This article develops a problematization of the notion of testimony with which the historical memory has been constructed in Colombia. It is argued that the use of testimony as primary information of historical memory reports starts from an epistemological frame of the notion of victim. The case of the politically complex victim is analysed as a significant subject that allows to make political decisions on how to build the corpus of testimonial information in historical memory exercises. This method leads to a questioning of the representational function of historical memory reports. The analysis is the product of different fieldworks developed over ten years with victims and demobilized former combatants of illegal armies in Colombia. The work concludes that the inclusion of the testimony of the so-called the others facilitates the necessary destabilization of the narrative of violence. Keywords: Memory, victims, armed conflict, Colombia. © Gabriel Ruiz Romero, Daniel Castaño Zapata. Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.