Anti-LGBT Violence and Brutality as Mechanisms for Social Control in Colombia

• In Event: Violent Social Control of Civilians by Armed Groups

Abstract

Studies of civilian victimization and the logics of violence during war have explained why armed actors target civilians as a strategy of war. However, thus far, they have been limited in their capacity to explain variation in how the armed actors target highly visible, marginalized populations with no clear ties to wartime cleavages in brutal ways. This puzzle becomes even more interesting in Colombia, where much of the existing literature on logics of violence has not accounted for a social politic related to sexuality and gender identity. While anti-LGBT violence became a standard act of armed actors throughout the country, in some places, the extremeness of this violence, its public nature and brutality, became notable in comparison to other cases. But this violence did not appear in a random manner, and its predominance in a country as diverse in culture and people as Colombia hints at a wartime logic that merits further investigation. Even if these people were despised, they were still human, and their deaths, their public suffering, must have had an impact on the communities in which they lived— even on people unlike them.

In this paper, I ask what explains the variation in how LGBT groups were targeted in Colombia’s armed conflict? And in exploring this question, I address two others: why target a social group with no clear tie to the conflict? And why utilize such brutal forms of violence? To answer these questions, I explore how paramilitary and rebel guerrilla groups that both targeted LGBT people— but in different ways— during the height of the country’s conflict at the turn of the 21st century. To develop these case studies, I rely on archival material, government victimization data, and eleven months of fieldwork in Colombia to inductively advance a theory of anti-LGBT violence during civil war.

I argue that armed actors collectively target LGBT people through brutal violence when they attempt to exert social control through a socialization process that I call abjection. Brutality against LGBT people becomes a low-cost way to impose new social rules in accordance with their ideology that redraws the boundaries of the community. This violence against a marginalized minority has a unique impact because the extremeness of the brutality against a visible minority sparks the attention of the broader population, but its targeted nature makes it less threatening and more easily justified through a moral framing. As such, ideology is a requisite for social control efforts through anti-LGBT violence, as without ideology, the violence will be harder to frame and legitimize in a moral context.

Author

• Samuel Ritholtz, University of Oxford