18 - Kidnapping and Representation: Images of a Sovereign in the Making

Summary

All social and political classes of Colombian society have experienced a degree of vulnerability with regard to kidnapping. It has become the main narrative through which the country's vulnerability, governance, and security are assessed. Its media coverage has reached the international community, inviting the involvement of foreign countries and human rights agencies as mediators. Putting an end to the “inhuman industry” of kidnapping figures prominently in the Democratic Security and Defense policy and the measures derived from it in the subsequent years of its application. This same policy describes kidnapping as a crime that threatens all citizens of Colombia and their basic social rights; therefore, its statistics are used as indicators of good governance or political failure. Despite the fact that Colombia is far from being a kidnap-free country, these statistics claim that eight years of Democratic Security and Defense policy and its derived measures have resulted in a decrease in kidnapping.

This chapter puts forward different sets of arguments about kidnapping. Rather than depicting it as merely criminal, I inquire into what kidnapping reveals about the vulnerability, sovereignty, and the space of war of the Colombia state. This so-called third world country has been striving to establish full sovereignty against the forces that effect its waning. These forces include insurgency groups within Colombia, flows of legal and illegal capital, global media, and new forms of global and transnational governance in the areas of security, human rights, and civil law. I suggest that kidnapping is another such force. On the one hand, it consists of illegal capture through strategies of penetration, seizure, and transfer, in which the victim is relocated outside the reach of family and the state. But by challenging the ideas of Colombian citizenship, national identity, and territory, kidnapping also threatens the already contested space of authority of the Colombian state.

I pursue this argument by analyzing images derived from political kidnapping that are the only link between the space ruled by the Colombian government and the space where the hostage has been taken. They speak of and bring to the public eye an unreachable space, a space that escapes the authority of the Colombian state.