Dispute for the Unity in the Colombian Political Discourse: an Eristic Reading

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical approach to a corpus of communications from the former President Juan Manuel Santos and the demobilized guerrilla FARC-EP, during the two-year period preceding the peace process in Havana, Cuba. Based on an eristic reading of the games of veridiction about the idea of unity as an “object of discourse”, the components of each discursive construction are contrasted, and the verbal mechanisms through which the social actors in dispute constructed meanings are dismantled, in that conjunctural moment of the country. The retrospective examination of this dispute allows to interrogate the political present in Colombia, in which the implementation of the peace agreements signed in 2016 has been hindered by the continuity of this struggle for the truth of the objects of discourse disputed by political actors.