From October 24th to 27th, 2024, Ruth and Laura, from the Redistributive Computing Systems Group, and Natalia, from the Global Development Department, participated in the 2024 Conference of the Peace and Justice Studies Association at Niagara University, with a panel entitled “Shapes of (post-)conflict in Colombia: an intersectional approach.”
Panel: Shapes of (post-)conflict in Colombia: an intersectional approach
In 2016, the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army; in Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo, FARC–EP or just FARC) signed a Peace Agreement after over fifty years of violent conflict. This agreement conceived a series of mechanisms that integrate the Comprehensive System of Truth Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition, designed to ensure sustainable peace. These mechanisms included strategies focused on land restitution, memorialization, monetary compensation, apologies, symbolic gestures, and three temporary institutions: The Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition Commission (CEV), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), and the Unit for the Search of Persons Presumed Disappeared in the Context or Due to the Armed Conflict (UBPD).
In this panel, we explored how Colombian society has shaped the understanding of conflict through intersecting memory, art, gender, information, and the construction of territory and environment while clinging to diverse and place-specific notions of peacebuilding after the peace agreement. Natalia presented the case of the communities of Tierralta, Córdoba, who got involved in a conservation project led by the Colombian government as part of the implementation of point 1 of the 2016 Peace Agreement (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform). Laura presented three ethical concerns in the flow of information in Truth Commissions, using the case study of the Testimonial Volume in The Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition Commission. Ruth presented the potential of art to enable sensibilization and promote the creation of representations of intersectionality through the case of the artworks created as a result of the implementation of the Peace Agreement, deepening in the space and counter-monument Fragmentos, conceived by the artist Doris Salcedo.
Flow of Information in Truth Commissions. Case study: Testimonial Volume in the Colombian Truth Commission by Laura Cortés-Rico
Societies transitioning from periods of violent conflict towards more peaceful futures use mechanisms of Transitional Justice (TJ) that involve diverse intersectional groups and tackle various aspects of the conflict. One relevant mechanism is Truth Commissions (TC), as temporary, non-judicial bodies that take a victim-centered approach to investigate patterns of violence and human rights violations in the specific context and time of the conflict they are committed to. In this presentation, Laura considered the case of the Colombian Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition Commission (CEV) as a sociotechnical system that implied intricate flows of information, circulating large amounts of qualitative and quantitative data in various formats, from oral testimonies to structured databases, with the complex goal of delivering “truth.”
Laura concentrated on the production of the Testimonial Volume in the CEV as an innovative deliverable that included the direct, albeit mediated, testimonies by different actors of the conflict between the FARC-EP, the state, and other armed groups in the middle of civilian society between 1964 and 2016. This book had as its fundamental axis the question of how violence became constitutive of daily life. Laura presented three concerns that arose from her approach to the Testimonial Volume production process, together with some reflections on the design of information technologies in Truth Commissions involving large amounts of testimonial data.
First is the portability trap. The United Nations states, referring to TJ mechanisms, that “We must eschew one-size-fits-all formulas and the importation of foreign models, and, instead, base our support on national assessments, national participation, and national needs and aspirations.” (UN, 2004). However, following this statement through the lens of information technology is challenging. Most models, like those of Natural Language Processing, come from different contexts, and temporary institutions like the CEV lack sufficient time to tailor these models to specific contextual needs. To briefly illustrate this trap, the CEV faced substantial limitations with automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) due to their difficulties in accurately recognizing Spanish out of standard forms and including paralinguistic features in transcriptions, which are central to testimonial voices.
The second concern refers to automation. Information that flows through a TJ mechanism is cognitively exhausting and emotionally shocking. In addition, the listening work in the CEV Testimonial Volume was primarily human because the reliability of the systems was not enough for this task. Since this hearing was essentially human, what ethical concerns are raised when listening turns into labor? To what extent do hearing agents automate testimonial listening? How do we use machines to support the listening to testimonial voices?
Third, we have the absences. The Testimonial Volume’s commissioner, Alejandro Castillejo, and the rest of the team argue that silence is a legitimate form of testimony. If silence can act as testimony, then should absences in other forms of register also be considered as ways of bearing testimony? Information processing traditionally confronts absence through avoidance. The elimination of absences often occurs through statistical techniques, such as filling out missing data with the most likely values based on other features or prior knowledge. When the probabilistic filling is overly complex or speculative for a record, the register is usually excluded from the dataset to allow the system to correctly process the rest of the data. But how can we reframe the design of information systems to recognize missing data not as problematic but as informative?
Political Art: Creative expressions from the Peace Agreement by Ruth Martínez-Yepes
Ruth examined the relationship between art, society, and politics through the work of Colombian scholars who analyzed the impact of art practices on building memory in the context of armed conflict.
First, Dr. Elkin Rubiano wrote that political art aimed to touch, activate, raise awareness, or move emotionally and how, in Colombia, art engaged with the armed conflict through a myriad of expressions that shaped the roles of artists and communities. Second, the author Susana Botero Cifuentes pointed out that creative processes reconstructed identities affected by conflict, fostering awareness and offering alternatives to violence. Finally, Ruth mentioned the work of Álvaro Medina and María Malagon, who defined three historical phases of Colombian art: Bipartisan Violence (1940–1960), Revolutionary Violence (1960–1980), and Narcotized Violence (1980–1990). From the 2000s onward, Rubiano observed a shift in conflict representation, as the paramilitary demobilization efforts allowed artists to create new dialogues with victims, territories, and symbolic reparation efforts.
Afterward, Ruth discussed artistic processes that contributed to transitional justice from an intersectional perspective, focusing on memory construction and peacebuilding efforts. She highlighted examples related to the Final Peace Agreement signed between the FARC and the government, which aimed to “end the conflict and begin building a stable and lasting peace.” The agreement included the surrender of firearms and ammunition by the armed group for the creation of three artistic monuments. Two were completed between 2017 and 2019, while the third remained uninitiated.
One was the sculpture “Kusikawsay,” located in the garden of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Created by Chilean artist Mario Opazo, exiled during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, the artwork represented a canoe made from steel armaments emerging from the grass, symbolizing the Colombian rivers and the nation’s progress towards peacebuilding. The monument, installed in 2019, was officially inaugurated in July 2024 during a visit by Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro to New York. Diego Tovar, a Farc signatory of the tranquility agreement and a member of the peace agreement’s verification commission (CSIVI), accompanied him. The International Center for Transitional Justice described this as “a powerful gesture, honoring the bilateral nature of the peace deal.
The work of Doris Salcedo, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists, is known for exploring collective memory, mourning, and absence. Salcedo’s project Sumando Ausencias (“Adding Absences”) was a response to the rejection of the Colombian peace agreement referendum in 2016. Citizens came together to sew 1,900 pieces of cloth, each bearing the name of a victim of Colombia’s armed conflict in ashes, to cover Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar. This intervention symbolized mourning and questioned the political institutions surrounding the plaza, emphasizing the loss and absence caused by the armed conflict making visible the trauma endured by thousands of families. Mieke Bal, a scholar on Salcedo’s art, described her work as a “counter-monument” that constructs memory while resisting the silence surrounding violence.
In 2017, Salcedo created Fragmentos with architect Carlos Granada, transforming surrendered FARC weapons into a reflective museum space. The building’s floor, made from 37 tons of melted armament, was crafted collaboratively by twenty women survivors of sexual violence. Their hammering of metal sheets created a surface symbolizing pain and hope. Salcedo envisioned the space as a place for public dialogue, enabling society to confront the memories of conflict and work toward reconciliation. By intertwining memory and participation, Fragmentos is also a counter-monument that offers a vision of peace and collective healing through the reflection on shared trauma.
A bonus: The painful history of the Love Canal
Luella N. Kenny, a mother, a victim, a survivor and an activist in the tragic history of the Love Canal, guided us to this place at Lewiston, NY, to share her testimony, which we briefly present here. The name of this location originates from William T. Love’s failed “Model City.” Love envisioned a model community built around inexpensive power generation through a canal connecting the upper and lower Niagara Rivers. However, his plan ultimately failed, and he abandoned the site. His dream became a nightmare that started when the Hooker Chemical Company (HCC) bought this zone in 1920 and dumped more than 21.000 tons of chemical waste in the canal during the subsequent decades. In 1953, when there was no more place for chemical toxics, the HCC buried the waste and sold the place to the local school district for 1 dollar.
After nearly 20 years of living with the toxic chemicals underground, in the 1970s, public awareness arose. Unexplained illnesses and deaths, alongside chemicals leaching into homes and schools, galvanized the local community, particularly the women. After years of the community being unheard and having their claims diminished by local and federal governments, in 1978, for the first time, the US federal government declared a federal state of emergency stemming from a man-caused environmental disaster. However, their response was limited to the central areas, referred to as the first and second rings. Places in the third ring, while still affected by contamination, remain largely ignored even today. The cancer rates in the zone are higher, and many families continue to live there, allowing their children to play nearby, with a playground located right next to the enclosed area.
We heard Luella’s testimony in front of long fences with private property signs warning people to not trespass, without explicitly saying the reasons.
Luella looked at what once was the space where her kids and the community used to spend time for recreation 40 years ago. Luella reflected on her experiences with various institutions that attempted to downplay or overlook the challenges faced by the residents of Love Canal. Together with other concerned mothers and housewives, she helped organize efforts to collect information and testimonies that substantiated their experiences. Despite facing skepticism and being labeled as overly emotional “hysterical housewives,” they pursued thorough research on the impact of the chemicals contaminating their community. Initially, the New York Department of Health deemed their findings invalid; however, the subsequent investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the data collected by Luella and her fellow community members. Nowadays, Luella Kenny is still advocating and working to raise awareness of the non-isolated history of the Love Canal disaster; as she states: “My mantra is that no other child will die because of corporate irresponsibility.”
Recommended documentary:
Poisoned Ground: the tragedy at love canal