Cartography of Forced Disappearance in Colombia

For those of us who have accompanied the resistances in Colombia for decades, the amount of terror is immeasurable. Once thousands of testimonies have been heard, when people have walked the paths of pain, when the stories have already been written, the emotions depicted and the silence portrayed ... there seems to be no good way to explain what, despite having an explanation, does not want to be understood.

The complex conflicts that penetrate the Colombian reality have historical roots and colonial and postcolonial explanations that no expert would find strange. ‘War’ can be a scant concept to describe the reality of the country. Other words or terms, such as violence, territorial control, oligarchy, illicit markets, mafia, revenge or organised crime, are nothing more than vectors of an extremely degenerate reality in which the ways of producing pain, fear and control continue mutating without ever disappearing.

That is why attempting to continue drawing maps that place in its real dimension the mechanisms of terror and death cannot be deemed sterile. These mechanisms have turned the country into a necropolitical laboratory that seems perpetual.

Mapping is not just a trend, but a tool very scarcely used in the past, that now helps to democratise information and localise it in space. This helps to draft working hypotheses to stop these dynamics or, at the very least, resist them with more and better data.

This Cartography of Forced Disappearance in Colombia can be considered as the first issue from a body of work extracted from an immense flow of information available from contradictory sources. It is a first step that will allow, in subsequent work, to pursue specific lines of inquiry. This first exercise which you hold in your hands, already allows you to foresee many of those lines of research. That is why we did not want to close it without showing some of the paths that we intend to pursue.