Join us for a discussion with visual anthropologist and filmmaker Yezid Campos following the screening of “El Baile Rojo. Memoria de los Silenciados,” a 2003 documentary film about the political violence in Colombia.
This discussion and film screening explore the origin, development, and dissolution of the left-wing party Unión Patriótica (UP), which emerged after the 1985 peace negotiations between President Belisario Betancur’s government (1982-1986) and the FARC guerrillas. From 1986 to 2002, over 6,200 political members—including two presidential candidates, Congress members, council members, union leaders, students, artists, activists, and supporters—were systematically killed by the Colombian state, according to the country’s Centro Nacional de la Memoria Histórica. In February 2023, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) found the state responsible for the UP’s extermination, and Colombia’s Justice and Peace court declared the party’s destruction a political genocide.
Yezid Campos thoroughly documented this brutal political genocide in his 2019 book and documentary, El Baile Rojo: Relatos no contados del genocidio de la UP. The work draws from firsthand accounts of survivors and relatives of victims, yet it remains relatively under-discussed in academic circles and Colombian society.
Discussant: Félix Burgos, director of the Colombian Studies Initiative.