La naturalización de la violencia : damnificados, víctimas y desarrollo en la segunda mitad del siglo XX colombiano

This dissertation takes seriously the problem of the naturalization of "violence", starting from the visual analysis of the photographs of the classic book of Violence in Colombia (1962). Instead of social actors the only element that stands out in many of the photos is the idea of violence as a natural disaster. At the time of the social and political violence of the fifties, there was no talk of victims as there is today in Colombia. Instead of the contemporary figure of the victim, who morally gained traction with the start of the transitional justice process, the category normally used was that of the survivor, as it was used for natural disasters.  This thesis aims to historicize the relationship between the State and the care of victims, beginning with the identification of a couple of key moments. Consequently, the Minutes of the 1959 Rehabilitation Commission were scrutinized in search of the moral place of the victim in them. In the same way the National Rehabilitation Plan that started in 1982 was located in the complicated archives of the State. From the Minutes I learned that the idea of the survivor was, once again, the social agent used to channel state aid. Instead of spaces for remembrance, what was opened were opportunities for development, understood here as policies of colonization and state-building.  The analysis of the National Rehabilitation Plan archives, in its files related to the reconstruction of areas affected by the Armero volcano, led me to conclude that the state-building process does not differentiate between types of tragedies, whether they are supposedly natural or of a more political nature. On the contrary, disaster preparedness becomes a starting point to deal with the consequences of violence. The archive shows how the insistence on development to rebuild Armero and to provide infrastructure in those regions of the country considered distant leads the State to basically use the same knowledge to attend different types of events. In this way, national and transnational knowledge that was accumulated so the State could undertake emergency care was used in the care of violently displaced persons. Instead of an abstract and totalizing state, what is clear in the dissertation, regarding the question of its relationship with the victim, is that what we know as "State" actually corresponds to a set of practices. Many of these practices, although presented in everyday life as impartial and technical, imply an exercise of continuous depoliticization that will make other stories of violence also lose their specificities. Such will be the case of the displaced people of the eighties and nineties, whose tending was left to the Office of Disaster Assistance created as a result of what happened in Armero. The year 1985 was chosen as the official start of recognition of victims by the institutions, but it’s also the year in which the survivors will be integrated to the rationalities of the State. At the same time in which victims earn their right to have a history and a memory, their depoliticization is made official. Perhaps for this reason, I argue in the conclusions, many "victims of violence", and in particular those of violent displacement, appear before the country without regional, moral or historical texture.

Keyphrases: Naturalization of "violence", Victims, Disaster, Memory, Development, Colombia, Armero, 1985, Victimas