Methodological Summary

This visualization presents an interactive heat map of armed actors in Colombia based on ViPAA data. The term Armed Actor refers to state and non-state armed entities that exercise the organized use of violence in a specific territory to achieve political or economic goals. For this particular research, the main types of armed actors include: government forces, insurgent organizations, paramilitary groups, and criminal organizations. These main actors are further disaggregated in a variety of specific organizations.

To generate the database of Violent Presence of Armed Actors, the project relies on the computerized identification of actors and locations using Eventus ID (Osorio & Reyes 2016).  The raw information comes from Noche y Niebla, a systematic and encompassing collection of human rights violations narratives provided by CINEP. These narratives provide a brief but detailed account of violent incidents covering a broad range of actions (e.g. threats, rape, beatings, torture, forced displacement, arson, killings, etc.). The software reads the text of the Noche y Niebla narratives in order to identify the actors and places mentioned in the text. To do so, the software relies on dictionaries of actors and locations. The result of the coding process is a database of armed actors geo-located at the municipality-year level.

Each data point in the database represents one observation of an armed actor in a given municipality-year as detected in the Noche y Niebla narratives. The exact location of the incidents at the XY coordinate level is unknown, so the researchers assigned the coordinates of the municipality center to their respective observation. The map presents a heat map displaying a higher intensity color range in areas concentrating a higher density of armed actors.