Paper numbers: The colombian government´s accountability to justice as a way of complying incompliantly

Abstract

In 2009, the Colombian Constitutional Court issued ruling Auto 004, declaring 34 indigenous groups as being at risk of extermination due to the internal armed conflict and ordered the Colombian government, led by the Interior Ministry, to protect them. Since then, although the critical situation persists, the government has proven its compliance with the Court´s order through a documentation process. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of documentation in mediating legal protection in a violent context. Based on yearlong participant observation at the Colombian Interior Ministry, the study approaches the production of the government´s documentary response as an artifact. It addresses its formulation and context within the institutional setting, the discussions regarding what to include and what to exclude, and the decisions that shape its content. It highlights how the assembled document enchants, by skillfully combining the aesthetics and technical aspects. It illus-trates how numbers that portray compliance are constructed and displayed in the document, while concealing the failure to make the changes that were ordered: a phenomenon termed here as complying incompliantly. The paper´s originality lies in deconstructing the powerful governmental sophism of money invested as compliance with an obligation, through ethnographic attention to the document. Likewise, the analysis is part of the challenge dealt with by studies of the gap between law and reality, by suggesting that the problem lies not in a gap between well-intended law and the violent reality that overflows it but rather in the way this “gap” is filled by complex docu-menting processes. As such, the paper contributes to the anthropological studies on law, documentation and accountability.