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This paper is an approach to the way in which the State takes shape in the margins of the Colombian nation. It also inquires about the way the law work in such spaces, in postpeace agreement contexts. It is based on the testimony of two men who were actors in the Colombian armed conflict. The information was collected under the methodological approach of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Our conclusion is that the so-called post-conflict is a stage where alternative legal orders emerge as embodiments of State institutions. This means that the margins are spaces where the State has not consolidated effective and stable forms of social regulation. This situation opens a space for the emergence of local actors who play a role as intermediaries and no formal personifications of the State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acts of armed violence can pour a new sense over the spaces where a community build its social identity. In Nueva Venecia, a small pile-dwelling village in Magdalena (Colombia), three different armed actors (the guerrilla, the right-wing paramilitaries and the Public Force) gathered the local people, at three different times, on the same social space: the main square. In the first meeting, people was warned, by the first one of the three groups, about the possibility of a slaughter that could happen there. In the second occasion, local people was both victim and witness of the way that the second one carried it on. In the third meeting, the third group offered excuses for what happened. The paper analyses the way in which these three acts determined three marks of the continuum of violence over the local nodal space of memory. The article is organized around the last act, when national Army and Police representatives organized a public ceremony of forgiveness because of the paramilitary massacre. The study of such a ceremony shows it as a stage where agents of confronting memories are trying to achieve social legitimacy rather than a true act of symbolic reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]