The Unión Patriótica’s genocide: The exceptional nature of political violence in Colombia

Abstract

This is an effort to reconstruct the logic of the genocidal practices that promoted and facilitated the genocide of the Unión Patriótica political movement in Colombia. An experience that, contrary to being exceptional, is presented as a rule of political violence. Methodologically, this paper is developed in three moments - bureaucracy, dehumanisation and impunity which serve as articulating axes of the entropy of genocide as an analytical proposal. To this end, three sources have been brought together in a dialogue: first, a series of interviews with survivors of the movement; second, the archives of the newspaper Semanario Voz; third, the final report of the iaCHR and the arguments presented at the hearing in case 11.227. While the genocide of the Unión Patriótica presents exceptionalities such as the iaCHR ruling in January 2023, this case denotes a preliminary response to the apparent contradiction of a representative democracy with high levels of repression and outlines a methodological route to deepen the understanding of how political violence functions in the country as rule of the political system. Although this paper arises during a political transition in Colombia, and the recent condemnation of the State in case 11.227, this research was based on the recognition of a political genocide that did happen and left a toll of at least 6,528 people who were forced to live a life they did not choose; an experience of political and social exclusion in a country marked by war and antagonism as the driving forces of democracy.