The Role of Remembrance in Colombian Peace Building

Ana Maria Cuesta Leon is a young, intelligent Colombian sociologist and researcher. After graduating with a master’s degree in political and social studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and publishing her thesis on informal modes of communication among indigenous populations in Mexico, she returned to Bogotá to promote a more stable Colombia. About 18 months ago, she became the director of Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación. According to its website, the CMPR is a governmental center that serves as an “instrument that promotes a culture of peace and respect for human rights based on memory and historical truth…” 

After six decades of conflict, Colombia has found workable solutions for peace and reconciliation across much of the country. While drug traffickers, organized crime, and resistance forces like the ELN (National Liberation Army) drive violence across many parts of the country, Colombia is now seen by many as a beacon of hope for other countries in the region. 

Calm and stability can assume many shapes and forms. Uneasy peace often teeters on the fulcrum of goodwill and hope. Countries often embrace a patchwork of fragile security environments as acceptable experiments on the path to something more far-reaching and permanent. 

Fragile Models of Peace

In 2005, for example, my wife and I visited Lebanon. I was on leave from a civil society project in war-torn Iraq. I welcomed the tranquility of a stroll along the Corniche Beirut—the famous seaside promenade—and meal in an open-air cafe, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Despite the calm, tensions simmered below the surface. Scratch the top layer, and the old hatred and grievances appeared, threatening to explode into civil conflict at any time. In front of our hotel, Saint George, the cratered crime scene still stood cordoned off, the site where Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated a few months earlier, when a van laden with explosives detonated as his convoy passed by, killing him and 21 others.

Our Christian taxi driver told us that he had missed out on high school while fighting to protect his community in the Lebanese Civil War. What money the family could scrape together supported his younger brother’s education. When peace finally came in 1990, he was too old to return to a classroom and had few marketable skills. Taxi driving was the only job he could find. He felt cheated by the universe, his adversaries, and maybe even his family. While he hoped for peace, he was ready to take up arms again at any moment should the need arise. “If they want war,” he said, “we will give it to them.” 

Lebanon’s fragile peace fractured over the next few years into border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel, internal skirmishes among parties and movements, and a complex civil conflict from 2011 to 2017. 

In June 2006, my wife and I returned to her native El Salvador for the first time in many years. Some 14 years after the Chapultepec Peace Treaty was signed between the government and the FMLN (Farabundo Martí Liberation Front) in January 1992, locals told us just how tenuous peace really was. Anger and discontent boiled under a veneer of pacification that could erupt any moment into civil conflict. But by 2016, the tiny Central American country had become the most violent country on earth, but on entirely new terms. “A whole new generation, for which the civil war and the Peace Accords didn’t mean anything, knew that this situation could not be called peace,” wrote ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. The country was suffering countless cycles of gang violence and counter-gang crackdowns, eventually evolving into the current controversial State of Exception in 2022. 

Sober Reminders of the Costs of Conflict

Bogotá’s Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation Center is aptly constructed next to the city’s Central Cemetery, a sober reminder of the permanent costs of the Colombian Conflict, the longest-running armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere. Although causes can be traced back to the 1920s, the year 1964, the formation of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), serves as the start of asymmetrical, low-intensity conflict. The Colombian military, paramilitary groups, criminal gangs, drug cartels, FARC, and other resistance movements fought until an agreement was reached between the FARC and the government in November 2016. 

For many Colombians, remembrance plays a central role in the establishment of peace. A Colombian acquaintance told me before coming to Bogotá that there could be no peacebuilding without involving victims. 

I am curious about the sociological and psychological impact of placing remembrance at the center of peace efforts. At what point does the constant reminder become counter-productive?

Some of the strongest examples of lasting peace involve relegating a secondary role to the history of past crimes and victimization. Social, political, and economic relationships between the United States and the former Axis partners—Germany, Italy, and Japan—, for instance, have flourished in large part thanks to these nations refusing to give memories of WWII violence a seat at today’s cultural table. Naturally, history books, art, and memorials host remembrances and images available upon demand. 

Riding my bicycle through Vietnam a couple of years ago, I was warmly welcomed by an entire generation of youth, who today love American culture. I joined hundreds of Vietnamese tourists at war memorials and museums, but I experienced no resentment. Only smiles and respect.

No doubt geographical distance and separation of time factor into the equation somehow. It is much easier for the next generation of Japanese youth, for example, to view Hiroshima catastrophe as an 80-year-old historical reference in a book or online. A memorial park to visit on vacation, while the nation responsible for the destruction is half a world away.

For young Arabs and Israelis neighbors, on the other hand, the fresh violence in Gaza makes it nearly impossible to disregard past atrocities. 

Camilo and Camila

About 18 months ago, Ana Maria became the center’s director. Five minutes into our meeting over coffee, I felt I had known her for years. She explained how moving past atrocities involves passing through symbolic memorials to the victims. 

Take Camilo Sánchez Mc-Cub and Camila Ospitia, a young man and young woman, whose faces are sketched inside frames, sitting in the shrine on Ana Maria’s table. Camilo and Camila were local youth activists, artists, and entertainers who performed hip-hop, created a community garden, and led human rights and substance-abuse initiatives. Camilo’s mother said that her son “often showed up at home with strangers to provide them food and a roof.” 

As the young artists’ success in the community of Bosa grew, so did the perceived threat to local drug traffickers. In August 2024, Camilo and Camila were assassinated. The peace and reconciliation center began working with the community, partners, and the victims’ friends to curb rising tensions. Violence often takes place, Ana Maria said, “When culture is forgotten… We must remember the culture.” The center helped stakeholders embrace the artists’ art, hip-hop, and other elements that memorialized the victims, instead of giving way to instinctive responses of fury and retaliation. Only after that, could come dialogue. 

It is hard not to recognize an almost Gandhian subtext to the center’s psychosocial approach to healing and building resilience. Listening to the victims, engaing them culturally-appropriate activities, and engaging them in dialogue allow victims’ loved ones to process their loss.  

Trauma Healing

This conversation reminded me of our Trauma Healing program in Somalia in 2013–2014. “Tarzan” Mohamed Ahmed Nur, the Mayor of Mogadishu, promoted the program that had enjoyed considerable success and notoriety well before I joined the team. Occasionally, victims confronted their assailants, or alleged the perpetrators of some injustice—say, seizing property illegally—which often resulted in tearful reconciliation by both parties. To the best of my knowledge, there was never a case of renewed violence sparked by these confrontations. 

Not all Colombian peace programs require remembrance as centerpieces for reconciliation. “We are all victims,” said Tatiana Mosquera, the Director-Specialist in Education, Dialogue, and Methodology at Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP). A group of Colombian business owners established the non-profit more than 25 years ago to support peace and security research. Today the NGO works in the areas of Conflict and Security, Peace Building, Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS), and Education and Training.

Tatiana Mosquera’s welcome was also very warm and friendly. Coming from similar backgrounds of working for non-profits, we spoke the same language, had similar experiences, suffered the same types of setbacks, and enjoyed comparable successes in different contexts. 

Community Action 

When I asked Ana Maria where she would start if she were building a nonprofit like PeaceBridge in the U.S. to bring polarized individuals and groups to the table—not to dialogue about differences, but to find common ground for social cohesion—she said to identify their priorities, their community interests. At the intersection of these interests, I would find “little linkages” or common priorities: interlinking building blocks on which to establish a foundation for peace.  

Ana Maria had just described a process reminiscent of Community Action, an approach adopted by USAID decades ago to create promote reconciliation among communities in conflict. I had had, in fact, used this approach to ease tensions among hostile clans in Somalia, stabilize volatile areas in Yemen, and reconcile differences among Shia and Sunni sects in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. 

A video on the Ideas for Peace’s website portrays a group activity with Jenga blocks that manifests its own identity through FIP’s approach to reconciliation. Participants write on a wooden block a single idea—connect, trust, dialogue, leadership—that they view as indispensable for peace. That way, every participant has a voice and a role in the process. “We have a great challenge,” the narrator says, “to bring together different ideas and actors to drive change.” 

In the initial community meeting, Tatiana said, the balance of diverse actors is critical. In Somalia, we strategically ensured that community representation included government actors, elders, youth, women, men, business owners, and different clans. Every representative had a voice and only one vote to ensure that one demographic or clan did not overshadow another. We also used cultural icons and elements as foundational elements: Hosting meetings under shade trees, recitations of the Koran, serving customary meals and fruit. I remember at a big lunch during a workshop in Mogadishu, a Somali looked at my large plate of food—the same served to everyone—and turned to me and said, “We Somalis eat a lot.” Later pealing a banana, he said, “We love bananas… No meal is complete without bananas.” 

Sharing Sustainable Skills

In the Colombian context, the facilitator or non-profit nowadays must offer something concrete, Tatiana said, to communities just to get them to the table. The groundwork before the actual peacebuilding begins. When asked for a couple of examples of community requests, she replied, “Storytelling or photography workshops.” 

These are types of requests that development workers like to hear. Laptops and furniture are important, but useful lives of a few years; whereas report writing, photography, and budget management are sustainable skills that can serve communities for decades and can be handed down to others. 

My Colombian hosts had given me a lot to think about. PeaceBridge adopt and adapt as appropriate. There is a lot we can offer by remembering cultural identity, sharing sustainable skills at the outset, or finding creative ways to stimulate ideas for peace.