The victims of violence in Colombia also exist

March for the victims of violence in Colombia, 6 March
By Marsares

Wednesday 19 March 2008 11:58 COT

Este artículo está disponible en ESPAÑOL

* Photos by Germán Quimbayo and Carolina Giraldo / Special for equinoXio

It was a march quite different from the one on 4 February. Here, it was not the anger only against one armed organization, but against all the violence which took this country over, against the lack of memory, against indifference, against impunity, against corruption, against anything which has made Colombia a worldwide example of violence.

Here there was no single slogan. There were a lot of them, as many as the suffering of years, as many as the humiliations received by the victims every time they ask for justice and redress, a crowd messed with chaotic but true slogans, because today the ones who have suffered the pain first-hand and the ones who do not want the horror of the premeditated, cruel, coward death have marched…

It was a different march. It was not the spontaneity recruited on Facebook, which parade moved by the proofs of survival of a few kidnapped. Today, 6 March, were the ones recruited by death a long time ago. The ones forcibly displaced by the same who wash their consciences and their wealth with a Shame and Forgetfulness Law.

The widows of the war went out to the streets too. They who lost their husbands, their sons, their brothers. With them by their side, the survivors of the left-wing Patriotic Union genocide, perpetrated by those who became the owners of the life, the honour and the goods of this country today.

A quite different march because today it was not a weekend anger who marched, but the pain of years, that which marks loneliness, exile, forgetfulness. There was no marketing or uniforms to march. They just marched because when you’re taken away everything you own, you only have the hope to keep living left.

Next to them, the ones who always have been there, present, though mass media make them invisible, unruly, even stateless or uncomfortable neighbours, because there is nothing harder and more caustic than the truth. They, the students, marched as they did not a long time ago, to show the others that they do exist, despite everything.

There were also the NGOs, which by definition will be always suspicious.A lot of acronyms, a lot of names, a lot of people shouting the names you should not forget because the day we do they will have won. Jaime Garzón, Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, Jaime Pardo Leal, Héctor Abad Gómez… an endless rosary of names, photos, captions, memories.

And many more. Unionists, gays, even fossils with sickles and hammers, anarchists and ghosts from another time, protagonists of failed stories, with old-fashioned speeches and slogans suitable for a memory chest. But they did with the right given because they have put their victims in a excluding, unequal, anaesthetized country.

And above all, they also marched: the dead, the tortured, the disappeared, those persecuted for having a different thought. And they made us remember we are not alone, that they are still with us to remind us the task is not done yet, the country they dreamt of is still a dream.

It was a very different march.

This article was published 7 March 2008 in equinoXio. Translated from Spanish by Carlos Raúl van der Weyden Velásquez

Tags: Bogotá, Colombian armed conflict, Colombian politics, demonstration, FARC, guerrilla, march against violence, United Self-defence Forces of Colombia, victims, violence in Colombia