CENTRE for LATIN AMERICAN
RESEARCH and DOCUMENTATION

From Coke to Cops: Colombia’s Journey from Internal Conflict to Regional Security Exporter

SPEAKERS: Markus-Michael Müller, Roskilde University 

Markus Hochmüller, Freie Universität Berlin & University of Oxford

DISCUSSANT: Abbey Steele, UvA

DATE: 11 April 2025

TIME: 15:30

ACTIVITY: CEDLA LECTURE
VENUE: Vox-Pop, Binnengasthuisstraat 9, Amsterdam
 

This talk examines Colombia’s transformation into a regional security exporter under the United States-Colombia Action Plan on Regional Security (USCAP). Signed in 2012 by Presidents Barack Obama and Juan Manuel Santos in Cartagena, USCAP aimed to strengthen Latin America’s security forces by positioning Colombia—a country long perceived as fragile and a source of regional instability—as a model of a professional and adaptable security provider. Over the past decade, the Colombian Armed Forces and National Police have trained tens of thousands of security personnel across the region, shaping a new narrative of Colombia’s role in regional security.

Drawing on original research, including over 70 interviews with policymakers, military and police officers, diplomats, and security advisors, the presentation explores how Colombia’s security assistance—focused on counter-narcotics, counterinsurgency, and migration control—prioritizes stability, pacification, and national security, often at the expense of citizen safety.

State Violence as the Blindspot of Transitional Justice:
Critical Insights from Situated Research in Colombia and Peru

SPEAKERS: Diana Gómez Correal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Goya Wilson Vásquez (University of Bristol)

DATE: Monday 28 April

TIME: 15.00-17.00, followed by drinks at CEDLA

ACTIVITY: CEDLA SEMINAR
VENUE: CEDLA, GHK 0.04
REGISTRATION: FORM (open until Friday 25 April)

In this seminar, Diana Gómez Correal and Goya Wilson Vásquez will present their research on state violence, memory, and transitional justice in Colombia and Peru. Drawing on their recently published books, the speakers will explore how state violence has been systematically overlooked in transitional justice frameworks, perpetuating impunity and exclusion for victims, the organizations they belong to and their families.

Gómez Correal’s De Amor, Vientre y Sangre: Politización de Lazos Familiares y Gestación de una Paz Transformadora en Colombia (2024), examines the politicization of relatives of state violence’s victims, focusing on the role of emotions, identity and subjectivity. Through a decolonial and feminist approach, the book critiques the limitations of transitional justice for tackling victims’ rights and claims; and offers a transformative vision of peace rooted in the proposals and lived experiences of affected communities.

Wilson Vásquez’s Learning through Collective Memory Work: Troubling Testimonio in Post-war Peru (2025), traces the struggles of the HIJXS de Perú collective, the children of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), as they navigate the stigma of being labeled “children of terrorists” and reclaim a space in a post-war society. The book theorizes memory work through a cycles of inquiry approach, placing alongside three movements: a realist testimonio, a politics of memory, and a poetics of memory to challenge dominant narratives and explore alternative ways of knowing.

Methodologically, both authors display embodied and activist research that develop creative methodologies, as well as innovative strategies of writing that challenge traditional notions of knowledge production. Their work exemplifies a reflexive and critical approach to research that bridges activism and academia, offering new possibilities for understanding violence, memory, and transitional justice in Latin America.

Together, in addition to share the methodological approaches, the speakers will address critical questions related with the specificities of State violence; the blindspots of transitional justice regarding this violence; the particularities of the category of “victim” in this context; and the contributions of the organizations of victims and relatives in rethinking justice and society in both countries.

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SPEAKERS
Goya Wilson Vásquez has a PhD in Education from the University of Bristol. Born in Peru, grew up in Nicaragua and now lives in the United Kingdom where she works on memory struggles and creative/radical methodologies from Latin America by examining the dilemmas of writing violence, the intersections between research and activism, and the uses of creativity/imagination in memory work.

Diana Gómez Correal has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was the first vice-minister for women in the Ministry of Equality and Equity in Colombia, and has also worked as an associate professor, researcher, and public servant. Her research interests include transitional justice, memory, gender and feminist studies, social movements, decoloniality and post-development. Gómez Correal has been involved with women's, feminists, peace, victims' and generational movements in Colombia.
 

DESCRIPTION OF BOTH BOOKS
De Amor, Sangre y Vientre: Politización de Lazos Familiares y Gestación de una Paz Transformadora en Colombia / Diana Gomez Correal (2024) 
The book explores the particularities of state and paramilitary violence and social transformation in a context of political transitions and disputes over the meaning of peace and transition in Colombia. The book is the product of a situated ethnography that focuses on relatives of victims of such violence and their processes of politicisation. The research included an autoethnographic component and the deployment of a decolonial research methodology. This book draws on decolonial feminisms and dialogues with different strands of critical theory from anthropology, history and other disciplines. It is therefore a research that recognises the importance of subjectivity, the body and emotions in the production of knowledge; and that displays a sensitivity to the social suffering experienced by those victimised by state and paramilitary violence. The book was written with three alter egos that represent the academic, the activist-family member and the decolonial thinker. The text is structured in three sections: love, blood and womb. The first focuses on the role of emotions, the construction of the identity of victims, changes in the subjectivity of relatives of victims of state and paramilitary violence and the way power circulates in the contentious field of victimisation. The second offers a long-term reading of this violence; and the third analyses the implementation of transitional justice in Colombia from a critical and proactive perspective.

Learning through Collective Memory Work: Troubling Testimonio in Post-war Peru / Goya Wilson Vásquez (2025) 
This book traces the process of producing testimonio with the children of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) which was a former insurgent group during Peru’s internal war (1980–2000). Through a decade-long engagement with the HIJXS de Perú collective, the author examines how the group lives the post-war struggles over memory while dealing with the ‘children of terrorists’ stigma.The writing navigates the ambivalence and complexities of ‘testimonio’ as an important and necessary tool for countering the silencing and dominant narratives that construct them and their parents as ‘terrorists’ and exclude them from the category of victims - and at the same time the impossibility of testimonio, both in ethical and epistemological terms, because to write (about) violence is to denounce it but also to reproduce it, and because ‘realist’ testimonio is also an iteration of a certain re-presentation. Drawing on a cycles of inquiry approach, the book theorizes three movements for memory work: a realist presentation of testimonial narratives, a ‘politics of memory’ engaging with the conditions of production, and a ‘poetics of memory’ that troubles memory, voice and representation for qualitative inquiry in post-war contexts. The author challenges the notion of war-torn countries as pure devastation, and invites readers to see them as sites of knowledge and creativity, with much to offer for education, peace studies and social justice research.

Infrastructural hybrids: Examining human/other-than-human entanglements in a climate changed world

SPEAKERS: Karen Paiva Henrique, University of Amstedam

DISCUSSANT: Daniele Tubino de Souza, Wageningen University

DATE: 16 May 2025
TIME: 15:30

ACTIVITY: CEDLA LECTURE
VENUE: Vox-Pop, Binnengasthuisstraat 9, Amsterdam

ABSTRACT: Efforts to adapt cities to flooding have long relied on evolving infrastructural paradigms that seek to overcome past (material) limitations to control exacerbating water flows. In the context of a global climate crisis, the urgency to prevent and manage urban floods has renewed calls for locating the ‘right’ technical solution as defined within global expertise networks. This lecture critically traces how this pursuit for the flood adaptation ideal unfolds in Latin American cities. Focusing on São Paulo’s eastern periphery, I map the evolution of flood adaptation to demonstrate how, when juxtaposed to the complex materialities and temporalities of the city’s floodplains, discrete interventions evolve into new infrastructural hybrids. Attention to such hybrids, I argue, allows for a more nuanced understanding of flood infrastructures as dynamic objects, making visible the many ways in which they entwine, coexist, and transform one another while creating and foreclosing possibilities to achieve urban climate justice.

Reimagining value from Bolivia's popular markets: Economic diversity in El Alto

SPEAKERS: Kate Maclean, University College London

DISCUSSANT: Dana Brablec, CEDLA - UvA

DATE: 13 June 2025
TIME: 15:30

ACTIVITY: CEDLA LECTURE
VENUE: Vox-Pop, Binnengasthuisstraat 9, Amsterdam

This lecture explores the livelihood strategies of indigenous women working in El Alto’s vibrant popular markets, offering a new way to think about modernity, value, and economic inclusion—grounded in their worldviews and practices. These markets have been central to Bolivia’s evolving economy, but the ideas and activities of urban indigenous women have often been overlooked, even in the radical decolonial vision promoted by Evo Morales’ government. While his commitment to an ‘economy where all economies fit’ promised plurality, indigenous feminists have observed that it remained shaped by a masculine, rural lens.

Drawing on twelve years of research into rural credit, contraband trade, and the rise of an indigenous bourgeoisie transforming Bolivia’s cities through architecture and fashion, this talk reimagines economic inclusion from the ground up. It challenges both orthodox and heterodox assumptions about value, scale, and national production, offering a hopeful vision for economies that embrace diversity on their own terms.