Truth Commissions and the Politics of Memory in South America

This article explores how truth commissions in Argentina, Chile, and Peru have addressed past violence and shaped collective memory. While they offered recognition and documentation, their impact has been limited by political resistance, institutional weakness, and exclusion of marginalised voices. The analysis highlights memory as a contested space, vulnerable to revision and denial. The article argues that truth-telling must be supported by institutional, educational, and civic mechanisms to ensure a lasting democratic culture.

Keywords: Truth commissions, politics of memory, transitional justice, Argentina, Chile, Peru

In the aftermath of authoritarian regimes and internal armed conflicts, societies are often confronted with the pressing challenge of how to reckon with past atrocities. Truth commissions have emerged as one of the most prominent mechanisms of transitional justice, tasked with documenting human rights violations, acknowledging victims, and laying the groundwork for reconciliation. In South America, countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Peru have established truth commissions, with Latin America as a whole pioneering transitional justice mechanisms to confront the legacy of past military rule and internal armed conflict (Skaar et al., 2016, pp. 43-44).While their commissions have produced landmark reports and uncovered crucial truths, their long-term impact on national memory and democratic consolidation remains uneven and contested.

This essay addresses a critical yet often overlooked dimension of transitional justice: the politics of memory. Memory is not simply a passive compilation of past events; it is an active, ongoing process shaped by political interests, institutional dynamics, and cultural narratives. In each of the three countries under study, the findings of truth commissions have been subject to various forms of politicisation – through denial, instrumentalization, or selective remembrance – ultimately undermining their ability to foster a shared and inclusive historical consciousness. The central problem, therefore, is not merely whether truth was revealed, but whether that truth has been preserved, institutionalised, and internalised within the broader fabric of society.

By examining the cases of Argentina, Chile, and Peru, this essay investigates the relationship between truth commissions and the construction of collective memory in post-authoritarian and post-conflict settings. It explores how different political and social contexts have shaped the reception and legacy of truth-telling initiatives, and how memory continues to be a site of contestation. In doing so, it draws attention to the fragility of historical justice and the conditions under which memory work can either support or hinder long-term reconciliation.

The analysis proceeds in five sections. The first outlines the theoretical framework, focusing on the concepts of transitional justice, truth commissions, and memory politics. The next three sections examine the experiences of Argentina, Chile, and Peru, respectively, highlighting the origins, limitations, and outcomes of their truth commissions. Finally, the fifth section proposes a regional, inclusive, and institutionalised approach to memory-building, arguing that the protection and activation of historical memory are essential components of sustainable peace and democratic resilience in Latin America.

National Truths and Contested Memories

Efforts to confront legacies of violence in post-authoritarian and post-conflict societies are often guided by the framework of transitional justice. This field encompasses a variety of mechanisms – such as criminal trials, reparations, institutional reform, and truth commissions – aimed at addressing systemic human rights violations and rebuilding social trust. Among these, truth commissions have gained prominence for their capacity to produce official narratives of past abuses without the adversarial nature of courtroom proceedings. Defined by Priscilla Hayner (2011) as bodies tasked with investigating patterns of gross violations over a specific period, they seek not only to document the past, but also to catalyse the moral and political renewal by publicly acknowledging the suffering of the victims.

However, truth-telling is not a neutral or purely technical process. It operates within a broader field of what scholars have termed the politics of memory – the dynamic and often contested struggle over how societies remember, interpret, and narrate episodes of collective trauma. As Elizabeth Jelin (2003) argues, memory is both social and political; it is shaped by institutions, media, education systems, and the differential power of actors to impose or resist dominant narratives. The construction of public memory is therefore not merely a reflection of past facts, but a process of negotiation over identity, legitimacy, and responsibility in the present too.

This intersection between truth commissions and memory politics raises several key tensions. First, while truth commissions aspire to uncover “the truth”, there is rarely a singular or universally accepted narrative. Competing interpretations often lead to selective remembrance, where some victims are recognised while others are excluded, and some perpetrators are condemned while others are shielded by political considerations. Second, the institutional fragility of many Latin American democracies has left truth commission findings vulnerable to revisionism, denial, or outright suppression. In some cases, governments have actively dismantled or reinterpreted their legacy to serve ideological or electoral purposes.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of truth commissions must be evaluated not only by the comprehensiveness of their reports by themselves, but their afterlife: the extent to which their findings are disseminated, internalised, and translated into concrete reforms or social change. This may include the integration of recommendations, the establishment of memorials or museums, the integration of historical memory into civic action, and the ongoing engagement of civil society in preserving and activating the truth. They are best understood not as endpoints, but as initiating moments in a longer process of historical reckoning.

Finally, scholars of transitional justice increasingly emphasise the cultural and decentralised dimensions of memory. As Kimberly Theidon (2013) highlights in her ethnographic work, the experience and remembrance of violence often differ across class, ethnicity, and geography. National narratives may obscure or marginalise the voices of indigenous communities, rural victims, or non-state actors. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of truth and memory must also consider who is authorised to speak, whose suffering is recognised, and which stories are rendered visible or erased.

This theoretical framework provides the foundation for analysing the truth commissions in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. The following three sections explore how these mechanisms were implemented, how their findings were received and contested, and what role they have played in shaping the memory landscapes of their respective societies since their productions.

Argentina

Argentina’s approach to transitional justice is widely regarded as one of the most ambitious, evolving, and earliest in Latin America, with “the CONADEP report later serving as a model for truth commissions across the region from 1985 to 2003” (Crenzel, 2015, p.21). Following the collapse of the military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983, the newly restored democratic government under President Raúl Alfonsín sought to address the grave human rights abuses committed during the so-called “Process of National Reorganisation”. This period, marked by forced disappearances, systematic torture, and widespread state terror, left an estimated 30,000 people dead or missing, most of whom were unarmed political dissidents, activists, students, and trade unionists (CONADEP, 1984).

One of the earliest acts of the Alfonsín administration was the creation of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) in December 1983. Tasked with investigating the fate of the desaparecidos, collecting over 7,000 testimonies, and documenting more than 8,900 cases of forced disappearance. Its 1984 report, titled Nunca Más (“Never Again”), was a landmark moment in the construction of Argentina’s post-dictatorship narrative, providing the symbolic foundation for a national commitment to human rights. Yet from the outset, the pursuit of justice was constrained by political and institutional pressures. While Alfonsín initially authorised the prosecution of the military juntas, fears of destabilising the fragile democracy led to the passage of the Full Stop Law (1986) and the Law of Due Obedience (1987), which effectively halted further investigations and trials.

In this context, civil society became the primary guardian of memory and justice. Organizations such as the Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo played an instrumental role in documenting cases, demanding accountability, and raising international awareness. Their persistent activism kept the injustices alive in public discourse, challenging narratives of reconciliation based on forgetting and “using their identity as mothers of the disappeared in a powerful way – powerful enough to challenge the Argentine state” (Burchianti, 2004). Over time, a broad-based human rights movement emerged, encompassing legal professionals, educators, artists, and survivors, which helped transform memory into a cornerstone of Argentina’s democratic identity.

The landscape shifted in the early 2000s under the presidency of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández, who embraced human rights as a central pillar of national policy. In 2003, Congress annulled the amnesty laws passed under Alfonsín, and in 2005 the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional, paving the way for the reopening of human rights trials (El País, 2005). Since then, hundreds of former military and police officials have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity. This judicial review was accompanied by a broader institutionalization of memory. Former clandestine detention centres such as the ESMA (Navy Mechanics School) were transformed into public memory sites; school curricula revised to include the history of the dictatorship; and official commemorations like March 24th, the Day of Memory for Truth and Justice, were established as national holidays.

Despite these advances, memory politics in Argentina remain contested. Conservative sectors and segments of the political right have sought to relativize the scale of state violence or to promote the so-called “two demons” theory: equating the crimes of the dictatorship with those guerrilla groups that they tried to dismantle. These narratives often resurface during electoral cycles or in public discourse, revealing the continued vulnerability of historical memory to politicisation.

Chile

Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy represents a paradigmatic case of negotiated transition, where the pursuit of truth and justice was constrained by the institutional continuity of the authoritarian regime. The military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) was marked by extensive and systematic violations of human rights, including more than 3,000 cases of extrajudicial execution, enforced disappearance, and torture. Yet, unlike Argentina, Chile’s initial post-authoritarian approach to transitional justice was shaped by an explicit political compromise: to move forward, society had to accept the limits of justice in exchange for democratic stability.

In 1990, shortly after assuming office, President Patricio Aylwin established the National Commission for the Truth and Reconciliation – known as the Rettig Commission – with the mandate to investigate deaths and disappearances committed by state agents or those acting with state consent between 1973 to 1990. Crucially, it was not authorised to examine torture, exile, or sexual violence, nor was it empowered to identify perpetrators or recommend criminal prosecutions. The Rettig Report (1996) documented 2,279 cases of disappearance and extrajudicial execution. Even though it was a groundbreaking acknowledgement, it fell short of addressing the full scope of abuses, and it preserved the legal immunity of the military – particularly of Pinochet himself, who remained Commander-in-Chief of the Army until 1998 and a life senator thereafter.

It was not until the presidency of Ricardo Lagos in 2004 that the Chilean state established the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture – known as the Valech Commission (2004) – collecting more than 35,000 testimonies of survivors of political imprisonment and torture. However, the confidentiality of testimonies for 50 years – allegedly to protect survivors – limited the use of this material in legal proceedings and historical research. This restriction has been a long-standing source of contention in Chile, fuelling debates over the role of archival access in justice processes and positioning these records as a crucial arena in the country’s broader battle for memory (Ferrara, 2021).

Given the state’s initial reticence, Chilean civil society played a fundamental role: victims’ organisations, human rights groups, artists, and academics mobilised to document repression (Jara, 2020). Sites of former torture and detention, such as Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, and José Domingo Cañas, were recovered and converted into spaces of memory. Literature, film, and visual arts also served as tools of intergenerational transmission, bridging the gap between old and new generations. Over time, pressure from civil society, along with international human rights jurisprudence, led to a gradual opening in judicial pathways. The arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998 under the principle of universal jurisdiction marked a turning point (Connett, Hooper, & Beaumont, 1998); though he died in 2006 without being convicted, the precedent had been set for a limited but expanding process of justice.

Peru

Peru’s experience with truth-seeking and memory politics diverges significantly from that of Argentina and Chile, due to the nature of its conflict, the ethnic and geographic diversity of its victims, and the ambiguous role of the state as both perpetrator and victim. Between 1980 and 2000, Peru endured a brutal internal armed conflict involving the Maoist insurgency group Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”), the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), and the Peruvian state forces. The violence resulted in an estimated 69,000 deaths and disappearances, with the vast majority of victims belonging to rural, indigenous, and Quechua-speaking communities in the Andean highlands (CVR, 2004).

In the aftermath of President Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian regime, the transitional government of Valentín Paniagua established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR in Spanish) in 2001. It conducted more than 17,000 interviews, held public hearings, collaborated with forensic teams, and made a concerted effort to center on the experiences of marginalised communities (Hayner, 2011).

The final report, issued in 2003, challenged dominant narratives about the conflict. While it condemned the atrocities committed by Shining Path as the principal driver of violence, it also held the Peruvian state accountable for widespread extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, sexual violence, and systematic discrimination. This framing marked a radical departure from traditional narratives, which often cast the conflict in simplistic terms of terrorist violence and counterinsurgency. By naming both the state and insurgent groups as perpetrators, and by foregrounding the ethnized and class-based nature of suffering, the CVR reframed the conflict as a national trauma with deep historical roots in exclusion and inequality. Despite the CVR’s rigor, its findings were met with immediate political resistance. Key institutions, including the military, conservative media, and Fujimorista factions in Congress, rejected the report’s conclusions, particularly the equivalence it drew between state and non-state violence.

Efforts to implement the CVR’s recommendations were partial and inconsistent. The creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion (LUM) in Lima was a major achievement, but its content and public reception have been the subject of ongoing controversy, as the armed forces, civil society, and victim’s families have all used public space as a battleground in which competing narratives of the internal armed conflict are curated, contested, and negotiated (Milton, 2018). In this context, “the LUM’s ability to act as a site of broad social reconciliation remains limited” (Willis, 2021, p.665).

Peru’s fragmented geography and profound social inequalities have deeply shaped its memory politics. Unlike Argentina or Chile, where state repression was highly centralized and urban-based, the violence in Peru was dispersed, peripheral, and ethnically coded. This created multiple, often incompatible, memory narratives: for many in Lima and other coastal cities, the conflict remained mostly distant, while for highland communities, it is a lived and intergenerational trauma. These divergences reflect “the dominance of state-military limeño perspectives (i.e. those produced by Lima inhabitants, particularly whiter and more middle-class groups)” (Willis, 2021, p.665), and despite greater indigenous input in research years, “scholarship remains largely produced by Lima-based or elite international academics” (Willis, 2021, p.665). The memory of violence is mediated not only by politics but also by language, identity, and historical exclusion. For many victims, truth remains unheard, not because it was never spoken, but because it was not understood or valued by the dominant society. As Theidon (2013) notes, reconciliation in Peru must contend with a legacy of structural marginalization, not merely political violence.

Towards Sustainable Memory

The persistent politicization, fragmentation, and contestation of memory in Argentina, Chile, and Peru point to the limitations of transitional justice when it is not accompanied by long-term, inclusive, and institutionalized memory policies. A viable solution lies not in replicating or expanding truth commissions per se, but in reconceiving memory as a plural, participatory, and ongoing political process that transcends formal transitions.

First, states must institutionalize memory beyond the lifespan of specific governments or commissions. This requires the creation of permanent, autonomous public bodies dedicated to historical memory (national memory councils or ombudspersons for transitional justice) that operate independently from political cycles, as sustained government cooperation is essential for these measures to have a lasting impact and legitimacy (Eleftheria, 2015). These institutions should have the mandate to oversee the implementation of truth commissions’ recommendations, protect memory sites, and mediate disputes over historical narratives.

Second, education systems must be mobilized as central pillars of memory policy. Curricula should incorporate the findings of truth commissions and include multiple narratives of past violence, ensuring their broad dissemination so the entire population can access and engage with them (Brahm, 2004). Training teachers and developing inclusive pedagogical materials can help address generational gaps and combat revisionist efforts.

Third, judicial accountability must be aligned with memory efforts. While not all perpetrators may be prosecuted, symbolic trials, public naming of perpetrators, the removal of impunity-enhancing laws, and reparations are all signs of the government’s commitment to healing wounds (Brahm, 2004) and are essential for memory work to have moral and legal legitimacy.

Finally, international and regional bodies – such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and UN special rapporteurs – can support national processes providing normative guidance, technical expertise, and advice to the new governments, as well as pressure exerted against regressive political forces (Brahm, 2004). Memory politics is not merely domestic; it is embedded in transnational networks of rights, solidarity, and resistance.

In sum, a sustainable solution requires reframing truth and memory as ongoing civic responsibilities, not finite exercises in historical clarification. Only through institutional resilience, participatory practices, and cultural pluralism can Latin American societies ensure that memory serves not as a battleground for political interests, but as a foundation for democratic coexistence.

Conclusion

Truth commissions in Argentina, Chile, and Peru have played a pivotal role in documenting past atrocities and offering recognition to victims of state and non-state violence. Yet their legacies reveal the fragility of truth in the face of political change, ideological polarization, and structural inequality (Skaar et al., 2016). While initially conceived as instruments of national reckoning, truth commissions have frequently become sites of contestation – vulnerable to denialism, selective appropriation, and revisionist narratives.

This article has argued that the limitations of these commissions are not merely procedural or technical, but deeply political and cultural. Memory, far from being a neutral recounting of facts, is shaped by power, exclusion, and struggle. In South America, this has meant that even the most rigorous truth-seeking efforts can be undermined without institutional guarantees, civic participation, and sustained commitment to pluralism.

The solution lies in reframing memory work as a continuous democratic project, not a finite phase of transition. Institutionalizing memory through education, decentralizing it through grassroots initiatives, and reinforcing it with judicial and regional mechanisms are essential steps. Importantly, the inclusion of marginalized voices must become a central axis of historical justice.

Ultimately, the politics of memory cannot be avoided; it can only be navigated. Whether truth commissions contribute to reconciliation or division depends on the willingness of societies not only to uncover the past, but to defend and inhabit it as part of their democratic future.

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