Analysing Mutual Surveillance Practices During Long-Term Kidnapping Situations: The Case of Jungle Kidnapping Camps in Colombia

Sociology, 2006

Kidnapping is a crime that has not received due attention in sociological literature. Policy and risk assessment milieux discursively construct it as a ‘threat to society’, and administrative studies have focused on classifications that describe the phenomenon. The most widespread typology of kidnapping incidents takes as a starting point criminal motivation, producing a bipolar analysis of the crime as economic or political.This article re-examines classificatory and discursive approaches, placing emphasis on the social logic of kidnapping. It is argued that kidnapping presents all the characteristics of a rationalized system of exchange, based on rules and regulations reminiscent of legitimate business.The way that these regulations are described by state authorities or private agents alike allow us an in-depth analysis of the crime itself. KEY WORDS exchange / kidnapping / organized crime / symbolic capital / terrorism / violence

Language & Communication, 2019

What was the impact of one-way radio messages aimed at hostages kidnapped by the FARC and held captive in the Colombian jungle? Messages were read out on air every Saturday night (reception in the Colombian jungle is best between 01:00am and 04:00am) for 22 years. Here, radio animated emotional registers of lived experience as one-way radio messages intensified novel forms of imagination for both speaker, hearer and the ‘community’ of other hearers, in this case thousands of hostages dotted around the jungle. This article examines the linguistic instrumentality of the radio voice. The research is based on interviews with all parties (released hostages, defected guerrillas and relatives of hostages). By analysing the Voces del Secuestro messages, it is shown how a phenomenological listening of the radio voice gave hope in times of anguish.

Crime, Law and Social Change, 2017

This paper shows how human trafficking for criminal exploitation can occur in environments of armed conflict in which adults and even children are recruited to fight. It proposes that these people's status as victims should be taken into account when determining the degree of their criminal responsibility within the framework of a transitional justice process such as the one applied in Colombia under the 2005 Justice and Peace Act (Ley de Justicia y Paz). In order to prove that some victims of human trafficking exploited in the Colombian armed conflict have not been duly identified as such, it presents the main results of a qualitative study carried out with 20 women inmates in Colombian prisons who were members of guerrilla groups and were demobilised under the terms of the Justice and Peace Act. The study shows how the life stories narrated by 16 of these women make it possible to identify them as victims of trafficking for criminal exploitation even though they have not been classified as such. In 80% of the analysed cases, the women suffered episodes of victimisation that led them to join and remain in the armed group, often against their will. These episodes involved the use of means to recruit them and to force them to stay active in the group that show they underwent a genuine process of human trafficking.

The activities of combatants in paramilitary groups in Colombia can be seen as 'dirty work' that acts as a form of social control. We study the experiences and representations of former combat-ants concerning violence perpetrated by their groups against 'outsiders', arguing that the rhetoric of paramilitary groups not only plays a role in denying crimes. It makes possible for combatants to dignify the dirty work of paramilitary activities, but also offers an opportunity to study social control in Colombia in times of economic transnationalization and neo-conservatism.

e-misférica 9.1-9.2, 2012

These are six of the last ten servicemen released by the farc in april 2012. Source A significant amount of scholarship as well as everyday knowledge on Colombia has focused on the complex set of events that are commonly associated with and bundled under the label "the Colombian conflict"-an intricate series of social, political, economic, and historic factors which have been the concern of politicians, activists, scholars, artists, and common citizens for the last seventy years. These involve armed actors (guerrillas, paramilitaries, common criminals, armed forces), illegal activities mostly connected to the drug industry, struggles over material and symbolic resources, and a whole range of national and international policies developed to address the nature of this ongoing conflict or, more appropriately, series of conflicts. This discussion does not seek to question the existence of this trope though its bounded characterizations could also be a good subject for critical inquiry; rather, in this piece I assume its existence and its overwhelming influence in creating and reproducing a national identity. Here I focus on a particular aspect of this conflict and the narratives about nation that are produced in a very specific practice associated with it: long-term kidnapping and one of its many products, the radio program Las voces del secuestro (Voices of kidnapping), which broadcasts messages from the family members of the kidnapped

Conflict, Security & Development, Vol. 11, No. 5, pp. 579-606, 2011

Previous literature on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) argues that a lack of personal security may lead ex-combatants to re-engage in violence. The present article takes a deeper look at what happens when ex-combatants are faced with insecure situations. More specifically, it asks about the narratives ex-combatants construct with relation to personal security. This article is based on 62 semi-structured interviews with former members of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). After their demobilisation, 1385 ex-members of this paramilitary group have been killed between 2003 and 2010. In this climate of violence against the demobilised, many ex-combatants feel exposed to potential threats and claim to respond to these threats with anonymity, good citizenship or isolation. When faced with imminent threats, they mention relocation, self-defence and group protection as consequential strategies. The latter two narratives may lead ex-combatants to re-engagement in violence. State protection is a hypothetical narrative since most ex-combatants do not trust in authorities. The bottom-up approach applied in this study allows one to identify the security alternatives from their perspective. Considering the security-related skills and experiences of ex-combatants, this is an important element in the post-demobilisation period. Furthermore, the mentioned set of mostly non-violent coping strategies challenges the dominant view that ex-combatants are predisposed to violence.

Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America, eds Rachel Sieder and Karina Ansolabehere. Taylor and Francis, New York, , 2019

This chapter focuses on the forms of legality and illegality produced by, and within, prison systems in Latin America due to surging incarceration rates in many countries that led to severe overcrowding and a loss of state control of individual facilities. In these the state either committed violence against prisoners, permitted violence between prisoners, or ceded the carceral space to the prisoners themselves. The chapter discusses this effective “prisoner capture”, a double-sided phenomenon of illegality in the state’s practices of detention on the one hand, and informal, or parallel, governance exercised by those that it detained, on the other. State authorities held tens of thousands of people in extended and legally unjustifiable pre-trial detention, and frequently denied convicted prisoners their legal rights, including timely release. This officially sanctioned form of kidnapping created such overcrowding and underinvestment in prisons that national, constitutional, and international minimum norms on detention standards were routinely, systematically and grossly violated. These multiple illegalities on the part of the state in turn encouraged the emergence of prisoner self-defence and self-governance organizations. This resulted in “prisoner capture” of a different kind, when inmates took over the day-to-day ordering of prison life. In turn, this produced a parallel normative and pseudo-legal world in which inmates disciplined, and even adjudicated on, other inmates in the absence of state officials within the prison walls. The chapter opens by signaling what the study of Latin American prisons and penal practices can add to the field of socio-legal studies in the region. It then examines the reasons for prisoner capture by the state, proceeding to discuss the consequences of prisoners’ increasing control of the carceral space, including the implications of this phenomenon for the dominant socio-legal literature on prisons and imprisonment.

Hostage taking terrorism. Kidnapping. Bank robbery turned hostage situation.

Several years ago, a negotiated, consensual abduction scenario took place in downtown Toronto, Canada. Following the public abduction the captive was taken to a secure, private location and (consensually) subjected to physical and sexual aggression: 'gang-rape'. The public abduction involved five queer and trans persons, some of whom are people of colour. In a Foucaultian context, an abduction scenario eludes surveillance and remains invisible until revealed. During the abduction scenario some citizens stopped, observed, and considered using their cellular phones, visibly concerned with what they were witnessing. At one point the scenario paused for consultation and explanation with bystanders troubled by what they interpreted as potentially criminal behaviour. This response can be understood as policing non-normative, public, physical activity. What are the limitations of Sadomasochism (S/m) in the public sphere? And how are identifications of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality positioned in this analysis? To those inexperienced with S/m, unfamiliar with consensually aggressive activity, there can be a questioning of psychological contiguity. In the twenty-first century there has been a mainstreaming of kink. Yet, there remain limitations of public tolerance for S/m as counter–conduct. Through the work of Warner and Munoz, this paper suggests the scenario can be interpreted as a counterpublic. This research is an autoethnographic account of the scenario and addresses the limitations on S/m scenarios conducted in the public sphere.