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

As anthropology sought to reinvent itself as more relevant to modern challenges, a whole generation of researchers turned in the 1980s to writing about violence, fear, and the politics of terror in Latin America and beyond. In the last decade, there's been something of a shift to study the global panoply of advocacy organizations and bureaucracy that have grown up in the name of defending human rights principles. Now the culture of human rights activism itself comes under examination through what Zora Neale Hurston once called "the spyglass of anthropology."

Winifred Tate does just this in Counting the Dead, an account of human rights organizing in Colombia. Tate's long involvement in Colombia as a student, volunteer, and researcher for the Washington Office on Latin America and Human Rights Watch makes her something of a "native" anthropologist, or an "embedded ethnographer" (p.13), as she prefers to call it. She had an insider's access and first-hand experience of the fractured, always contentious Colombian culture of human rights activism. The result is a strong, smart, thorough book very valuable for anyone trying to understand Colombia's recent history and the bigger question of the globalization of human rights institutions and discourse.

As Tate and many others have noted, Colombia is a human rights emergency not from the expected mold. The country is comparatively prosperous by comparison to other Andean countries. Nor does it have the sharply drawn ethnic or religious cleavages that so often power mass violence. Yet even as the age of the Latin American dirty war waned with the Cold War's end, Colombia has remained suspended in a state of crisis. Here the violence and terror generated by drug money and vendettas, attacks and kidnapping by leftist guerrillas, and paramilitary and state brutality show little sign of abating with poorer, more marginal regions suffering the brunt of it all. Tate shows how a culture of human rights activism began to develop in the 1980s from earlier leftist political traditions. That human rights was becoming a priority for international donors and organizations provided encouragement for this new "traveling theory" (p. 73) to take hold in Colombia. The task was "counting the dead," or, as Tate explains it, bringing the "public secret" (p. 292) of massacres and killing out into the spoken record; and it was also to "make the dead count" (p. 26), in other words generating pressure nationally and abroad for change in Colombia.

At every turn, Tate probes the dilemmas, contradictions, and paradoxes of the process. Many leftists were wary at the start of the very concept of "human rights" with its supposedly "bourgeois" concern for individual freedom as opposed to revolutionary change. The left's influence in human rights organizing led some groups to be slow to denounce the abuses of Marxist guerrillas. There were tensions between better-funded, more internationally connected organizations based in the capital of Bogotá and smaller provincial ones. Unsurprising stories of non-governmental organization excess—the junkets abroad and the chasm between well-off city activists and poor victims—also figure into the picture. As Tate shows, the government itself entered into the human rights business with its own investigatory branches, albeit limited and with the authorities very often divided against themselves. In an even stranger turn, the Colombian military began to take up the discourse of "human rights" as its own; it tarred existing groups as enemies of the state, and ran its own watered-down human rights training courses. Evident throughout was the struggle to generate pressure from abroad with Colombian human rights activists wanting to create a global "boomerang effect" by encouraging foreign governments to demand accountability and change from the Colombian authorities.

For her smart, sometimes critical eye, Tate remains very much a supporter of Colombian human rights activism. Dozens of activists have given their lives in the fight...