Mass Violence, Memory and Paths for Justice. The Colombian Case of Unión Patriótica in light of Inter-American Court’s Judgment

The issue of violence seems to be the key to defining and interpreting Colombia’s troubled history. This is also reflected in the extensive scholarly on the causes, the timeline and the methods by which such violence has been perpetuated. In 2016, the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) signed a peace agreement after decades of armed conflict, but violence and land issues continue to pose challenges to the real implementation of the agreement. One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of violence in Colombia is that concerning the extermination of Unión Patriótica, the party born in 1984 after the peace agreement signed by the governement of Belisario Betancur and the FARC. From its debut in the political arena until the 2000s, but especially during the 1980s, the party was the target of a cruel campaign of stigmatization and of a plan of extermination that produced more than six thousand victims. Recently the Interamerican Court issued a ruling in which it recognized the responsibilities of the Colombian state in the plot of violence, including symbolic violence, against the Unión Patriótica party. This essay aims to reconstruct that historical chapter, starting with the reconstruction of the context within which the extermination plan matured, a context of impunity and political terror unleashed against an "internal enemy" seen as something to be eliminated.