Viviendo la Impunidad: State Crime, Impunity, and the Materials of Meaning-Making in Early Post-Accord Colombia
Open AccessThis ethnographic study analyzes the social dimensions of impunity in cases of State crime (defined as grave violations of human rights) in early post-Accord Colombia. Drawing on 27 months of immersive fieldwork centered in Bogotá, I develop the analytic “viviendo la impunidad” (living the impunity) to study impunity empirically as a social process rather than a juridical or institutional matter. Living the impunity is formulated as a dual conception—first of impunity as a palpable experience affecting the lives of those harmed by it (and positioning them as closest to it and most clearly able to perceive its contours) and, second, as a productive social force circuiting through social worlds and generating effects. Working with surviving kin of victims of forced disappearance and the so-called false positive extrajudicial executions, I trace impunity’s presences in the social world through the things—objects, practices, forms of expression, and social configurations—produced in its wake. The study begins with a focus on photographic objects that families reprint, transform, and circulate to demand responses from the State and public about the whereabouts of their loved ones and the reasons they were taken. I argue that these objects diagram the social relations of impunity, concretizing its diffuse and obfuscated operations in the public square. I then turn from spaces of protest to those of redress as families confront dilemmas generated within reparative and redressive initiatives. This analysis sites harm related to grave violations of human rights and impunity in broad systems of meaning-making rather than in victims’ persons. From photographic galleries and banners to symbolic repair workshops and courtroom proceedings, impunity’s multimodal power becomes apprehensible in its movements along various spectra of perceptibility/imperceptibility, presence/absence, and concealment/disclosure—that is, through the logics of camouflage and delineation. Impunity thus is characterized as systematized force relations that are able to circumvent expected requirements to be answerable for the use of force, however those constraints are constituted.
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Richardson_gwu_0075A_16255.pdf | 2023-11-14 | Open Access |
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