This dissertation ethnographically explores the Colombian National Police's encounter with the state’s duty to remember. In other words, this work studies the encounter between police agents rejecting the label of human rights abusers and official and unofficial collectivities seeking to hold state security institutions accountable for historic forms of abuse against civilians and activists. The exploration this dissertation provides is the product of 13 months of fieldwork in Colombia. In five of those months, I conducted participant observation in the Police Unit of Peacebuilding (UNIPEP), a recently created subdivision in the police with a “peacebuilding” mandate. However, it also has a mandate to build a historical narrative of the police that could represent it as legitimate, victorious, and transparent. UNIPEP’s historical memory mandate has produced material and symbolic cultural expressions that illuminate the way the police encounter criticism from other institutions of the state and justice seekers. This dissertation analyzes the material and symbolic expressions of the police encounter with the state’s duty to remember by focusing on three critical dimensions: its historical context, the content of the police’s memory products, and the police's endogenous memory players' search for legitimacy. This dissertation starts with an unshakable assumption: the police memorialization of the conflict is a socio-cultural development that cannot be adequately understood without accounting for the Colombian transitional period, marked by the profound influence of human rights culture in politics and the introduction of transitional justice institutions. Following the work of scholars like Winifred Tate, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, and Alejandro Castillejo, this dissertation traces the introduction of human rights grammar in Colombia, but with a focus on its role in the documentation and memorialization of violence. Closer to Steve Stern and Elizabeth Jelin’s theoretical and methodological frameworks to make sense of collective memories and memory politics, this dissertation explores the chronology of memory and politics, establishing that the police memorialization of the conflict and its role in it is just one expression of a larger reaction to human rights memories and their institutionalization between 2005 and 2025. The larger reactionary politics that the police are making a part of, which is not characterized by strict denialism, demonstrate that reactionary movements in Colombia are appropriating human rights grammar to contest calls for accountability made by a significant number of victims of human rights violations. The contestation that the police are a part of is creating a new reactionary framework of meaning that questions the plural approach taken by transitional justice institutions in their mandate to clarify the past and to serve justice. This dissertation confirms the reactionary imprint of the police memorialization of the conflict by studying the memory products it has mobilized as the police's “contribution to historical memory.” It includes the analysis of memory sites, books, and documentaries that the police incorporate as part of their “institutional historical memory,” concentrating on the representation of police agents as heroes and victims of the conflict. The allusion to the police victimhood is interpreted as an update of the police collective identity, one that revises the meaning of heroism to include suffering and injustice as part of the everyday life experience of police agents at different hierarchical positions during the conflict. But, following the concerns police agents communicated during my fieldwork, victimhood is also interpreted as a problematic concept with multiple connotations that not every police agent is willing to accept. Overall, the exclusive concern for representing police agents as heroes and victims of the conflict cannot be separated from the chronology of memory and politics. The reactionary attitudes held by powerful elites invite police agents to interpret that, when it comes to memorializing the past, sidestepping institutional responsibilities for human rights violations is better than facing the complexity and bitterness of truth. The dissertation finishes by discussing how the police's endogenous memory players sought legitimacy for their memory initiatives, focusing on the role that outside experts have had in the police's “institutional historical memory,” and how the value-free ideal is mobilized by the police when publicizing their memory products. This discussion engages critically with the police's claims of “impartial memorialization.” At the same time, it also demonstrates that the police's memorialization also comes from ahistorical but still human rights-informed perspectives that outside experts have. In other words, my discussion shows that the police's memorialization of the past is not only a strategic development or a systematic form of denial, but an outcome of a society where human rights culture is dominant, and where multiple actors embedded in it try to navigate the murky configuration of Colombian violence and its truth.
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