Evidentiality in the Colombian “Diálogos de Paz”: An Analysis of Quotations and Presuppositions in Colombia’s Peace Talks

October 12th, 2012 in Oslo, Norway, marks the official beginning of a peace talk promised to be the end of more than 60 years of war for the country of Colombia. With the slogan “Buscar la paz con justicia social por medio del diálogo” (‘to find peace with social justice through dialogue’), the political entities involved in this talk were the Colombian government and the guerrilla group FARC, e.p., the latter ones considered the perpetrators of countless terrorist attacks in the country. Since the beginning of these peace talks, each party has presented at the beginning of their cycles of talk, a communiqué charged with informing the Colombian people about the negotiations and processes taking place at the table. This study analyzes each individual communiqué as separate language instances, which show that each pragmatic act presented in them, contain a series of language manipulations that allow each media statement to be something more than a simple report of events. Using the Multilayered Model of Context (MMC) (Berlin, 2007; 2011) to conduct a critical discourse analysis, this study observes the relations and dynamics of power present in the communiqués delivered by the Colombian government and FARC-ep to the Colombian public during the entire peace dialogue process. By using the MMC, this study presents, in addition to the analysis of the extrasituational, situational, and interactional contexts, a particular focus on the linguistic context. This last focus analyzes the use of evidentiality as a pragmatic device, which can be found co-occurring within the presence of presuppositions and direct quotations in the communiqués. The employment of evidentiality highlights the level of control that the different sides attempted to exert over the public, not only in what was said but also over the context (van Dijk, 2001a). Moreover, the use of presuppositions and direct quotations highlight the way each political entity wanted to be perceived by its audience, as well as the ideological message they wanted to transmit.