Bogota, April 16. The association Mothers of False Positives of Colombia (Mafapo) commemorated this Sunday with art 15 years of fight against impunity that exists for cases of extrajudicial executions of which their children were victims during the armed conflict.
The women, in the company of plastic artists, intervened with painted boots as part of a catharsis in which they sought to make a discharge “not speaking from 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 of the artists who are participating have also been direct or indirect victims of the conflict.”
“The meaning is very particular, in these 15 years when all the research was done, many of them found their children with their boots backwards. When they camouflaged them and put them in uniform, they put their boots on backwards,” he said.
The artist added: “That was an internal struggle and a very painful message, but when we came to find the project as such, we said that you have put on your boots very well for 15 years not to be silent, to carry a message. For 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 Army who were later presented as guerrillas killed in combat 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 false 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 will finally rest so that people can come from anywhere and learn about this story,” said the artist.
SLOW STEPS, BUT GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS
For Jaqueline Castillo, spokeswoman for Mafapo and sister of the victim Jaime Castillo Peña, “although they have been very slow steps,” the mothers have achieved “great achievements.”
As an example of this, he cited to EFE “the work that has been done with the JEP, having demonstrated that figure of 6,402 fully documented cases”, with which they showed that “it had been a systematic practice under a State policy”.
“I managed to find my brother in very sad conditions because he was not even in a cemetery, they began to rent places on the farms where the owners told us that they arrived with the bodies and dropped them from helicopters,” he recalls.
For this reason, the commemoration of this Sunday serves to remember the death of their relatives, which “are facts that cannot be forgotten” and “also show society” how they can “remember through art” and “heal Through the art”.
“We are with an idea of being able to collect those 6,402 boots,” he added. EFE
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