On the bodies of the defeated and the normalisation of barbarism

Human dignity does not disappear with death. In Colombia, a history scarred by violence is once again raising questions about the boundaries that the State must respect, even with regards to a fallen enemy, to avoid the risk of converting corpses into symbols of victory, effectiveness or power, and reestablishing patterns that the country already knows all too well.

F. Sanri

In Colombia, we gradually became used to normalising violence. In the news, the dead appeared more frequently than the living. For decades, people would contemplate dead bodies, car bombs, attacks, massacres and kidnappings while eating their lunch. We have racked up thousands of nameless deaths.

This cohabitation with death taught us a dangerous form of survival: we stopped being shocked. There is no greater danger for a country than becoming used to seeing the death of another person as a victory or their corpse as a trophy. During La Violencia, the slogan “leave not even the seed” was put into action; babies thrown up into the air to land on machetes and bayonets. Added to this were practices whose names alone are enough to make us shiver: corte de corbata (“the tie-cut”), bocachiquiar (“slicing like a bocachico fish”) and picar para tamal (“chopping up for tamales”). It was not enough just to kill someone. They had to humiliate the enemy’s body, stripping them of dignity and turning their corpse into a message of terror, domination and power.

In a country whose history has been marked by cruelty towards the bodies of our enemies, the past should serve us as a moral compass. And yet we seem to have forgotten about it.

It is one thing for the State to use force legitimately, including lethal force strictly in the situations where the law permits it, and quite another thing to turn the corpses resulting from this force into a political prop.

President Abelardo de la Espriella has appeared in his first month of government walking triumphantly among corpses in body bags after Public Force operations.

The image tries to communicate victory, strength and authority. The corpse has become a trophy, legitimisation and a warning: power is capable of destroying whoever challenges it.

Even though a judge had already ordered these images to be hidden from the President’s official social media channels, due to the risk of violating fundamental rights, the order arrived too late to avoid what had already been normalised: the scene had become a visual symbol of their security policy. Ombudsman Iris Marín, expressed it thus: the State cannot compete with armed groups to prove “who can be the cruellest”, nor compete with them over who causes more fear or humiliates their adversary the most. Home Office Secretary Rodrigo Lara, described equating the State with drug trafficking gangs as a “sad mistake” and requested that the Ombudsman be treated as an “ally of the victims”.

Without expressly saying it, this answer insinuated that questioning the imagery could mean putting oneself on the side of the criminals.

This line of reasoning is dangerous. Criticising the way in which the State represents death does not mean protecting criminals. It is not about drawing parallels or establishing levels of cruelty, but pointing out that the State has obligations that require it to behave in an appropriate fashion to maintain their dignity.

In The Iliad, Achilles kills Hector (the Prince of Troy) and then desecrates his corpse by dragging it behind a carriage in front of the city walls, where his family is watching the spectacle in shock. This is what he seeks: revenge. Hector has killed his cousin Patroclus and he wants, as does everyone that is suffering, to share his pain.

At night, dressed as a beggar, King Priam enters the enemy camp and does something heart-rending: he kisses the hands of the man who killed his son to beg him to give his body back. Achilles relents and allows Hector’s body to return to his people and receive funeral rites. Even an enemy needs to rest.

Antigone poses the issue from a different angle. Creon orders Polynices to remain unburied because he considers him a traitor to Thebes. Antigone defies the order because she understands that political condemnation cannot indefinitely lay claim to the bodies of the dead. There are limits even after death, and power is also measured by its capacity to respect them.

In Colombia, we know the opposite all too well. José Antonio Galán was executed and dismembered in 1782, and parts of his body were sent to different areas. In El Salado, paramilitaries even played football with some of their victims’ heads. Different eras and different actors: the same temptation to transform the corpse of the defeated into a message.

This is why it is concerning that the language of body bags is turning into a celebration. Senator Jota Pe Hernandez proposed a fundraiser to buy nearly 30,000 bags intended for the corpses of members of armed groups killed by the Public Force. He even said that he would be “proud” to contribute to buying them.

Thirty thousand.

When lives are turned in advance into a figure representing dead bodies in bags, we are dangerously close to normalising barbarism again.

It is clear that illegal armed groups have crossed all imaginable limits. The State should not do it too. This has been one of the greatest struggles of modern criminal law and human rights: limiting the power to punish and putting human dignity at the centre of it all.

Dignity does not reward the criminal, nor does it prevent the fight against crime. It defines what the State cannot do, including against those who have disregarded all the rules. Neither does this duty end with death.

Those who commit crimes should be pursued, captured and tried. The Public Force can employ force legitimately, even taking the life of someone who rises up in arms against the common good: however, turning corpses into indicators of success could lead to disastrous consequences.

Colombia already knows this. The ill-named “false positives” made bodies into a measure of effectiveness: innocent civilians who were murdered and then passed off as guerrilla fighters killed in combat. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has established a provisional estimation of at least 7,837 victims between 1990 and 2016.

A State demonstrates its strength by respecting boundaries: treating the captured with dignity, guaranteeing a trial for the accused, and respecting the dead. International Humanitarian Law demands protection of corpses against desecration and handling them respectfully.

On the other hand, equating the death count with security lets the conditions that perpetuate violence remain intact. Drug trafficking, corruption, inequality, the absence of the State, lack of opportunities and a still-pending agrarian reform do not disappear because the number of corpses increases; let alone because they have been put on display.

If deaths were enough to build peace, Colombia would already be the most peaceful country on the continent. We have had no shortage of deaths; the truly difficult task has been building a country in which killing no longer seems like the only solution.