The Tragic Experience Behind the Processes of Forced Migration in Colombia: The History of The Caño Jabón Massacre

Abstract

The objective of this work is to present forced migrations due to the dynamics of paramilitary organization and violent practices in Colombia, exemplifying a case study: the massacre in CañoJabón - Meta village (1998) and the testimony of a survivor, a migrant who fled the violent situation. We will describe the Colombian armed conflict from the perspective of those who survived the massacre and through their memories. In theoretical-methodological terms, we base ourselves in the current of Italian micro-history, making an effort to use micro-historical objects beyond the local question, as a space of demonstration and place of experimentation for the re-elaboration and reformulation of hypotheses of a clearly macro-historical and global order. To do so, we start with a particular event, a testimony, to understand the violence and the massacres that surround the history of a country and the forced migrations resulting from this situation of calamity. In dialogue with first-person narrative, we find other sources that we use to tell this story: newspaper reports on the Caño Jabón massacre and the paramilitaries responsible for the crime, judgments of the Attorney General's Office, judgments of the Inter- Human Rights and the testimony of the paramilitaries themselves before the Colombian justice system. We understand, therefore, that the dynamics of capitalist accumulation in Colombia act in a particular way as producers of an order of social control based on the unrestricted use of violence, causing the displacement of thousands of people.