More than documenting LGBTQ + narratives: a human rights activists’ perspective from Colombia’s truth commission

This article explores how LGBTQ+ organisations engage with transitional justice not only to achieve recognition, but to interrogate and reshape its epistemic foundations. Focusing on the Colombian organisation Caribe Afirmativo and its contributions to the country’s Truth Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad), it examines how memory work becomes a site of negotiation, contestation, and political intervention. Drawing on qualitative methods – including document analysis and generative dialogues (Fried Schnitman, 2001, Nuevos paradigmas, cultura y subjetividad. Paidós) with activists – the article analyses how Caribe Afirmativo navigated three interrelated challenges: maintaining autonomy while engaging with state institutions; producing knowledge from grassroots and dissident perspectives; and advancing claims for collective reparation amid inequality. Rather than celebrating inclusion as progress, the article critically assesses the limitations of state-led mechanisms which, while symbolically inclusive, remain structurally constrained. Caribe Afirmativo’s dual positioning – as a contributor to state-led truth-telling mechanisms and a producer of autonomous memory practices – reveals how LGBTQ+ actors navigate between institutional dialogue and activist critique. These dynamics underscore that queering transitional justice involves more than adding new voices: it requires unsettling the normative logics that shape recognition, reparation, and justice.