Huellas de un trauma psicosocial y retos pedagógicos para la construcción de paz en Colombia

Abstract

The article aims to document, based on some episodes of the Colombian armed conflict, the impact it has had on the social fabric, from the configuration of what Martín-Baró (1988) called psychosocial trauma. This implies a collective damage, specifically to the community ties, mediated by representations, languages, practices, and cultures that established relational dynamics based on indifference, prevention, and exclusion of the other. To support the idea of this psychosocial trauma two historical moments are analyzed, without ignoring the traces and impressions from other processes such as conquest and colonization, which have also been documented, but are not addressed herein. The first moment, called “the era of Violence”, constitutes a period in which some of the marks that reflect this psychosocial trauma were incepted, such as the friend/foe logic, a social ethos of community-inherited hatreds, an environment of tension and prevention, the conviction that violence is the only alternative among others. The second one, corresponding to the 80s and 90s, is marked by drug trafficking with the participation of dissimilar and lethal actors that were combined in different ways: guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the Colombian political class. Subsequently, some pedagogical challenges for peacebuilding are addressed, starting from the post-agreement stage. Once the peace agreement was signed between the National Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC-EP) in 2016, the country still experiences situations of political and social violence, amid expressions of armed conflict. Taking into account this situation, the proposal of a Social Therapeutics is presented, resorting to two sources, the voices of the victims and art as a scene of encounter and resignification.