Falling into Silence: or, The Reach and Limits of Reporting Horror in Patricia Nieto’s Work

Abstract

Based on a case study of Colombian journalist Patricia Nieto, who has written extensively about Colombia’s armed conflict, this article offers a new approach to understanding demands on journalists and challenges that face them when covering the effects of violence and trauma. The analysis focuses on the prologues Nieto wrote for the edited volumes of testimonies that she and her students put together. The books were product of a collective endeavor by which Nieto and her students guided and helped victims and survivors of violence to write their own stories. In the prologues to these volumes, Nieto’s reflections place politics and aesthetics close together in discussing the act of writing as the search for an inner voice to reconstruct the events that transformed someone into a victim. To understand the process of working with the victims, the article combines textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. It analyzes Nieto’s professional trajectory and her position in the local field of journalistic production, considering her emotional and ethical quest when covering her country’s armed conflict.