# Cuando los pájaros no cantaban (Testimonial) — Digest

## 1. Identity & purpose

*Cuando los pájaros no cantaban. Historias del conflicto armado en Colombia* is **Tomo 6**, the **testimonial volume** (*tomo testimonial*) of the Colombian Truth Commission's (CEV) 2022 final report *Hay Futuro Si Hay Verdad*. It was directed by commissioner **Alejandro Castillejo Cuéllar**, an anthropologist, and built by a dedicated research, editorial, sound, audiovisual and photographic team. Where the other ten volumes argue, document and conclude, this one **does only one thing: it lets people speak**. The report's foreword calls it "netamente testimonial y coral" — purely testimonial and choral, "una curaduría de voces que van del pasado al porvenir." During the investigation it was internally nicknamed the "**Capítulo Voces**" (Voices Chapter).

The volume is the editorial distillation of the Commission's central instrument — listening. The CEV conducted ~14,000 interviews and spoke with more than 30,000 people. This tomo drew on the **Sistema de Información Misional** (the master database where interviews were stored and classified), plus dedicated fieldwork, and selected from **more than 1,100 people heard** the **~260 voices** that inhabit the book (the closing data page tallies **263 stories/fragments and 280 testimoniantes**). Its purpose is not to prove the war happened but to render what statistics cannot: the **texture of lived experience** of a six-decade war, treated as a source of truth in its own right.

## 2. Central thesis / what the testimonial approach adds

The opening essay, **"¿Qué es una voz?"** (What is a voice?), states the thesis: the problem in Colombia "is not that people lack a voice… the problem is that this society has not learned to listen in depth," despite two decades of memory policy. Where conventional truth-telling listens *retrospectively* — fixing on the moment of victimization, the "hecho victimizante" — this volume **recalibrates the ear** to hear the **everyday** (*lo cotidiano*) and the **future** (*el porvenir*). It defines **testimonio as an "articulación de la experiencia"** — an articulation of experience in which social and personal processes intersect — and insists people testify "not only with words but with the body in general." Hence photographs and poems are admitted as testimony too (the *fotógrafo testimoniante*, the *poeta testimoniante*).

The added value: war is shown as the **derrumbe (collapse) of the ordinary** — the father who must bury the son, the neighbor who becomes a stranger, the landscape stripped of its sounds and smells. The volume claims violence produces three concrete effects: **fracturas** (of places, bodies, social time, language-turned-weapon), **silencios** (silence as silencing, as protection, and as a mode of testifying the unnameable), and **ausencias** (of people and of relations, which become "ruinas de lo social"). These are the categories statistics flatten.

## 3. Structure / how it is organized

The tomo is deliberately shaped "**a la manera de algunos textos sagrados**" — like sacred books one returns to ritually — and is divided into three:

- **El libro de las anticipaciones** ("The book of anticipations") — 42 short texts in six sections, on premonitions and omens: a mother's *corazonada*, a body that feels strange to itself, rumors, hidden helicopters, birds as mythic emissaries, a furious river, agitated bees. Stories end abruptly, "en pico," privileging the poetic — what is said without over-explaining.
- **El libro de las devastaciones y la vida** ("The book of devastations and life") — the longest, structured in four *cuadernos*: **los lugares rotos** (broken places — displacement, environmental destruction), **cuerpos fisurados** (fractured bodies — the dead, the disappeared, forensic search, false positives), **las palabras como armas** (words as weapons — stigmatization, persecution for being punk, gay, indigenous, a street kid), and **fracturas del tiempo social** (fractures of social time — inheritance of war, ruptured life cycles).
- **El libro del porvenir** ("The book of what is to come") — the future as a present-tense act: rituals that rebuild community, reconciliation encounters between victims and ex-combatants, the **Territorios de la escucha** (listening territories in the Caribbean), the **Diálogos sobre la naturaleza** (Amazon/Pacific), and the 2021 *estallido social* (youth uprising).

Every story is "**un microcosmos**" meant to be read non-linearly, aloud, and even abandoned and returned to. Interleaved are two photographic essays (testimonial photography) and the projects on **nature as a testifying subject** (*espíritus testimoniantes*).

## 4. Recurring lived experiences & themes

- **Anticipation / the premonition body.** Mothers feel a *dolor en el ombligo* (navel pain) at the moment a soldier son is wounded far away; "yo lo sentí." The everyday becomes saturated with foreboding.
- **The collapse of the ordinary.** Curfews of fear ("a las cinco de la tarde teníamos ventanas cerradas… nos daba miedo toser"); a dog shot for barking; a child who wets the bed again; reversed life cycles.
- **Disappearance and the unending search.** "Uno sabe quién es su hijo"; the *cajita de huesos* (little box of bones); searching as a bureaucratic ordeal entangled with the State's technical-juridical languages.
- **Displacement and exile** as a chain of losses — arriving where "se habla una lengua diferente, hay otros olores," men losing the provider role, families crossing whole continents.
- **The body in war** — gusanos eating a wounded combatant alive in the Sierra Nevada; sixteen bullets; menstruation managed clandestinely in the ranks.
- **Stigmatization as a weapon** — killed or persecuted "porque éramos punkis," for being gay, for living on the street, for being from the periphery.
- **Faith and the sacred** — credos, the Holy Spirit, indigenous cosmology (Yuruparí) as the frame within which suffering is made bearable and meaningful.
- **Reconstruction** — ollas comunitarias, music, rap, the *baile cantao*, the chagra, and protest as a way to "florecer."

## 5. Emblematic stories / cases (several, briefly)

- **"Papi, no te lleves esa bicicleta."** A pregnant mother survives a paramilitary incursion; her 11-year-old escapes a massacre at a church; the terror triggers a miscarriage. Years later her surviving son still blames himself for taking the bicycle to mass that day — guilt transmitted across a family.
- **"Dolor en el ombligo."** A mother feels inexplicable navel pain the night her soldier son Anéider is wounded in an ambush at Santa María — the umbilical connection registering catastrophe before any phone call.
- **"¿Por qué fuimos positivos?"** Diocese workers — a former seminarian among them — are kidnapped, hooded for days, tortured and sexually assaulted by paramilitaries; a window into the **falsos positivos / "positives"** machinery and the destruction of the body under torture.
- **"Bandera de guerra."** A Rrom (gitana) woman is pulled into the drug economy, repeatedly raped and instrumentalized by both a guerrilla commander and a paramilitary commander — "la mitad del cuerpo mío era guerrilla y la otra paraca." She later becomes a victims' leader.
- **"Mi mayor tesoro."** A child born three months after his soldier father is kidnapped at **Patascoy** sends radio messages into the jungle for ~15 years; the father is killed in captivity in 2011. The son keeps the father's jungle-scented notebooks of letters and tiny colored pencils as his greatest treasure.
- **"Esa muerte me acompañó siempre" / reconciliation.** A former kidnapping captive, decades later, meets Lourdes — widow of a fellow captive who died — at a foundation retreat seeded with ex-combatants; the encounter produces physical catharsis and the long-postponed words "necesito hablar con Lourdes."
- **The 2021 *estallido*** ("¡Despertamos!", "Por el derecho a que no nos jodan", "Dieciséis mil hijos"): **Nicolás Neira** killed at 15 on May 1; **Jhonny Silva** killed at Universidad del Valle, his memory turned into a park, a chemistry lab, songs and murals ("perdiste un hijo, pero te ganaste 16.000 más").

## 6. Method — how the Commission treated testimony as a source of truth

The method is the volume's deepest contribution. Key moves:

- **Escucha en sus propios términos.** Listen to people "in their own terms," from their own worlds, "cadenas de significados," abysses and languages — never putting a researcher's argument in another's mouth.
- **Historias dentro de historias.** Because the database had been built for *esclarecimiento* (fact-extraction), the team mined the **fragments of everyday life buried inside the violence narratives** — the "susurro" filtering through "el ruido del dolor."
- **Escucha multidimensional** + **recalibración de la escucha.** They divided the database's twelve violence classifications and listened in depth for over a year, discovering shared narrative structures (e.g., the search for a disappeared person always carrying nostalgia, absence, guilt, and a fraught bond with the State).
- **Escuchar en perspectiva de futuro.** Deliberately listening for the future, which retrospective listening "turns down the volume" on.
- **Edition as filigree, not manipulation.** The "artificio" that turns raw transcripts into readable stories: translating oral to written register without losing its nature — explicitly *not* falsifying. The **Nota editorial** declares that apparent "errors" are editorial decisions honoring orality and linguistic diversity; testimonies were **anonymized** to protect speakers in a country where the war hasn't ended.
- **Ética de la colaboración** for photography — co-production where the artist transfers technique so testimoniantes make their own images.
- **Lecturas Rituales.** The volume was read aloud in communities across the country as part of its own production ("un libro vivo"). Reading (Latin *lěgěre*, kin to *lĭgare*, to bind) **legates** the testimony into the nation's intangible patrimony — "la herida… se va incorporando a la piel colectiva y con los años se convierte en arruga."

## 7. Voices across the spectrum

The book is explicitly **coral / polyphonic**. The closing data confirm it spans not only victims but **ex-combatants of FARC-EP, AUC, M-19, and former members of the public force (ejército/policía)**, as well as family members of armed-group members. The special project **"Narrativas de vida en la guerra"** gathered combatants of all sides, surfacing "una gran paradoja": Colombia's foot-soldier wars were fought by young people from nearly identical social backgrounds — families with members on opposing sides who "solo bajaban las armas cuando visitaban a la abuela para el cumpleaños."

Perpetrator and combatant voices speak in the first person and unsparingly: a soldier recounting how the army recruits "el soldado más gamín, al más desechable" and surviving 16 bullets only to be "dejado botado como a un perro"; a FARC ex-combatant on the hunger and frost of *Operación Berlín* and asking forgiveness of his mother from prison; a paramilitary intelligence operative ("Hacer inteligencia") describing seduction-tasking, forced sex with state functionaries, and the women binding their breasts with tape as self-defense. Crucially, the volume **does not flatten these into monsters** — "a veces se juzga y se deshumaniza a la gente que está en la guerra. Que somos monstros. No es así." It asks the reader to "escucharlas críticamente." It also extends testimony to **nature as a sujeto de dolor** — trees, rivers, birds, the sea as *espíritus testimoniantes*, voiced through indigenous and campesino communities of the Sierra Nevada, Amazon, Caribbean and Pacific.

## 8. Representative quotes

- "**Si las víctimas nos hubiéramos quedado calladas, seguramente no estaríamos hablando de paz.**" — Primera Lectura Ritual, La Honda, Medellín, 11 Sep 2021 (epigraph)
- "**Cada palabra que se borre es una cosmovisión que desaparece.**" — epigraph to *El libro de las anticipaciones*
- "**Llega un momento en que el miedo hace que uno no sienta más miedo.**" — mother, "Papi, no te lleves esa bicicleta"
- "**A veces se juzga y se deshumaniza a la gente que está en la guerra. Que somos monstros. No es así.**" — wounded combatant, Sierra Nevada
- "**Lo humano, que en realidad es lo que tenemos en común con todos los seres, solo se escucha desde las voces de los nadies.**" — Introducción general
- "**Perdiste un hijo, pero te ganaste 16.000 más.**" — students to the father of Jhonny Silva, Universidad del Valle
- "**No es con la venganza, sino con los ideales y el amor.**" — father of Nicolás Neira

## 9. Distinctive insights & coined concepts

- **The title.** "Cuando los pájaros no cantaban" is a phrase lent by **José** in an informal conversation in Sucre. It names a past legible only against a present in which the birds *do* sing again — there was a time, after a bomb or a scream, of "**El Gran Silencio**," a "vacío del sonido." Since in many cosmologies the world begins with a sound-event (a breath, an explosion), the absence of birdsong marks catastrophe; learning to listen means hearing the "densidad" of words — what they say *and* what they withhold.
- **Coined / load-bearing concepts:** *escucha multidimensional* and *recalibración de la escucha*; *éticas de la escucha* (ethics of listening) and *ética de la colaboración*; *testimonio as articulación de la experiencia*; *texturas / capas de la experiencia*; *espíritus testimoniantes* and **nature as a testifying subject**; *gramáticas testimoniales* (testimonial grammars beyond words); *ruinas de lo social*; *paz en pequeña escala* (small-scale peace, easily overlooked); the triad **fracturas / silencios / ausencias**; and **Lecturas Rituales** (peripatetic communal reading-aloud as legacy and *legar*). A comisión de la verdad is reframed as "**un gran dispositivo ritual que reúne y conecta voces**."

## 10. What this volume contributes that the data volumes cannot

The data volumes count the nine-million-plus victims, map perpetrators and quantify violations. This one delivers what they structurally cannot:

- **The interior of an event.** Not that a massacre occurred, but what it *felt* like to lie still among the dead playing dead, or to feel navel pain across a hundred kilometers.
- **The everyday as a primary site of war** ("lo cotidiano como uno de los lugares preponderantes de la guerra"), normally a "destello entre miles de datos."
- **Shared humanity across enemy lines**, recovered without exoneration — the paradox of identical-origin foot soldiers, the refusal to deal in monsters.
- **The future as evidence.** By listening "en gesto de futuro," it captures hope, reconstruction and resistance that retrospective data render "abstracto o un vacío desenraizado."
- **A reparative act, not just a record.** Reading testimony aloud binds (*ligare*) the wound into "la piel colectiva," making the report "un ejercicio vivo… un proceso social" rather than an "verdad oficial."
- **An expanded ontology of the witness** — bodies, photographs, poems and even rivers and birds as legitimate testimony.

In short: the data volumes establish *that* and *how much*; this volume preserves *what it was like to be there* — and insists that a society which cannot listen in depth to its "voces de los nadies" will recycle the war it claims to be ending.