The chronicles as a memory of the Colombian armed conflict. Los escogidos and Llanto en el paraíso by Patricia Nieto

Abstract

The chronicle is a hybrid genre, between journalism and literarature, ideal to represent the Colombian armed conflict from the perspective of the victims. It can be considered one of the experimental narratives proposed by Dominik LaCapra to explore post-traumatic processes documented by historiography and that contribute to the elaboration of the victims’ grief and allow readers a greater understanding of violence based on empathy. For this reason, it analyzes the narrative resources used by Patricia Nieto in the books Los escogidos y Llanto en el paraíso based on LaCapra’s proposals. The descriptive and interpretive reading is contrasted with the treatment of the subject in the narrative of Violence and the study of the historical context of Colombia to understand how the analyzed texts manage to build memory of violence and account for the experience of the victims of the conflict in its human complexity and not as part of the statistics.