Those Who Stayed

In 2007, eleven young men in a town on Colombia's Caribbean coast were killed by the army, reported as guerrilla casualties, and filed as false positives - part of more than 6,400 documented extrajudicial executions. Eighteen years later, their families are building a house with the soldiers who helped murder them.

In Piedrahita, a town in Sucre, a project called Casa O11ce brings together the families of the eleven and the soldiers who killed them under Colombia's transitional justice framework - one of the most serious attempts any country has made to reckon with half a century of its own violence. Margarita coordinates the project with international aid while the Colombian state contributes nothing, carrying the weight of what everyone in the room brings with them. Carmelo, a former soldier who has appeared before the JEP, shows up each morning to carry blocks alongside the mothers of the boys he helped kill. Noraldo, whose brother Juan Bernardo was one of the eleven, chose to stay in the town when others left and to build alongside the men who destroyed his family.

The novel asks what the framework reaches and what it cannot. Whether a sentence from the JEP changes what Carmelo carries home at night. Whether Noraldo's decision to participate is an act of faith in the process, or something the process needed from him more than it could offer back. Running through the construction in brief present-tense chapters, the eleven dead appear as they were: boys with names, habits, and futures the official record had erased for eighteen years.

Perfect for readers of:
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling
Héctor Abad Faciolince, Oblivion: A Memoir
Evelio Rosero, The Armies
Piedad Bonnett, What I Have Lost