Reparation policies in Colombia: Memory as a Repertoire

Abstract

Colombia is one of the countries that has opted for a model of restorative justice to repair the victims of the armed conflict. To accomplish this, it has created a series of reparation laws which involve building scenarios to foster a call for remembrance (duty of memory) and in which the truth can be cleared up. The objective of this study is to provide a discourse analysis of how the notion of memory is constructed within the official reparation policies in Colombia. A discourse analysis of Law 975, Law 1408, and Law 1448 was carried out, using the logic of interpretive repertoires. As a result, it was possible to identify four repertoires: Institutional, Archival, Commemorative, and Reparative. The increasing globalization of reparation policies and the use of memory for the purpose of institutionalization that hinders the possibility of interpreting the past in another way, is discussed.