Of Silences and Openings: The Recognition of the Victimization of LGBTI Social Sectors in Recent Models of Transitional Justice in Colombia

Abstract

This article proposes a queer approach to analyze the emerging notions of victim in different contents and institutional developments of Colombia’s Justice and Peace Transitional Justice (2005) and Final Agreement (2016) models, which are, as yet, little explored in the field of peacebuilding studies. It analyzes the openings and conditions of possibility to name heterosexual violence and cisprivileges as constitutive of structural and armed violence, focusing on official documents in dialogue with the existing queer literature in this field of studies. The analysis considers three scenarios: the first years of implementation of the Justice and Peace Law, the lessons learned in the justice component in the application of the gender approach, and the progress in the implementation of the Final Agreement and the persistent challenges. The analysis concludes, and therein lies the originality of the article, that there is a qualitative change in the understanding of violence, which goes from being androcentric and assuming a binary interpretation to explicitly recognize LGBTI people and their quality of victims in the face of heteronormative violence, the continuum of structural, daily and armed violences, its intertwining with other power matrices, and the recognition of the different patterns that operated to correct or eliminate sexual and gender dissidence.