Banana plantations

February 4, 2019.

According to the Observatory of Memory and Conflict by the National Historical Memory Center, from 1958 to september 2018, there were 24,518 victims of massacres in Colombia.

The Observatory documents acts of violence occurred within the framework of the colombia armed conflict, integrating social and institutional sources and unificating the registration and classification criteria, with the purpose of clarify the history and recognize the plurality of memories.

This information is extracted from a complex exercise of gathering information about the colombian armed conflict, which includes 592 sources and 10,236 databases and documents, which contribute to the clarification of the history and the recognition of plurality of reports on this issue in the country.

This information is derived from five characteristics of the documentation processes on the context of armed conflict in Colombia:

• High fragmentation of the information registers that have been built from the public policy or from civil society initiatives
• Absence of official information registers.
• High information sub-registers that vary according to the modality, the historical moment, region or profile of the victim.
• The absence of an adequate registration that has led the fragmentation of information, dispersion of efforts and / or keeping records that are not comparable between institutions.
• Hiding strategies of the armed actors.

The Observatory documents the circumstances of the way, time and place of the events, the perpetrators and the victims of the armed conflict.

In that period of time, more than 4 thousand massacres occurred, that left a total of 23,937 civilians, 480 combatants and 30 victims without information. The years with greater upsurge of these acts were in 1997 with 214 events and 406 events in 2001.

Source: CNMH, Databases, Memory and Conflict Observatory, in http://centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Masacres_15-09-18.pdf.

Those responsible for these acts were mostly paramilitary groups (2,113 incidents), followed by guerrillas (757 events) and state agents (296 incidents).

Source: CNMH, Databases, Memory and Conflict Observatory, in http://centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Masacres_15-09-18.pdf.

The data can be explored and downloaded here. Also, other types of information can be explored, such as military actions, selective assassinations, kidnappings, forced disappearance, and others.