Contextualising the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó’s Demands for Alternative Justice within an Ethnography of their Model of Society

Transitional justice is an important debate in the current climate of peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla. In December 2013, President Santos publically apologised to the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó – a peasant farmer community which declared itself neutral to the armed conflict in 1997 – for stigmatising statements made by his predecessor Álvaro Uribe. This is characteristic of a shift in Colombian politics. The Community has been in ‘rupture’ with the State since 2005, due to a massacre by State forces and paramilitaries, and set four conditions for re-establishing the relationship, of which a presidential statement was one. This talk contextualises this ‘rupture’ within Colombian geopolitics; ethnographises their ideological stance, and proposes implications for the field of transitional justice.

Speaker: Gwen Burnyeat, Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia