Since April 9, 1948, day of the murder of presidential candidate Jorge Elicer Gaitán, Colombia has gone through 70 years of internal violence for various reasons.
Since April 9, 1948, day of the murder of presidential candidate Jorge Elicer Gaitán, Colombia has gone through 70 years of internal violence sparked by very different causes and marked by an instable intensity. The first part of these 70 years of war - between 1948 and 1958 - can be interpreted as a sort of “long tail” of the troubled colonial and post-colonial period, which arose from the struggles for independence from the Spanish crown. Except for a short period of relative peace, Colombia has been, for just over two centuries, one of Latin America’s most disorganized nations, devastated by multiple wounds, the latter being drug trafficking, the guerrillas of Marxist-Leninist groups and right-wing paramilitaries.
The death toll is shocking: the most authoritative sources say that in the first period, called “La Violencia”, the victims, especially civilians, were 300,000. As for the period of internal war against the Farc, the dead are at least 230,000 over 50 years, again almost all civilians. However, this number must be added to a much larger, and yet unknown number to the world’s recent history: in Colombia, these years of clashes with the former Farc - a political group which has now pacified into a constitutional political party - and with the Eln (National Liberation Army), with which there are ongoing negotiations for peace in Ecuador, have caused a total number of 8,376,463 victims.
According to the “Registro Único de Víctimas” (RUV) cited by President Manuel Santos on the “Day of the Victims, Memory and Forgiveness”, the above figure is divided as follows: 7,134,646 displaced, 983,033 murdered (including 230,000 victims of internal conflicts with guerrillas), 165,927 forced disappearances (of which no one has any kind of news), 10,237 tortured and 34,814 kidnapped (including many children abducted to collect ransom and who never return to their loved ones). According to the RUV, 96% of the 8,376,463 victims are “victims of the armed conflict” and 302,191 belong to the category “víctimas por sentencias”, i.e. individuals who a court ruling included in the list of deceased people.
It is clear, therefore, that in Colombia the victims are not only the 230,000-people affected by the dynamics of the internal conflicts that we often hear of. For Colombian society, the victim status has politically, culturally and legally, a much broader concept, always respectful of truth and, above all, of the ten-year-long-suffering of an entire nation. This is the concept that we must keep in mind when Pope Francis is said to put the “victims” in the center of his trip to Colombia. Certainly, the Pope will recall the two bishops killed in these past years (Mgr. Isaías Duarte Canclini, 1939/2002 and Mgr. Jesús Jaramillo, 1916/1989) as well as the over 100 priests, religious men and women, deacons and catechists killed in the last 30 years.
He will also recall the dozens of killed managers and human rights activists, some of whom have been assassinated in recent months, after the signing of the Peace Accords, just as it had already happened some years ago after the pacification of another small armed group. Of course, the Pope will also pray for the thousands of farmers massacred by the right-wing paramilitary groups at the service of landowners and speculators. In the Pope’s heart and thoughts there will thus be collective suffering, that of a whole martyred nation, where the last two generations have been born and raised in what they perceive as “normal” violence, as they know nothing about living in peace.
The four central reflections of Francis’ trip to Colombia make up the “process of reconciliation” he wants to push and fuel as “a wave of tenderness and mercy”: Bogotá (”Builders of Peace, Promotes of Life”), Villavicencio (”Reconciliation with God, among Colombians and with Nature”), Medellin (” The Christian Vocation and Apostolate”) and Cartagena (” The Dignity of People and Human Rights”).
In his 20 international pilgrimages, only a few times did Pope Francis experience something similar to what awaits him in Colombia: meeting and embracing with an endless mass of young, old and middle-aged people, women, men, children, rich and poor, who carry in their hearts the scars of long nights of suffering, humiliation and loneliness. If we fail to understand, if we do not grasp, the true anthropological, social and spiritual dimension of this reality - that is, of the tearing and prolonged sufferance of the people, we will not understand why Pope Francis insisted on visiting this South American country, where, among other things - Catholic faith is very widespread, profound and felt. - and here we are faced with a yet-to-be solved mystery; it is unclear, and needs further investigation, though it is difficult to find an answer, why the two most catholic Latin nations, Mexico and Colombia, for many decades have been “open veins” of pain, iniquity, injustice and exploitation.
This is another challenge on Francis’s road to Colombia.
Finally, it is sure that Pope Francis will have a special thought for the over 200,000 missing persons of whom nobody knows whether they are still alive, or if they died, and if so, where and how they died, where they were buried and why they did not come home. This is perhaps the worst suffering because the oblivion is final, absolute. According to the Red Cross and the Equitas NGO, a significant number of these victims - 24,483 - are waiting today in the 375 cemeteries, many of which are illegal, a name, a burial and a prayer.
