*Translated by Timothy Hixson

68 Julin Gonzlez Mina

Simulation-Games as Educational Strategy for Social Harmony*
Julin Gonzlez Mina
1
University of the Valley
This research developed three games that required the participant to imagine non-destructive forms
of overcoming peronal conflicts, and favoring social harmony, collective solidarity and non-violent
forms to resolve conflicts in future social contexts. By conflicts in future social contexts, we
understand this to mean the factors that affect social harmony between persons that share
neighborhood activities, neighborhoods, family members, work and schooling. Four premises support
this proposition. First is a recreational focus of communication as a mechanism of generating social
fabric. The need of assuming the expressive competition of the students as an essential principle for
transforming urban living into strategic resources of education for social harmony. The idea of
convergance or synergy among the narrative, the expressive and the analytical in the popular urban
culture results in an invaluable educational potential that the conventional school squanders by
restricting the popular speech. And the idea is that the symbolic defecit is a key component of
common violence in the urban life of Colombia. After testing the simulation-games with students of
centers of Adult Education in Cali, the research explains which are the essential characteristics of the
strategy and what conditions can effectively result in order to connect the latent knowledge of the
students with the requirements of negative schooling. The research suggests that the resourceful use
of this knowledge contributes to fortifying the project of the subject (Touraine, 2000) and it makes it
more resistant to coercive control and many times violence of the communities and groups, and to the
action so many times manipulative and destructive of the market and the media.
The Problem
Colombia demonstrates a significantly fragile social harmony (Garay, 2002) that favors the use of force and
weapons to resolve some of its conflicts, an attitude which has turned violent homicide into the most important
public health problem in the country. The inclusion of violence (26%) in the percentage of illnesses in
Colombia is notable, in contrast with a percentage of 3.3% for Latin America and 1.5% for the rest of the
world (Rubio, 2000; data from 1994). Violence is the main topic of public agendas and the central point of
national, regional, and local policies. This fragile social harmony includes the armed political confrontation of
the last forty years along with diverse types of interpersonal violence which is diffused, social, and not
predominantly political. This research defines the conditions and requirements of simulation-games as a
pedagogical strategy for education in social harmony and peaceful conflict resolution, incorporating as a
problem of pedagogical design, the strategic integration of school culture with some aspect of the ordinary
culture of the popular urban sectors. This study addresses two issues: on one hand, that of pedagogical research
and particularly the construction of educational techniques and strategies for socially vulnerable school
communities, and on the other, that of the study of popular urban cultures, kinds of social harmony, and the
posibilities of reconstruction of the social fabric in contexts where there is a crisis of violence, unemployment,
and poverty. To recognize the cultures and ways of life of the popular sectors as a requirement for the design of
the simulation-games appears as the central problem of the proposal. This effective recognition implies the
integration into the school situation part of the communicative dynamics of the students, since social exclusion
is accentuated by the devaluation and belittlement of local knowledge, speech patterns, and the diversity of
expressive recourses of the populace. But, on the other hand, to recognize this should not arise by chance from
a school populism that revels in its culture without requiring and demanding from the adult student of the
popular culture, the painstaking, detailed learning of intelectual learning which schooling should instill. Paulo
Freire has already vaccinated us against this populist temptation, against the idea that the poor should not
encounter any obstacles or tension in the learning process. This school populism is centered in a certain type of
workshop mentality. And so, in this research, the basic problem was that of pedagogical design: how to
develop a pedagogical strategy that would allow the recognition of the cultural dispositions of the student,
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without avoiding the demands of scholarly disposition and without unwittingly promoting the culture of
poverty (Lewis, 1969).
Theoretical Framework and Purpose of the Study
Culture of Direct Producers
The culture and daily life of the urban inhabitants of the popular sectors are composed of complex
relationships between what is local and what is foreign, of conflict between traditional and contemporary, of
mixtures of memories, temporalities, and social wisdom of diverse historical and geographical origens. Popular
urban culture is more than culture; it is a place where relations between cultures are established; media-
driven and ethnic, techno-scientific and artesan, local and global, ancestral and emerging cultures. A still-
useful distinction is that which Williams (1980) established for the purpose of considering cultural formations.
For Williams the cultural dominion of the dominant sectors is never completely hegemonic; its dominion
consists of extending and enlarging the recognition of (and in some cases, expropiation of) those practices and
cultural dimensions of the non-dominant sector. In cultural formations, beside the dominant values are those
which are archaic, residual, and emerging. Archaic refers to that which is recognized as the dead past, subject
to a certain specialized revival by way of museums, the activity of students of folklore, or exotic tourism.
Residual alludes to that which originates in the past but is still a living culture in the present. Residual culture,
in some cases, is resistant to domination and integrates old values and cultural practices that in some ways are
alternatives and even opposites to dominant contemporary values. But there can also be conservative forms of
residual culture and ways in which the residual is appropriated and incorporated into the dominant culture.
Lastly, Williams speaks of emerging culture, that is, the new meanings and values, new practices, new
relations and types of relations that are continuously created (p. 146). The emerging new culture can be the
object of intensive incorporation (adaptation), above all when it has to do with alternative and opposing
values; or it can be the object of exclusion and marginalization. The popular urban cultures consider archaic
elements as residual (sometimes resistent, sometimes appropriated and adapted in the domination) and
emerging elements (sometimes alternatives to and opposed to the dominant values, sometimes integrated
systematically by way of the dynamics of recognition and expropriation, and often simply excluded, rejected,
and made invisible by the existing cultural formation).
In communication practices these different dimensions of culture are articulated, expropriated, or
suppressed, according to the inclusive or exclusive dynamics of each cultural formation. By communication
practices, it must be understood, in first place, the social customs and ways of being together in the city that
occur in the network of family life and blood relationships, by way of encounters and social celebrations, in the
calendar of festivities, the community social fabric, diverse forms of organization of work in popular settings.
In second place, the scenes in which this communication is forged domestic spaces, community streets and
parks, shopping centers, work spaces, school campuses, factories, churches, social organizations, public and
private beaurocratic institutions. In third place, the media that encourages, reinforces, duplicates, recognizes or
models the emergent, the residual, and the archaic cultures. And in fourth place, the cultural practices in which
there is unmediated communication gaming, dance, music, cuisine, eroticism, festivals, funeral rites, and
customs regarding hygiene, health, and illness.
It is of interest to the purposes of this research this specific concept of communication as an example
of recreation and social recognition: that is, in the practice of communication, the stage and the means
contributes symbolically to democratic society if it recognizes and acknowledges popular culture, and if it
favors the constitution of the social fabric. In other words, if it supports the social life of the marginalized.
What appears to be dispersed, contradictory, distant, or foreign is joined together and becomes linking
knowledge and practicality for the urban majority in this type of communication. It is not too much to insist
that communication can also be the instance in which exclusions are sanctioned, avoiding the representation
of certain critical dimensions of social and cultural life (Sunkel, 1985, 2001), apropriating and deactivating the
potential for resistance of the population. The simulation-games are supported by the idea that certain tyes of
communication favor the transformation of the living culture into linking knowledge and linking knowledge
into living culture; these are ways of recognition and inclusion of certain very powerful residual and emerging
elements in the culture of the popular sectors, and are possibilities of reactivating and restoring cultures and
latent knowledge in order to turn them into opportunities for survival. The residual and emerging dimension of
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popular culture in urban contexts can be utilized by a project of social harmony with the condition of studying
the communicative and recreative dimension of educational work.
In order for these latent cultures to be transformed into living knowledge, there should be kinds of
situations and specific social circumstances that transform what is latent into an active resource. To give an
illustrative example: the ambulant vendors that work the street corners in the city of Cali have a routine
understanding of directing city traffic, but this latent knowledge is only put into practice when the traffic lights
stop functioning for lack of electrical current. Until the traffic police arrive, these street vendors take it upon
themselves to direct city traffic, thereby avoiding bottlenecks and chaos, and in exchange, the drivers tip them.
The vendors imitate the gestures of the police, their ways of pointing, and the traffic whistle signals, affirming
in this way their authority as substitute traffic directors. And the drivers of vehicles concede to their authority
as long as the power outage lasts. The traffic light failure is the circumstantial situation that forces the
resourceful use of accumulated knowledge, and transforms latent and potential knowledge in an effective
practice of social coordination. The essential notion is the unexpected failure. A situation that dislocates and
breaks the routine order, an unforeseeable situation, obligating the use of latent knowledge or to make
unconventional use of accumulated knowledge. The simulated situations in the simulation games are the
equivalents of this unexptected situation, this power outage. They place the player in strange territory and
requires him to improvise. This throws him into an unconventional situation that forces him to use his
knowledge in an inhabitual manner (resourceful use of what is already known) or to call upon emerging,
residual, and latent knowledge that favor non-violent convivence in complex urban life.
What is it that students from the popular neighborhoods possess and that the simulation games can
provide? What people in an urban atmosphere have is cultural capital, in one sense that evidently broadens
the Bordian idea of cultural capital. They have routines and knowledge derived from either a short or long
stay in the school system. They have a positive evaluation - above all, among the women of school, of
literacy and the way that education can affirm their own lives (Gmez & Gonzlez, 2002). They have linguistic
capital, manners of speaking, sense of humor, story-telling ability and a certain recognition of the value and
implied power in the capacity for public speaking. They have an increasing quality of media domination, using
television in such a way that they can make some types of social demands (public utilities, security, health,
streets) visible in the world of media. They have the ability to recognize the languages of media, ridicule them,
imitate them, and reinvent them in a way that is part of the Colombian experience of community television and
radio stations, founded by men and women of the communities. They have a sophisticated knowledge of the
city, an acccumulations of tactics and strategies to evaluate and apropriate advantageously what the city can
offer them, to calculate where to purchase and locate material resources at the lowest possible cost. They have
technical knowledge that permits some people to recuperate and refurbish certain kinds of technologically
complex equipment, from autos to small appliances, telecommunication equipment to small machines for
industrial production.
The fact that a large amount of the food is prepared at home, that they resort to home remedies to care
for some health problems, that they make a family library using clippings and collectible pages from
newspapers, that in some places clothing is handmade or frequently repaired, that there is an abundance of
types of work producing goods and services (auto mechanic, small appliance repair, food vendor and small
restaurants, corner stores) that public utilities such as electric lines, water and sewage are many times
connected illegally, that houses, schooles and streets in the popular communities are built by the inhabitants
themselves, all of these show to what extent we are speaking of an enormous community of direct producers.
Of course a euphoric and romantic reading of this situation is to be avoided. To build a house, a school, to sew
clothing by hand, using local resources, reusing prefabricated goods, refurbishing what has already
deteriorated, indicateds the serious precariousness and vulnerability of life for the poorest inhabitants of our
cities. But the idea of a material culture of direct producers is essential for this study. In a community of direct
producers in which the network of services, the market, public and private beaurocratic institutions are fragile
and precarious, it is not strange that popular forms of direct justice enjoy a certain practical legitimacy. This
direct justice operates when non-aggressive and non-destructive methods are used to try to resolve some
conflicts , but also when violence and intimidation is resorted to for sanction, revenge, compensation, or to take
advantage of another person. In both cases institutional and professional mediation (courts, police, public
defenders, lawyers, judges, and police detectives) are avoided.
Independently of the generality of the notion, the characteristic of capital is not what is possessed,
rather it is only what is to the extent of what is achieved, or in other words, what is used to produce, to
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reproduce it and enlarge it. To this accumulation of cultural capital related to urban survival that can be called
latent culture, a resourceful culture, capable of making profitable certain goods and services in order to
introduce minimal levels of wellbeing in adversity. It is, above all, a culture of urban people that manage to
produce in a direct manner some of their material conditions of life. They are able to obtain goods and
services, avoiding recurring to costly, professional, and distant public and private empresarial and institutional
circuits, of the normal and integrated city.
The narrative and expressive dimension of a simulation game
The project designed three simulation games with their objectives and basic functions. The simulation
games are, in a strict sense, an educational device and a language that produces situations and imaginary
problems (simulated) related to the ordinary social harmony. In order to improve these situations, these
unexpected failures, the players should invert and invest (in the two meanings of the [Spanish] verb: alter the
senses and put into play) abilities obtained in urban life, they should use in a novel manner what is known and
use in a practical manner latent knowledge (less evident). As a teaching strategy, the simulation games
consider eight basic characteristics (see a brief description of the objectives and rules of each of the simulation
games under the heading Findings):
a) The simulation games are, in the first place, social laboratories. The idea of a laboratory indicates that
the game is a stage of experimentation in which the particpants simulate, resolve and maneuver in
modulated and modeled situations of conflict. They are not situations from practical reality rather
models that are relatively schematic and simple, representacions purified from ordinary reality in
which are prominent a few essential elements. This modeling allows the players to examine the given
situations in a short time. A laboratory is a stage that permits careful examination and the control of
the variables inherent in an object of study. The participants in the simulation games study and
examine these modeled situations, that is to say, they articulate an implicit or explicit work
hypothesis, they devise intervention strategies, imagine prospectively and anticipate the evolution of
situations. For this they call upon a body of experiences and knowledge of social harmony, they
employ their capacity of interacion in the group and use their ability to argue, represent, debate, and
publicly defend their own idea.
b) The simulation games have elements of contest games that have been popularized by the media,
including reality shows. The simulation games combine the basic logic of mind games (basic
problems, challenge questions, skillful answers, systematic attention to the rules of the game, etc.) and
the competetive and athletic logic of broadcast sports events (rewards, penalties, accumulated points
in order to decide winners, referees). Without exception, all of the simulation games have a rule book
of rules and guidelines. They are played with at least two teams of between three and seven players, a
jury composed of three persons selected from among the participants, and a game coordinator (the
teacher of the course) who oficiates as card reader. Each simulation game includes several items of
equipment: problem and challenge cards, illustrations, game pieces, and an hour glass for timing. In
order to form teams, the groups decide on a name for themselves and are baptized with this name
that is used throughout the strategy (several sessions of simulation). Baptizing the teams is a symbolic
gesture of consolidating the sense of belonging to the group, a characteristic of broadcast sports
events. Each simulation game develops a simultaneous dynamic of competition and cooperation.
Since the games are played several times and during several sessions, and the players are people who
know each other because they attend the same school, frequently the logic of the competition is
almost completely replaced by that of cooperation, including between competing teams. As the
players learn to play and improve their strategies, they understand that the true competitors are not the
other teams, but rather a third party in the educative scene: the jury. The jury controls the game,
intervenes to reconcile internal conflicts during the game, argues, explains, and debates their decisions
with the competitors, resolves punctuation problems, and occupies a strategic and symbolic place
more important than that of the coordinator, that appears on the athletic scene as a neutral figure.
Finally, in the simulation games there is an explicit contract that later will be internalized and
naturalized by the players. In the games played, the explicit contract indicates that, in no case should
agression, threats, or violence be utilized in the simulated situations.
c) They are games of simulation. The players are involved in the situation because they experience it as
if it could really happen. The participants of the simulation tend to maintain themselves within the
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limits and probable contextual references. The category of simulation has been employed suficiently
by Baudrillard (1978) with rather pessimistic connotations associated with the idea of surrealism. The
simulation constitutes a third epistemologic condition: beyond truth (in the sense of concrete realism)
and falsehood or untruth, it would be a simulation, surrealism, that which escapes the duality of
real/unreal. Next to this concept is the idea of simulation as a virtual model, associated with worlds of
information and and electronic technology. In a third sense, that of the prospective of social
phenomena, administration and economic calculation , the prevention of crisis in the social order, the
simulated refers to the possibility of possible future scenes. In any way, in the sense previously
mentioned, simulation appears as a phonomenon and a symptom eminently techno-cultural associated
with a rationality of an instrumental type that seeks to calculate and anticipate the resources and
investments necessary in order to reach certain desirable objectives. This investigation prefers the idea
of simulation in the anthropological and cultural sense. Simulation belongs to the repertory of social
skills that allows people to re-create, anticipate, and intervene in the world where they live. It is an
appropriate knowledge in social life from earliest life, in the first games of childhood imagination
which are realized in parodies, in imitation, in love games, in (auto)biographical narratives and in the
ways of representing each one in public and private life. This capacity to anticipate social conduct and
(re)present oneself in the social scene, is used by the participants in the simulation games in order to
incarnate, re-create and imagine the totality of the situations and characters narrated from a beginning,
a fragment, a small vignette which describes them. The simulation is as much the ability to anticipate
as it is to reconstruct a complete scene stemming from a clue: it is indicative knowledge (Ginzburg,
1994) and an ability to construct mental models (Bruner, 1988) from which are interpreted these
indications.
d) They are narrative games. The narrations that form the situations of simulation games suppose that
the probability of the narrated events are based in the fact that they would be possible, not in that they
would reproduce empirical reality. These narrations are poetic in the sense that Gadamer (1991)
remembers: while history only narrates what has occurred, poetry tells what always can happen (p.
49). It is the poetry of sleep and wakefulness, of what is being imagined that could be real, it is the
poetry of ambiguity that necesitates the intensity of the interpretive work of the implications. And so,
the simulation games presuppose the disolution of limits between fiction and reality. The imaginary
characters are not fictitious in the sense of falsification because each player is in charge of placing
them in same way in relation to his own history, his own biographical plot and his knowledge of the
world of his life. In other words, each player projects them and assimilates them into his own
experience. Simulation games contain blunt references to the popular urban world the
neighborhood, the characters, the types of conflicts and problems, the language, roles, ways of
thinking but they avoid stereotypical realism or characterization of poverty, the community and the
life of the popular sectors. For this reason they emphasize the possible and desirable world, not the
actual world. Each simulation game, each narration contains a symbolic dimension of a transcendent
character. In the simulation game there is a certain escape logic with respect to concrete reality, as it
occurs in a soap opera or in a party: the simulation game incorporates real life, but suspend
momentarily its most tragic moments. A certain esthetic that compensates for the disillusions of
ordinary life inspires it and supposes a project of reconciliation of the real world with the desired
world.
e) They are biographical games, that is, narrations that reconstruct experiences and paths of life of
persons or personalities that are obliged to make decisions assuming the ambiguity and
inconclusiveness of a life in development. The narration exposes life as a work in progress and forces
the players to invest their experience and knowledge to find solutions and answers that the game
cannot foresee or anticipate. And so, biographical alludes to the fact that lives are narrated, fragments
of life, stories are told that express moral ambiguity and the complexity of a life whose final chapter is
unknown. And like life, the simulation games are works in progress, in a sense that adapts in a
flexible way the idea supported by Umberto Eco (1979): they are works in progress because the
solutions to the given problems that the players can propose are unforeseeable; because the
educational communities can add new proposals and rules to enlarge the repertory of the games;
because the intensive participation of the players is necessary to finish them, and because the games
can be played again and again without the same situations ever being repeated exactly.
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f) They are expressive games. They imply an increase in expressive and communicative activity in the
participants (students and teachers) who are transformed into actors, thanks to the simulation. The
word actor is used here in the theatrical sense. The simulation game allows the expressive and
communicative productivity from the temporary abandon of self in preference to the dramatic
representation, to increase the levels of interaction and conversation, of debate and qualified conflict
(non-violent), and enriches the encounter between different viewpoints. A simulation game is above
all, a game of role-playing in which the participants incarnate and imagine multiple lives. It is about
getting out of ones skin to put oneself into anothers place. For this they utilize a multitude of
expressive repertoires. Against the general hypothesis that the popular sectors are excessively
situational and argue very little, the wager for expressive work is supported by a what we have called
a thesis of convergence or the synergy of what is expressive, analytical, and narrative. The basic idea
is that analytical and persuasive ability is no more than a capacity that is learned in the institutional
setting of the school system, that allows the separation of the debate and exposition of ideas, of the art
of narration, expression and play-acting. The work of becoming a student, the long process of learning
to write, the control of noise and excessive movement in school, of kinesis, are the practical way in
which we learn to separate the expression, analysis, and narration. In this sense, it is not that there are
no ideas and persuasion in the population with the least schooling. To the contrary, it is common to
find very good ideas and persuasion, only that they emerge articulated in the narrative and expressive
repertoire that gives them meaning. That is to say that what is lacking is habit aquired in the school
environment of sifting and separating narration, the exposition of ideas and the representation of
situations. The expressive and linguistic repertoires appear integrated, mixed, and mutually
reinforced. For this, in the popular urban rhetoric, ideas are underlined with corporal gestures, raising
the voice, or resorting to anecdotes; a story is told that contains and permits examination, by analogy
or contrast, of a situation; or by the use of song to indicate to the loved one the tone and disposition of
the desired love.
The simulation game is a game of conversion and conversation. Bruner and Weisser (1991) allow the
understanding of up to what point conversion is based in narration, in the self-disclosing biography, in
the narrative self-examination, that is not a pious and confessional exam. In day-to-day self-
disclosure, the narration of oneself and for oneself, are built the categories from which are
reinterpreted the parts or the whole of a life. These re-interpretations are conversations, they are
expressed as an I was like this and now I am or I was destined to be like this because as a child
such and such happened to me. If autobiography and narration are told publicly, the mechanisms of
conversion are accentuated, as some neo-religious groups recognize, the reality show or some forms
of collective therapy. Therefore public exposure (the conversation with others) of autobiographic
narration accentuate the conversion by conferring a commonly shared horizon, to which each one
imagined as a singular event, a unique and very personal anecdote, an inexpressible and individual
experience, never to be repeated drama. The conversaion makes the conversion (Flores, 1995), it
permits access to epistemological clarity and new modes of interpretation that cast each one outside of
his or her beliefs and common sense, and foster the recognition of unimagined perspectives in order to
broach certain topics.
To be human signifies to be linguistic, to participate in conversations in which are exchanged
requests and promises, and it bears saying, in which relationships are socially generated.
Human beings are the product of the linguistic relationships that they produce. The beliefs
and desires of understanding of common sense emerge only in the relationships in which we
are immersed or those which we aquire ourselves. In any case, the beliefs and desires are not
primitive elements; they are produced in social conversations that we have inherited or that
we personally engage in. (Flores, 1995, p. 65)
As a exam of oneself and of others, as narrations and conversations, the simulation games aspire to
cast each one momentarily outside of his own particular certainties and beliefs.
g) The simulation game is a pedagogical strategy that can enlarge or independently develop part of an
educational strategy. The simulation games can be used as components of a large educational project
designed to develop discussion, whether ethical or moral, political or judicial in educational programs
about harmony and conflict, about interpersonal relationships in the design of living projects. They
can potentially serve to mobilize discussions and conversations directed towards evaluating local
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living conditions in a specific community. In this sense, the simulation games produce their best
educational effects if they form part of an larger educational strategy that uses them as a means of
stimulation, proposing agendas and problems, diagnosing situations, evaluating moral decisions and
probable types of conduct in situations of conflict. It should be warned that the simulation games are
not entertainment or diversion, nor are they games in a strict sense, if we heed the distinction that is
made by Maturana and Verden-Zller (1994).
Playing is accomplished when we pay attention to what is being done at the moment when it
happens, and this is what is now denied us by our western culture, calling us continually to
focus our attention on the consequences of what we do and what we do not do. Therefore to
say we should prepare for the future means that we should focus our attention outside of the
here and now; to say we should give a good impression means that we should pay attention
to what we are not but what we desire to be. When we operate in this way, we create a source
of difficulties in our relationships with others and with ourselves, owing to the fact that we
human beings are where our attention is, and not where our bodies are. To play is to pay
attention to the presentPlaying has nothing to do with the future, playing is not some kind
of preparation, playing is to totally accept what there is to do without any considerations that
deny its legitimacy. (p. 144)
The simulation games constitute an articulated educational experience of the experience of simulation: they are
not games because they do effectively prepare for something, and they do attempt to project situations in the
future, and they do try to visualize concepts and more or less formal educational content, and they do predefine
conditions of legitimacy through the rules of the game. Nevertheless, they integrate the logic of the game by
establishing a temporary suspension of what we ought to be in order to boost the creative use of what we are.
In the adult and popular education of Latin America there is a long tradition of group techniques that
utilize simulation: ice breakers for enlivening groups, prospective workshops based in personal experience and
various forms of social dramas. The simulations are not foreign to the history of pedagogical innovations in
adult and popular education. Nevertheless, the simulation has been used frequently as an instrument, in
contrast to the work of education as such. It appears as a practical activity that precedes work that is more
analytical and conceptual. First the social drama is presented, expressive games with paintings, theatrical
representation using photographs, and later the time of reflection. The simulation games integrate analysis and
expression in such a way that the most ludicrous is not instrumentalized or separated from conceptual work.
The simulation games are at the same time, an analytical and a narrative or expressive challenge for the
participants. The analysis of experiences does not follow the exercise of telling and expressing them.
In many scenarios of social interaction, the simulation games aspire to stimulate better interaction and
conversations from those persons who adhere to the traditional, illustrated schoolroom. This has to do with
generating an adequate atmosphere of education where the learners can interact and cooperate for diversion,
education, acting, verbalizing, learning, constructing ideas, apropriating contents, changing conduct,
developing actions or formalizing plans, coordinating operations and designing proposals. The set of dynamics
are the real content of simulation games as an educative process. Simulation games are offered as a possible
scenario wherein is integrated what, in general terms, the school system is in the habit of separating. The
strategic notion in this sense is that of representing what we indicated before, signaling the convergent triumph
of what is expressive, analytical and narrative. When the learners tell stories, act out scenes, and expound
ideas, they are articulating knowledge that they derive from the world with those whom the schoolroom
requires.
But, why this emphasis in the narrative and expressive dimension of simulation games? Why are they,
in the final analysis, opportunities for the learners to reinterpret their own experiences, that is to say, are they
opportunities to transform their experiences in effective knowledge and in experience, according to the
perspective of Benjamin. Benjamin (1933) warned us about the impoverishment of human life in virtue of the
impossibility of comunicating it, due to shock, excess, saturation, and he discovered (1936) an inestimable
connection between the disappearance of story-telling replaced by the information and the progressive
disappearance of the artesanal way of life and its rhythms, that is to say, the long time of merchants and
travelers, of the old memories, the era of direct production. It can be recalled the passage in which is compared
silence and the inability to speak of the soldiers who return from the battlefield in World War I with the state of
drowsiness of the urban dweller who returns home at night after bearing the work and daily commotion of the
city. Drained from many intense events in the city, they return empty, tired, and weary and long to liberate
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themselves from these experiences. Shock in the product of events which occur in the contemporary city and
which we cannot assimilate, interpret, and understand. This difficulty of making sense of them generates loss
of feeling, that which is expressed in the unbalance, fleetingness and boredom of the urban world. We speak
of the difficulties of transforming what is lived into knowledge, i. e., significant knowing, useful symbolic
capital, vital understanding for changing and resisting. The construction of the sense of life requieres the
practice of continual reinterpretation that only can be given in narration. But in order to narrate another type of
time and space is required that is not that of speed and acceleration of a modern city. The most excellent story-
tellers, according to Benjamin are the elderly and the travelers. They enjoyed sufficient distance in time (the
elderly) or in space (the old fashioned merchants) to do artesan work on the story to transform life into
experience that is entrusted to others who hear it. In distance another time and place is accomplished the
interpretive work and allows the transformation of life into narration.
In this sense, the simulation games portray the story of what is not said, and what is not talked about.
They carry a therapeutic dimension when they stimulate a narrative which velocity suppresses. Is it not this
that explains in part the success of the new religions of the protestant type in Latin America, in favoring a
religious environment in which the parishioners - and not only the preacher are allowed to talk about their
lives ? The simulation games can be understood as educative scenarios in which persons have at least some
conditions where they can share their experiences from a world which is profoundly twisted by the velocity of
machinery, of information, of the rhythm of industry, and the urban flow. And it is exactly that many of these
inhabitants of popular neighborhoods, with their long sense of time, with the persistence of certain rituals of
greeting and conversation, those who preserve certain story-telling abilities that the conventional school
condemns and rejects when it sharply separates the exposition of arguments, the form of relating anecdotes and
experiences. In this way adult education in urban contexts fails to utilize valuable symbolic capital.
Violence and symbolic deficit
The necessity of enlarging the symbolic repertoire, the expressive abilities, narrative competencies,
self-examination, imagination for rethinking daily relationships with neighbors, has to do with a surprising
evidence. A significant percentage of urban violence in Colombia is not associated with political violence but
rather with crimes of passion, neighborhood conflicts, revenge between acquaintances or between those who
share at least the same territory, and the armed agression of organizations linked to illegal activities. Common
violence develops between people who appear to share ties, some type of previous social links and a common
territory (neighborhood, commune, house, or workplace), and has as its background the deterioration of
institutional capacity to handle social conflicts. Some data indicates that less than 20% of homicides in
Colombia happen in combat or have a clear political motivation (Chaux, 2002, p. 41). Between 1970 and 1990
the number of violent deaths quadrupled (Rubio, 2000). The rate of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants rose
from 20 to 40 annual deaths between 1960 and 1985 to levels of between 70 to 90 homicides annually in the
1990s (Rubio, 1999). According to Roberto Chaskel
2
, head of the department of child psychiatry of the Military
Hospital, in Colombia, one child out of every 18 has seen someone murdered in real life, not just on television.
According to Garay (2002) Colombia occupies second place in the American continent in the number of
homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants, sixth in violation of human rights, third in the perception of public
and private corruption in accordance with International Transparence. The country has a serious loss of
credibility and confidence in the court system, associated with impunity, and there is a significant crisis of
legitimacy in the institutionality of the State due to the skepticism of its citizens about its effectiveness and
ability to represent them. In addition to all this, there is inequality and fraud. In 1989, for example, 67% of
property owners owned 5.2% of the available land while 1.3% of property owners claimed 48%.
In the dynamics of control and armed conflict over urban and rural territories, it is clear how Pecaut
(2002) warns that whether it be in a popular neighborhood with its urban militias, groups of common criminals,
paramilitaries or armed citizens, or whether it be in rural zones, above all in periferal zones and internal with
low numbers of law enforcement personnel, where the economy is relatively marginal (illegal cultivation, strip
mining), violence favors a climate of disconfidence in personal and individual interactions; it stimulates
oportunism and the law of silence, and bolsters the forced withdrawal towards purely individual strategies
(Pecaut, 2002, p. 56). In general, armed groups discourage forms of social organization in territories where they
interfere, and intimidation creates a collective spirit of acceptation, transitory and opportunist from the arbitrary
domination of some armed agents. Besides the difficulties of narrating and expressing the experiences that the
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urban environment imposes, there are the added difficulties of uniting and reconstructing the framework of our
daily violence.
It has been a long time since public opinion has ceased to be manifested. Masacres committed on the
outskirts of large cities only produce a sense of powerlessness. Collective emotions emerge when an
important public figure is assasinated. Since these assasinations are practically never brought to
justice, they do not contribute to a public outcry, but rather they are taken as news items that mount up
without interruption, almost like gossip. Gossip has the same status as news bits. These items are
conveyed without proof or comparison. From this there results an amazing absence of collective
memory, which testimonies are quickly forgotten and into which fall previous events and fugacity of
emotion. From this there also comes a lack of taking a stand against the problems which are most
associated with violence, whether they have to do with the drug economy or with strategies against
the guerillas. Everything happens as though the logic of violence were imposed, which causes silence
to reign. (Pecaut, 2001, p. 68)
According to Guzman (1993) the forms of violent homicide in neighborhoods are caused by persons
who have lived a long or medium period of time in the city (not recent immigrants) with greater income than
those who live in poverty; including youth with some schooling, candidates for the more or less structured
forms of urban unemployment (that has less effect on populations with less schooling and more effect on those
who have some level of secondary education.) Guzman also indicates that the principal victims of violent
homicide are not the sectors that are seen as the most endangered (middle and upper class) that hire private
security, but rather the popular sectors themselves. Frequently the occupation of the victims is worker, vendor,
employee, and student.
A transversal lecture by Lechner (1988) y Pecaut (2001) allows the establishment of an additional
class of worker. For generations we Colombians have perceived that we are in a situation of permanent
violence. This lasting and generational perception that we live in a long-time violence coincides with the first
and most important social fear: the fear that the precarious order of our lives (home, family, work, loved one)
could be snatched by another person (a criminal, the police, the government, neighbors, and friends). Pecault
discovers that what at first sight seems paradoxical (high rates of violent homicide in a country that maintains
relative stability in its democratic system and in the economy) are not contradictory phenomena, rather are in a
certain sense, complementary: Order and violence are not created separately, rather they are two sides of one
coin. Order is not built on a base of a violence always ready to break forth, violence flies to help order which
has not been established (Pecault, p. 27). Violence has produced fear of loosing the order of life. The defense
of this order although precarious, will become the source of new conflicts because with the possibility that it
could be snatched from us, appears a complementary and opportunist reaction: to organize defensively or
offensively to make the best of the situation. The logic of self-defense is based in the criminal organization that
dominates the neighborhood or a greater territory, in the beaurocratic snarls that mobilize the sacking of public
property, in groups of social cleansing that lynch and assasinate in the name of reestablishing security, in the
citizens that build a wall that impedes free access to a public space. This mechanism explains in part why as
Pecaut (2001) said, "in the case of Colombia, the violence, once unleashed, spreads so easily across all of
society and institutions, it confounds the point of reference which have been established, it places on the
scenario an imaginary and redefined aspect of a 'normal' phenomenon that can be prolonged without arousing
surprise or indignation (pp. 27-28). In this way, the political violence of the mid-twentieth century are tied
together in terms of collective memory with the urban violence of the 1980s and are connected with the
common perception that the crisis of unemployment and insecurity will be indefinitely prolonged and endanger
jobs, property, and life.
The existing limitations for reinterpreting that violence which affects us, for declaring national
mourning periods for the dead and injured which are left by violence, in order to show solidarity with the
victims and impose social and legal sanctions on the perpetrators, is translated into incapacity to dispose
publicly of the evils derived from violence, to articulate a more vigorous public opinion capable of rejecting
cruelty, of translating pain and helplessness into symbolic actions of numerous protests and resistance to
violence. Although there have been a series of events that signal the emergence of certain forms of organized
and active resistence to violence, the process barely begins to settle and to gain strength as an autonomous civil
movement. The indigenous marches of the communities of Cauca (2000, 2001), the public reactions to the
masacre of Bojay in Choc (2002), the public mobilization of black women under the slogan The Pazharn
Women (2002), are some pertinent and significant indications.
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77
We can label the difficulties in articulating a narrative with sense and imagination of the national and
urban violence a symbolic deficit or a deficit in the representation and public expression of violence, and, in
general, the limitations in including and representing an important volume of experiences, actors, and
dimensions of our collective history. These difficulties have to do with the precariousness of the public space
required for it. This public space is consituted slowly and over a long period of history through diverse forms
of social groupings and sociabilities in which the conversation and the sharing of narratives and the collective
imagination retells the peoples own collective history and its tragedies. In Colombia, this public space where
the retelling of our violences has been inhibited, supressed, substituted, or replaced by the protectionistic action
of the government and the political parties, by the influence and power of the Catholic church in public life, by
the intimidation or utilization that from the movements or social organizations are made to be armed
participants, either legal or illegal, for the diminishment of public opinion about that which is broadcast by the
mass communication media, and by the kidnapping of the national memory by educated people and the clergy
(Martn-Barbero, 2001) that in making the official history, the history legitimized by power, eclipsed 'the
writings of the excluded ones', these writings of the resistence whose multiple and contradictory memories are
struggling to reinvent the political and cultural map of the nation" (p. 10). And connecting with the problems
that involve generating places of encounter and collective recognition in cities that are becoming continually
more heterogenous and complex, poorly planned, overflowing with a demographic growth that could not be
anticipated. The symbolic deficit alludes to the difficulties that we have in taking charge of narrating some
cities in which the diversity and the conflictive social heterogeneity are on the increase. The symbolic deficit is
expressed as the absence of a national story including that of common citizens (Pecaut, 2001, p. 27). Adult
education, popular education, and the projects of social intervention in our cities have to face this symbolic
deficit.
Much of the success of popular education, of community development and of the projects of social
intervention occur in rural communities, in small villages or in relatively homogeous popular neighborhoods.
The rate of success diminishes in urban surroundings or with more culturally heterogenous groups: urban
youth, in normal popular neighborhoods, families with children and youth born in the city (Gmez, 1994). In
the phase of combative solidarity of the popular neighborhoods during the processes of invasion,
exappropriation of property and installation of the first houses the projects of intervention, of popular
education, of community development are very efficient because they are adequate for this stage that promotes
mechanical and opportunistic solidarity (Coraggio, 1993). Even the efficiency of these projects of intervention
is prolonged until the first phase of normalization of the neighborhood, when the social fabric of the
neighborhood is first being configured, with its first organizations of community activity and community work
groups. But everything becomes complicated in the next phase of normalization of the neighborhood, when the
first forms of intensive privatization appear, goods and services are aquired that represent social ascent
electrical appliances, home improvements and additions, access to a private vehicle, domestic borders are built
associated with the personal and family progress and elevation of living standard. And the whole system breaks
down completely during the phase of breaking with the longstanding neighborhood heritage, when new social
and individual aspirations are developed that devaluate it or question it. It is a rupture caused by the youngest
members, the new generations, by the women who look for jobs, by the newly arrived, by the new inhabitants
and by new waves of invadors (of a poorer class, displaced by armed conflict). These segments of the
population signal a new stage for the neighborhood and a new horizon of expectations distinct from those of
the founding fathers. In many occasions, the old invadors of yesterday reject and make very disparaging
remarks about the poorer recent arrivals. In some way, the current difficulties of popular education have to do
with the fact that the communities tend to become unstable and to disappear upon their insertion into the urban
surroundings, because they are trampled by the market and the media because people from different origins
and social history share a common territory, and because in them spring conflicts that are no longer expressed
as a fight against another external adversary (the government, the landowners, the police that try to expel the
invadors) but rather as internal fights with fellow residents. For this reason it is indispensible to renovate the
methodological tools, abandon the tentative levelers and overcome the romantic and immature idea that
believes that the urban and popular neighborhoods are necessarily communitary and united, homogenous
and internally articulated. To assume the social diversity of which a community is made is to begin to
understand the size of the challenge and the difficulties that are involved, and that obligate us to rethink the
educative work that we are carrying on there. Only in this way can we understand the neighborhood violence,
the interfamily violence, the forms of agression that prosper in what appears to be a collectivity of women and
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men, children, and youth who know each other. In many cases, social conflict and agression are connected less
with the absence of links - that is, the erosion of the social fabric than to the intensity of pre-existing links.
Bourdieu (1991) knew how to warn us how the great subjective differences are built on small objective
differences between those who share intense ties and nearness. Consequently, neighborhood conflict is, above
all, conflict between persons who have strong ties (affective, symbolic, laboral, territorial, or brotherly), where
the small objective differences can be the source of dramatic conflicts and agression, as occurs between gangs
of youth or in the conflict between neighbors.
The forms of inherited social links explain why in the neighborhoods there is such solidarity during
funeral rites, the reason for the forms of coertion, intimidation, violence, and collective terror that are
enmasked under the law of silence. The intensity of these ties explains the capacity of local processes as well
as the tranformation of this organizational knowledge into the opportunistic acceptation of rings of criminals
and selective violence towards some members of the community. The social fabric serves to mobilize social
revenge but also to negotiate in a patronistic fashion the resources that should yield public benefits. This is not
about taking possesion of or stimulating an ingenious strengthening and development of the social fabric, but
rather of designing games that permit the learners to examine and critically evaluate these relations. Touraine
(2000) has illustrated for us the risks that certain excessive communitarianisms involve that are translated into
authoritarian exercises and forms of oppressive control over the persons of a community, a family, a social
group; and has allowed us to understand that the strengthening of the local communities, of the close social
ties, of the small community, does not necessarily result in more democracy and greater capacity to resist the
desocializing and massive effect of the market and the media. It is necessary to resist the authoritarianism of
the small community as well as the dissolving and disorienting effect of the mercantilization of social life,
through what he calls the project of the Subject (p. 21), that is, becoming an actor and jestor of the social
world and the history that we live. The Subject has no other content than the production of himself. He serves
no other cause, no other value, no other law that his necessity and his desire to resist his own dismemberment
in a universe in movement, without order or equilibrium (p. 21). This is the utopic horizon of the simulation
games: they should give the participants not only ties and a better social fabric, but also projects of the subject,
personal projects that allow them to resist and creatively reinvent their own conditions of social harmony in
very heterogenous and socially diverse contexts.
To examine the biographical type of narration that identifies each one, helps to explain this social
heterogeneity of which the urban community is made and its long history. What is biographical appears to us
as the first and most immediate form of beginning to make this recognition that allows us to confront the
challenges of this diversity. In the biographical dimension it is possible to recognize, although in a fragmentary
and partial way, the different points of view of the social conflict and to understand how the socially different
experiences lived in a common space (the family, the neighborhood, the school, the community) are expressed.
The simulation games are founded in a central belief: the symbolic deficit can be partially overcome through
an educative setting in which, to examine a modeled and modulated situation, the learners are obligated to
advantageously use their life experiences and cultural capital. This implies an understanding and learning that
to treat conflicts in a non-violent manner and to procede in an inclusive way, is a greater and more difficult
challenge than to procede toward the exclusion or the extermination of the other, but it is more intelligent and
socially profitable.
Specific Questions of the Study
1. What should the technical requirements, the operative conditions and basic concepts of the simulation
games be in order to yield a productive pedagogical strategy in the processes of education for social
harmony and for educative programs in which participate youth, children, and adult laborers from
popular urban sectors?
2. How do expressive and communicative dynamics, prodded and stimulated by the simulation games,
relate to the processes of learning and construction of socially significant knowledge achieved by the
learners in the school environment?
Data Collection and Analysis
The field work consisted of the following tasks:
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1. Identification of the kinds of interpersonal violence adaptable to study by way of the simulation
games.
2. The revision of the models of educational games that within the environment of intervention have
been developed in Colombia and some other countries in Latin America in order to establish criteria
and basic principles for the simulation games.
3. Interviews, informal conversations, discussion groups and trials of simulation games with some
students from three centers of adult education in Cali, in order to identify skills and abilities in dealing
with conflict, evaluations, and conceptions about playing the game, and gathering stories adequate for
adapting to simulation games.
4. The process of constructing the simulation games.
Identification of the kinds of interpersonal violence adaptable to study by way of the simulation games
In order to identify the kind of violence that the simulation games would study, we examined some
literature about violence and about the relationships between violence and life history, and we examined an
educational experience oriented to the development of abilities for peaceful conflict resolution entitled, Wed
Better Talk, of the Institute CISALVA (Institute for Research in the Prevention of Violence and Prevention of
Social Conflict of the University of the Valley). The project, Wed Better Talk collected from the city of Cali
true stories of personal conflicts that were resolved in a non-violent fashion. These stories were broadcast by
way of the news media in order to encourage the public to try to imitate and model them socially. After
examining 80 cases of conflict documented by the project, Wed Better Talk, and after evaluating the
available literature, we found the appearance of six kinds of recurring violent conflict: a) interfamily violence
(child abuse, sibling conflict, marital conflict, parental conflict, and conflict between relatives); b) violent
neighborhood conflicts (due to property line disputes, gossip, sewage problems, electric bills, domestic
animals, such asdogs, etc.) c) the conflicts between groups of teenagers (tension between rival gangs, between
groups of teenage friends, between students from different schools); d) the violence associated with
celebrations and drunkenness (parties, soccer games, bets); e) the violence associated with romantic conflicts
and of friendship (because of jealousy, gossip, unfaithfulness in friendship or in love) and f) the conflicts
related to the workplace (over money, property, the quality of service rendered). In almost all of the cases
documented by Wed Better Talk various related or simultaneous conflicts were present. Of the 80 cases that
were studied, 50% (40) of the cases refer to simple interfamily conflicts and interfamily conflicts associated
with other conflicts; and 16.25% (13 cases) corresponded to neighborhood conflicts; 16.25% to conflicts
between friends, couples, in relationships of friendship and love, and all associated with gossip and/or parties;
8.7% (7 cases) to conflicts between groups of teenagers and associated with celebrations, parties, and
drunkenness; and 8.7% (7 cases) related to school and the workplace (7 cases).
This revision allowed us to define the kinds of violent conflicts that we would examine by way of the
simulation games. There would be five: conflicts between neighbors, conflicts associated with structures and
local organized crime (the presence of gangs in the neighborhood, imagined or real threats to the local
security), family violence, the violence associated with romantic conflicts, passions or friendships, and the
conflicts associated with unrestrained social events (Maffesoli, 1985, 1990, 1993) in which alcohol, drugs,
soccer games, and festive celebrations unleashed aggressive practices. We left out conflicts which were less
interpersonal and more collective, that is to say, the forms of violence that derived from exclusion and social
isolation affect the poorest classes and that require a further reaching kind of public and political
mobilization. For example, we did not directly address the conflicts stemming from habitational structures and
minimum family space, or from the neighborhood difficulties with public utilities (water, lighting of public
places, electricity, parks, roads, public transportation, telephone), illnesses brought on by precarious living
conditions, the crisis and problems related to the supply of food and nutrition, types of excluding, stigmatizing,
and criminalizing of the popular sectors by means of the media, the police, and in the daily perception of the
citizens of middle and high socioeconomic class. In other words, we did not directly examine the violence
contained in poverty and social exclusion, which would necessarily introduce a bias and limit the reach of the
proposal and the research.
The revision of the models of educational games for projects of development and social intervention
We revised several sets of educational games used in intervention projects, adult education, education
for community development, and education for social harmony. We examined some from the High
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Commissioned Peace Office, the Raphael Pombo Foundation, UNICEF Colombia (pedagogical commission),
the project Enlaces (Ties) (for the prevention of drug addiction), and the Free Fun Foundation. We also
analyzed the experience of simulation games that we did in 1995 in the district of El Rodeo in Cali. The
examination of this repertory of games allowed us to recognize at least four persistent problems in the kind of
educational games that some educational and social institutions create. In the first place, they are closed games;
that is to say, they foresee the contents and educational solutions to the challenges that are presented, by way of
a set definition of true or untrue answers previously codified in the game. In second place, there is the
utilization of the ludicrousness of what appears as make-up for a typically school-based educative dynamic. In
other words, in the strict sense, they are not games, rather schoolroom dispositives that recur frequently in the
form of familiar table games (parcheesi, poker, checkers) to innoculate against instructional content. In the
third place, they are not games that permit repetition, they end quickly because the players soon learn the
internal logic of the game, they foresee the answers that they should give and they learn to calculate which are
the correct forms of conduct and the foreseeable solutions. In fourth place, they are games that lend themselves
to the simplification of literature and the excess of illustrations in order to make the game accessible to a
population of poor readers. The proposal of simulation games preferred to go in the opposite direction: open
games in which the solutions are not foreseeable; games in which the skill and ability of the participants to
judge the quality of the suggested proposals; games in which the complexity of the situations and the stories is
not diminished, and the presence of a coordinator reader is relied on, who is a good reader and is capable of
reconstructing the stories and the instructions. In this way, it is not necessary to diminish or excessively
simplify the narrations and the complexity of the game. These criteria were key in order to proceed toward the
design of the simulation games.
Interviews, informal conversations, discussion groups, and trials of simulation games with some students
from three centers of adult education in Cali
The field work was done in the Center of Adult Education of the Mustard Seed Foundation in the
district of Aguablanca; in the Center of Adult Education in the district Polvorines, and in the Center of Adult
Education of the Foundation Nacederos from the district of Mujica. Each center is located in the most
impoverished communities of the city. We conducted some interviews and informal conversations in the three
Educational Centers. We also held four discussion groups (Ibaez, 1992) in two of the three centers of adult
education. The topic as it was foreseen in the theory of Ibez was introducing thematic agendas that
emerged from the ones that the research originally considered: notes appeared about the problem of violence in
the world, the crisis of collective values, the excessive commercialization of interpersonal relations, the
difficulties of communication within the family, forms of punishment for children, the fear of loneliness and
abandonment. Each discussion group was held with seven people (men and women) from two centers of adult
education. The information that was gathered in these discussion groups and in the interviews served to
diagnose kinds of neighborhood and family conflicts, imagined forms of solution to these conflicts, personal
and family histories of social conflict, stories to re-create in the simulation games and types of evaluation of
the game as an educational and formative resource in their lives.
The interview consisted of four parts: a) a brief personal biography and history in the district, the
home, and the neighborhood. b) Anecdotes and stories about the social conflict in the district, the family and
the neighborhood. c) Inquiring about the disposition and competence of the subjects of the interview for the
game and public oral communication. d) Attitudes and conduct in certain events and situations of conflict.
Twenty-four persons (8 from each center of adult education) participated. 13 women and 11 men. The ages of
the subjects of the interview ranged from 13 to 71 years. There is diversity in their social and productive roles:
housewives, an ex-member of a gang, retirees, unemployed, construction workers, storekeepers, domestic
workers, ambulant salespeople, mechanics, janitors, and small home-based business owners. In addition, we
asked them to describe their opinions about the four situational models of interpersonal conflicts to identify
some of the types of moral and ethical judgement that they routinely exercise in their daily life.
The first situational model is as follows:
You have a very low class neighbor who leaves garbage in front of your house, he likes to insult you
or your family over insignificant things, he turns his vicious dog loose anytime he likes. He has a gun
and is dangerous. At night he comes home drunk and starts making noise and wakes up the
neighborhood. One day you discover that this neighbor has your television that was stolen. You are
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furious and decide that you are going to be done with him once and for all. Honestly, what would you
do about him?
The second situational model is as follows:
Things in the neighborhood are very difficult and a well organized gang has decided to charge you in
order to leave your house and your family alone and to charge all of your neighbors as well. Since the
gang was organized, all of the robberies have stopped, everybody can leave the door of his house wide
open and nothing is stolen. The gang steals in other districts and traffics in drugs and weapons; but
your neighborhood has become exceedingly quiet. A friend of yours is a member of the police force
and he lets you know that they are going to raid the neighborhood and capture the gang leaders. What
do you do? Do you warn them? Do you act like you know nothing?
The third situational model is as follows:
Teresa is a married woman. Her husband mistreats her and has a mistress. He has told Teresa that he
no longer loves her. But Teresa continues to be in love with him in spite of everything. But she met
another man that she likes a lot. His name is Pedro. Pedro has invited her to visit him and this
afternoon Teresa takes a cab and goes to see him. After making love and having a good time, they
start arguing over something insignificant. She insults him. So then Pedro tells her that he doesnt care
for her any more and that he is tired of seeing her and he forces her to go home at near midnight in the
rain. Teresa tells him no, that she wants to be with him, and Pedro who is furious, kicks her out of his
house. The neighborhood where Pedro lives is dangerous at night. Teresa sadly starts toward the street
to look for a cab, but at this time of night it is difficult to find one. As she heads toward the avenue, a
man assaults her and gravely injures her in order to rob her purse. Teresa dies in the street. Who is to
blame for Teresas death?
The fourth situational model is as follows:
There is a family composed of father, mother, three daughters 14, 12, and 10 years old and a son, 4
years old. The mother works as a waitress and the father as a cab driver, but he is unemployed at
present. He mistreats his wife, hitting her and brutally punishes his children all day. While he is away
the children are happy, they talk animatedly and have fun among themselves. But as soon as he comes
home everything changes: they are terrified of him. The wife suspects that while she is working he
carries on an incestuous relationship with the two oldest daughters; but she doesnt dare say anything
to him because she is afraid of him. She has explained to her daughters what they should not do with
men (including their father) and she holds them responsible if something does happen to them because
she considers that they have been warned. The father is agreeable toward the daughters when they
give in to him and he turns into a monster when he finds them talking with their friends or out of the
house. What do you think that the daughters and the mother should do in these circumstances?
The revision and analysis of the material, the classification of the answers and the contrast of the
findings allowed us to identify among the subjects of the interview and the participants in the discussion
groups, the following indicators and abilities that favor social harmony in neighborhoods with precarious living
conditions:
1) The rich density of oral traditions and forms of popular expression that contribute to building a
powerful collective narrative and vigorous ways of spreading wisdom, customs, and tactics of non-
violent social harmony.
2) The forms of neighborly solidarity in strategic moments: death, illness, interfamily violence, robbery,
local tragedy. At times, in a definitive way, the powerful recognition of another in the neighborhood
provides the conditions for a joint action of solidarity, defense, and partial support.
3) A powerful appreciation and recognition of territory, motivated by a more or less prolonged stay in
the neighborhood. There is a memory of the territory and a recognition of the territory, of the
neighborhood, and when there were no sophisiticated ways to achieve private seclusion. There are
ways of social and civic organization associated with the joint resolution of strategic problems:
tactical clientelisms, community organizations oriented to the solution of immediate problems,
religious clientelisms, joint neighborhood associations.
4) A vocation of participation and associative activism, in particular among adult women and the youth.
5) A positive evaluation of the educative action and of the school (above all among adult women) in
contrast with what can happen with young students of the integrated sectores who perceive a certain
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devaluation of titles and school credentials. Of the students from the Centers of Adult Education who
participated in the research, almost 5 of every 6 were adult women who were mothers.
6) Laboral resourcefulness and diverse forms of coping in poverty and precarious conditions. The
configurations of popular markets, non-traditional forms of doing business, bartering, loans between
friends, family or neighbors, credit in small businesses that allow small daily payments.
7) Flexible and innovative forms of social harmony derived from the non-privatization and excesive
individualization of ways of life, of informality in agreements and covenants that do not depend on
beaurocratic or institutional legality.
8) Associated with the purposes of roots and stability in the neighborhood, diverse initiatives for
building wealth, improvement and increase in the stations of life prosper. It has to do with making the
neighborhood a warm and secure place. This is translated, for example, in a dynamic of comfort and
maintenance of the spaces within the popular neighborhoods (sweeping the streets by the housewives,
taking care of the sidewalks, desire to build parks for the children, planting trees, gardens, special
celebrations for children and the elderly, painting house fronts, repair of asphalt). Signs of dignity in
precariety.
9) The ability to map the neighborhood in terms of positive and negative relationships, and the capacity
to anticipate and detect possible sources of conflict and future agression.
10) The ability to detect, in the case of mothers, possible factors of risk and going astray for their own
children (rape, drug addiction, association with delinquents) and in some cases, solidarity between
women and mothers to control and watch each others children.
11) A positive view of the collective future of the neighborhood although, at the same time, they see a
significant deterioration in their personal working conditions, income, and salaries. The majority of
the participants in the discussion groups and interviews said that there are clear indicators that, in spite
of the problems of violence, their neighborhoods have improved and they expect them to be even
better.
On the other hand, some indicators appear in order to understand how some forms of routine social
violence are reproduced in the space of the popular neighborhood.
1) Low interest in dealing institutionally with local social conlicts by way of a neutral third party: the
police, the courts, the community action groups, the justices of peace. Only three people of the 24
interviewed suggested that the situation models 1 and 4 require processing by formal institutions
(reporting a crime, calling the police, or family judges). The perception that people have regarding
corruption, inefficiency, or social distance of these institutions about these routine problems, is
translated in a lack of confidence to inspire them and the difficulty of considering them within their
ability to solve.
2) Propensity to obey the law of silence, of opportunism and to resort to the tactic of withdrawal when
problems of violence present themselves that directly affect the collective security and the social life
in the neighborhood. Only five persons rejected vehemenently the idea that a gang would be in charge
of the security of the neighborhood.
3) Propensity to transform the moral and ethical justice in legal justice and verdict regarding the situation
models. Only 1 of the 24 subjects who were interviewed considered that the person responsible for the
death of Teresa (situation model 4) was the assaltant. The majority (15 persons) considered that the
responsibilidad fell upon the husband and 8 persons affirmed that Teresa was responsible for her
infidelity.
Process of constructing the simulation games
The interviews and the discussion groups allowed us to attune our understanding of urban violence
and the experiences of living in the most depressed popular neighborhoods of the city. Thanks to these
interviews, our understanding has grown about the relationships between neighborhood and family
sociabilities, violence and non-positive conflicts, and the destruction of the social fabric. Without exception,
the subjects of the interview have a very complex view of the level of violence in their own neighborhoods.
They believe that they are not dangerous neighborhoods, although they recognize an important incidence of
criminal cases around them. And although it seems paradoxical, this is not all wrong. The perception of danger
has to do with what is unknown to us, what we lack references and guides for. Since the subjects of the
interviews have lived in their neighborhoods for at least five years and have close relationships with their
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83
neighbors, of friendship and recognition of their surroundings, they do not feel insecure there. They know the
map in which they move. The strangers, the non-neighbors, those who come from outside are those who feel
endangered since they do not know the places that they walk. So, the intensity of the neighborhood and social
links creates the conditions in which some of the inhabitants do not feel endangered there; but at the same time,
in the intensity of these ties are generated some of the practices of violence and agression (neighborhood and
family conflicts, quarrels between friends and companions at parties). In some neighborhoods it has been
configurated what we could call forms of armed social harmony, i. e., a positive evaluation of weapons and of
the law of silence as the ways of generating a safe environment for those who adapt to the rules of this type of
life. It is not necessarily about gangs or delinquents who patrol the neighborhood in exchange for money,
privileges, prestige, or to defend their own territory of influence: it has to do with workers, business owners,
retirees, homeowners that patronize or cooperate with cladestine armed groups in order to assure themselves
that the thieves and criminals from other neighborhoods do not penetrate their zone. The complicity and the
law of silence between inhabitants guarantees a minimal order that many accept with pleasure.
In addition to this, thinking would be fostered a certain positive evaluation of the tactical withdrawal,
and its echo within oneself, in that the best thing is not to establish close relationships with anybody in the
neighborhood. For some of the subjects of the interview it is clear that the nearness of the ties is also the source
of very serious conflicts, and, as a result, they prefer to flee from the more intensive relationships. They aspire,
rather, to neutral relationships with their peers in the neighborhood. A good neighbor, one of the women
interviewed said, is one who doesnt meddle in my affairs. I dont like to have much to do with anybody so
that nobody will meddle in my affairs. Another woman who was interviewed said that you can talk better
with people that you dont know than with those you do. These affirmations signal the development of
another ethic: that of social neutrality, that is very distant from that of intense social harmony that
characterized the popular neighborhoods for a long time. Intense social harmony, armed social harmony, and
social neutrality are categories that have turned out to be useful in order to understand the complex forms of
relationships between neighbors and families in the popular neighborhoods on the outskirts of Cali. They were
also very useful to adjust the simulation games and recognize their extent and limitations.
The first step in the design of the simulation games consisted in defining their educational objectives
and their rules or terminology. In the work team, from the point of agreement on the educational objectives of
each game, we examined various proposals for games in the light of the information that was collected. Some
of the proposals turned out to be very complicated in terminology and confusing, others seemed interesting on
paper, but on making small trials within the work team, they turned out to be deceptive or not very effective for
achieving the desired objectives. The critical examinaton of each one of the terminologies of the proposed
game allowed us to move from a group of 8 different proposals to 5 that seemed more adequate to us. For
neighborhood conflicts (The Evil Neighbor); for neighborhood fears, practices of exterminating, and of private
justice (Life Savers); for interfamily violence (Weavers of Life); for romantic or love conflicts (The Romantic
Consultant), and for non-destructive forms of festive celebration (Fernandos Party). A new, more careful
examination of the interviews and the discussion groups, of the literature about violence and about educational
games, the observations of our assesor Miriam Ziga (Ph.D. in Education and retired professor of the Institute
of Education and Pedagogy of the University of the Valley) and Mario Acevedo (Ph.D. in Education and
professor of the Institute of Education and Pedagogy), who did critical readings of the five prototype
simulation games, permitted us to make a fundamental decision: to include also in the three large simulation
games the five objectives or topics about violence prevention. The Evil Neighbor has to do with the conflictive
neighbor relationships. Life Savers is about danger, violence, and fear in the neighborhood., and The Busy
Bodies examines forms of festive celebrations that do not imply the consumption of hard liquor and mutual
agression and conflicts in the domestic situation interfamily violence, child abuse, and the relationships of
couples, of love and friendship. All of the games employ cards of three types: those that combine narrations of
situations and problems of social harmony (challenge cards), those that consider resources to invent solutions
to these situations (resource cards) and those that describe a biography (biographical or macro cards). We also
defined the organizational structure of all the games (teams, jury with an uneven number of members 3 or 5
persons eventually one person that incarnates and represents the central character of the games The Evil
Neighbor or The Busy Bodies, a simple point system approved or not approved and a stop watch to keep
track of the time of formulation of the proposals (5 minutes). And we made the definitive repertory of cards for
each one of the games. The following is a presentation of the synthesis of the rules of each of the three games.
Gonzlez
84
Findings
Description of the three simulation games
The Evil Neighbor. Works in neighborhood conflicts, the ambiguous condition of neighbors (of
solidarity and potential agressor), the network of neighborhood relations, the difficulties that are involved in
knowing, living, and sharing the popular urban space with others that are, at the same time, potential allies, or
else a true menace to the family and domestic life of each person. Educative objectives:
To learn to handle conflicts without resorting to physical confrontation or the destruction of another
person. In the worst case, opt for symbolic forms of sanction and criticism of a person without
resorting to any type of aggression.
To learn to put oneself in anothers place, to learn to recognize the history and biography of another
person as a way of understanding the complexity and logic of conflict.
To favor the mediation of a third party (institutional or not) in the comprehension and resolution of
conflicts and actors in the game; and to learn to construct scenarios of encounter and debate that are
relatively neutral and open.
The name of the game can be understood in two senses: The neighboring evil (in which evil is a noun)
and the evil neighbor (in which neighbor is the noun). In this game, the teams should discover and construct a
strategy to integrate a neighbor that is characterized by his poor relations in the neighborhood. But, to contruct
and represent this strategy they should find out some secrets in the neighbors biography. These secrets are
revealed as the game progresses through the cards. The teams present proposals to seduce, integrate, and
transform the evil neighbor through the recognition of his biographical secrets. Each proposal is evaluated by
the jury, which examines its originality and viability, and which approves or dissaproves it. At the end, after
various rounds of the game in which the teams present their proposals, the points are added and a discussion is
mounted which is derived from the findings presented during the game. In some variations of the game, it is
possible to ask someone to represent the evil neighbor, with which can be introduced higher levels of theatrical
effects.
Life Savers. Addresses conflicts associated with structures and local organizations associated with
delinquency, the presence of gangs in the neighborhood, the imagined or real threats to the stability of the
neighborhood, sexual violence, the forms of popular justice, and the local customs about justice, control, and
vigilance. (The ambiguous presence of the police, perceived as a threat and as the principal figure in certain
types of delinquency, or as an accomplice, by action or omission, to local criminal activity.) Educational
objectives:
To stimulate collective and associative forms for the solution of local conflict. To promote creative
forms of neighborhood reorganization that allows united social control and which avoids
individualization and personalization of conflict.
To recognize the links and associations within gangs of delinquents that operate in the neighborhoods,
to contribute to the understanding of their history and to establish their links with family, friends,
neighborhood locations, and as much as possible, to favor the discriminalization of the associative
activities of some potential juvenile delinquents and adult criminals within the neighborhood.
To promote the idea that each man, woman, and child who is killed or injured represents irreparable
loss of knowledge, experience, and life for the social order; it destroys the social fabric and the
creation of a climate of camaraderie that affects even the perpetrators and their families. The
perpetrators are also, in a growing trend, victims of a circle of aggressive delinquency and are
potential victims of collective revenge and execution.
The teams have a certain number of lives that they must protect during the game. They also try to
rescue lives that are under the power of the Gray Region. The Gray Region is made up of three sub-regions: of
Fear, Death, and Shadow. In each one of them there are cards with challenges that the teams should resolve
(through the presentation of the proposals) and depending on the evaluation of the jury, they can rescue lives
from the Gray Region or else lose them. (The tone of the challenges is very similar to the situations 1, 2, 3, and
4 that are presented in the section Collection of Information and Analysis). When a team loses all of the lives
in its care, it leaves the game. The challenges and problems that are presented by the cards of the Gray Region
have different levels of difficulty. Those of Death combine problems that are the most complex and crucial (the
lives of some persons are at stake), those of Fear present problems of the moral and ethical type that are
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85
somewhat complex, with potentially fatal consecuences; and those of Shadow combine problems that are more
general and less risky. Each one of the cards of the Gray Region specifies the quantity of lives that can be lost
or gained during the challenge that is presented. In some cases, the challenges proposed in the cards of the
Gray Region demand that the teams use specific resources. There are four types of resources: institutional, the
team should describe an institution to which it would resort to resolve the situation; laws and customs the
team should refer to traditions, folk wisdom, customs, or laws that can help to resolve the situation; people,
that is to say, the team should name definite persons that, in the city neighborhood- could be consulted to
improve the given situation. The jury evaluates the proposals and then approves or disapproves them. They
should also explain the reasons for their decision, or they can question the teams for clarification, or for
specifics or to better defend a proposal.
The Busy Bodies. This has to do with interfamily violence, of molestations and physical and verbal
mistreatment among members of the family, with violence exercised by different members of the family, with
the authoritarian dynamics, the significant forms of exclusion and threats of expulsion from the home, the
subtle or explicit forms of blackmail and sexual harrassment in the family group. The violence associated with
conflicts over romantic love, passion, and friendship, conflictive seduction, sexual violence in romantic
relationships, infidelity, jealousy in love relationships, conflict in sexuality, and the conflict associated with
parties and unrestrained social events: alcohol, soccer matches, psychoactive drugs, and festive celebrations as
contributors to aggressive practices in the social context of the neighborhood. Educational objectives:
To appropriate the capacity to confront family secrets, the past life history of the adults in the family,
as a condition for understanding the internal conflicts and reasons for aggression. To face what is
secret is a way of neutralizing its silent reproduction and the complicity of those who hide, assist, and
cover - by omission and without necessarily intending to - inherited injustices and molestations.
To learn to recognize the institutions, laws, and third parties that can help to mediate a peaceful, non-
destructive resolution to the conflict.
To favor the strengthening of self-esteem, the appreciation of history and life and the building of the
concepts of love, friendship, eroticism as defined less by the patrons of inherited and
conventional conduct. To appropriate the imaginary invention of forms of responsible love in which
the subjects creatively assume their relationships.
To learn to generate states of euphoria, festivity, and expressivity without the means of any type of
drunkenness induced by drugs or alcohol. To build rites of encounter and personal confession
(intimate) and of conversation in which each one can speak freely of his own life and of that of others.
Each game involves one person to protect. The first card in the game describes the general
characteristics of the person and the situation of potential risk (loneliness, depression, loss of self esteen) in
which he currently finds himself. From this moment the participants will be invited to imagine specific
interventions regarding this life. The other game cards (smaller) consider specific moments in this life: in some
cases, the game cards re-create future scenes of this person, in others they are occupied with the past life of this
person. The meddlers act as invisible presences that change the outcome of those persons. From the capacity to
imagine rituals, gifts, imaginary and creative interventions to alter the course of a life depends on the decisions
of the teams. Each card defines the limiting conditions to resolve the situation. For example, in some cases, the
cards oblige the team players to recur to certain objects to make the gift that they will give to the person they
protect. In other cases they have to invent a special celebration for this person. In others they must hurriedly
compose a song, etc. Each card includes the number of points that the teams can earn.
The results of the tests
In the definitive test sessions of the three simulation game participants consisting of 65 people: 47
adult women, 10 adult men and 8 minors (5 girls and 3 boys). There were 22 from the neighborhood, 22 from
the sector of Alto Naples, 20 from the sector Marroquin, and 23 from the sector Mujica. The sessions were
held in the evenings from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m on weekdays, in the sectors of Mujica, and Alto Naples, and on
Saturdays from 2:00 to 5:00 in Marroquin.
The information was gathered by video recording, taking daily notes in the field and registering the
post-game comments made by the participants. In general, we we able to notice the following indicators and
significant results of the tests:
There is real growth in the participation and expressive presence of the students as the games develop
and the strategy is constructed.
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86
Qualification and growing complexity of the creative solutions which they give to each one of the
challenges that are presented.
Effective integration of teams, the constitution of tied and intergroup solidarity, the reduction of the
symbolic distance between the professor and the learners in the school situation.
Increase of the recognition and integration of life and the collective personal contexts towards the
analysis of situations and problems proposed by the games.
Increase of indicators of solidarity and the progressive reduction of the competitive dimension of the
game in order to favor the cooperative aspects of the game between groups or teams of players.
The growing multiplication of expressive resources (not only written material) for the effect of jointly
building solutions and expositions of ideas according to the progress of the strategy. There are
sufficient evidences of growth of expressive participation, qualification of creative solutions to the
stated problems, effective integration of groups and reduction of the competitive dynamic in favor of
a cooperative dynamic. The incorporation of experiences and stories associated with the contexts of
life and the multiplication of the expressive resources on the part of the learners.
The comprehension of the rules of the game is not immediate, but improves substantially in the
second round of each game. The instructions, requirements, and modes of playing the game are
comprehensible and are clear to the players after trying the first round.
The learning and apropriation of the game rules have three stages: explication and general
presentation of the game; the instructions and specific clarifications to each team; and the practical
application of the rules as the game develops
The learning of one game helps in learning another one.
The games requiere at least one competent reader, which can be the teacher or advanced students of
the course.
The participation of the women in expressive terms and in terms of resources for imagining
unconventional formulas for resolving conflicts was more significant than that of the men. The men,
with a few notable exceptions, felt more inhibited and less disposed to seek unconventional proposals.
In some cases, some members of the teams have the tendency to lead the group dynamic in an
individualistic manner. Rotating the team leadership helps to reduce these forms of personalization of
opinion and participation.
People tend to give consistency and flesh and bones to narrative fictional characters, including the fact
that they incorporate details that are not considered in the original descriptions.
Of those who participated, at least 20 manifested, explicitly, interest in continuing the game in the
future and recognized the therapeutic and entertaining dimension of the game. Twelve people
indicated that in the games they talked of matters and discussed topics that they were not in the habit
of discussing in their daily lives.
In all the game sessions, excepting in two, there were spontaneous post-game discussions and debates
about the topics that were brought up in the game, about the learning derived from the session or
about their own experiences of convivence and social conflict. This signals the possibilities of a
simulation game to animate and install the discussion of agendas referring to social, personal, and
colective life.
Achievements of the research
The project allowed me to formulate the basis of what can be a theory and a pedagogy founded in
simulation games, their advantages and their limitations, in the context of the education about social harmony
and the reduction of interpersonal violence. The three games, as designed, are a valuable product that can be
enriched and developed in the immediate future (integrating new games and new types of games for other
types of agendas of social intervention). The research also permitted confirmation that, in no manner, are we
condemned to cruelty and violence. There have been long periods of national life in which the rates of
homicide and violence have been low, and there are very clear indicators in the popular neighborhoods about
an extraordinary potential for qualifying life conditions and reducing the forms of lethal aggression that affect
social harmony between neighbors. Of course it is not sufficient with an educational strategy, but it is clear that
the symbolic enrichment and the capacity to examine our conflictiveness narratively and expressively are,
today, fundamental requirements for facing the reduction of our violence. Popular and adult education, due to
its particular sensibility to the demands and characteristics of the learners seem ideal for contributing to this
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87
task of enrichment, compensation and symbolic recognition of the excluded. A city such as Cali, with a little
more than two million inhabitants is not sentenced to violence and exclusion. And the educational projects
only confirm this. The simulation games are no more than one strategy among a multiplicity of educative
strategies, that the peoples of our country are inventing each day so as not to surrender to barbarianism and
horror.
Impact
The strategy of simulation games has been presented in the context of the Masters in Education, with
Emphasis in Popular Education and Community Development of the University of the Valley. The games and
the strategy will be integrated into a macro-project which the School of Social Communication, the Mayor of
Cali, and the Interamerican Bank of Development (BID) will develop in 2003, as a continuation of the first
phase developed in 2002, and entitled Cali Alive. In this strategy, the simulation games will be used as a
resource to prepare a television program that will be transmitted by the regional channel (Telepacific and the
University Channel) in the city of Cali. The academic program of Recreation, of the University of the Valley
has included an elective for 2003 about simulation games that recreation directors can plan for the design and
implementation of similar strategies. The results of the project will be presented in a Seminar of Intelectual
Production of the School of Social Communication and in Seminar of the Faculty of Integrated Arts in the first
semester of 2003. For the fall semester of 2003 there will be an elective offered on the formation of Social
Communicators for the development and application of simulation games. The popularization of these games
between institutions in Latin America, Colombia, and the United States will begin to be seen in the first
semester of 2003. A course about simulation games will be offered for recreational institutions in the province
of Valley of Cauca in February 2003. And lastly, we will use the model of simulation games for the
development of a research project, approved by the National Television Commission , to be called Reflective
Screens (media education).
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Notes
1
Giving attention to the perspective of the research, we would like to thank the following students and
professors of the Centers of Adult Education for their participation in the experience: Yessica Montao, Liliana
Patricia Daza, Mara Fernanda Torres, Mariela Pea, Estela Angulo, Mara Gamboa, Lola Tabares, Enrique
Rivas, Virgelina Mosquera, Flor Edilma Vivas, Lady Ximena Amariles, Yesilda Arisala, Narcisa Congo, Neira
Alejandra Riascos, Eufemia Vivas, Esperanza Cortez, Guillermina Riascos, Luz Dary Quiones, Eydiz
Mayorga, Nancy Torres, Ana Avendao, Zulma Herrera, Karem Quiones, Oscar Fernndez Ortiz, Mariluz
Nuez, Rubiela Snchez, Juan Pablo Carmona, Paola Andrea Morales, Jenny Murillo, Diana Snchez, Elvira
Velsquez, Fernando Inestroza, Patricia Carmona, Rosa Helena Crdoba, Jenny Ziga, Ana Rosa Valois de
Palacio, Karem Yiced Muoz Palacio, Jeison Smith Meneses, Juan David Santamara, Gloria Ins Gonzlez,
Lina Mariela Gonzlez, Aura Meneses, Olga Grisales, Licorena Patio, Mara Yuli Castro, Noralba Muoz
Muoz, Janeth Bravo Castro, Omaira Chocue Campo, Maria Leyton, Marcela Gonzlez, John Muoz, Jenny
Jazmin Valencia Hoyos, Diana Carolina Vargas, Gladys Yepes, Nelsn Ortiz, Belly Guzmn, Jorge Isaac
Jimnez, Miryen Urmndiz Rivera, Jhon Jairo Murillo, Susana Prez Sierra, Mara del Carmen Nez, and
Mauro Granjas. Professors: Giomar Jimnez, Selene Medina, Luz Dary Quiones, and Eydiz Mayorga.
The following people participated in the research team: Roco del Socorro Gmez Ziga as associate
researcher, Miryan Ziga as consultant, and as research assistants Sandra Chavarro, Claudia Isabel
Bustamante, Marcela Lpez, Mnica Hernndez, Erica Soto, and Flor Isabel Carrillo
2
Interview of Roberto Chaskel, The psychiatrist of children of the war. The Newspaper Magazine El
Espectador, Sunday, November 10, 2002, Bogot.