Jelin - Public Memorialization in Perspective

The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol.
1, 2007, 138–156,
doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijm006
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/article-abstract/1/1/138/2356766 by Birkbeck College, University of London user on 01 February 2019
Public Memorialization in Perspective:
Truth, Justice and Memory of Past
Repression in the Southern Cone
of South America
Elizabeth Jelin*
Abstract
The end of dictatorial regimes and state-sponsored political repression involves a multi-
layered process of transition. This entails the development of a democratic institutional
apparatus and, at the same time, ways to deal with past crimes and state repression. The
task of settling accounts with the past converges with the need to build a different future.
This paper deals with one specific arena of this process, namely, the struggles around
memories and meanings as reflected in public memorialization.
The paper is based on research into the recent experiences of countries coming out of
periods of political violence and repression in South America. It analyzes the ways in
which societal demands for public memorialization change over time. The past has to be
clarified, perpetrators punished, victims recognized and legacies conveyed to future gene-
rations. In that process, the politics of recognition and remembrance involve the coming
together of institutional, symbolic and subjective dimensions.
Introduction
The end of dictatorial regimes and state-sponsored political repression involves a
multilayered process of transition. This entails the development of a democratic
institutional apparatus and, at the same time, ways to deal with past crimes and
state repression. The task of settling accounts with the past converges with the
need to build a different future. This paper deals with one specific arena of this
process, namely, the struggles around memories and meanings as reflected in pub-
lic memorialization.
This paper selects three areas in which practices and policies of memorialization
are at stake: dates of commemorations, territorial markers and archives. On the
basis of research into the recent experiences of the countries coming out of peri-
ods of political violence, state terrorism and political repression in the Southern
Cone of South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay), it ana-
lyzes the constant interaction between state and societal actors in the struggle for
understanding and interpreting past violence and repression. The paper makes
* Professor and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, (IDES) and at the
National Council of Scientific Research, (CONICET), Argentina.
E-mail: elijelin@fibertel.com.ar
© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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Public Memorialization in Perspective 139
two basic points: first, that policies of memorialization are part of a larger arena of
transitional politics and cannot be seen independently. By showing how these
processes develop on various institutional, symbolic and subjective levels, it
becomes clear that the demands for public memorialization are always part and
parcel of the demands for truth and justice. Second, there is no state and society
division of labor involved in the sense that institutional justice is in the hands of
the state and symbolic memory in the hands of society. Rather, in all the arenas
where settling accounts with the past is at issue, both state actors and societal
forces come into play.1
In fact, processes of democratization after periods of political violence and mili-
tary dictatorships are never easy or smooth. In South America, once formal demo-
cratic mechanisms are in place, the main challenge becomes how to develop deep
modes of democracy. In the long and protracted transitional periods after dicta-
torship, confrontations arise as to the content of democracy itself, in a context that
usually involves persistent social and economic inequalities, continuing instances
of police brutality, weak judicial institutions and attempts to twist and bend the
interpretation of constitutional principles to suit the economic and political inter-
ests of the powerful.
Despite the relevance and centrality of these confrontations on the content of
democracy itself, the dictatorial past of the 1970s and the 1980s is still very much
part of current debates. Many of the victims and their advocates demand a com-
plete account of the abuses that took place under dictatorships, as well as full
punishment for the perpetrators. This demand is evoked by the phrase nunca más
(never again), which has become a symbol of the struggle against impunity in
South America. Others, claiming that they are concerned above all with the func-
tioning of democratic institutions, emphasize the need to focus on the future
rather than the past. They are less inclined to revisit the painful experiences of the
authoritarian repression, and may seek to implement policies of oblivion, usually
through a discourse of reconciliation. Still others look at the past in order to glo-
rify the ‘order and progress’ that dictatorships presumably secured.
Thus, there are competing and conflicting understandings and memories of the
past in societies that are emerging from periods of political violence and state
repression. This dialectic process fosters intense social, cultural, and political
1 The arguments presented here, and the processes referred to, have been the focus of a large interna-
tional comparative research and training program on ‘Collective Memories of Repression:
Comparative Perspectives on Democratization Processes in Latin America’s Southern Cone,’ spon-
sored by the Social Science Research Council, New York. The program, developed since 1998,
involved the training of close to 60 young researchers in six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay). The results of the program have been published in the series
‘Memorias de la Repression.’ The conceptual framework for the whole program is presented in
Elizabeth Jelin, Los Trabajos de la Memoria (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España
Editores/Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2002), translated into English as Elizabeth Jelin, State
Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). In this
paper, I rely extensively on the conceptual framework developed in that book, and on first-hand
research carried out by myself and by the fellows of the program, to whom I extend my sincere
thanks. Specific sources are referred to in footnotes.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

140 Elizabeth Jelin
struggles about the place of these understandings and memories in the democra-
tization process. In all cases, as time passes and it becomes possible to establish or
conceive a temporal distance between past and present, alternative and even rival
interpretations of the recent past and its memories take the center stage of cultur-
al and political debate. They become an unavoidable public issue.
The existence of different interpretations of the past implies that at any time and
place, it is unthinkable to find one memory, a single vision and interpretation of
the past shared by a whole society (whatever its scope and size). There may be his-
torical times when agreement is higher, when a single script of the past is more
pervasive or dominant. That script will usually be the story of the winners in his-
torical conflicts and battles. But there will always be other stories, other interpre-
tations, and other memories. After periods of high political conflict and repres-
sion or state terrorism, there is an active political struggle around meaning; the
meaning of what went on and the meaning of memory itself. In this arena, the
struggle is not one of memory against oblivion or silence, but rather between
opposing memories, each of them with its own silences and voids.
These struggles unfold on various institutional, symbolic and subjective levels.
Societal memories and oblivion, remembering and the diverse kinds of social amne-
sia (or its institutionalized manifestation such as amnesty), are an integral part of
the process of building and recognizing collective identities (national and other).2
They are also an integral part of democratic institution building, insofar as respect
for human rights defines the ethical grounds of the institutional setup being built.
In this way, the demands – voiced usually by human rights movements – regarding
truth and justice are, from the very beginning, also demands for memory.3
More than two decades after the transition to democracy in the Southern Cone
of South America, many issues regarding the recent past are still pending. There
are still efforts to clarify human rights violations and bring perpetrators to trial;
there is contestation regarding amnesty laws granting impunity to members of the
military; there is discussion about reparations policies; new investigative commis-
sions are being set up; kidnapped children are recovering their identities; the
search for clandestine graves and the identification of bodies continues; and offi-
cial commemorations, memorials and museums are being discussed and con-
structed. These initiatives are carried out with debate and controversy in a sce-
nario where both state and societal actors participate.4
A caveat has to be inserted here: in the analysis that follows, center stage is occu-
pied by the dynamics of actors and processes at the national level, mainly state
2 ‘The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and
space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.’
John R. Gillis, ‘Memory and identity. The history of a relationship,’ in Commemorations: the Politics
of National Identity, John R. Gillis, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.
3 For Argentina, see Elizabeth Jelin, ‘La Política de la Memoria: el Movimiento de Derechos Humanos
y la Construcción Democrática en la Argentina,’ in Juicio, Castigos y Memoria: Derechos Humanos y
Justiica en la Política Argentina, Carlos Acuña et al. (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995).
4 Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Memories of State Violence: the Past in the Present’ (Marsha Lilien Gladstein
Lecture, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, 2006).

agencies and societal movements and actors. Processes at the local level, as well as
the international and transnational levels, including international agencies and
NGOs and foreign states, are not incorporated fully in the analysis. One could
show that their role in the struggles for settling accounts with the past in the coun-
tries analyzed is not as significant as in other cases, such as Guatemala, El Salvador,
Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Balkans. What was highly rele-
vant in the region are the intraregional links, as evidenced by Plan Cóndor5 and in
the regional dimension of its human rights movements.
What Memories?
We start with a concept of memory that refers to the ways in which people con-
struct sense or meaning of the past, and how they relate that past to their present in
the act of remembering. This asking about the past is a process that involves sub-
jectivities; it is always active and socially constructed in interaction and dialogue.
The people may have lived personally through a given event or period, or they may
be part of a collective body sharing a cultural knowledge base through transmis-
sion by others. In both cases, the sharing of an experience involves the existence and
putting in motion of a cultural interpretive framework and a meaningful language
that enables us to conceptualize, think and express such experience.6
This perspective involves understanding memories as subjective processes
anchored in experiences and in material and symbolic markers. There is a dyna-
mic link between individual subjectivities, societal or collective belonging, and the
embodiment of the past and its meanings in a variety of cultural products which
can be conceived as vehicles of memory, such as books, museums, films, rituals of
commemoration and photographs. Furthermore, the emphasis on struggles and
conflicts around memories refers to the active role of the participants in those
struggles to make historical meaning. Power relations and the claim of hegemony
are always present. It is a struggle for ‘my truth,’ with advocates, memory entre-
preneurs and attempts to appropriate (and at times monopolize) meanings and
interpretations. Struggles around legitimacy of voice and truth are involved. The
role of the state is highly significant, insofar as the formal legitimate authority of
5 Plan Cóndor or Operation Condor was a coordinated transnational terrorist operation established
by the dictatorial regimes of the region. It was aimed at wiping out opposition to their repressive
regimes through coordinated intelligence activities and the use of death squads who engaged in
forced disappearances, torture and assassinations.
6 I follow here Joan W. Scott’s notion of experience: not a linear, direct, immediate lived event, but one
that is mediated by language and culture and is narrated, told and listened to. Joan W. Scott,
‘Experience,’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York:
Routledge, 1992). Narrative memory is contrasted to habitual memory and to events in trauma,
voids, holes and silences. One of the features of traumatic circumstances (in contrast with memo-
ries or experiences) is their massive impact that creates a void in the possibility of fully interpreting
or narrating. Ernst van Alphen, ‘Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma,’ in
Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer
(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing
Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Mieke Bal, ‘Introduction’ in Acts of
Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1999).

142 Elizabeth Jelin
the postdictatorial state is capable of endorsing and institutionalizing mecha-
nisms to deal with societal demands regarding the dictatorial past (through com-
missions, trials, reparations and the like). There are diverse and shifting meanings
of the past and in the role of memory in different societies, ideologies, cultural
climates and political struggles. Thus, we need to look at the history of memory.
Each new development or adoption of a certain measure to deal with the past
opens up new opportunities and possibilities for further measures, which are
always path dependent, as Olick shows in the case of Germany.7 More broadly,
even when decisions regarding the adoption of mechanisms to deal with the past
are seen as political choices among alternatives in an either-or pattern, historical
reality shows trajectories and paths that involve interaction and succession rather
than mutually exclusive alternatives.
The task of analyzing memory involves scrutinizing the process of societal
remembering (and forgetting) and looking at the various levels and layers in
which this takes place. The focus is, in this case, on the relationship between some
extremely painful acts for which the state was responsible – including physical
violence, disappearances – and the current and ongoing processes of searching for
a meaning. The constructions of meanings and understandings are cultural
processes that occur at the institutional, the symbolic and the subjective levels. Yet,
they do not take place in a vacuum; they are rooted in the hard facts of the recent
past.
On Dates and Commemorations

The official calendar of a country is an arena where the collective past is brought to
the present. It is part of the construction of the symbols of the community and the
nation. Participating in public rituals of remembrance involves a performance of
the feelings of belonging to the community and the reaffirmation of a collective
identity. It is seldom the subject of critical reflection. Some dates have very broad
significance, such as 11 September in Chile (the date of the military coup in 1973)
or 24 March in Argentina (the date of the military coup in 1976). Others are sig-
nificant at a regional or local level, e.g., the yearly call for a rally, the Jornada de dere-
chos humanos y cultura, in a town in the province of Jujuy, Argentina, to comme-
morate the repression that took place in July 1976 (El apagón del terror in Ledesma,
Jujuy).8 Others have more personal or private significance, such as the anniversary
of an abduction or a birthday of someone who is not around any more.
7 Jeffrey Olick, ‘What Does it Mean to Normalize the Past? Official Memory in German Politics Since
1989,’ in States of Memory. Continuities, Conflicts and Transformations in National Retrospection, ed.
Jeffrey Olick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
8 This commemoration, and the gap between the meaning developed at the national level (through
the rendering of the story of Ledesma in the report of the National Commission on the
Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP)) and local interpretations and meanings, are analyzed in
depth in Ludmila da Silva Catela, ‘Escrache en el Museo, Apagón en el Ingenio. Tensiones y Dilemas
Entre las Memorias Locales y las Memorias Nacionales,’ in Luchas Locales, Comunidades e
Identidades, ed. Ponciano del Pino and Elizabeth Jelin (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de
España Editores and Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2003).

Social memories become established through practices and markers. These are
public performances and social practices that gradually become rituals, marked by
symbolic inscriptions such as calendars. The yearly rhythm – repetitive yet with
shifts from one year to the next – provides the occasions, dates and anniversaries
for remembrance and commemorative events. Yet markers are not automatically
crystallized once installed. Different social actors will appropriate for themselves
specific meanings of these markers, depending on the circumstances and the
political scenarios in which their strategies and projects unfold over time.
In turn, the process of establishing official dates and commemorations is seldom
smooth and consensual. Insofar as there are different societal interpretations of the
past, public dates themselves may be the object of dispute or conflict. Which dates
are to be commemorated? Or, in other words, who wants to commemorate what?
Furthermore, the same date may have different meanings for the social actors in
terms of the forces that frame their current struggles in relation to these dates.
In the Southern Cone the military, when taking power in the 1970s, emphasized
their salvationist role as bastions defending the nation in continuity with the
founding heroes of the early 19th century.9 The threat was always perceived as
external – international subversion or communist infiltration. In fact, the event
itself – the military coup – installed its own determination to be commemorated.
The military projected themselves toward the future, trying to determine and fix
the meaning of what should be remembered. In Chile, this led immediately after
the coup to officially sponsored public festivities on 11 September and to the incor-
poration of the date in the official calendar as a holiday.10 In Argentina during dic-
tatorship, the public scene of commemoration was occupied totally by the military
in power. On 24 March, they organized a closed commemoration inside their bar-
racks, with no civilian participation. The only point of contact of the military with
civil society was a message to the Argentinean people, self-praising their service to
the country, explaining that they were forced to occupy the state to save the nation
from chaos, lack of governance and the terrorist threat.11
At the very moment that the winners were attempting to install their narrative,
controversy about the event began. The alternative views and explanations might
have been censored, forbidden, repressed, kept in private and family circles,
silenced and hidden. Yet, gradually, various channels of expression started to
open. Performative acts were crucial in this dictatorial period, as signals and hints
9 The histories of commemorative dates related to the recent past in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile,
Paraguay and Brazil are analyzed in the country chapters included in Las Conmemoraciones: Las
Disputas en Las Fechas ‘in-felices’, ed. Elizabeth Jelin (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España
Editores and Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2002). A summary and initial comparative analysis is
found in Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Contested Memories of Repression in the Southern Cone:
Commemorations in a Comparative Perspective,’ in Political Transition: Politics and Cultures, ed.
Paul Gready (London: Pluto Press, 2003).
10 Azun Candina Palomer,‘El Día Interminable. Memoria e Instalación del 11 de Septiembre de 1973 en
Chile (1974–1999),’ in Las conmemoraciones: Las disputas en las fechas ‘in-felices,’ ed. Elizabeth Jelin
(Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España Editores/Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2003).
11 Federico Lorenz. ‘De Quién es el 24 de Marzo? Las Luchas Por la Memoria del Golpe de 1976,’ ibid.

144 Elizabeth Jelin
helping to initiate the process of reconstruction of destroyed and threatened com-
munities of belonging: wearing black clothes, silenced trajectories in city streets
and visits to cemeteries could not easily be the target of repression. The protago-
nists were societal actors, organized in the human rights movement or dispersed
in popular expressions of protest, heterogeneous and diverse. They were attempt-
ing to produce alternative memories to the military narrative, claiming an inter-
pretation of the past that emphasized repression and suffering. They were also the
actors who were denouncing impunity and demanding justice, primarily in the
international arena.
In the case of Chile, this double meaning and embodiment of the date of the
coup involved open and bloody confrontations every 11 September between sup-
porters of Pinochet and antidictatorial social forces in the streets of Santiago. This
pattern of confrontation persisted after transition (1990). Police repression has
been and is a rule on that date. Only about 15 years after transition was the date
removed from the official calendar of national holidays and, in 2006, a new com-
memorative date – the day of the ‘detained-disappeared,’ to be commemorated on
30 August – was introduced in the official calendar.
In Argentina, since 1976 the 24th has been an important date, one that evokes
different meanings for various actors. It has never ceased to be commemorated,
although with antagonistic discourses. During the 30 years since the military
coup, the human rights organizations have presented the main antagonistic inter-
pretation to the military understanding of the events of the 24th. If, during the
military regime, the only voice to be heard in the public sphere was the military
one, since transition (1984), the human rights organizations have occupied the
public space of commemoration. Commemorations included a wide variety of
aesthetic expressions related to images of dictatorship and its consequences: there
were silhouettes, murals and theater performances accompanying the massive
marches and the white scarves of the Madres.12 Books, documentary films, special
TV programs, and a variety of exhibits presented and re-presented the voices of
the violence and the suffering of victims and their relatives. The state was formally
absent from these commemorations, except for an occasional message in the news
media.
This pattern changed many years later. The day 24 March 2004 was to be a very
special commemoration. The new president, Néstor Kirchner, and the mayor of
the city of Buenos Aires, Anibal Ibarra, were to sign a document regarding the
Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) by which this ominous site,
located in a fashionable neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires, was going to be
converted into an official site of memory. This was the place where up to 5,000
12 The Madres de Plaza de Mayo is one of the best known organized groups of relatives of disappeared
people. It is formed by mothers of the disappeared, and it has had (and still has) a highly visible role
in the demands for justice and redress. As a symbol and marker of their identity, they wear white
scarves: diapers with embroidered inscriptions. The organization split into two groups – Asociación
Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Línea Fundadora – in 1986 around strate-
gy and leadership issues.

people were clandestinely detained and then disappeared (there are approximately
200 survivors). At that time, the government decisively entered the scene as a key
protagonist and organizer of the main commemorative event. Two years later, on
the 30th anniversary of the coup, the date was incorporated in the official calen-
dar as a national holiday.
The parallel stories of Chile and Argentina show the unfolding of paradoxes of
meaning. In the hands of two governments – the Argentine and the Chilean – that
have similar interpretations of the past in terms of state terrorism and repression,
the date of the military coup is to be erased from the calendar on one side of the
Andes and incorporated as a national holiday on the other. Undoubtedly, the
meanings of the decisions have to be interpreted in terms of their location on a
historical path and in reaction to preceding developments. In the case of Chile,
during and after the Pinochet regime, 11 September was a date of official celebra-
tion. Thus, the signal of a break with the past is the elimination of the date from
the official calendar. In Argentina, during the military regime, the date was cov-
ered by silence. Afterwards, the first transition governments did not pay attention
to the date, leaving all commemorations in the hands of the human rights move-
ment. Years later, therefore, the break with the past would imply incorporating the
date into the official national calendar.13
For many sectors of society, commemorative dates have a special significance,
and the public nature of the rituals is a vehicle for conveying that significance to
others. When commemoration is centered on painful past events, the public
sphere offers room for the emotional impact of the testimonies and personalized
narratives; it offers the opportunity for telling what had been silenced or forgot-
ten, for previously unknown stories to be heard and for the acknowledgement of
stories that had been partially or totally negated or sidelined in consciousness.
People are faced with the reality of re-enacting fears and disturbing feelings,
including asking themselves how deadly repression could have coexisted with nor-
mal and seemingly undisturbed everyday life. In such moments, the labors of
memory become more inclusive and shared, invading everyday life. It is hard work
for all people of different ages and experiences, on all sides of the controversies.
Facts are reorganized, existing perspectives and schemes of interpretation are
shaken, voices of new and old generations ask questions, tell stories, create spaces
for interaction and share clues to what they experienced, heard and silenced
before.
Such moments are markers, occasions where the clues to what is going on at the
subjective and the symbolic levels are more visible, where the memories of differ-
ent social actors are enacted and become the present, bringing out and expressing
the stories and the traces of the past that partake in the development of shared
social and public, even officially sanctioned, memories.
13 In Brazil, the official date of the military coup of 1964, 31 March, was an official date of commem-
oration (though not a national holiday) for more than 30 years. The date was abolished from the
calendar in 1998. Alessandra Carvalho and Ludmila da Silva Catela, ‘31 de Marzo de 1964 en Brasil:
Memorias Deshilachadas,’ in del Pino and Jelin, supra n 10 at 8.

146 Elizabeth Jelin
Two issues should be raised at this point. First, dates of commemoration, as part
of memory itself, suffer transformations along time, visible especially in the
public manifestations around the relevant dates, in the protagonists and in the
discourses that arise. On such occasions, can past and present be separated? Could
it be possible to face such profound shifts in the meaning of a date that the origi-
nal reason becomes only a pretext for political and social struggles related to the
present? Are the events and activities that are carried out really commemorations
of past events? Or are they vehicles of a current political struggle?
Second, even in such significant public moments, not everybody shares the
same memories. Memory refers to the ways in which people construct sense or
meaning of the past, and how they relate that past to their present in the act of
remembering. On the one hand, as mentioned above, there are different and even
contradictory interpretations of the same past events, not only among winners
and losers in the conflicts, or victims and perpetrators, but also among each of the
sides of the conflict. Furthermore, there are those who have lived personally
through a given event or period, and those who are part of a collective body shar-
ing a cultural knowledge base through transmission by others. Since Maurice
Halbwachs’ pioneering work on the subject, it is known that there are special insti-
tutions that provide the initial frames for societal memories. How do these insti-
tutions (family, school, church and others), social products (artistic and others)
and practices (such as public commemorations) operate in the process of convey-
ing meanings of the past? How do the younger generations, who did not live
through the events being commemorated, incorporate or transform their signifi-
cance? There are times when the young show a complete lack of interest regarding
what went on. At other times, some young people may become highly involved
and express militant positions regarding those events. Intercohort differences
among those who lived through repression at different times in their personal
lives, between these groups and the very young who do not have personal memo-
ries of repression, and the relationships that are established between generations
produce a distinct societal dynamic vis-à-vis the memory issue.14
Territorial Markers
Just as there are significant dates, there are also significant sites and attempts to
establish physical markers of the past. What are the material objects or sites
connected with past events that are chosen by different actors to territorially
inscribe memories? Memorializing the actual sites of horror and repression,
monuments and memorials, museums, plaques and commemorative inscriptions
in institutions, are the ways in which official and nonofficial actors try to convey
14 Issues related to intergenerational transmission and youth movements are analyzed in the various
papers included in Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G Kaufman, ed., Subjetividad y Figures de la Memoria
(Buenos Aires and Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editora Iberoamericana / Siglo Veintiuno de España
Editores, 2006); and in Elizabeth Jelin and Diego Sempol, ed., El Pasado en el Futuro: Los
Movimientos Juveniles (Buenos Aires and Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editora Iberoamericana / Siglo
Veintiuno de España Editores, 2006).

and materialize their memories. Initiatives of this sort are at times opposed by
contesting actors’ attempts to erase the remnants of the past, as if by changing the
form and function of a place, the memory of what took place there will also be
erased.
Struggles over monuments, museums and memorials are plentiful all over the
world. They are attempts to make statements and affirmations; they are facts and
gestures, a materiality with a political, collective, public meaning. In that way,
although not always explicitly, they are also attempts to reaffirm a feeling of col-
lective belonging and an identity rooted in a tragic and traumatic history. They are
political in at least two senses: their installation is always the result of political
struggles and conflicts, and their existence is a physical reminder of a conflictive
political past, which may spark new rounds of conflict over meaning in each new
historical period or generation. To prosper and come to fruition, the initiatives,
kindled by individual and group activities, have to become public and collective
and have to involve governmental decisions and resources. Once in place, they
may function as a means to the intergenerational transmission of historical conti-
nuities and discontinuities, although that transmission and its meaning cannot be
guaranteed.
The creation of public markers of the past, such as sites, museums or memori-
als, is usually the result of struggles and confrontations. The confrontation is
between the voices of those who call for commemoration, for remembrance of
repression, disappearances and torment, for denunciation of the repressors, and
those who make it their business to act as if nothing has happened or even to claim
the recognition of the heroism and patriotism displayed in repression and state
terrorism. There are also those who ‘did not know,’ who did not see; the bystanders
of horror.
Territorial markers are the product of human will and human agency, resulting
from the initiative and the commitment of social groups acting as memory entre-
preneurs.15 At any given historical moment, their action involves an attempt to
link their interpretations of the past to their views about the future, through their
double will to pay homage to victims and to convey a message to the new genera-
tions. The physical site, the material object, matters insofar as it represents an
embodiment of a given meaning and a certain historical message. Yet what mat-
ters about such places goes beyond the physical location – it is the symbolic and
subjective location of those who charge it with their own memory and their own
meaning.
Introducing a consideration of human agency and will, both at the time of the
determination to install the marker and inscribe its message and later on, when
the site is visited, used and taken up by others, implies that even when memory
entrepreneurs attempt to fix a certain message, meaning is never crystallized,
carved out or inscribed in the stone of a monument or in the engraving of a
plaque. The markers are not memory itself, but vehicles and material supports for
15 Jelin, supra n 1 at 2.

148 Elizabeth Jelin
the subjective labors of memory, for collective action and for reaffirmation of col-
lective identities.
The struggle for monuments and physical reminders of repression has been
unfolding in South America since the moment of political transition. Initiatives
are spearheaded by human rights organizations, often with the support of a wide
array of groups and organizations (labor unions, professional organizations, stu-
dent and parent school organizations, some churches, political party groups, and
governmental agencies). Although those who propose the marker may have a clear
and unique message to convey, there are usually multiple voices, areas of contesta-
tion and of ambiguities: survivors and protagonists of past conflicts, victims of
repression, human rights organizations, new generations probing into the past to
find continuities for their current action and political and social actors who
attempt to use the past as part of their future plans, desires and utopias.16
Initiatives are not always immediately successful. For example, societal efforts to
transform the detention center known as El Atlético in downtown Buenos Aires
into a site of memory through the installation of commemorative plaques and
structures encountered opposition and destruction: several times, markers
installed by societal actors were vandalized. Destruction would not deter those
who pushed for the territorial marker, as commemorative acts took place repeat-
edly, and vandalization followed. In fact, only about 15 years after transition did
the government of the City of Buenos Aires take upon itself the preservation of the
site, starting archeological excavations to unearth the remains of the buildings
that were covered by the construction of a modern city highway and planning for
an official display of the ruins and the objects found there.
Cases such as this pose a disturbing question: what happens when the proposal
to physically locate the act of remembering in a memorial or a monument fails?
When memory cannot be materialized in a specific site? Force or administrative
measures cannot erase personalized memories or public projects of active memo-
ry entrepreneurs. When blocked by contesting social or governmental forces, the
subjectivity, the desire and the will of the women and men who are struggling to
materialize memory look for alternative channels of expression, renewing their
strength. There is no pause, no rest, because memory has not been deposited any-
where; it has to remain in the minds and hearts of the people. The issue of trans-
forming personal feelings, which are unique and cannot be transferred easily to
others, into public and collective meanings, is then left open and active. Is it pos-
sible to destroy what people intend to remember or perpetuate? Indeed, could it
16 Langland has analyzed the way in which the student movement in Brazil reestablished its symbolic
and material claim of the site where the students’ organization used to have its headquarters; a
building that was burnt on the day of the military coup of 1964. For the students who mobilized in
the 1980s and even in the 1990s (more than 30 years after the burning) the demand for recuperat-
ing the site represented the symbolic historical continuity between the repressed student movement
of the past and their current projects for the future. Victoria Langland, ‘La Casa de la Memoria en
Praia de Flamengo 132: Memoria estudiantil y nacional en Brasil, 1964–1980,’ in Monumentos,
memoriales y marcas territoriales, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland (Madrid and Buenos
Aires: Siglo XXI de España Editores/Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2003).

be that the silence and oblivion that are sought by repressing commemorations
have the paradoxical effect of multiplying memories and keeping alive the ques-
tions and the public debate around the recent past?
Controversies do not automatically calm down once the memorial, museum, or
monument is constructed. The initial or official understanding of the past to be
conveyed by a given site may be the one presented by the group that promoted it,
or it may be a negotiated script. With time, there will be new processes of giving
meaning to the past, with new interpretations. Thus, revisions, changes in narra-
tives and new conflicts over interpretation will have to arise.17
Memorialization initiatives can take different forms. In the first place, there are
memory initiatives related to detention camps and jails of dictatorship; sites
where actual repression took place. Often, the military tries to destroy or erase the
traces of repressive activities before leaving power (as in the case of El Atlético in
Buenos Aires mentioned above). After transition, some of these sites become are-
nas of struggle among those who attempt to transform the use of these spaces, and
by this means erase the past, and those who promote initiatives to establish
inscriptions, markers, memorials and museums in such places. In some cases, the
physical space has been recovered for memory, like the Parque de la Paz in
Santiago, Chile, which was built on the premises of what was the detention camp
of Villa Grimaldi,18 after the Chilean army decided to sell the place for private con-
struction. The recovery of the site involved the creation of a park, the preservation
of ruins and remnants with reminders of what had happened there. The opposite
may happen as well, projects can erase signs and destroy buildings, obliterating the
materialization of the remembrances in physical markers. Such was the case with
the Punta Carretas jail in Montevideo, Uruguay that was turned into a modern
shopping mall and five-star hotel.
In Argentina, the recuperation of actual sites of repression has been a long and
tortuous process. There have been countless societal initiatives in different parts of
the country (given the existence of more than three hundred clandestine deten-
tion centers). In most cases, it takes years of struggle and demands on govern-
ments to attain some positive response to the initiative of recovering the site for
memory.19 Then begins the long process of discussing what should be done with
and in the site itself.
17 Koonz discusses the ongoing debate about memorials in concentration camps in Germany and east-
ern Europe, showing that the struggle is intensified, rather than diminished, as time passes and
political change takes place in the region. Claudia Koonz, ‘Between Memory and Oblivion:
Concentration Camps in German Memory,’ in Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity,
ed. John Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
18 Michael J. Lazzara, ‘Tres Recorridos de Villa Grimaldi’ in Monumentos, Memoriales y Marcas
Territoriales, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de
España Editores/Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2003).
19 To give an example, in the northern province of Jujuy, Argentina, the clandestine detention center of
Guerrero operated in what is now a trade-union picnic ground. Only in 2006 could the annual com-
memorative march, which used to stop at the gates, enter the grounds and build a commemorative
plaque.

150 Elizabeth Jelin
The unfolding of the story of the above-mentioned buildings of the ESMA in
Buenos Aires is a good example of the processes involved. Being a navy academy,
the buildings in a fashionable neighborhood of the city continued being used after
transition by the navy. Demands from human rights organizations went unheard
or unheeded. In the late 1990s, President Menem proposed the clearing of part of
the 17-hectare site to construct a monument symbolizing ‘The Reconciliation of
Argentina.’ Opposition was vociferous, and the presidential initiative was soon
aborted. Interpreted as an act of provocation, the human rights movement inten-
sified its public voice and its demands to oust the navy and to transform the place
into a site of memory and a museum. In 2004, the government formally endorsed
the initiative, opening up a new Pandora’s box: what should be memorialized? In
what way can the ESMA be considered an emblem of repression for the whole
country? Should a literal rendering of what took place there be the main script of
the site? Should it rather be an open pluralistic space for debate, expression and
discussion?
There are also the attempts to commemorate events and honor victims through
monuments, through naming streets and parks, through building memorials and
museums, not necessarily on the physical sites where events took place, although
usually some real or symbolic link is established between the past event and its
present memorial location. In such cases, conflicts over interpretations include the
selection of the site and the definition of its appropriate aesthetical form. For
instance, in the case of the statue of Salvador Allende – the President of Chile who
was ousted in 1973 and committed suicide in the Presidential Palace – controver-
sies about the location of his statue in the main square facing the palace (where
other Chilean presidents’ statues are located) and about the appropriate rendering
of his image in bronze unfolded in the Chilean Parliament and were the object of
political negotiation among contesting parties.20
Finally, at times what is attempted to mark may not be a new place, but rather to
add a layer of meaning to a place that is already charged with historical signifi-
cance. The Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires has been the site of public
expression of political demands since the very birth of the nation. The
Argentinean military dictatorship (1976–1983) added to it a new layer of mean-
ing: the struggle of the human rights movement, symbolized in the never-ending
rounds (each Thursday afternoon) of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.21 The site
becomes meaningful, in this case, in a performative and active way. Although there
are markers on the pavement of the plaza (painted designs of the white scarves of
the Madres), the meaning of the place is reenacted each week, each anniversary,
each 10 December commemoration (International Human Rights Day) by the
20 Katherine Hite, ‘El Monumento a Salvador Allende en el Debate Político Chileno,’ in Jelin and
Langland, supra n 16 at 17. The state-society negotiations regarding the Parque de la Memoria in
Buenos Aires are presented by Patricia Tappatá de Valdez, ‘El Parque de la Memoria en Buenos Aires,’
included in the same volume.
21 Silvia Sigal, La Plaza de Mayo. Una Crónica (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2006).

people who participate in the rallies, who through their bodily movement
remember the absent bodies of the disappeared.
Once a site becomes significant, the interplay of different layers of memories
becomes crucial. The Plaza de Mayo becomes the emblem of resistance to dicta-
torship that took place all over the country, yet at the same time it conveys the
memories of the plaza itself, of the violence that took place there, of the succession
of protests and rallies in which the people who converge there have participated,
and of the memories that the old participants convey to the new ones. In that
complex process, a sense of community is recreated.
A further matter is involved in this issue. Violence, horror and repression
involve symbolic voids, absences, the ghostly specter of the disappeared. How can
this emptiness be represented? What kinds of materializations and physical
objects can take the place of absence? Discussions about the limits of representa-
tion and about the esthetic dilemmas involved in monuments and markers are
unending. Is there a proper esthetic standard? Who can decide on such standards?
How does one incorporate expectations of active societal participation in the pub-
lic display of territorial markers?
The esthetic debate is always present in projects of monuments and memorials.
Although the realist monumentalism of 19th century nation building22 has given
way to more pluralism in the forms of representation, it is still around in the
debates about proper forms among the memory entrepreneurs (usually survivors,
their relatives and more broadly the human rights movement), the experts (cura-
tors, artists, museologists and the like) and government agencies. Albeit realistic
renderings attempt to fix and crystallize in stone the meanings that their promot-
ers want to convey, it is clear that this is no more than an illusion: those who
encounter the stones and inscriptions will give their own subjective meanings,
which may include indifference and ignorance.
One of the issues currently at stake around the world is whether the construc-
tion of traditional monuments and memory sites in fact discourages engage-
ment.23 This involves the search for ways in which to incorporate in the design of
territorial markers a level of ambiguity that invites active engagement of the pub-
lic, offering an opportunity for expression of a variety of sensibilities and for an
active labor of memory, with the transformation of meaning entailed.
The Archives of State Repression

A third arena of struggle in the process of settling accounts with the past refers to
archives and the preservation of documentation. Documents referring to repres-
sive activities of the regime are highly significant, insofar as they are taken as
unquestioned evidence in state-sponsored institutional practices such as trials and
22 Gillis, supra note 2.

23 James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge. After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).

152 Elizabeth Jelin
reparations policies. Yet, the significance of archives goes beyond the instrumental
use of documents.
The notion of the archive is linked to the idea of protecting and preserving the
traces of the past. The passage from current official and private papers and docu-
ments to historical archives is marked by the intervention of those who have the
power to decide what should be kept and what should be destroyed, usually based
on considerations of what is important or valuable vis-à-vis what is defined as
trivial. In the western tradition, the symbolic and political importance of the
national archive has grown throughout the last two centuries, turning this into a
place of affirmation of the nation-state, a place that defines national identity and
heritage.24 Once archives are established, however, controversies arise as to the cri-
teria for inclusion and exclusion: should a set of documents be kept in a national
archive or in provincial ones? Which papers are official and which are personal
when a high authority leaves office?
Criteria for inclusion, for ownership of a collection and norms regarding access
and use are recurrent themes of controversy in political debates about govern-
ment archives. Conflicts about personal interests of various sorts (be it the pro-
tection of honor, respect for privacy or potential intellectual property rights of a
future book of memoirs or testimony), about group or corporatist interests (such
as interests to destroy documents based on considerations about their potential
danger as proof of wrongdoings) and about public concerns (often justified in
terms of national security) make it clear that archives are not the depository of
dead papers and traces of the past, but rather the lively arena of social and politi-
cal dispute.
When documents refer to traces of dictatorial and totalitarian political regimes,
in which the norm was to act in clandestine and arbitrary ways, the protection of
these documents and traces has to be seen in a different light. Since the arbitrary
power of dictatorial regimes implies illegal and clandestine activities, not many
written or documented traces of their action are to be found at the time of transi-
tion. Yet these were regimes with a hierarchical organization, with chain com-
mands, with army, police and intelligence authority structures. And the usual
bureaucratic practices of these types of organizations imply keeping registers,
drafting reports and organizing personal files and records.25
There is enough evidence to support the idea that authoritarian political
regimes have kept and developed such registers. Intelligence reports, combined
with documents and personal papers impounded at the time of detention as well
as confessions of detainees – often obtained with the help of torture – comprise
24 Krzysztof Pomian, ‘Les archives. Du Trésor des Chartes au Caran,’ in Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. III,
ed. Nora Pierre (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
25 The significance and potential consequences of finding and opening up for consultation such
archives led to the establishment by UNESCO of a working group to draft ethical and practical
guidelines about the preservation of and access to such archives. For results of this working group,
see Quintanilla A. González, ‘Archives of the Security Services of Former Repressive Regimes,’ Janus
2(1998): 7-23.

the personal and group files referring to the population, organized by secret police
offices and the armed forces. Furthermore, dictatorial regimes and dictators often
strongly believe in the longevity and health of their regime, in the bureaucratic
legitimacy of their actions, and in their eternal immunity against potential
incrimination. If this is the case, there is no need to destroy documents, until the
time of collapse of the regime is in sight. It is at such final times that orders are
imparted to destroy documentation and erase the proof that could incriminate
them in the future.
Dictatorial regimes in the Southern Cone acted bureaucratically, following
chains of command and establishing areas of responsibility for each institution
(the police force, the navy, the army and the air force), while at the same time car-
rying out clandestine operations. The former falls into the bureaucratic culture of
following orders, as reflected in the statement Este es mi informe (this is my report)
reiterated by police officers before signing the papers, found innumerable times in
the documents recuperated in the Paraguayan Archivo del Terror.26 These are orga-
nized registers of the institutions in charge of repression during dictatorship. Up
to now, the archives of this type found in the countries of the Southern Cone are
primarily those of police and secret police agencies, rather than those of the armed
forces. The culture of intelligence or police reports and the practice of keeping
these in organized files seems to have been usual practice during dictatorship.
At the time of transition, large societal energies are spent in demanding the sys-
tematic search for military and police archives. Yet there is no clear pattern to
guide such searches; those recovered are often found hidden in rooms and boxes,
at times purely by chance.27 The next steps, involving criteria for preservation and
access, involve major political debates and decisions.28
During the period of postdictatorial transition, the new political regimes have
to respond to the societal demand for truth, i.e., knowing how repression func-
tioned and trying to establish the fate of each of its victims. Investigative commis-
sions of various sorts, by now well established under the generic name of truth
commissions, could not always count on the information provided by these
archives of repression, since they were not available. A different type of deposito-
ry of registers and files was then activated: the documentations that human rights
organizations had collected, primarily through the register of denunciations of
victims and their relatives. In the catacombs of the opposition to the dictatorial
26 Alfredo Boccia Paz et al., Es Mi Informe. Los Archivos Secretos de la Policía de Stroessner (Asunción:
Centro de Documentación y Estudios, 1992).
27 E.g., when preparing to move to another building, workers from a national bank in Buenos Aires
found some boxes in a cellar containing a large set of official documents. These documents record-
ed a systematic plan for cultural repression – including censorship, banning books and authors, and
the like. Hernán Invernizzi and Judith Gociol, Un Golpe a Los Libros. Represión a la Cultura Durante
la Ultima Dictadura military (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2002).
28 Ludmila da Silva Catela, ‘Territorios de Memoria Política. Los Archivos de la Represión en Brasil,’
and Myrian González, ‘Los Archivos Del Terror Del Paraguay. La Historia Oculta de la Represión,’ in
Los Archivos de la Represión: Documentos, Memoria y Verdad, ed. Ludmila da Silva Catela and
Elizabeth Jelin (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de España Editores/Siglo XXI de Argentina
Editores, 2003).

154 Elizabeth Jelin
regimes, alternative archives were developed and preserved. The records of
Clamor in Brazil,29 the Vicaría de la Solidaridad in Chile,30 the Asamblea
Permanente de Derechos Humanos and others in Argentina,31 as well as the records
that families and individuals kept,32 were crucial inputs into the labor of these
commissions and the trials that took place.
At the time of transition, the aim was to gather information for immediate use,
for knowing the truth of what happened and to use as proof in the search for jus-
tice. The concern was not to create an archive for future history. This memorialis-
tic concern would emerge and display itself years later. By then, when societal
attention turned to the preservation and organization of all archives and traces of
dictatorship and repression, initiatives evolved to combine documentary archives
with the development of testimonial and oral history archives.33
In sum, three types of archives evolved during dictatorship and transition: the
(rarely surviving) documents developed by the repressive institutions; the infor-
mation gathered by the human rights organizations and investigative commis-
sions; and other diverse bodies of documents and data about a variety of dimen-
sions of life under dictatorship, including the oral history and testimonial archives
that evolved years after the facts.
The construction of archives involves dilemmas and processes of decision mak-
ing. Which documents are to be saved? Who has the power to decide about this?
To whom do archives and documents belong? Who has the right to see those doc-
uments? What are the criteria for respect for intimacy and privacy? The content to
be archived, the rules related to property and the rules governing access are the
three basic issues around which social and political struggles emerge among dif-
ferent actors, with diverse interests and perspectives.34
Furthermore, the difference between political and administrative functions and
the role of the archive as a depository for future history is significant and full of
tensions. Perhaps the best example of this is the discovery, in 1991, of the Archivos
del Terror in Asunción, Paraguay.35 Once discovered, many victims and their rela-
tives attempted, with understandable urgency, to look for their own files so as to
recover objects and papers that were taken away at the time of detention as well as
29 Samarone Lima, ‘Clamor: la Colcha de Retazos de la Memoria,’ in Da Silva Catela and Jelin, ibid.
30 María A. Cruz, ‘Silencios y Poder: los Archivos de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad y la Iglesia Católica en
Chile,’ in Da Silva Catela and Jelin, ibid.
31 Emilio Crenzel, ‘Génesis, usos y resignificaciones del Nunca Más: La memoria de las desapariciones en
Argentina’ (Ph.D. Diss., Buenos Aires: Universidad of Buenos Aires, 2006).
32 Ludmila da Silva Catela, No Habrá Flores en la Tumba del Pasado. La Experiencia de Reconstrucción
del Mundo de los Familiares de Desaparecidos (La Plata: Ediciones Al Margen, 2001).
33 See www.memoriaabierta.org.ar
34 Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Gestión Política, Gestión Administrativa y Gestión Histórica: Ocultamientos y
Descubrimientos de los Archivos de la Represión,’ and Ludmila da Silva Catela, ‘El mundo de los
archivos,’ in Da Silva Catela and Jelin, supra n 28 at 23.
35 The importance of this archive goes well beyond Paraguay, since it comprises the official documen-
tation to prove the regional coordination of repression, known as Plan Cóndor. Its information was
used by the Spanish prosecution to indict Augusto Pinochet, the (in)famous Chilean dictator,
among others.

to recover and protect their violated privacy. The slow pace of juridical and
administrative management and the formal procedures involved did not coincide
with that urgency. Neither did it converge with the political connotations of the
discovery, so important for public figures who were struggling to limit and control
the political power of the followers of dictator Stroessner. In that scenario of
struggles, technical and professional criteria regarding the organization of the
archive and its rules of access were overpowered by the other considerations. Only
later could professional standards be recuperated, fostering some longer term per-
spective that would distance the archive from the immediacy of political and per-
sonal demands. Yet the public debate about privacy rules and ownership of objects
is not easy to settle in one or the other direction.36
These struggles unfold in parliaments, human rights circles, administrative state
offices and the press. Rather than a confrontation between state and society, there
is an ongoing debate among the diverse views and positions (for instance, around
issues related to open or restricted access) that cut across the state-society divide.
These debates have broader implications since they may lead to new legislative
proposals referring to the protection of privacy and intimacy (legislation that did
not exist before in most countries of the region).37
The Owners of Memory

In commemorations, in the establishment of memory sites and in the recovery of
archives, there is usually a political struggle between societal forces calling for
remembrance and those calling for oblivion and erasure of the traces of the past,
who try to render a narrative that minimizes or eliminates the meaning of what
others wish to remember. Tensions, conflicts and struggles also emerge within the
memory camp, having to do with the proper forms or means of remembering, as
well as over which actors have legitimacy, i.e., who have the symbolic power to
decide the contents of narrative to be conveyed. It is not usually a confrontation
between state actors and societal forces; rather, it cuts across both, with divergent
views within the state and among various societal actors.
At one level, there is a confrontation about the proper and improper forms of
expression. Are there standards for judging remembrances and memorials?
Further, and most importantly, who is the authority, that is going to decide what
the proper ways to remember are? Who embodies true memory? Is being a direct
36 As shown in González’ paper supra n 28; Da Sliva Catela, in her paper on Brazilian archives (supra
n 28) shows that the secret police archives in Brazil followed a different path. The rules of access
were discussed in each of the provincial parliaments and expert opinion was sought.
37 The complexities of the criteria for opening up archives emerge in most societies at the time of tran-
sition. Confessions obtained under torture and false records with names regarded as informers were
practices shared by many dictatorships, from South America through Eastern Europe to South
Africa. In South Africa, this was sometimes done deliberately and then leaked, so as to have libera-
tion force individuals killed by their own for being suspected informers. The implications of open-
ing the archives are self-evident. For an overview of the South African debate on this issue see
Graeme Simpson, ‘South Africa Cannot Afford a Culture of Secrecy,’ This Day, December 10, 2003,
http://www.csvr.org.za/articles/artsimp3.htm.

156 Elizabeth Jelin
victim of repression a necessary condition? Can those who have not themselves
lived through repression participate in the historical process of building social
memory? Is the state an autonomous actor? Are state officials to legitimize their
action in their own condition as victims? In fact, the very definition of what con-
stitutes personal experience or being a direct victim is also part of the historic
process of social construction of meaning.
It is clear that victims suffered and they, and society as a whole, have the right to
recover the truth of what took place under a repressive regime. Nor is there any
question of the protagonism that direct victims and their families took as the ini-
tial voices of resistance and denunciation of dictatorship. The issue at stake is a
different one, involving the mechanisms by which the community that remembers
remains within the relatively narrow range defined by personal experience or
becomes a wider citizenship issue. The role of the state is highly significant, inso-
far as it can offer the parameters for sociopolitical legitimation based on general
ethical criteria (the legitimacy of the rule of law). Furthermore, it has the possibi-
lity of transferring issues related to memory to the institutional judicial apparatus,
thus making memory and justice one and the same encompassing project.
Another layer of issues is at stake here. Are these practices and policies of
memorialization – commemorations, territorial markers, archives – independent
of each other? Are they alternatives to other state-sponsored policies such as trials,
commissions or reparations? Some concluding comments are in place here. First,
as shown in the discussion of memorialization practices, the arenas of struggle
and confrontation involve both state and societal actors. The social and political
dynamics of transition entails the interaction of different actors and forces, both
in the state and in society. This relates to a second issue, namely, the relationship
between the different mechanisms involved in settling accounts with the past.
Much of the literature on transitional justice sets apart institutional and symbolic
measures. This is a false distinction from the perspective of the main actors the
victims, as well as the national community more generally. Trials have symbolic
meanings; commemorations or archives involve institutional state-level actions.
Rather than seeing memory as a symbolic and subjective (perhaps secondary)
layer, it is an integral and central component of the practices and policies regard-
ing the past. Finally, although not specifically dealt with in this paper, I would
claim that in the historical dynamics of transitions, the either-or dilemma is a false
one. One type or set of policies cannot solve or close the accounts with the past.
Rather, the unfolding of one policy sets the stage for the others. There are no sim-
ple recipes and no unique path, nor can there be a final closure regarding the
painful past.

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The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol.

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

the postdictatorial state is capable of endorsing and institutionalizing mecha-

On Dates and Commemorations

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

helping to initiate the process of reconstruction of destroyed and threatened com-

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

The unfolding of the story of the above-mentioned buildings of the ESMA in

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

The Archives of State Repression

22 Gillis, supra note 2.

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

regimes, alternative archives were developed and preserved. The records of

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

The Owners of Memory

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 1, 2007, 138–156

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