Winifred Tate: Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia

WINIFRED TATE. COUNTING THE DEAD: THE CULTURE AND POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN COLOMBIA. BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2007, 400 PAGES The 1989 murders of three Colombian presidential candidates and the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of another phase in this Andean nation's decades of civil strife. Since then, tens of thousands of Colombians have died and 3.8 million--disproportionately Afro-Colombians--have been internally displaced due to political violence. Much of the violence occurs in massacres that make the flesh creep. In Counting the Dead, Winifred Tate attempts to empower the victims of human rights violations in Colombia. She successfully accomplishes the goal of "making them count." An unintended consequence of human rights (HR) activism is that the paramilitary death squads received training in international humanitarian law. Now, thugs avoid murdering more than four people at the same time and place, the international definition of a massacre. Instead they use chainsaws to cut up the victims, burying legs in different pits or in scattering arms across the landscape and along the rivers.