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The National Centre for Historical Memory (NCHM) is a national and public entity attached to the Administrative Department for Social Prosperity (DSP) in Colombia.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2015) |
The National Centre for Historical Memory (NCHM) is a national and public entity attached to the Administrative Department for Social Prosperity (DSP) in Colombia.
The NCHM was created by the Law 1448/2011, also called the Law of Victims and Land Restitution. [1] The NCHM is in charge of contributing to the State´s duty of memory regarding the violations committed during the Colombian armed conflict. Also, it helps on the comprehensive reparation and the right to the truth to which the victims and the entire society are entitled. [2]
The Centre produces public information available for everyone interested, through museum and educational activities that enrich the knowledge of the social and political history of Colombia. In 2021, the NCHM will inaugurate the Colombia’s National Museum of Memory, a platform for the dialogue and articulation of plural memories of the armed conflict that guarantees the inclusion of different actors and populations and contributes to the comprehensive reparation, historical clarification, guaranties of non-repetition and the construction of a sustainable peace.
Deemed to be very close to the Colombian government and the Armed Forces, the Centre was excluded in 2020 from the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (which brings together more than 200 museums and memorials in over 60 countries). According to associations of victims of the conflict and historians, the center carries out "negationist" work by reducing the armed conflict to a struggle between the State and "terrorists. [3]
The government approved the so-called "veterans' law," which provides that a space in the National Memory Museum be dedicated "to displaying to the public the life stories of veterans of the public force, especially highlighting their courageous actions, their sacrifice and their contribution to the general welfare.
The director of the organization, Darío Acevedo, resigned on July 7, 2022, following a complaint filed against him by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace for having altered documents, when he did not have the right to do so, in order to conceal the role of paramilitarism in the conflict. Darío AcevedoHe faced several controversies and was criticized by victims' associations who accused him of denial. In particular, he signed a controversial agreement with José Félix Lafaurie, president of the Colombian Federation of Cattle Breeders (FEDEGAN), to highlight the role of cattle breeders in the conflict, while FEDEGAN has often been criticized for financing paramilitary groups and opposing reparations to victims through land restitution. [4]
To fulfill its mandates and strategic objectives, the NCHM is divided into four large areas:
One of its main objectives is the contribution to the clarification of the facts, the culprits and the conditions that made the armed conflict possible, as well as the institutional, political and social dynamics that unleashed and degraded the conflict.
Also, the NCHM works to:
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army is a Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group involved in the continuing Colombian conflict starting in 1964. The FARC-EP was officially founded in 1966 from peasant self-defense groups formed from 1948 during the "Violencia" as a peasant force promoting a political line of agrarianism and anti-imperialism. They are known to employ a variety of military tactics, in addition to more unconventional methods, including terrorism.
The United Self-Defenders of Colombia was a Colombian far-right paramilitary and drug trafficking group which was an active belligerent in the Colombian armed conflict during the period from 1997 to 2006. The AUC was responsible for retaliations against the FARC and ELN communist organization as well as numerous attacks against civilians beginning in 1997 with the Mapiripán massacre.
The Colombian conflict began on May 27, 1964, and is a low-intensity asymmetric war between the government of Colombia, far-right paramilitary groups and crime syndicates, and far-left guerrilla groups, fighting each other to increase their influence in Colombian territory. Some of the most important international contributors to the Colombian conflict include multinational corporations, the United States, Cuba, and the drug trafficking industry.
In 1994 Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification - La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) - was created as a response to the thousands of atrocities and human rights violations committed during the decades long civil war that began in 1962 and ended in the late 1990s with United Nations-facilitated peace accords. The commission operated under a two-year mandate, from 1997 to 1999, and employed three commissioners: one Guatemalan man, one male non-national, and one Mayan woman. The mandate of the commission was not to judge but to clarify the past with "objectivity, equity and impartiality."
Right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia are paramilitary groups acting in opposition to revolutionary Marxist–Leninist guerrilla forces and their allies among the civilian population. These right-wing paramilitary groups control a large majority of the illegal drug trade of cocaine and other substances. The Colombian National Centre for Historical Memory has estimated that between 1981 and 2012 paramilitary groups have caused 38.4% of the civilian deaths, while the Guerillas are responsible for 16.8%, 10.1% by the Colombian Security Forces and 27.7% by non-identified armed groups, although the chief prosecutor of the ICC would contradict these numbers.
Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, was born in Valledupar, Colombia. He was the leader of the Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. He demobilized with his two thousand men strong group on March 10, 2006 in La Mesa, Department of Cesar.
Salvatore Mancuso Gómez, also known as "el Mono Mancuso", "Santander Lozada" or "Triple Cero", among other names is a Colombian paramilitary leader, once second in command of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group. The paramilitary groups commanded by Mancuso fought the guerrillas, and financed their activities by receiving donations from land owners, drug trafficking, extortions and robbery.
Anti-communist mass killings are the politically motivated mass killings of communists, alleged communists, or their alleged supporters which were committed by anti-communists and political organizations or governments which opposed communism. The communist movement has faced opposition since it was founded and the opposition to it has often been organized and violent. Many anti-communist mass killing campaigns waged during the Cold War were supported and backed by the United States and its Western Bloc allies. Some U.S.-supported mass killings, including the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 and the killings by the Guatemalan military during the Guatemalan Civil War, are considered acts of genocide.
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.
Memorialization generally refers to the process of preserving memories of people or events. It can be a form of address or petition, or a ceremony of remembrance or commemoration.
Colombia has a high crime rate due to being a center for the cultivation and trafficking of cocaine. The Colombian conflict began in the mid-1960s and is a low-intensity conflict between Colombian governments, paramilitary groups, crime syndicates, and left-wing guerrillas such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN), fighting each other to increase their influence in Colombian territory. Two of the most important international actors that have contributed to the Colombian conflict are multinational companies and the United States.
Colombia has been in the throes of civil unrest for over half a century. Between 1964 and now, 3 million persons have been displaced and about 220,000 have died, 4 out of 5 deaths were non-combatant civilians. Between left and right-winged armed forces, paramilitary and/or guerrilla, and an often corrupt government, it has been difficult for Colombia to set up any kind of truth or reconciliation commission. That is why the first on the scene, so to speak, were representatives of the UN. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has been present in Colombia since 1997. Since 2006 though, there has been another international movement turning its attention to Colombia; namely the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). The works of both of these institutions have led to a few semi-official national committees to oversee truth seeking missions in the hopes of eventually achieving reparation. In 2012, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) began their fourth attempt to negotiate an end to the fighting. Peace talks between the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC, the main guerrilla force in the country, are currently underway in Havana, Cuba. The main issues are land redistribution, integration of the FARC into the political arena and an end to the powerful cocaine cartels. Though past attempts at peace talks have failed, negotiators in Havana, Cuba have gotten significantly further than ever before. Experts agree that it is not unreasonable to expect an accord by the end of 2014. In the words of President Santos: "Only in a Colombia without fear and with truth can we begin to turn the page."
The Truth Commission for El Salvador was a restorative justice truth commission approved by the United Nations to investigate the grave wrongdoings that occurred throughout the country's twelve year civil war. It is estimated that 1.4 percent of the Salvadoran population was killed during the war. The commission operated from July 1992 until March 1993, when its findings were published in the final report, From Madness to Hope. The eight-month period heard from over 2,000 witness testimonies and compiled information from an additional 20,000 witness statements.
FARC dissidents, also known as Carlos Patiño Front, are a group, formerly part of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who have refused to lay down their arms after the Colombian peace process came into effect in 2016, or resumed their insurgency afterwards. In 2018, the dissidents numbered some 2,000, to 2,500, armed combatants with an unknown number of civilian militia supporting them. The FARC dissidents have become "an increasing headache" for the Colombian armed forces, as they have to fight them, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Clan del Golfo at the same time.
Yolanda Becerra Vega is a Colombian feminist and pacifist activist. She is the founder and currently the national director of the National Directorate of the Popular Women's Organization, an entity created in 1972 in the Diocese's Pastoral Ministry, which in 1988 became an autonomous organization based in Barrancabermeja to support women in peaceful resistance against violence and defend peaceful dialogue. She is currently putting her efforts into establishing entities for women such as the construction of a Museum of Memory and Human Rights for Women and she also developed Women's Agendas for Territory and Peace.
Édgar Orlando Gaitán Camacho, also known as "El Taita", is a human rights activist, healer, spiritual teacher, and expert in the indigenous plant medicine and shamanic traditions of Colombia. Monica Briceño Robles accepts that Gaitan Camacho was briefly president of the Association of Peasant Workers of the Carare, which he helped form to find a solution to the violence caused by conflicts between the Colombian military, guerrillas, and paramilitary groups in the Carare region.
The Aucayacu massacre was a selective massacre that occurred on 6 August 1986 in the Peruvian city of Aucayacu (Huánuco). The attack was directed at gay men and sex workers. Those responsible for the attack were members of the Shining Path, a terrorist group, during the internal conflict in Peru.
María José Pizarro Rodríguez is a Colombian artist, activist, and politician. She was a member of the country's Chamber of Representatives from 2018 to 2022, and has been a senator for the Historic Pact since July 2022.
Reconstrucción is a Colombian mobile video game developed by Pathos Audiovisual. It was released for Android and iOS in 2017. The game depicts the Colombian conflict, following Victoria, a woman that returns to her village after fifteen years.
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