as combat casualties during the Uribe administration; and in statements that have not yet been released, there are several commanders and generals who have accused retired General Mario Montoya – the key member of the Uribe government, during which he was commander of the army – of demanding “rivers of blood”. from his subordinates, and reward them according to the number killed instead of captured. (Montoya has denied these allegations and his case is still under investigation by the JEP).
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“It seems to me that Uribismo’s position of denying responsibility does not strengthen public power, but rather weakens it,” says María Emma Wills, a researcher who worked at the National Center for Historical Memory (2012-2018) and the National Group for Historical Memory (2007-2012). Wills explains that the protection of institutions in a democracy necessarily comes through the accountability of the agency, which maintains its legitimacy.
“What isn’t democratic, in my view, is a look where you’re basically shielding the institutions from denial. That’s where impunity is cultivated, and that’s how you plant the seeds of institutional collapse,” Wills adds. “What is happening seems to me more like a social cognitive dissonance that can happen to a perpetrator who has committed the worst crimes in order to live with himself, rearranges his own existence in order to live with it, and then lies about this himself: He says he did not murder the civilian population, but that they were all guerrillas. And, well, no. Cognitive dissonance does not rhyme with democracy, with debate, with conflicting sources, with historians, with judges, with increasingly robust arguments.”
The following 14 introductions were written by several bishops of Uribe: the senators María Fernanda Cabal and Paloma Valencia, the director of the Nubia party Stella Martínez or the former defense minister Diego Molano. There is only one anonymous author, the one in Primer 12, who quotes Hitler to describe the truth commissioners as a group of fascists (the commission was headed by a Jesuit priest and consisted of some of the country’s most respected academics). The pamphlet, entitled “So that yesterday’s victims are today’s heroes”, accuses the commissioners of carrying out a mistranslation in their report: they made victims of guerrillas and victims of heroes (the military or Uribe). More than an academic study, the text is a manifesto of the former president’s heroism.
To the political struggle for heroism is added a more difficult one about the origin of war. Senator Paloma Valencia is the author of a pamphlet that summarizes one of Uribismo’s key arguments about the causes of the conflict. The cause was not the social and political exclusion of large population groups. “The great war in Colombia, most of its violence, is explained by drug trafficking,” writes Valencia.
But the Petro government understands that a key trigger for violence is a consequence of political and social exclusion, and it distances itself from the view that Colombia has faced 50 years of drug terror attacks. The counter-kartillas were released on the same day that the President appointed María Valencia Gaitán, daughter of Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, who was assassinated in 1948 and whose death sparked a wave of violence, as director of the National Center for Historical Memory. “I think she is an appropriate person to be a victim of the initial violent process that gathered us here,” the President said, naming her from an event at the Center for Remembrance, Peace and Reconciliation.
Uribism’s struggle with memory research has been ongoing for nearly a decade, from its criticism of the reports of the National Center for Historical Memory during the reign of Juan Manuel Santos to an attempt to appoint a historian from his current institution as director during the government of Iván Duque. The director in charge, Darío Acevedo, was accused of being a denier and of manipulating the victims’ files for a script at the National Museum of Remembrance. In the new government, Petro has said that “approaching the truth cannot be seen as a space for revenge, as if it were an enlargement of arms”. But with Uribismo in opposition, the fight for truth is now going through a series of primers.
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