Abstract

TAMAYO PLAZAS, MARÍA ANGÉLICA. The Sources of Memory: Uses of History and Social Sciences in the Proyecto Colombia Nunca Más. Anu. colomb. hist. soc. cult. [online]. 2021, vol.48, n.1, pp.203-230.  Epub Jan 28, 2021. ISSN 0120-2456.  https://doi.org/10.15446/achsc.v48n1.91549.

This article analyzes the relationships between memory and history in the case of the Proyecto Colombia Nunca Más (PCNM) and the memory work it carried out in the 1990s and 2000s. It was an initiative of a group of human rights organizations whose purpose was the construction of memory of recent violence in the country, in particular State crimes. The objective of this work is to explore the practices of memory in this initiative, emphasizing the use of history and the social sciences for the purposes of memory, starting from the documentation of the institutional archive of the PCNM, reports published, and semi-structured interviews with project participants. We found that this memory initiative was made of the information accumulated over the years by different human rights organizations and testimonies of the victims, along with concepts, techniques, and literature typical of the social sciences, causing slips and intersections between different frames of meaning, those of a memory initiative and those of the social sciences. It is analyzed how the information and academic resources are appropriated by the PCNM and integrated in its narrative about the past-present of violence, during a moment of important changes in social mobilization in defense of human rights in Colombia and Latin America.

Keywords : Colombia; history of the present time; human rights; memory; memory studies; violence.

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