Bogotá, April 16. The association Mothers of false positives of Colombia (Mafapo) commemorated this Sunday with art 15 years of fight against the impunity that exists for the cases of extrajudicial executions of which their children were victims during the armed conflict.
The women, along with visual artists, stepped in with painted boots as part of a catharsis in which they sought to make a discharge “not speaking of hate” or pain, but “carrying a message of reconciliation, of rebirth, of hope and of peace.”
Iván Rinconesarte, director of the Rinconesarte Foundation, assured EFE that “many artists who participate have also been direct or indirect victims of the conflict”.
“The significance is very particular, in these 15 years when all the research has been done, many of them have found their children with their boots upside down. When they camouflaged them and put them in uniform, they have put their boots on backwards,” he said.
The artist added: “It was an internal struggle and a very painful message, but when we came to find the project as such, we thought to ourselves that you have been in your boots very well for 15 years to not not be silent, to carry a message. That’s why the project is called ‘Women with well-placed boots'”.
The name “false positive” refers to the executions of civilians by members of the military who were then presented as guerrillas killed in action to receive rewards or benefits.
According to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), at least 6,402 innocent young people were deceived with promises of fake jobs and executed by members of the Army to improve the statistics of the fight against the guerrillas and receive rewards in exchange .
“The goal is that in the Museum of Memory (under construction in Bogotá) the boots finally rest so that people can come from anywhere and discover this history”, said the artist.
SLOW STEPS, BUT GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS
For Jaqueline Castillo, spokesperson for Mafapo and sister of the victim Jaime Castillo Peña, “although they were very slow steps”, the mothers achieved “great achievements”.
As an example, he cited to EFE “the work that has been done with the JEP, having demonstrated this figure of 6,402 fully documented cases”, with which they showed that “it had been a systematic practice in as part of a state policy.
“I managed to find my brother in very sad conditions because he was not even in a cemetery. They started to rent places in the farms where the owners told us that they had arrived with the bodies and had dropped them off the helicopters,” he recalls.
For this reason, this Sunday’s commemoration serves to remember the deaths of their loved ones, which “are facts that cannot be forgotten” and “also show society” how they can “remember through art”. and “healing with art”.
“We are in the idea of being able to collect these 6,402 boots,” he added. ECE
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