Voices against silence, memory against forgetting life trajectories of 25 victims of forced displacement based in the neighborhood Café Madrid Bucaramanga

Abstract

Colombia has been suffering an armed conflict since five decades ago. This paper is focused  in giving a voice to the victims, in giving them courage to defeat fear, to heal wounds and  to find out their truth. We built and analyzed, in cooperative way, the history of the life of  25 victims of forced displacement, they’re located in Café Madrid, Bucaramanga. They  understood that his narrative helps them to build a reasoned memory, to break the silence,  to evidence the apathy or acquiescence from society and state. They also contribute to  reach justice, integral reparation, guarantee of nonrepetition and reconciliation towards a  long and stable peace This research has a theoretical and methodological approach of oral history, biographical  approach and grounded theory. Also there’s a category analysis of internal armed conflict,  forced displacement, gender violence, social networks and memory.
Within the stories are spotted actors in conflict, their interests, their behaviors, their links with  the establishment, their strategies in order to achieve control of the people and territories, the  ways for destroying individual and collective life projects, the winding roads from their  homes to their current locations and their losses along the way.
We realized the need of Resignify the Café Madrid Train Station in order to, as a reparation,  it become a collective memory place.