2.4.1 Violence as a Cultural and Historical Phenomenon
The definition of violence has been an issue of debate for a number of political philosophers, peace researchers, anthropologists, media, political and international scientists (Mahatma Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Johan Galtung, Jean-Paul Sartre, Keane and Walter Benjamin). Approaching the notion of violence from different perspectives will help to understand the case study, for example understanding violence, as a part of society (Fanon, 1963); critics of violence as a negative phenomenon of social interactions (Galtung, 2000b; Arendt, 1960; Sontag, 2003) consider the monopoly of the legitimisation of violence an essential characteristic of modern states.
A weak democratic state fails to protect citizens from any form of violence, particularly during conflict. Violence in Latin America has been a longstanding companion throughout history, taking the form of internal conflicts (1980’s), dictatorships, coups d’état, revolutions, insurgencies and, more recently, the war on drugs in Colombia and now in Mexico which have increased the levels of violence in these countries (Zárate, 2011). The Colombia—and later Mexico— did not accomplish civilian protection and rather allowed violence against the general population reflects the limitations of the states on institutionalising the rule of law. During the 1980s and 1990s, democracy replaced authoritarianism, yet states fall short of guaranteeing the protection of citizen rights (Waisbord, 2002). In this environment violence against journalists is regarded as commonplace, for they are immersed in this environment of impunity, that yet again, the state foments.
Violence in Colombia is imbricated. Defining violence itself is a highly intricate process, and social researchers have worked for decades to do so. This research understands violence using Gerbner’s definition; ‘the overt expression of physical force, with or without weapon, against self or others’ (1976:179). In Colombia
violence is understood differently according to the context: cities and countryside, North and South, and in places directly affected by conflict (see Appendix A showing the violent zones in Colombia and its different degrees, described by a NGO). It has become apparent that there is a disparate notion of violence within the country. A newspaper editor interviewed during this research, Sierra (2008), pointed out that ‘Colombia is like R.L. Stevenson’s story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde; both the angelic and the monstrous, the modern and the primal, development and the barbaric coexist here, and one face of society is determined to deny that the other one exists’35.
Violence is not only situated as a central element, it is interwoven into all political and social spheres. Therefore, ‘the kind of violent acts committed in Colombia—political, domestic, common and organised crime—coexist and commingle, making the classification of violence and the production of accountability a highly contested public process’ (Tate, 2007:31–32). Government and NGOs continue to debate the accuracy of statistics of violence in Colombia. In the nineties, annual deaths fluctuated between twenty thousand and thirty thousand people, a figure which represents around eighty in every hundred thousand inhabitants, one of the highest death rates in the world. Approximately thirteen percent of those (3,000 to 4,000) are considered to be political violence; that is to say, massacres, homicides or disappearances perpetrated by State agents or members of armed groups in conflict, generally against the civilian population (Meertens, 2000: 89).
The characteristics that intersect in the overall situation of Colombian violence can be summarised as comprising four types: structural, institutional, cultural and interpersonal. Violence and survival are another two elements to analyse, as citizens have created mechanisms to coexist with violence by adapting to the rules of the paramilitary, guerrillas and drug cartels alongside official norms. Thus, the various powers in the country condition the behaviour of the population living in the middle of the war. In societies where the structure of violence is institutionalised and violent culture is internalised, ‘direct violence also tends to
35Research interview, 2008.
become institutionalised, repetitive and ritualistic, like a vendetta’ (Galtung, 1990:302).
Colombia passed from the political violence of La Violencia to terror. In the 1980s the country was again subject to violence of great intensity. According to Pécaut (2001:186), statistics show that the national homicide rate regularly exceeded 70 per 100,000 inhabitants. In some regions and cities, the average reached 400 per 100,000. Between 1980 and 1995, the overall death rate exceeded 300,000.
On a larger scale, there have been many massacres of five or more people: ‘Between 1993 to 1998 more than 900 massacres were counted, these claimed more than 5,000 victims’ (Uribe & Vásquez in Pécaut, 2001:187). Furthermore, politically active members such as union members (sindicalistas) were also murdered; the official yearly kidnapping rate in 1990 varied between 1,000 and 1,717; more than 500,000 people had to abandon their regions of origin; extortion and blackmail became routine in most of the country. Violence is now pervasive in all aspects of daily life, not only within the direct context of the conflict. Annually this country experiences some 2,500 acts of hostility from the different factions, which employ more than 3,000 combatants36.
Considering such numbers, it is impossible not to ponder the reasons why Colombia did not react to national and international public opinion, as was the case with the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala. Pécaut (2001) argues, in an extraordinary study of Colombia’s violence, that many factors can explain this silence. One of them is the ‘banalization’ of violence; these events have become so common that they now have only a fleeting impact and are therefore forgotten or ignored.
36 Media for Peace Report (2008:1).
2.4.2 Consequences of the Pervasiveness of Violence in Everyday Life
Violence in Colombia is a phenomenon that has permeated all levels of society as a result of decades of armed conflict and drug cartel wars. Pécaut (2001) suggest that certain Colombians perceive violence as a part of everyday life. There is a significant body of research that look at the implications of this continual violence in society (Jimeno 2001, Galtung 1990). Galtung’s (1990) cultural– structural violence theories become self-evident when observing the cultural– structural violence in this country, whether popular culture or politics. By depicting the reality of Colombian society, television, soap operas, cinema, journalism, news and literature all illustrate violence as a part of life. In Colombia people regard themselves as being in a state of chaos and experiencing diverse confrontations. In 1997 the World Bank identified violence as being the country’s key developmental constraint (Moser, 2000).
In this regard, violence is considered an endemic characteristic of Colombian history. Meertens (2000) asserts that during the past two decades the levels of violence have grown across all of society. Such violence can be direct or indirect, organised or disorganised, actual or potential (Derrennic, 1972). The visible signs are the most evident consequences of violence, and the invisible are the ones underneath the surface that comprise the structural conditions that create and preserve violence and the culture that sustains it.
Colombia’s violence is a factor that interests anthropologists, sociologists, peace researchers and activists because of the complexity of levels and causes that are intertwined within it. Tate (2007:31) asserts ‘what makes Colombia’s case illuminating is (...) that multiple forms of violence exist in the context of a relatively wealthy, established democracy’. In this regard, the non-governmental organisation Global Peace Index in its 2008 Report declared that Colombia is placed among the ten most violent countries in the world, after Lebanon, Iraq, and Chad.
2.4.3 The Colombian Violentología
Even though violence is considered a prevalent condition arising out of the country’s armed conflict, during the past three decades its growth has skyrocketed; it has intensified at all levels and expanded throughout all sectors of society. In Latin American political science, the violence in Colombia is in itself a subject of study and it is often referred to as part of the categorisation of recent circumstances within this country (Meetens, 2000).
Violence has been an important issue in Colombia throughout its history. Although it has been continuous and has evolved in different ways, academic analyses only started to come to light in the 1960s and then grew during the 1980s. There have been several reflections and incessant studies of violence in an effort to understand its reality. In order to make sense of its logic and trends, this subject has been addressed in many ways over the past few decades, ranging from academia (sociologists, anthropologists and historians), to governmental special commissions and civil society investigations. There have also been significant analyses of the roots of violence: its development, consequences and ways that it might be addressed in modern Colombian society. Of course, such debates can be considered strange in a country that is living an on-going conflict and where to discuss ‘violence’ as an abstract concept may not always be able to avoid the reality of day-to-day violence.
Such circumstances have conspired to set the scene for the development of a novel ‘science’, known as ‘violentology’ (violentología), which is particularly Colombian and based on the phenomenon of violence. From 1986 to 1987 the government created an official commission to study and analyse the causes of Colombian violence. Members of the government’s official commission, who became connoisseurs of violence, were named ‘violentólogos’, creating a new Spanish word for ‘violentologists’; an expression that later became the term for people with an expertise in the subject. Thus violence in recent Colombian history became a matter of public interest across all sectors. The subsequent publication of the government’s study in 1987, named ‘Colombia, Violence and Democracy’ and based on the study of the armed conflict in Colombia, was the
genesis of violentología37. The main research focused on exploring the causes and development of the conflict, analysing the actors, the quantitative presence of the armed actors, the various violent acts and impacts upon victims, as well as the regional dynamics of the violence (Meertens, 2000).
The commission’s information was important for contemporary studies of violence because it acknowledged that guerrillas had passed from a dispersed presence to high levels of cohesiveness. The information emphasised the notion of a multiplicity within conflict, called ‘the violences’; these included actors, dynamics, motives, geographic scenarios and social spaces (Meertens, 2000:90). The main objective of this research is to establish points of departure for further analysis and comprehension; first of all regarding the plurality of violence and, secondly, the multi-causality of violence.
Jean Seaton (2005:186) states that ‘the way in which different countries tackle violence in their own history reveals much about their relationship to contemporary reality’. This postulate can easily be discerned in Colombia’s attempts to understand its cycle of violence from many positions. Among these is violentology; other analysts consider a psychosocial approach, an implicit mechanism of resistance to oversee and overcome their contemporary reality. From this perspective, the sequence of dramatic events during the past decades in Colombia ‘acts as a kind of avalanche within which, in individual consciousness, people can only cope with this living risk by reinforcing the shell of supposed indifference, which they have built around themselves as a means of exorcising the spectrum of violence’ (Jimeno, 2001:238).
Thus, citizens can either adapt to their environment, resist or reject it. Jimeno (2001), a psychologist of conflict, asserts that Colombia has suffered social disintegration, as ‘the types of violence which have increased during the past few years have affected social consciousness, mainly by producing a sense of social division’. There is also a perception of living in a society containing a variety of
37 French sociologist Daniel Pécaut, an academic expert in Colombian sociology and politics, published a classic book ‘Order and Violence’ (1987) which differed from the violentologists’ vision of ‘violences’ suggesting that violence should be seen as a whole, as one, because the social is inevitably unified with the political.
criminal forces and types, and in which people feel relatively helpless to do anything about the situation. Jimeno also argues that ‘a well-established line of thought in Colombia sees violence as a non-specific, all-pervasive historical phenomenon—the very essence of evil in Colombia society’ (2001:234).
Yet another view perceives violence as an epidemic and endemic disease of Colombia’s social structure. By only focusing on violence as a result of social inequalities, both these visions disregard the different types of hostilities in their history. In this sense, these perceptions can be frail if conflict is not considered in its historical dimension, including the different degrees of intensity, as Margold (1999) stated in a thesis on the ‘cultures of fear and cultures of terror’. Power is based on the intimidation of civilians; therefore, they adapt to the conditions of violence, fear and terror as a characteristic of their society. For instance, violence has become ‘deeply engrained in the collective psyche and has become something which helps to define being Colombian’ (Oslender, 2008: 78).
Fear and intimidation have become an intrinsic condition in Colombian culture, and are linked with indifference as a form of resistance. For instance, the media has played an important role in the propagation of fear through the acts of violence it reports. Violence is portrayed through the use of two contradictory types of discourse: on the one hand a detailed registry of, and commentary on, acts of violence in the media and in daily conversations; on the other hand, the repeated attribution of an evil and cruel nature to Colombians, according to which some would be prone to violence and others would be ‘indifferent’ to it (Jimeno: 2001:237).
Meertens (2000) classifies the studies of Colombian violence as including the following: ‘literary-anthropological’ (urban scenarios focused on gangs), also studies centred on ‘psychological and individual effects of violence’ (kidnapping), analysis of ‘perceptions of violence’, from everyday life and the internally displaced people’.
Violence and sacrifice are two concepts constantly seen in the Colombian social mindset (imaginary)38. Guerrillas, the paramilitary and political parties constantly suggest that sacrifice is necessary in order to achieve social goals. In this way the sacrifice of martyrs and killing of innocent civilians is justified by either side through the use of demagogic discourse. The notion of ‘sacrifice’ has also been adopted by certain journalists interviewed during this research (who were threatened and have been in exile) who exercise the notion of ‘sacrifice’ for their profession and country and that impacts directly upon them as a result of their work.
This social, cultural and historic scenario on violence sets the basis for the next section, helping to contextualise the multiple causes of violence in conflict situations, specifically focusing on Colombia. In order to understand the journalistic coverage and the development of peace initiatives in this country it is important that this research carefully analyse violence in detail. This is especially true because of its complexity, diversity of variables and range of causes involved, including social, economic, political and psychological. It is through such analysis that it will be possible to better comprehend this society and the impact violence can have upon its journalism.