Colombia’s White Elephant

Towering over the intersection of two crucial avenues, one can findthe future ruins of the Colombian Museum of Memory (Museo de Memoria de Colombia). While it was originally scheduled to be inaugurated in 2022, today all that can be found is a menacing concrete structure - a proverbial »white Elephant« in the heart of the country's capital. Perhaps one can take the sad state of this initiative as a metaphor to understand the ways in which initiatives to »memorialize« the Colombian armed conflict have been caught up in wider political disputes in the midst of the country's transitional justice process. In this article, I trace these fraught collisions between memory, law, and power by analyzing the history of the Museum's parent institution, the National Centre of Historical Memory (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica) as an entity within the executive branch. From its creation in 2011 through the Law of Victims and Land Restitution (Ley de Víctimas, 1448 de 2011), the Centre has become a crucial site of political disputes over how to memorialize the country's history. Indeed, it was even delisted from an international network of Sites of Conscience in 2020 over fears of its institutional independence from the executive branch - or lack thereof. As such, its material history - including that of its »White Elephant« museum - has much to teach audiences in Colombia and abroad about the role of the law in the production and contestation of political memory in contexts of ongoing civil strife and violence.