Challenging Power through the Colombian Truth Commission Report

Rachel Nolan is a historian of modern Latin America. Her research focuses on political violence, Central American civil wars, childhood and the family, historical memory, and U.S.-Latin American relations. Prior to becoming a historian, Dr. Nolan worked as a journalist. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and El Faro, among other publications.

In her most recent article with the London Review of Books, Dr. Nolan analyzes the 895-page final report of Colombia’s Truth Commission. The Truth Commission was conceived in 2016, as part of a peace agreement between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC guerrillas. Through an exclusive International Relations Review Q&A, learn more about what the report means for the changing balance of power in the Americas:

Bridgette: Can you tell me a bit about your scholarly work leading up to this point? What are the main highlights, and how did your other work lead you to study the Colombian Truth Commission?

Nolan: My background is strange for a historian. I was trained as a journalist first, and I still write more journalistic articles in addition to kind of scholarly work. I worked as a freelance journalist in Mexico for a little while; I worked as a freelance journalist in Germany for a little while. When I returned to do a Ph.D. in history, I looked at my language skills, right? Not just my interests, but what languages I had, German and quite fluent Spanish at that stage. And I thought, “Okay, what are some unanswered questions that I can get at through a combination of archival research which is typical for historians, but also through interviews?” And I settled on a subject that I'm finishing a book on right now, which is the history of international adoption from Guatemala. You might wonder: how does one end up writing about the Colombian Truth Commission report from such a different background? The answer is that Truth Commission reports are international. These are a feature of regimes from South Africa post-apartheid, to Guatemala post-civil war, to Argentina post-Dirty War, and now to Colombia, trying to come out of the sixty year confrontation between the government and the FARC. What originally drew my interest was that I had read the Guatemalan Truth Commission in its entirety, which it's enormously long, just like the Colombian report. It's one of the best accounts that we

Rachel Nolan Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University

have of what happened during the [Guatemalan] civil war, especially since the government was inclined to be in cahoots with the military and lie about what had happened, the history of what had happened. So what attracted my interest to Colombia was to see the similarities and differences with [the Guatemala] case.

Bridgette: Do you find your background in journalism helping your work in unexpected ways, and does your work differ from other historians with more traditional historian backgrounds?

Nolan: I think it helps me write faster honestly, or sort of not have writer's block, but as a matter of approach, I actually think that my historical training has informed my journalism more than vice versa. I write a very different kind of journalism now than I think I would have been able to without the historical training, and no one writes alone. I was discussing this essay in great depth with my friend Rob Karl, who's a historian of Colombia, and his training is entirely historical. We both were noting how the Truth Commission report documents in a kind of similar way as a historian would, which is to kind of triangulate some other sources with what we were seeing in the Truth Commission report. Because the truth is so deeply contested in Colombia, we wanted to know: what are they drawing on to know about the truth? My journalistic training would generally include a lot more calling around interviewing people. But this was not that kind of thing, because I was really trying to write about the Truth Commission report itself. I read some Colombian newspapers, obviously to get some of the political context and talk to a couple of people informally. It doesn't have a journalistic structure in the sense that it doesn't have scenes. I am not in Bogota, sitting in the theater when the Truth Commission report was being presented (as much as I wish I could have been there). I was not there, so it's. It's a kind of different animal. It's neither scholarship nor entirely journalism.

Bridgette: Could you give us a brief overview of what the report is and what its goals are in a few sentences?

Nolan: The importance of the Truth Commission Report can't really be overstated. These are hugely important documents that tend to come out of post-conflict situations. It was one requirement of the historic peace accord between the FARC, the long-standing guerril- la army in the Americas, and the Colombian Government, that this report would be produced so as to make that clear one of the demands of the FARC. One of the demands of the guerrilla organization, before they would agree to sign the peace accord with the Colombian Government, was that a report would be created in an unbiased fashion to catalog, not just the crimes of FARC against the civilian population, but also the crimes of the military and the state against the civilian population. FARC wanted it on record that they were not the only perpetrators of violence in the conflict, as they knew very well. And now it says in the Truth Commission report, the majority of killings of civilians and other crimes were committed by the State forces or paramilitary groups that were directly linked to the state. It took a huge team of not just the Truth Commissioners, but a lot of researchers to go around the country and interview people, creating an enormous bank of interviews that are now part of the historical record. This is going to be hugely important for victims' families’ questions about repara- tions and more. On the other hand, it's incomplete because there are still groups that are fighting. FARC is not the only guerilla group in Colombia. There's a splinter group of FARC that wants to continue to fight, although they've said they will come to terms with the new leftwing Colombian President. There's the ELN, which is a group that has also said they'll come to terms with it. As hugely important as the Truth Commission report is, the conflict goes on. So it's a little bit difficult to say exactly what the impact of the report will be because this is not a conflict that is over yet.

Bridgette: While doing initial research on this topic, were there any historical comparisons that could be made? How does this report measure up to similar reports?

Nolan: This Truth Commission report measures up in the first instance at an enormous length. It is much longer than other Truth Commission reports, and that's significant because it's not just an account of what happened and who died. It's an account of the environ- mental damage that was done. It's an account of specific violence that was perpetrated against the LGBTQ community, against women, against minors. It's just enormously long in a way that other Truth Commission reports from Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, South Africa, among others, have been criticized. Counting the deaths is hugely important. I would never say that it's not. That was the main function of those Truth Commission reports, and those are numbers that people in Guatemala, for example where the history of the Civil War is highly politicized, people on the left, in particular, can point to the Truth Commission Report and say the UN Back Truth Commission report found that this many people died. That is hugely, politically important to be able to do in Guatemala, so I am criticizing the lack of information about other crimes. But I want to be clear that the Truth Commission reports are hugely important for what they did manage to do, which was already heroic. The

Colombian case goes to another level of discussing environmental damage and sexual violence crimes against children, crimes against LGBTQIA communities I mean. It's just – there's also a museum, there's an archive. It's clear that the Truth Commission Report wants to be so much more than words on a page. It wants to be a teaching tool. It wants to be a permanent archive. It wants to be a kind of ongoing impetus to construct a better society in Colombia. I found it difficult to read because it's so huge. It can be sort of difficult to access, but particularly if you're looking for information about a geographical region or a kind of crime or an event, it's extremely complete and easy to use in that sense. If you're trying to get an overview of what happened, it's maybe not the best place to start.

Bridgette: Do you think there will be other forms of reconciliation as the conflict develops, and potentially comes to a conclusion?

Nolan: If you carefully read what I wrote about the Colombian Truth Commission Report, I think some of my discomfort with the reconciliation meetings might come through. That said, who is it for me to say if the victims want to be involved in those reconciliation processes? I think it's wonderful that that avenue has been opened for them. Some of the victims have found it enormously cathartic to speak to the perpetrators who killed people in their family or made them suffer other harms. Other victims have found it maddening and frustrating that they're asked to appear with these people. There's a wide variety of reactions to those encounters from comfort to discomfort, and the encounters are just one possibility of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a long-term project that is not something that the Truth Commission can snap their fingers and guarantee. So am I in favor of reconciliation? Yes, because like anyone else, I want Colombia to be a place where people can disagree without violence. That's the ideal in most societies. Do I think that the victims who don't necessarily agree with all the reconciliation pressures and processes that they are part of have a point? I do. So, I'm sympathetic, but who am I? My role is more as a translator in that sense: reading something, translating a context rather than giving my opinion, which I don't think in this case is particularly valuable.

Bridgette: What is the significance of the government working with the FARC guerrillas to conceive this report? Will we increasingly see peace agreements between govern- ments and nonstate actors?

Nolan: I think we're gonna have to [accept the increase in peace agreements between governments and nonstate actors], because in most of the long-burning civil wars around the world, it's not like the U.S. Civil War where one part seceded. It's two so-called governments fighting each other… It's more often a guerilla force or a separatist group that wants to form its own country. I think the answer is: Yes, you have to. You're going to have to see peace processes with non-state actors. We've seen that before, famously in El Salvador. At the end of the peace process, there is FMLN, which was formerly a guerrilla group and transitioned into a political party that is now widely accepted. We've seen that in Northern Ireland as well. So there are other examples of guerrilla forces or insurgent forces kind of using peace processes to enter traditional electoral politics. But in this case, the conflict was so long, and the animosity is so great that it's been kind of extraordinary to see FARC sit down with the government

Bridgette: If these peace processes are politically crucial, do you foresee any socio-cultural struggles or fallout in pursuing these peace processes?

Nolan: There already is a struggle in Colombia over whether the Truth Commission is true. There are already significant sectors of the right-wing on the political side in Colombia, who say that the Truth Commission Report overestimates the crimes of the government and underestimates the crimes of the FARC, despite the fact that the Truth Commission Report is extremely well-researched with the participation of people from across the political spectrum. I just want to be clear: those complaints are not true. However, it's a political and social reality in Colombia that not everyone accepts the Truth Commission report that was produced. The most obvious example of the social transmission of Colombia is the recent election of Gustavo Petro, who is himself a former guerrilla fighter. He was an armed member of M19. That would almost be inconceivable right before the peace process, because before the pre-peace process any person who was vaguely leftish, left-esque could be tagged as a Communist and sort of sidelined. So having a left-wing President and Colombia is a huge change, and he was elected by a coalition of student activists, environmental activists, Afro-Colombian activists, and young people a quite broad coalition.

Bridgette: The 27th issue of the International Relations Review is called “Perspectives on Power”. How do this report and your research shift the perspective that we have on the memory and contextualization of history?

Nolan: Who has power? When? Why, you know, when does it flip? Who can grab power in different ways? It gets you to economic questions. It gets you the political questions, the social questions, the racial questions. It's often about power and money. So in this case, I see the Truth Commission report as flipping the usual power configuration and in a really interesting way, because the victims who were telling their stories to the Truth Commissioners, and those who were doing the research were often from rural areas where many Afro-Colombians and Indigenous Colombians were. That's something we haven't mentioned in this interview. There were huge harms committed against Indigenous Colombians, and they were able to say their piece. And now their account of what happened during the Colombian conflict has been elevated to the level of official truth, because a Truth Commission report is about making a claim to official truth. That's their version, and that's been the accepted version of Colombia for a long time. That's really being questioned by the Truth Commission report, and the just official in the form of being a Truth Commission report going out and interviewing people allows that power flip to happen because it's not as if Afro-Colombians and Indigenous Colombians and women and children have not been telling us all along what was happening. This conflict has gone on for 60 years. We knew very well, but the NGOs, the women's groups, they did not have that level of power to be able to say, “This is the narrative. This is what happened. These are the harms.” And they didn't have the level of organization to kind of make the account and give the definitive percentages for the far committed. Yet, the army and paramilitary groups both admitted to many massacres, and that's hugely important. So I see the Truth Commission report as a kind of really necessary power flip.