NGK Cultural Bridge Fellowship 2006

I know it has been a while since I have posted an entry on my blog!

I have been frantically trying to finish my report in time to allow me to travel a little before returning to Boston. I have therefore spent way too much time in front of my computer and not nearly enough time practicing the salsa, etc!

Senator Pardo’s terms as a senator concluded on 16 July so the office was packed up and I then worked from home. This morning I met with him to present my final report and I am looking forward to having another chat after has had time to read the report more closely.

My final report consists of a summary of the JPL and a review of other studies which estimate the costs incurred by particular categories of victims, i.e. those who have suffered death or physical injury, forced displacement, kidnapping, landmine incidents or property damage, etc. There is very little consistency across these studies, with each covering a different group of victims, looking at different periods of time and being subject to different assumptions. The different estimates, even within the same category of victims, are incredibly diverse.

To arrive at an estimate of the cost of repairing victims of the conflict, I extrapolated the results of each of these studies so as to cover the period from 1964 to 2005 and converted the figures into Colombian pesos of 2006. I then selected what I thought to be a reasonable combination of these different estimates so as to cover the universe of victims and reparable harm. Adding up these estimates gave me what I have called a ‘feasible estimate’ of the cost of repairing all victims of the conflict of between 55,525,477 and 96,340,358 million Colombian pesos of 2006, approximately US$23,000 – 40,000 million.

I then allocated responsibility for this figure between guerrilla and paramilitary groups, which turned out to be approximately 65% and 35%, respectively. This is important because only groups that choose to demobilize are required to repair victims. At present, most paramilitary groups are expected to demobilize but no guerrilla groups have expressed any such interest.

I have had some really positive responses from different people. The Conflict Analysis Resource Center has made me a Research Associate as a result of my investigation (with Professors James Robinson and Robert Bates also involved in the Center’s work). They are hoping to publish my report and use an agency to promote it to different media organizations, all of which is pretty exciting.

I have also had regular contact with the head of the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation who is responsible for the implementation of the reparation provisions of the JPL. It will be fascinating to see how the reparation process plays out given different resource and political constraints.

Tonight I head off to the Caribbean coast for a week or so before returning to Bogotá for a couple of days. I promise at least one more update before I leave.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.