For the past seven years, Cartagena-born photographer Carlos Saavedra has portrayed fifteen of the Mothers of False Positives in Colombia. Together with Princeton anthropologist Sebastian Ramirez, they have collected the mothers' stories and accompanied them in different projects that seek to remember their loss. All the mothers participated in long interviews in which they were invited to make an act of memory to remember their children, to relive their childhood, their family life and the moment of loss. The book has been the result of a dialogue with these mothers who have opened their personal archives to build a memory that is their own.
In addition to the 15 portraits of these women who agreed to be buried in a delicate and respectful process of symbolic reparation, this book has been designed to tear the pages in order to open chapters of this process of personal memory that tells us how the mothers have lived these losses and how they are still demanding justice.This is a book that seeks to unearth the memory of the conflict to make it known visually.
It has great relevance for Colombia's recent history because it provides vital testimony of a part of these 6402 executions by the state between 2002 and 2008 that, according to the JEP (Special Justice for Peace), could amount to several thousand. Investigations by Human Rights Watch and the Attorney General's Office revealed that many of its top army commanders participated in the systematic campaign of kidnappings and executions of civilians in order to increase the record of combat casualties.
