Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (review)

In this ethnographic study, Winifred Tate traces the evolution of Colombian human rights activism and discourse over the last thirty years. The work draws on an array of interviews she conducted with nongovernmental human rights activists, United Nations officials, state representatives, retired generals, and active duty military officers. Exploring the competing frameworks of human rights activism embraced by her narrators, she argues that rights talk has changed over time and has been used for multiple ideological ends. Attentive to how the unequal relationships of power shape the narratives of human rights, she emphasizes the agency of local activists who define their struggles based on the "political imaginaries at hand" (306).

Chapters 1 through 5 focus on the history of nongovernmental human rights organizations in Colombia. Emerging out of a period of mass detentions of leftists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, early human rights activists sought to build up local committees through consciousness raising and participatory education. Drawing on a model of "transformative witnessing," the local committees attended to victims of violence and wrote up "denuncias"to publicly document the secrets of hidden violence and spur social action (5, 9). By the early 1990s, with access to new international funding streams and training, activists began professionalizing human rights work (108). They stressed the importance of objective reporting in a dispassionate tone that adhered to international legal standards. The new accounts simplified local narratives and undermined activists' emotional commitments to social transformation, but they allowed for the possibility that local stories could enter into the realm of international activism.

Chapters 6 and 7 document the emergence of state-run human rights agencies in Colombia in the early 1990s and the appropriation of human rights talk by the Colombian military in the late 1990s. Tate argues that the state agencies channel human rights cases into repeating loops of bureaucratic programs that "contribute to the production of impunity" (230). Competing for international funding with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), they facilitate the ability of perpetrators of political violence to evade public scrutiny and sanction. Initially hostile to Colombia's embrace of the human rights paradigm, by the late 1990s, the military mimicked the efforts of the NGOs and established local committees to document and publicize the human rights abuses of the guerillas. This approach responded to military aid requirements adopted by the U.S. government and drew upon the psychological warfare tactics promoted by the U.S. military. The Colombian military's embrace of human rights discourse did not lead to a reduction in violence but resulted in a transformation in the practice of violence as the military and paramilitaries gained a greater understanding of the dynamics of international human rights law and scattered the bodies of their victims.

In her conclusion, Tate offers a provocative critique of her early work as a human rights advocate. Faced with the emotional burden prompted by her new awareness of the reality of political violence, she embraced the only model she knew—that of transformative witness. Knowledge, in this model, transforms the individual and prompts her to act. Years later, however, she came to a new understanding of the importance of what Michael Taussig describes as the "public secret"—what is widely known but cannot be publicly stated (292). In this model, human rights activism is not about revealing the hidden and unknown but rather about expanding the "public transcript"—the dominant discourse that cannot be dismissed (297).

The focus of Tate's study is on the history of human rights activism in Colombia. However, oral historians will find her methodological commentary to be of particular interest. She identifies her approach as "embedded anthropology" (13). Tate worked for over a decade as a human rights activist in Colombia and utilized this experience to develop contacts and facilitate trust among her activist narrators. Nonetheless, she is astutely aware of how her status as an outsider from the U...