The disappeared, pilgrims and cemeteries: Spaces and practices of memory in colombia

Abstract

Since the middle of the 20th century, more than 80,000 cases of disappeared persons have been recorded in Colombia. Some of these are buried in clandestine graves and others remain buried in different cemeteries throughout the country, under the acronym N. N. As in other Latin American countries, the term disappeared has occupied an important position on the country’s public agenda and has led to different debates on the figures, the causes of disappearances, and their final location. This photographic essay reflects on cemeteries as a space in which social and transcendent links are generated between pilgrims, society in general and the disappeared. This type of relationship takes place through funerary rituals, religious ceremonies, and cultural manifestations, which go beyond the cemetery itself, and account for an inside-outside, mutually influenced by the living and the dead. That is, practices and exercises of memory that strive against oblivion. The research is based on an ethnographic methodology carried out in the Cementerio del Sur de Bogotá and other municipal cemeteries. The text employs a self-reflexive exercise based on my experience as a consultant for international organizations such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Human Rights Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior on issues related to the search for the disappeared.