LAUSR

Between 2002 and 2006, the municipality of Quinchia (Risaralda, Colombia) was the focus of regional and national interest due to the magnitude of the bloodshed that occurred there and to the impact on communities of both paramilitary and insurgent violence and the State’s pacification strategy. The article seeks to understand, from a historical perspective, how this was possible. Along these lines, our research led us to the “representation” of Quinchia as a “Plaza Roja” (liberal stronghold), mobilized since the end of the 19th century by the social and political elites. Paradoxically, this representation arises in a region also imagined by the elites as a haven of peace, or as a place where the impact of the armed, political, and social conflict was considered to be minor with respect to other areas of the country. One of our main findings was that this representation guides and concentrates a good part of the social framework for the memory of what occurred in Quinchia. That representation has served to justify the political violence perpetrated by diverse actors and the stigmatization by the State of the forms of social organization in the region. It has also nurtured and fueled a varied local resistance to certain logics, institutions, and agents thought to have assaulted the territory and its communities.