"Present Pasts: Memory(ies) of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone of Latin America"

CRENZEL, EMILIO ARIEL

The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2011; p. 1 - 13

Present Pasts. Memory(es) of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone of Latin America Emilio Crenzel Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay lived through decades of political violence, military rule and state terrorism. With the return of democracy, these countries came to terms, in different ways, with the legacy left behind by human rights violations. Notwithstanding the various strategies that were employed, twenty years after the end of military rule memory has become a field of dispute and conflict among diverse actors in these three countries. For this reason, it can be said that the past continues to be very much present in public debate nowadays.   The essays of this collection, whose authors come from a variety of academic backgrounds from the social sciences and humanities, examine through unique research the impact that political violence and state terrorism had in these countries. In order to do so, the chapters analyse the traces and imprints in the intimate space of private and family memories, as well as in the public arena of social memory; they study state policies of memory, its tensions and agreement with initiatives coming from actors of civil society; they focus on the dilemmas of ‘postmemory’ and transmission, the relationship between testimony, literature, ethics, law and power, and historicise the conflicts among different actors to attribute meaning to the past and its activation on symbolic dates, commemorative locations and from specific political processes.     This introduction, first of all, offers a general framework on the nature of state violence that was perpetrated in the region and the challenges this created for its public and private evocation. Second, it investigates the political and cultural context in which the memory of past violence became an objective for several governments and civil society actors in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Lastly, it presents an overview of the field of memory in the region and, building on that, contextualises the contribution of the essays of this book.