How to Wash Your Hands in a War Zone
Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata combines Colombian flora and fauna with documents to explore the ways violence transforms social ecosystems. This hummingbird incorporates threats made by paramilitaries to “clean up” the village of Pichilín shortly before they murdered thirteen farmers there. Photo courtesy of the artist. The Ministry of Health recommends adopting the following handwashing technique:
Wet your hands with water.
Not many family members maintain the tombs of their loved ones in the Las Mercedes Cemetery in Dabeiba, a municipality of nearly 20,000 inhabitants tucked into a valley in northwest Colombia. Dirt and moss obscure the names on many of the tomb markers in the communal mausoleum. Dingy scabs of paint pull away from concrete walls. Mildew-speckled family mausoleums stand about like mangy dalmatians. Only the crosses shine blinding white in the midday sun.
It is December, 2019. A soldier stops cold as soon as he enters the cemetery. He is a witness for the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP, for its initials in Spanish), the centerpiece of the transitional justice system created by the 2016 Peace Accord, which ended five decades of war with the leftist FARC-EP guerrillas. Twelve years earlier, he dug graves in this cemetery to help his battalion disappear false positives: civilians, illegally executed by the army, registered as guerrillas killed in combat. When his battalion made their monthly quotas of neutralized
