Memories at work, or peaceful reconciliation?
Thirty years of activism in the Southern Cone

In Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina, during the nineteen sixties and seventies, periods of high political conflict came to a close with the military taking power and establishing harsh military dictatorships. Massive repression and violations of human rights ensued. Furthermore, the military dictatorships in the region coordinated their repressive actions (the “Operativo Cóndor”), engaging in collaborative actions beyond the borders of each state. At the same time, the human rights movement was growing in activity and in international solidarity. The context was at the same time one of regional coordinated repression and of regional solidarity.

At the time of the military coups, the armed forces emphasized their “salvational” role, defining themselves as the bastions defending the nation. In the context of the Cold War, the threat came to be defined as external –“subversion”, or “the communist infiltration”. The military, as is the case with most winners of political battles or wars, interpreted their deeds in terms of long term histories and “essential” identities – taking upon themselves the task of assuring the continuity of the nation. Thus, the military coups themselves installed their own determination to be commemorated: the present event was to project itself towards the future, conveying the meaning of what SHOULD be remembered.The past history, reenacted in the present, was to design the script for future memories.
Success, however, is not assured. The discourses, with their foundational and salvational narrative, were to be revised and challenged by other actors. In fact, the struggles for meaning and memory begin at the very moment of the traumatic event. Alternative views and explanations may be censored, forbidden, repressed, kept in private and family circles, silenced and hidden. Yet, channels of expression start to emerge. Performative acts are crucial in this dictatorial period, as signals and hints helping to reconstruct destroyed or threatened communities and collective identities: women dressed in black on the anniversary of the coup, visits to the cemetery, white scarves (or diapers) worn by the Mothers of the disappeared. The human rights movements1 were the protagonists, presenting an alternative interpretation of the recent past, one that emphasizes repression and suffering. They were also the actors that demanded justice and denounced impunity.

The nineteen eighties were times of political transition in the Southern Cone. Argentina in late 1983, Uruguay and Brazil in 1985, Paraguay and Chile in 1989 and 1990, experienced a change in their political regimes. At that time, political violence was at its peak in Peru, only to subside in the nineties. Elected constitutional governments took office, and a new “democratic” ethos became the mark of the times. A period of institution building was in the making, anchored in the specific political scenario of each country.
How to deal with past repression and human rights violations became a key feature of political transition, and each country implemented specific policies: trials, truth commissions, amnesty laws, denial, economic reparations, and so on. Furthermore, since transitions were mostly based on civil-military pacts, the expectation of the military and the civilian politicians was that the human rights violations and mass atrocities would be answered through impunity and not through trials or punishment. The human rights movements were powerful forces demanding from the newly elected governments clear policies regarding their dealing of the recent past. Countries varied in the range and type of policies that were implemented. In Argentina, there was an investigative commission (the CONADEP –Comisión Nacional de Desaparición de Personas – established in late 1983, receiving denunciations related to disappeared persons), and then trials of the military leaders of the country (with convictions, to be followed years later with presidential pardons). The elected government of Uruguay, on the other hand, never recognized that any violation had taken place. An amnesty law implemented by the civilian government was followed by a failed attempt to revert the law through a plebiscite. In Chile there was a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” and a gesture on the part of the president, asking for forgiveness from victims, with no prosecution of perpetrators. In Brazil, a 1979 amnesty law allowed the return of exiled members of the opposition, while at the same time it granted impunity to military violators of human rights. At the regional level, what was going on in one country was looked at and followed or contested in the other. In all cases, the recent dictatorial past was still very much part of the present.

In the early nineties, institutional arrangements seemed to have reached a kind of equilibrium, and the human rights communities were frustrated. Their demands seemed to have reached a limit, and the movement was dwindling. In Argentina, the trials and convictions of the members of the military Juntas were followed by legal moves to limit liabilities and with a presidential pardon in 1990 (Truth and Partial Justice, as the Human Rights Watch Report was called). In Uruguay, the amnesty law implemented by the civilian government (with the euphemistic name, “Ley de caducidad de la capacidad punitiva del estado”) was followed by an attempt to revert this law through a plebiscite, a move that was defeated by popular vote in 1987. In Chile, the installment of the constitutional government came hand in hand with a continuing strong position of the military and especially of the Commander in Chief, General Pinochet. Brazil was not looking back to its long and protracted military government. Its relatively smooth transition was taking place amidst such high levels of urban violence that the political violence of the past faded in the popular imagination, and the military could continue benefiting from economic gains. In Paraguay, by contrast, in spite of the continuities in real power and personalized politics, there were some trials and soon, the discovery of the Archivos del terror was going to open up the regional dimension of State terrorism.

“Realpolitik” seemed to have won the battle. Efforts to secure justice for violators of human rights had enjoyed little success. For many of the victims and their advocates, NUNCA MAS implied a complete accounting of what took place under dictatorship and the corresponding punishment for the perpetrators of abuses. And nothing in this direction had been attained, nor was it in the making. Other political and social actors of the process of democratization, concerned above all with the functioning of democratic institutions, were emphasizing the need to focus on the future rather than on the past, and were not inclined to revisit the painful experiences of the authoritarian repression. They were fostering policies of oblivion or of “reconciliation”. Still others were ready to look at the past to glorify the ‘order and progress’ that dictatorship secured.

Domestic impunity, amnesty laws and frustration in the local human rights movements were only one side of the coin. The international scenario was moving in the direction of an increasing body of international treaties (against torture, disappearances, and the like), and of the creation of United Nations sponsored ad-hoc international tribunals for the cases of the former Yugoslavia (in 1993) and Rwanda (in 1994). These developments had important consequences for the Southern Cone. Both, third country justice systems and the signing of international treaties would affect the issues of impunity in each of the countries.

If in the early nineties it seemed as if certain “solutions” had been reached and the recent past was, in fact, the “past”, the solutions were in fact not so final. Ten years later, the political scenario is completely changed, as if this part of the world is a Pandora’s box, full of surprises. The Pinochet case is the one that is better known internationally. But there are strong waves and even storms in the way past violations are being reopened in Argentina, in Uruguay and even in Brazil, in an international context that is increasingly accepting transnational prosecution of crimes against humanity.

The reopening of the past implies a continuous struggle for its meaning. The struggles for memory unfold in different scenarios: institutional justice, the search for truth, governmental acknowledgment and implementation of policies of economic reparation, symbolic politics on the part of governments and of societal actors. There are multiple initiatives dealing with commemorations, memorials, monuments, and artistic expression of all sorts.

Artists and other societal actors have the right, and often feel the urge, to express, perform, narrate and represent the past. Historians and social scientists also concentrate research efforts in the painful past, accompanying and at the same time distancing themselves from human rights organizations, victims and their relatives. The matter of past violence and state terrorism becomes a public and political issue when commemorations and memorials are to be established in the public realm, when actors want to establish them in public space, in the public agenda. And they become even more contested when the attempts are to incorporate them in the official or governmentally approved activities.

In all cases, there are struggles about what to remember or commemorate, and more so, with what meanings. These struggles take place in a variety of complementary scenarios: the judiciary, legal changes in Congress, school curricula, sites and dates of commemoration. All these are sites of struggles for memory rather than sites of “calm” memory. Memory is work, it is tension, it searches and questions, confronting other narratives of the past, other memories. It is never calm, be is mournful or celebratory.
I would like to draw some conclusions from this story. The first deals with the call for “memory” as against oblivion. What is to be remembered? For some, it is the military dictatorship and its violations and mass atrocities. For others, it is the political violence and armed guerrillas that led to “chaos”, requiring the call for the ‘glorious’ army to save the nation… The struggle, therefore, is always between memory and memory, between different interpretations and understandings of the past, each of them with their own silences and “forgotten” aspects.

We are faced with opposing forces and opposing meanings for different actors. Yet these contrasting memories cannot be seen as standing on the same and equal footing, equivalent to each other in the political scenario of the transition. Although they committed crimes against humanity, the military maintained their institutional power, while the victims and the human rights movement have to rely on their own and societal agency and resources. Under these circumstances, it is clear that calls for ‘consensus’ or ‘reconciliation’ are lopsided. Because there is still a deep inequality in the power of the perpetrators and the victims. Pardoning and reconciliation are acts of freedom and will, they have to be acts of choice and not of obedience. Thus, a basic question is the following: Has the person or group that is asked to pardon or reconcile the power to do otherwise? As Hannah Arendt stated, one cannot pardon that which one has no power to punish.

Therefore, it is the role of the State to act as the locus of authority and legitimate power, and to foster those memories and those narratives of the past that acknowledge violations and mass atrocities, legitimating the voice of victims, acting in the search of justice and against the impunity of the perpetrators. The democratic state cannot be neutral in this conflict.Yet in most cases, it follows policies of compromise and fosters institutional amnesia.

The relationship between societal processes and the state – or rather processes of legitimation and recognition of responsibilities – is also an open question. If the state was the main repressor, how can it be brought back to the public scenario? Under which circumstances will the transitional state assume responsibility for the past? Or will it distance itself from it, as if that past were alien to the new democratic state?
And to add a final unresolved issue: the construction of a democratic state and society involves, by definition, the recognition of diversity and pluralism, and the incorporation of conflict and of opposing views. Why then search for closure and ‘consensus’ regarding past conflicts?

The human rights movements are heterogeneous and plural. Their composition include at least three distinct yet overlapping types of participants: directly affected persons (including direct victims and their relatives), progressive political, intellectual and social actors, and members of a variety of churches.

Notes:
1 Being the only Latin American participant in the Forum, I have decided to combine some background and contextual information on the countries covered in this presentation with the issues that are directly addressed in the seminar. Grounded in the experience of political violence, military regimes and processes of transition in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru and Brazil, the presentation explores the way in which the issues related to human rights violations have been redefined during the last thirty years in the region, since the military dictatorships and repressive policies were implemented in the nineteen seventies.