LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 210, Vol. 43 No. 5, September 2016, 78–98 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X16655306 © 2016 Latin American Perspectives 78 Colombia’s Gallery of Memory Reexamining Democracy through Human Rights Lenses by Erika Márquez The Gallery of Memory, a street exhibit organized by Colombian activists affiliated with the Victims of State Crimes Movement to memorialize human rights violations, con- nects individual cases of human rights abuse with a larger critique of state violence. Through this exercise, activists bring together earlier and current violations of human rights and provide a framework that situates present undemocratic currents within the trajectory of the state’s politics of exception and its correlates, national security and the internal enemy. Critical reflection on the potential for place-based, coproduced resignifica- tion of security measures in a context of systemic violence suggests that the Gallery has become part of the movement-based human rights repertoire for democratizing citizenship in Colombia. La Galería de la Memoria, una exhibición callejera organizada por un grupo de activistas colombianos afiliado al Movimiento de Víctimas de Crímenes de Estado para conmemorar violaciones a los derechos humanos, conecta casos individuales de abusos a derechos huma- nos con una crítica más amplia de la violencia del Estado. Por medio de esta práctica, los activistas sitúan las corrientes antidemocráticas actuales dentro de la trayectoria de las políticas de excepción del estado y sus correlatos de la seguridad nacional y el enemigo interno. Al promover una reflexión crítica sobre el potencial para una resignificación espe- cífica y coproducida de las medidas de seguridad en un contexto de violencia sistémica, la Galería se ha convertido en parte de un repertorio de derechos humanos para la democra- tización ciudadana en Colombia con base en los movimientos sociales. Keywords: Collective memory, Human rights, Security, Colombia During a research trip to investigate the effects of state security policies on human rights mobilization in the Colombian Southwest in 2008, I was introduced by activists in the city of Cali to the Gallery of Memory. Part street museum and part popular forum, the Gallery aimed to memorialize victims of human rights violations since the early 1980s. The body of the Gallery included pictures, banners, and newspaper clippings carefully arranged on the ground or hanging from trees. In various sections infor- mally divided among the participant human rights organizations, activists featured a selection of assassinated or disappeared leftist presidential can- didates, members of Congress, and militants, along with indigenous or Afro-descendants fallen in paramilitary massacres, students killed by armed Erika Márquez is a lawyer and political sociologist. She is currently a professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Cali, Colombia. 655306LAP XX X 10.1177/0094582X16655306Latin American PerspectivesMarquez / COLOMBIA’S GALLERY OF MEMORY research-article 2016 at SAINT JOHNS UNIV on August 3, 2016 lap.sagepub.com Downloaded from