Communities across Colombia are using museums to highlight pitfalls of slipping back into conflict. Colombian soldier Libio José Martínez’s son used to play with a toy version of the helicopter he hoped his father, held captive by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group, would escape in. His father, however, never made it to freedom — in 2011, after 14 years in captivity, Martinez was killed. As was 26-year-old civilian Fair Leonardo Porras, in 2008, when he was tricked by the Colombian army with a job offer, shot dead and displayed with a gun in his hand to falsely boost the military’s combat kill numbers. This past April, the two cases were presented side by side in a memorial wall at the back of a 1,200-square-meter exhibit — a preview of Colombia’s future National Museum of Memory. The exhibit was part of a growing movement to ensure that memories of the longest-running conflict in the Americas, now over, at least on paper, stay front and center as Colombia charts its future. | 