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>> Hello everybody. Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And it's really a delight to welcome you here for the first Policy Talks at the Ford School lecture for this which is our 100th year. We are very honored to be joined today by Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar and it's a great pleasure for us to have him here. He has traveled from his post as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia to deliver today's lecture. And bienvenido to Ann Arbor. My Spanish used to be better, I should say.

>> OK.

>> And so, excuse my mispronunciations if so, but we're delighted to have you here. Welcome.

>> Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Well, I'll have the opportunity to introduce Alejandro more fully in just a moment but I did want to just give a couple of minutes on how special it is and how remarkable it is to have him here in particular for this first Policy Talks during our centennial year. For the past 100 years, our school has trained students to train--to study local as well as global issues. And as you may not know, our first international students matriculated in 1925. One of them was from the Philippines and two of them were from China. Sometimes I do wonder as we think a lot about our community now. Today, I do wonder what their experience was like and how they felt being part of our very closely connected small community as few of very small international student group. But they did come and they studied and they graduated and I hope they made some wonderful friendships along the way. After they graduated, they went back to their home countries to serve the public. One of them went on to represent his district in the national legislature, another one served as a mayor of a vibrant economic trading port. Well, these days, as you can see, we're much, much more diverse and we're really proud of our diversity. Our public policy students hail from 14 different nations at the moment and they enrich our program in so many ways with their perspectives, their personal experiences, their passions, and all that they bring to the Ford School. About a quarter of Ford School students intern outside of the United States each year and about another 20 percent intern with the US-based organization that deals with international issues. And I can say that it is in many ways truly, a much, much more global community, and I hope a more welcoming community with far more understanding of international issues and a deep thirst to understand those issues better. And so, we've really been enthusiastically awaiting Alejandro's visit and this lecture this afternoon. I should mention that his visit would not have been possible without the tireless work of our friend and colleague, Yazier Henry who is here with us in the front, who is an eminent human rights scholar of course in his own right who came here to the Ford School and has--from South Africa and has been part of our community since 2007. I should also mention that today's Policy Talks is named for Joshua Rosenthal. Josh was a 1979 graduate of the University of Michigan. He spent his senior year here at our school before going on to earn a master's in public policy from Princeton. Josh was passionate about world affairs and he worked in the field of international finance. He died in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th in 2001. Josh's mother, Marilynn Rosenthal, was a long time Michigan faculty member and it was very important for her to shape positive meaning out of what happened on 9/11 and to honor her son's optimism about the world and his understanding of how mutual understandings, dialogue, and analysis can improve communities both in the United States and beyond our borders and that really was where this lecture series was born. Marilynn and others established the Josh Rosenthal Education Fund which enables the Ford School to encourage new and deeper understandings of international issues. I know that Josh's aunt, Harriet Burke, is here in the audience today and we're delighted to have her with us. And Josh's cousin Suzanne Waller is watching the event via live webstream. So, we're very grateful for your family's ongoing support and it's really truly an inspiration for us. Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

Marilynn Rosenthal died in 2007 but I know she would have been so pleased to see the Ford School welcome world renowned international human rights scholar, Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar. Referring to him as world renowned is not just honorific. He has taught in many prominent universities in the United States, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Latin America and in Africa. And so, has really been engaged in communities all over the world. In 2006, he was awarded the Stanley Diamond Memorial Award in Social Sciences and in 2010, the Angel Escobar Foundation Award in the Social Sciences. His research interests focus on the anthropology of violence and his expertise in this difficult area has been sought by several world governments. In 2002, he was a consultant to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in 2010, to the Colombian National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation and The Historical Memory Group. He was also charged with the task of writing the official proposals on behalf of the National Conference of Victims of Forced Disappearances to the peace processes in Havana. And his extraordinary work with communities' testimonies to violence in Colombia and abroad inform the lecture that we will hear today. He expressed his eagerness to take questions from the audience following his remarks and at around 4:40, our staff will be walking through the aisles to collect the cards, I hope that all of you received a card and encourage you to put questions that you have for Alejandro to be picked up there. Yazier Henry will select questions along with two of our students, Patricia Padilla and Juliana Pino, so welcome to them as well. Both Patricia and Juliana have lived and studied in Colombia which is our speaker's home and will help to facilitate the Q&A session. If you're watching online, please submit your questions via Twitter and use the hashtag Policy Talks. And so, with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Alejandro to the podium.

[ Applause ]

Oops.

>> It looks like--Hello. Well, good evening to everyone. I want to thank--first of all, I want to thank the organizers, Dean Collins. My colleague and friend, Yazier Henry whom I know for some time now and I'm happy to, as we say, recognize and acknowledge this friendship of intellectual character as well, and the school in general for the opportunity to talk and to be honored to be here as well. It's been a while since I have--since I spoke English last time, so please excuse my--yeah, my accent. I mean, I'm not anymore ashamed of my accent but sometimes I just. So, for today I had this kind of question, I was thinking what could I bring to this table when I have the--when the problems in Colombia can be so complex and the histories can be so interesting as well. I understand that not everybody here is an expert in this country, so I decided basically to write something that I brought to make it easier for me to develop myself in the argument that I want to make. And basically, it has to do with the work that I have been doing with the organizations around the country. Thinking in--now in the country there is an interest in organizing a truth commission and my sense is, based on the experiences that I have had in other parts of the world, a truth commission will require certain--I would say certain changes, certain new types of investigation, certain concepts. So, what I brought was idea of developing the concept at least of historical injury, something that I think should be included in this commission if it happens in the end. So, what I'm--I will read basically the text, it's a rather short text, I hope. And I will take--we will take questions and we'll do something later on. So, the text is called--I have to take off my glasses by the way. The text is called, On the Politics of Historical Injuries: Colombia's Struggle for Peace and Memory. In this lecture, my voice operates as a resonance device. My intention today is to pose a question as I express a kind of skepticism that I have come to nurture with others, intellectuals, survivors, and activists in many places. I speak not only as a scholar but also as someone whose family ties and life has been entwined, perhaps in small ways with the history and politics of my country. In this lecture, I would like to provide a few thoughts on the importance, not only in Colombia but in other national cities as well, of dealing with the structural forms of violence, political conflict, and chronic inequality in times of transitions. I will do so by--I will do so using a number of vignettes and excerpts from my ethnographic notes in Colombia. In trying to explore these broad topics in recent years, my work has concentrated on the social interactions that emerge as a result of the implementation of a series of laws in the country, particularly, the Ley de Justicia Y Paz or Peace and Justice Act and the Victim's Law, the Ley de Victimas. Broadly speaking, my perspective on these legal instances is based on the idea that they create very concrete realms of everyday life that frame and define the meanings of harm, of collective pain, of the past, and I would even say of the future as well. In this regard, we're looking at the workings of certain institutional practices, these everyday oscillate between highly ritualized and technical series of procedures, implemented by bureaucracies, and more informal social spaces where historical narratives are produced, legitimated, and circulated through different channels and technologies of reproduction. In the following five vignettes, I want to delve in to the connections between violence and temporality, and in to what is unsaid render structurally unspoken or unintelligible in these spaces of the law. But before I turn to them, allow me a brief detour to situate myself. First vignette and I will just every time I will--every vignette has a title so I will also of course read it. First vignette, Fracture and Continuity. The ways in which societies have experienced different forms of violence has been at the forefront of a number of academic and political debates in recent decades. The idea of transitional justice and the complex network of legal and extra legal mechanisms for dealing with the causes and effects of human rights violations is based on at least two basic assumptions, from my point of view. On the one hand, it is grounded in the promise and the prospect of what I called an imagined new nation. And secondly, it is also grounded in the very possibility of assigning violence a place behind relegating it to reclusion of the past. In other words, as societies move forward, violence is left behind this liminal space where societies seem to break time between the old and the new is a kind of betweenness. In a kind of betweenness is where the social imagination of the future begins to take shape. However, in countries where political conflict, structural and longstanding economic inequalities have determined peoples' life, this promise poses a series of critical questions. Is it possible to think of transitions as a kind of "continuity" with the past rather than the rupture in which they are often presented? How can these continuities be identified and how do they determine the fate of politics in the present? In other words, how can chronic hunger or historical injustices be healed if that is possible? In this sense, critics of this transitional paradigm have pointed out the difficulties of conceiving the prospect of a post violence future in countries where political and economic hegemonies have been and continue to be historically rooted. How can a sustainable peace be accomplished if, as in Columbia, the historical and structural causes of internal conflict remain unresolved? Could this situation constitute the seedbed for future conflicts? It seems to me that identifying these tensions is essential, not only to understanding the possibilities of a long-term peace but also to grasping how individuals and broader communities interconnect larger historical processes and personal experiences in an effort to create a future. As an anthropologist, I explore these questions in Colombia from the perspectives of the daily workings of this paradigm and these mechanisms. In fact, a history of the social spaces under legal, geographic, productive, and even sensory devices that come as a product of the application of what I call generality speaking laws of national unity and reconciliation. These social spaces are characterized by a series of ensemble of institutional practices, expert knowledge and global discourses that interact in a particular social world--in a particular social and historical context to deal with gross violations of human rights. I compound all of these issues under the idea of transitional scenario. It is precisely the tensions between fracture and continuity and the technological process through which the old and the new emerge in a particular juncture that interest me the most. In these spaces, certain experiences of victimhood, of survival become unintelligible by the current institutional discourses. This is what I would like to highlight today. As I speak with victims around the country as part of my work, I realize that when facing the unimaginable tomorrow, sorry for the complication here, as a society will have it a kind of illusion. When I say illusion, I mean the following. In English, the etymology of the noun illusion evokes, deceit, deception due to a fantastic plan or desire, a false perception or a trick of the senses hence, the term "illusionist," someone who performs a trick to devise [phonetic] the eye. However, in other languages, like Spanish or Italian or French, illusion when used as a verb, ilusionarse we'd say in Spanish, singular, or ilusionarnos, plural, also evokes the act of building one's hopes up or entertaining or harboring expectations and getting excited about something like a future plan, a project, a new situation. Depending on the narrative context of a particular turn of phrases, its meaning is closer to the idea of an expectation created by the prospect of new possibilities and realities. It revolves more around the prospect of forward-looking perspective rather than the deceitful, phantom-like aspect of an illusion. Here, I retain both of these connotations, blending the Latin etymologies, the ambiguities, and the simultaneous sense of fracture and continuity associated with these uses in other languages. Now, it seems to me that in Colombia, as the negotiation process advances in Havana, we face the possibility of ilusionarnos as the discussion of historical reconstruction and memory is sealed on the negotiating table at this point. The process seems to be moving forward. In fact, a truth commission investigated not only the fate of the disappeared and the assassinated but also, the historical responsibility of the state or guerillas will be the most likely future scenario, and I hope so. However, in this context, I am more interested in highlighting how certain victims, forms of victimhood problematize the dividing line of the old and the new, one of the illusions in times of transitions. I will do so then now in the following two sections or vignettes. First, I want to recall the story of an indigenous woman and acknowledge the possibility of rethinking the connections between violence and temporality. Secondly, I will explore how structural forgetfulness was inscribed on the procedures of the justice and peace process. Now, an excerpt from my field notes I took in Colombia in order to develop the idea of historical injuries. Second vignette, The Ethics of Listening. Julia's Story, I gather fragments of her life due to the series of interviews and conversations I conducted between 2001 and 2013 as part of a larger research project on the impacts of the Justice and Peace Act. I want to unravel as I listened to bits and pieces of her life the semantic density of the words used by this indigenous woman in order to highlight the existence of forms of violence that lie beyond the conceptual architectures put in place by official truth-seeking mechanisms. In general, I am concerned with the ways violence is mediated through language. Not only the mediations embodied by a survivor's testimony but also the mediations established by the institutional procedures. The conversation in question echoes other voices and other encounters I have had in recent years with people who have shared their experiences of terror with me. She has allowed me to relate her story today. And I open quote in this case. Julia is a married woman. She initially had two children, Paula and Leon who is 15 years old and suffers from leukemia. Several years ago, when she was 27, Julia and her daughter Paula, who was only 5 years old at the time, were raped by paramilitaries somewhere in the southern parts of the country. Julia became pregnant as a result of the rape and was so desperate that she thought of having an abortion at one point. But eventually, she gave birth to a baby girl who is now nine years old who--Sorry, nine years old. As could be expected, Julia feels all kinds of ambiguities with regards to the child who reminds her of the abuse she suffered. Life and death coexist together for Julia since Clara's birth for the baby was, in more than one sense, an unwanted human being. On the other hand, her son had an incurable disease. In a different way, life and death also coexisted in his body. Julia ran away after the rapist threatened her when she took the case to the police before she knew she was pregnant, a decision which turned out to be a fatal mistake. She later abandoned her husband and was forced to move to the dusty southern outskirts oh Bogota's endless localities, slum neighborhoods that filled the hilly landscape barely observable from the privileged parts of the city, sometimes. She still lives there in a tiny hidden away space and feeds her children by selling cigarettes on an urban bus at 10 US cents a piece. Her husband eventually found her and discovered that she had given birth to a child who had--who he embraced in times as one of his own. However, Julia still lives today in abject, chronic poverty. One day, a close friend of Julia told me laconically, and I open quote, the problem in Colombia paradoxically is that the state has no way to repair this woman's life. There is no mechanism to repair this person's life, end quote. Last time, I asked about Julia, a neighbor told me her sick youngster was into drugs and gangs. It seems she decided to run away--sorry, it seems she decided to return to the south but it looks like she hasn't been able to, the woman said. Third vignette, Violence and Temporality. Julia's history is indeed a series of profound tragic events. Her experience is an example of sexualized power exerted over an indigenous woman by men carrying guns, an example of her body quite literally taken as a territory of war and her personal subjectivity as a battle trophy in the context of so called arm conflict. Of course, there are institutional programs devised to accompany rape victims, however, her situation is, as an indigenous leader once told me, more broadly the product of a larger history, our wider temporality that exceeds current debates and technocratic approaches to memory, to reparations, and justice. Hers is the story of the exclusion and historical inequality of indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in this country. Her body is a repository of this palimpsest. Inequality is the product of economic exploitation and the exploitation of difference too. Julia inhabits a form of victimization that however immediate and concrete falls beyond the legal epistemologies that inform and even determine the debates in Columbia on the nature of violence itself. Her experience speaks more to forms of violence that are not perceived as such and therefore, cannot be repaired, either because they are situated by the current political establishment in a remote, neutralized past or because they are softly dressed in the robes of national unity and reconciliation that force a society to look to the future "to turn the page" and "to leave the past behind." However, bodies and subjectivities emaciated by the daily carvings of permanent and systemic need reminds us of an ever present past. In short, her story is that of an indigenous woman living in a situation of chronic misery embodying chronic silence, I would say. In part, the tragedy was not only the sexual abuse with all the destruction that this conveys, of course, but also the structural conditions that allow the abuse to happen in the first place as well. Rape has been historically chronic. The kind of violence she embodies are so multifarious, localized in a set of multiple spaces, geographical, bodily, imaginary, existential, and sensorial, and temporalities simultaneously in the historical colonial past and the ever present past that in Colombia the State employing the current discourse on healing does not know how to repair. That was a long phrase. In the end, how is chronic hunger repaired? Yes. Thank you.

[ Pause ]

Thank you. In the end, how is chronic hunger repaired? In other words, how can the violence of structures--I'm sorry. How can the violence that structures every day or the everyday almost to the point of being rendered invisible be healed? Furthermore, is it possible to conceive of a violence that simultaneously structures and de-structures the realm of the everyday existence? Might it be possible to speak of harm as an accumulative phenomenon over the course of centuries, for example, a kind of existential palimpsest in which layers of collective suffering entwine? In this context and from the viewpoint of historically destitute communities in Colombia or South Africa or Central America for whom violence is grounded in longer temporalities in a certain register that don't necessarily experience transitions as ruptures. In fact, for them, it represents a different chapter in the history of violence of civilization in which land expropriation, culture and a literal genocide by different mechanisms and the theft of wealth and strategic resources speak of a continuum rather than a cleavage. To what extent do these injuries also become historical erasures, how do they both play out in the politics of the present? Fourth vignette, Bureaucracy and Testimony. Now, how are these historical silences produced in the present? How do they become institutionalized even when truth-seeking mechanisms like the ones triggered by the Ley de Justicia y Paz or Justice and Peace Law are implemented? Let me now turn to the technical certification of harm in Colombia as a way to delve further ethnographically into the previous questions. In 2005, the law 975 or the law of Justice and Peace Law, the legal framework in charge of administrative demobilization of members of paramilitary groups was implemented. I am not interested in commenting in such a complex process at this point except to say that according to the law, members of paramilitary groups would obtain "legal benefits" or reduced sentences in exchange for admitting their criminal acts. At the beginning of the justice and peace process, these admissions were rendered by way of a procedure known as free depositions or more literally free versions, versiones libres in Spanish, in which, paramilitaries tell the national prosecuting authority their versions of events, mainly all types of criminal acts. In the end, the voice of perpetrators play center stage and in some cases, trigger low-level corroboration mechanisms. As a scholar, I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to observe one of the procedures established by the law. One in particular, a special investigation commission consisting of a team of forensic investigators, criminal profilers, topographers, representatives from the Fiscalia or National Prosecution Authority, lawyers, army, special forces, offices from the National Penitentiary Institute and one paramilitary commander whose, code name was Alpha. I was an observer playing the role of a forensic historiographer, as I term my own involvement there. The purpose of those--of these or those 15-day long traveling commission which due to serious security risks took almost one year to organize was to cut across the southern state of Meta from the Sitio of Villavicencio to Puerto Gaitan and Mapiripan, a small town in the south of the country, in order to locate mass graves, to reconstruct the region's historical memory, and to certify the impact of these paramilitarism. I call this process peripatetic memorialization, by the way. Logistically speaking, the commission organized several micro itineraries within the overall activities in the region in order to gather stories of war from different communities. These stories were intended to legally certify the occurrence of violent and criminal incidents and their effects on people's life. A protocol was used to collect information about specific cases. During these encounters, communities were asked to give detailed accounts of events such as the murder of a family member. However, what is interesting about this process is that it resembled a surgical procedure that allows all forms of violence to emerge while others disappear. It implanted, in a way, a structural forgetfulness. In other words, what happens when testimonies cannot be easily classified according to the illegal categories established by the Justice and Peace Law? Let met tell you the story of one of such forensic encounters when the fiscalia or the district attorney visited the Wakoyo indigenous community as it would help to illustrate this erasure. One afternoon, a representative of the fiscalia came to the resguardo, a special autonomous political and administrative unit recognized by the state, and asked for a certain family in order to inquire into the circumstances of their son's death more than a decade ago. To begin, the fiscalia people had to adapt to the collective performance of this telling, whereas they had been expecting a semi-legal face-to-face question and answer interview. The old man, who was the authority figure within the family group, spoke while the other members listened and assented. There was a certain social division of speaking in place in the telling process that the investigators didn't seem to recognize. Thus, a kind of silence was stalled during the procedure itself as officially recorded on video, audio under protocol reflecting the person's perspective of history. This was accentuated when the man was asked to speak in general of the history of violence. The interviewees he had--The interviewers had the circumstances of his son's killing in their mind, but he centered their narrative on apparently unrelated anecdotal information. The investigating team was used to--was not used to such extended narratives since they were trained to listen to something entirely different. The three-hour tour de force carried out in a barely audible Spanish rather than in the community's own Piapoco or Sikuani languages tells the story of a systematic displacement and persecutions that they have endured since the time of their grandparents, generations before the events they are asked to describe. From the very beginning, his history deviated from the legal categories inherent to the fiscalia's investigation. Its historical depth had nothing to do with the time and the space coordinates implicit in a criminal investigation. These narratives could not be easily translated into standard four months design for collecting information. From the viewpoint of the officials the witness "spoke too much, a lot" but not the way the interviewers needed to hear. They require concrete legal facts about the ways in which paramilitary operations, massacres, and disappearances, affected individuals under communities. Contrary to what they expected of him, the narrator jumped from one period to the next in a seemingly erratic way reaching back several decades and infusing the story he was telling with great authority. The elder was in fact a very skilled speaker. The community grouped around him as visitors coming from the surrounding area sat down to listen to what he had to say. Dozens of children hover all over the place as many men and women gathered to listen in a kind collective ritual of mutual recognition. Surrounded by the most basic material conditions and obviously anemic children, it is difficult not to see the evidence of chronic and historical poverty. Nevertheless, for the prosecutor leading the inquiry commission, this social setting was almost unintelligible. The elder's narrative did not speak of recent death, murders of the--or displacements, although they lurked there in the background. He dealt with historical persecution instead. In fact, when I was looking around the compound, I clearly saw the ever present traces of this history. The dismal living conditions and the abandoned toilets that had been donated as acts of charity, traces of so called development projects and promises of a better world. Some officials, however, saw what they imagined to be the meaning of culture, ancestral customs, and even an expression of "primitive nature" of these communities in this particular social landscape. Later in the afternoon, in order to speak with greater clarity about paramilitary violence, it was necessary to look for a "expert," "specialist" from within the community who could speak the language of justice and peace, the language of the state. And who would be able render this testimony comprehensible to the legal bureaucrats. The story told by the old man was literally beyond the possibility of being put on record since it would not be tabulated and consequently could not be turned into evidence. It is a violence not certifiable. In the end, the psychologist conducting the meeting scratched the following conclusion loosely on the protocol page. After listening to another family member recounting the case, I open quote again. Name of the victim Alfredo Sicuani. Date of event, May 2003. Type of event, picked up by paramilitaries and killed, end quote. The rest of the elder's story was legally irrelevant. For the record, let me say that I understand the importance of clarifying these events but it is also important to highlight the shortcomings, the structural silences inherent to these procedures. The investigative team requires specific information and did everything in its power to cleanse the story and the history of, allegedly, unnecessary biographical narrative or apparently subjective information. What were the connections anyway, one of them asked me, between the persecutions and literal hunting of the indigenous communities by large landowners seven decades ago with the murder of their son few years ago? The nature of the spoken word resulted on comprehensible utterances for the state bureaucrat, it needed to be domesticated. A word or two before I finish on this last term seems necessary, domestication because I do speak of the domestication of testimonies. As we know, the verb domesticate has a double etymology as well, again. Don't--Not only does it conjure up the idea of bringing under control or converting animals to domestic use by overpowering them but also to accustom to home life or to adapt to an environment. The term evokes the possibility of rendering familiar or bringing home into the private family sphere that which is perceived as otherness. Power, control, and homeliness inhabit this term. Of course, in Latin domus and in Greek doma, that's the origin. To domesticate is to render familiar. One of the underlying argument is what I would--is what I have just described--I'm sorry, one of the underlying arguments in what I have just described is that, broadly speaking, testimonies of victims of violence are brought by way of different mechanisms into the familiar world, but also into domesticity. In other words, experiences, and this is what I would like to stress, are render intelligible by the workings of institutional language as power. One way to bring them into confine--to bring them into and confine them to the realm of domesticity is to install an epistemological silence around certain forms of violence that play out in particular ways in specific historical experiences. Beyond the specificities of the meeting held during the time of the investigation, the fact is that the justice and peace processes created concrete, historically informed scenarios involving different actors. There may well be a distance between the vision presented by public servants and the experiences of violence, what I again call historic injuries, expressed by an old indigenous man. These experiences are explained by a younger generation of family members who have a greater understanding of the official internationalized language of truth, justice and reparations. Despite the surgical extraction of testimony, it still appears to float in the air with no greater meaning other than to illustrate the history of war. What is clear is that a new generation of leaders has emerged, many of whom have already been targeted for persecution by the way, who have understood and adapted strategically to the language of the state. On final thought, an exploration of the ways, words, and testimonies inhabit these frameworks, requires an examination of how technical processes like the one mentioned above produce and reinforce a series of silences that paradoxically emerged at the very moment of their enunciation in language. During testimony, the semantic density or what is narrated is subject to this cursive pressure and theoretically--and the theoretical limitations that defined the nature of the word and what is intended to convey. In these pages, I have attempted to understand the pressure by which the truth of the other, the violence imposed on a woman's body, or the language of a man's words, are trapped in epistemic violence again. Although these lines--along these lines, I have not only dealt with what is frequently uttered or testified in the context of transitional scenarios, but also connected to the kinds of absences unspoken and uncanny that elude the currently hegemonic troves [phonetic] of trauma and human rights. Silence is, in its own right, an articulation of experience and as such, it requires a particular form of calibration, sensibility, and engagement from the listener. Perhaps even an ethics of listening. In trying to grasp the multiple dimensions of harm through different mechanisms, certain languages of pain and suffering instituted by state sponsor laws under daily workings may fail to render intelligible the structural and the historical dimensions of harm there are at the root of conflict itself. This implies a series of data-collecting practices in which words and testimonies are inscribed and framed. As explained earlier, it is through this domestication that the word of the other is in a way made familiar. When concrete forms of violence are left out of the archive in its traditional sense or fall beyond the contours defined by what I have referred to transitional scenario, spaces where concepts of victimhood, history, and memory are negotiated. The questions regarding sustainability of peace following internal conflicts emerge. To what extent are they likely to be reasons for future confrontation, the seeds for future violence? Peace is not only laying down arms, it's also taking this temporal scale, this violence of structures of inequality into consideration to move forward at a different society or to a different society. Let me close now with a quote from the latest meeting of the indigenous leaders in Colombia some time ago. And I quote the taita in this regard. "If national and local governments are genuinely interested in contributing by providing fair and constructive reparation, they must begin to recognize that the injury caused to the aboriginal peoples has occurred over a long period of time, and that it is not enough to simply count the number of recent victims, or to quantify the cash payments that have been offered in compensation for the material damaged cost." And I want to thank you, that would be all.

[ Applause ]

So how should we proceed now?

>> Hello, can everybody hear me?

>> Yes.

>> I'm Juliana Pino, I'm a dual degree student obtaining my Masters of Public Policy in the Ford School and my Masters of Science in Natural Resources and Environment. The first question asks, the Ley de Justicia y Paz, what exactly does it do?

>> The Ley of--wow, interesting question, maybe once we should say what it doesn't do, or what it didn't do. It was meant of course to be the process through which paramilitaries were going to demobilize and in the end, I mean, there has been in Colombia, of course, a debate as to whether that is true or not. But it was supposed to produce, on the one hand to administer this demobilization and on the other hand to sort of clarify through the process itself which included of course the foundation of the National Commission for Reparation and other institutions. It was meant to clarify 30 years of paramilitarism. And in fact, to some extent it did. It did because as far as I can tell, the National Prosecution Authority has 7,000 DVDs recording paramilitaries speaking of their deeds. That is so much information that I think is almost impossible to administer. But yet in the end, despite that, the Justicia y Paz law didn't actually made the connection between the responsibility of officials in the state and paramilitaries themselves. So, in a way it's perceived also like an impunity law for many, I mean, for certain organizations in the country. So I think in some ways it--for me personally, it's a revisionist law. Because in the end, the whole architecture of the law impeded the military forces to be accused of violations of human rights. So in a way, it is a revisionist law. So that's why I say instead of saying what it did because it did some things, of course, I wonder what it didn't do in the end. And it didn't do is clarify a lot of things of 30 or something more years of paramilitarism and the connection with the state as well. That's a complicated topic I have to say.

>> And Alejandro, thank you very much for your lecture. My name is Patricia Padilla, I'm a second year student of the Master in Public Policy. And our second question is, what is the role that the drug trafficking is playing in the current peace process and especially what is the role that it will take in a long-term sustainable peace?

>> Well, the role of the drug trafficking in the current peace process, I have no idea. I mean, the peace process is supposed to break precisely to, I mean, to take up the issue of drug trafficking. In fact, one of the first as we say puntos, one of the first issues that we're discussing, Cuba had to do with the idea of illegal agriculture and the cultivation of drugs in general. And that has to be seen, I mean, there is not much information about that because the process has kept much of the conversations in reality hidden from the public view and I have no access to that. But certainly, from my point of view, the demobilization of the FARC would imply the necessity of restructuring what happens in the countryside. And most likely, they will be working as, I guess, as kind of a law enforcement people if that at the end works out. I mean that's the idea in any case. So, it's difficult to say because it also--has to be also--has to do with the reconstitution of the land owning, has to be also with the idea of what is agriculture in the future of Colombia. What would be the role of different set of activities in the countryside? And that set of activities will be part of the, I guess, of the tensions connected to the drug trafficking and so on. To be in a more sort of pessimistic, I think, I find it very difficult to break somehow, to de-structure the connections with the drug trafficking in general because it's just a new--kind of new structures in place now. And we'll see what happens after the process if that ends up and somebody was asking me yesterday if I was positive with regard to the processes and I always say that after 75,000 people disappear, 50 years of work, I mean, the least I can do is be positive of course. I try to.

>> Thank you. The next question reads, what do you think the effect of the vote in December regarding amnesty for the perpetrators will be on the memory of the victims?

>> The vote on the--Can you explain that question? I don't understand.

>> So the person who asked this question is in the room, I don't know.

>> He's here.

>> Maybe to clarify.

[ Inaudible Remark ]

>>Thank you.

>> Yeah. Just, I know that the vote is happening in December about whether to grant amnesty or to continue to pursue a lot of the perpetrators. And I just want to know like how do you think it's going to affect the peace process and then how in the memory of the victims.

>> The vote in December?

>> Yes. I was told that there is a vote in December regarding the law of justice and peace.

>> Oh, OK. What you--the law justice and peace?

>> I believe so.

>> I don't know. I don't know. There is to be after the process is finished, some people say one year, I mean, being optimistic some people say one year. After the process has been finished, I mean the dialog in Havana, and they come to the conclusion to these points in particular. I mean there are several points that they are debating in Cuba right now. After that happens, there would be a national, let's say vote or a national process through which the--through which the negotiations in Cuba would be formalized, let's say. I don't know if that is what you mean. I don't recall any vote in December this year to be honest, I mean, for-- in regard to the justice and peace law, I don't know. I apologize, I have no idea.

>> Thank you. The next question is, is a Mandela-like approach to reconciliation possible or desirable for Colombia?

>> What I--In regards to South Africa although I lived there for a while to--that's an interesting question. I would say that the difference between--I mean, in Colombia, there is now two currents. One is a public current, if I can use that term, which is let's say interested in peace, interested in finishing conflict. And there is also a counter current who is more interested in war, who is people who is willing to go back precisely to the years of massacres and so on. And I think that in some ways, and I say these very respectfully, especially for the government, I think we still lack the political leadership that is able to move even the people who is against these process to move it even further forward. I think we lack, in some ways, the leadership of somebody like Nelson Mandela who was able to--and who did it of course, who was able to put, to put it in a light way, to put the country on his back and move it forward. I think we don't have that leadership yet. I think we have a lot of, I mean, Colombia now it's a very particular country. You live there, in my case personally, and you have this sense of everything is cool, everything is moving forward, everything is fine. And at the same time you feel that something is going on underneath that you don't really understand what it is and are the currents of war indeed. And I happen to inhabit in the middle of that, so for me it's kind of a complicated issue. But I, you know, in the question with regards to Mandela, I just think, I mean, these are different context, different histories, different conceptions on violence as well, one thing is paramilitarism, in collusion with the state, one is natural resources, petroleum, gold and something else, in South Africa racism, although they might be connected in some ways. So I would say they are two different contexts. However, we lack now I think a more kind of personal leadership that move the country forward and in some ways, make us believe that reconciliation is something in fact possible.

>> Never mind.

[ Inaudible Remark ]

>> Thank you. The next question asks, is peace possible in Colombia and what will be necessary for this possibility in Colombia?

>> Again, that was a question that I--somebody raised yesterday and has two answers for me. One is that I hope that, you know, arms may be laid down, that would be peace in some ways, of course. It's better to not to have arms instead of having them although I don't think necessarily that by demobilizing guerillas is going to be a laying down of arms. The other one, the other topic is that peace is not only guns and bullets. Peace is also justice, social justice and I wonder if after this process ends, we will have a measure of social justice even in 10 years or so. And in that point I tend to be rather pessimistic, I have to say. So it has a double edge to the question.

>> So, the next question came from Twitter and it reads, is domestication a valid argument for leaders who abuse their power?

>> Is domestication--I have no idea. This is another topic. Is domestication a valid argument for?

>> Leaders who abuse their power.

>> I don't really understand.

>> Then pass to the next one.

>> Alejandro, the next question reads, what would you recommend as an alternative process of capturing and preserving information about historical injustice and "illusions" about the future that is less prone to silencing those historical injustices?

>> That is what--I'm sorry?

>> That is less prone to silencing the historical injustices.

>> Well, I think in general, I believe that the country still has to go a long process of historical reconstruction and in fact, I'm writing right now a piece of paper, an article which is going to be published in Argentina next month on the idea of a truth commission in Colombia. I have been a critic--I have been a, let's say, a critic, rather of certain mechanisms but I understand that there is a necessity to do that now. And the only way perhaps is to imagine a different kind of investigation commission that includes precisely these kinds of topics, these kinds of conceptions of harm, these kinds of conceptions of violence, et cetera, et cetera, in a different way. So, still, my sense is that despite the fact that we have had over the last years quite a lot of initiatives related to history and memory, it seems to me that we still have to grapple with quite a lot of events and deeds in the last decades--that had happened in the last decades. I mean, there is a need for historical clarification. And there has to be a larger debate than the one we have right now, which is very institutionalized.

>> Thank you. The next question says, does the Ley de Justicia y Paz take away responsibility from the state and the military? How come the military and the state make reparations for their role sponsoring and assisting in paramilitary activity?

>> That's also a complicated question. I have connections with the military people as well and I have had this conversation with some of them. One of them in fact is a director of the Historical Memory Unit in the Armed Forces. And in the last conversation I told him that the military, in general, and the state, of course in some ways, have to face what had happened over the last 44 decades, that it is impossible that a country moves forward only supposing that the only responsible of conflict and war is only one of the sides. Conflict in itself requires many sides or I don't know if require, but has different sides and I think they have to be--Of course, they have to deal with that. The problem is that the Justice and Peace Law precisely exonerated the state and the military of the process. That's why I say it is a revisionist law and this is a very polemic argument in Colombia to say that the Peace and Justice Law is a revisionist one. So it is a revisionist law because in their structure, the state appears as an administrator of justice and not as a perpetrator, let's say, you don't like to use that word but not as a perpetrator. And in that sense, if we move forward the army would have to face exactly what has happened in the last four decades or so. It makes no sense to remain only as a force of peace which is not necessarily true.

>> Thank you. The next question reads, how do you maintain the integrity of an experience with the limitations of language, voice, and listening? These testimonies become surgically removed and exploited as examples as a type of epistemic violence for use by the state.

>> Well, I have to say that in that way my relationship with the people and the communities that I work, it's a relationship of a collaboration. It's a relationship that it has taken a long time to be built. I have seen other colleagues and other people in other places of the world having perhaps interest in testimonies and interest in the integrity even in good faith, of course, on the integrity of people but what happens is that sometimes and this is a very personal perspective, what happens is that sometimes we pull in front our interest as scholars with a particular rhythm of life, we put that in front and we leave behind the life and the integrity of the life of these people. So--And that happened to me specifically especially in Colombia just a few years ago and South Africa and I do believed that as a researcher of these topics, one has to create longer relationships and collaborative relationships as well. It's the only way, I think in my personal view, that the integrity of people can actually be sustained. Otherwise, I say, we have spoken of this, how academics with all due respect can become also a structure of information, be that testimonies, be that--I don't know, other kinds of information. And communities can actually be very sensitive to that and unless one changes those practices in the way we research, we tend to, I don't know, re-traumatize, we can use that term, re-traumatize the people that we are working with. So in a way, I'm an advocate, if I can say that, I never use that word in this way, wow. I can be an advocate of a more collaborative approach to the story of violence and victimhood in general.

>> The next question says what can be made to make information more reachable for individuals in Colombia so they can be more engaged on building the truth?

>> Well, that's complex. The pages that I read, I'll tell you how I got there. I was one day walking into the district attorney's office in one of the free depositions that I mentioned in the text. And I was trying to listen to one of those sessions because they were close to the public, they were done literally in private, although they appear in the lowest public spaces, they weren't. In order to go there, you had to take--you have to surf through the legal system and as you may know, to do that is--can be quite a tricky issue. So in the end, there is a lot of information but there is also the usual difficulties going through the legal systems and the processes and talking to the people. So a lot of Colombians actually criticize how that process was done. How the peace and justice process was done because although it was presented as a public, in fact it had too many rituals, too many terms, too many complications. And it is indeed very difficult for someone who is not part of the story to try to get some information out of there. As I say, to get just one CD or one DVD from the district attorney is almost impossible. You have to be friends with the district's attorney, with the lawyers, with the bureaucrats in the fiscalia and so on. So, I think in the future, I guess, there has to be--somehow that has--that material has to circulate much more, there has to be other mechanisms to do that but in the present. Also, because what was testified by paramilitaries in some ways troubles still a lot of people there. There are still interests. There are still financial, economic, political interests. So the voices of these people can be very dangerous to circulate. And some say even that that's why the main paramilitary leaders were extradited to the US because they could speak about the connection between paramilitarism and politics. And as they were extradited here, that process of truth-seeking was in a way broken down, so--but, yes.

>> Thank you. The next question reads, doesn't extreme violence tend to make smaller crimes insignificant? How can the Justice and Peace Law differentiate these acts?

>> One of the complexities when I have to speak is to translate number one, all the terminology, the legal terminology. And number two is to take a very broad topic and to put it into various more details. The irony of the peace--of the justice and peace process, I get confused now. The irony of the justice and peace process is that it actually produced a lot of little crimes. In fact, the mass violations of human rights weren't taken into consideration seriously because as the paramilitaries had the will to speak, they would speak whatever they wanted and they would, in any case, they would never recognize their own violations of human rights. So in the end, it's thousands and thousands of gigabytes of little crimes, of course, many other massacres and so on that you spoke about, but the majority of the information is theft, is lesser crimes. Not the crimes of humanity. No one. None of them, I mean, except for some cases would actually recognize the massivity of their--of the--of what they did. So it's quite the opposite.

>> The next question is the recent presidential election show how divided the countries regarding the peace process. As it is being currently conducted, can the process of reconciliation be actually divisive?

>> I'm sorry. Say that again, the last part.

>> Can the process of reconciliation be actually divisive?

>> Divisive.

>> Divisive.

>> Yes. I think so. I think that in Colombia, there is--There are people who still have a--I mean, after 50 years we can say that war is a good business. And there are people who would be interested in continuing the situation maybe because they were connected to the same war situation before and they rather continue like that in order not to be judged, for example. Or because in itself as I was saying, war is a good business and therefore, better--it'd better that way, I mean as long as it doesn't really take--as long as it's a good business, there would be perceptions of the process as something that is not positive. But the reason why it's so divisive is because I think there hasn't been enough information in the end. I mean, so--for some people exaggerating of course, they would say that what is happening in Cuba is that they are breaking down, you know, you take this money, I take this money. I'm the government, you are guerillas. You know kind of a negotiation in the commercial sense perhaps. So this is the view of some people, but I have to say that the people who view that conflict--that particular process with the skepticism tend to be more to the right than to the left, I have to say. So whatever that means because that's kind of a tricky opposition of course. So it is divisive. Again, going back to the topic of before I think it requires a kind of different leadership that moves skepticism in another different direction. And that is what I think is lacking now, although I--my sense is that the process has come to a point in which it's very difficult to turn back. But you never know. In 1992, we're talking yesterday with Yazier the Boipatong massacre in the middle of the processing in South Africa and how that massacre actually almost breaks that process and it didn't because somebody took the country in their hands and move it to another place. So, yeah, that's what I would say.

>> Thank you. The next question reads, many of our students here at the Ford School will work in violent context and with victims, people who have been harmed, what lessons can you share with our students?

>> My God.

>> It's a simple question, I know.

>> Sorry. Well, I don't know. That's a tough question. And it's interesting too. Engagement. I would say long engagements, the commitment to historical understanding. The commitment that people--we deal with people, we don't deal with academia, with numbers, statistics, policies. Policies is of--Policies is people as well. So I would place people before and I would try to understand and that's these--the presence of the--of human beings informs the way I do my work. Informs the way I speak in public. Informs the risks that I take when I do speak in public, not here but in other places, and I would put that in front. I think that's the most important. That's what I would--That's what I teach my students as well and, yeah, people is first and then statistics later perhaps.

>> Thank you. The next question is how, if at all, does there exist solidarity among the indigenous communities in Colombia both intra and international. And as an explanation, the person say, "I'm imagining solidarity resistance to the silencing you discussed."

>> There are indeed social movements around indigenous communities, Afro-Colombian communities. They are in the end also--They are also highly politicized, they are broken down, they have moved around. I mean, something that one has to take into consideration is that all the future development projects, for example, with regard to petroleum, to gas, to, you know, strategic minerals, many of them will be happening in indigenous territories. So they end in a way becoming kind of unnecessary in those territories also. So there is an internal [inaudible] and internal conflict among indigenous communities to how to relate to those future processes. How to relate to the so called post-conflict economy which in the end is an economy, in my sense, I don't know this is--I might be mistaken here, but in the end is going to be an economy based on the expropriations of lands as well. So there is resistance and there are a lot of communities who are in fact rethinking the connection with the state due process precisely to that. And I think there is a lot of work to be done in that particular topic and on the topic of how indigenous communities relate to the state in the context of a post-conflict economy. And the post-conflict economy is an economy that is going to produce more poverty, that's my sense, and I find that profoundly ironical with that, yeah.

[ Pause ]

>> I think we have time for two more questions. And as you can see sorting out these questions is challenging in and of itself. Given your experience, what do you see as the most formidable challenge to adapting truth and reconciliation commissions in context where there have been historical violence? Context, for example, like the US as well where there's a discussion and in many parts of the country on the possible application through questions of historical injustice, reparations in the context of slavery, reparations in the context of indigenous rights movements, you know, is it adaptable? Can a truth commission be of value in addressing such as that? And that's the second to the last question.

>> OK. The--I think it's a step forward instead of not having one. Let's say, I speak from the perspective of someone who is living in--at this particular time juncture in Colombia and I ask myself, should we have a truth commission after years in the case? Even myself, is that case of criticizing the schemes, the structures, the theoretical architectures of that and I have some work on that. And, you know, facing the future, I think they are a step in the right direction. What I am more skeptic is about the idea of the promise that by doing that, we will have a better world, I mean, in some senses we will because it will be a mechanism to change at least some part of the circumstances. But to promise that that would be a radical change, that promise that we will--like in South Africa many years ago then we will overcome historical inequality by applying TJ or transitional justice mechanisms like a truth commission, I think is an--to be honest an exaggeration. And it would have to be a TJ. In fact, transitional justice don't--I don't like that. I prefer rather transformative justice, something more along the lines of what you're asking but I think to put that promise or to put that--such an expectation of that on that promise I think is an exaggeration. And it would require, and this is what I'm writing now precisely, as part of the peace process. It would require a kind of re-conceptualization of what truth and seeking processes really mean. And there is a lot of debate there. Of course, some would rather stick to the model, to the official, international model instead of going into the complicated topics of who is in power, who is--where are wealth--how is wealth distributed, how is it connected with the past, and of course with the future. In South Africa we know perfectly that in the end, the negotiation process was really about politics and you had--I remember you had the expectation, not you but South Africans I met had the expectation that by changing the structure of the state, by changing the political process of course, issues of social justice would be resolved. And now that I'm going to South Africa in November, I'm quite interested to see how--what happened. And my sense is that it didn't really happen, you know? So, yeah. Thank you.

>> Thank you. And the last question is what would be the most important challenge of Colombia if the government signed a peace agreement with the FARC?

>> That's an interesting question too. I often refer to the idea of what is most complicated for us and for societies that have been on their conflicts for many years, is to imagine a society without conflict. I was saying yesterday or maybe this morning to a group of students, I was telling them that my second--as a country, as a nation, my second--last--my last name is political conflict. Whenever I speak I say I'm from Colombia and of coursem, everybody knows political conflict, drug dealers et cetera, et cetera. So in a way that term political conflict is now somehow engraved in our identity. Somehow we've been speaking of this topic for 50 years now. It is impossible to think out of the idea of Colombia without a conflict. So for me the challenge after that, I mean, we can speak of many other more pragmatical challenges of course, but for me the real one but more philosophical, if I may say that, is the very conception of Colombia without conflict. And that is so unimaginable that nobody really understands what we mean a society if the peace processes finally conclude. The other is, of course, a certain idea of thinking that by signing, all these things are going to disappear, that poverty is going to disappear, that violence is going to disappear. That is not the case and it will not happen. It's going to mutate. It's going to be transformed again. And that is going to be in a more pragmatical way the great challenge of that country. I think so.

[ Applause ]

>>Thank you so much, Alejandro. Those were very candid and insightful comments. I would also like to thank our audience for such a wide range of thoughtful questions, both those who were here and those who sent via Twitter. I'd like to encourage you to join us for future Policy Talks. And in particular, let me highlight our keynote event on October 31st as part of our centennial reunion, we will be featuring Freakonomics author Steve Levitt. You will need seating passes for that event and I encourage you to visit our newly designed web page both for information about the October 1st Steve Levitt event, but also about other Policy Talks that are coming up. And we do have a reception just outside of the Great Hall and I invite you to stay and continue the conversation. But before we do that, please join me in a final round of applause. Thank you so much, Alejandro.

[ Applause ]

END