Photo: Anyone's Child.
During the 1970s and 1980s, in the midst of a wave of military dictatorships and while armed conflicts between guerrilla groups and paramilitary forces were paving their way into Latin America’s tumultuous political history, numerous processes of remembering and forgetting started to sprout throughout the region.
These early civil society initiatives, later institutionalized within the State’s executive, legislative and judicial branches, played a central role in thematizing the experiences of violence and terror. By responding to the urgent need of gathering evidence concerning human rights violations, they came to complement, even replace State functions in times of authoritarian rule, and shed light on the possibility of peace. The resistance of the Latin American society—whose allure has been broadly documented and consisted in all sorts of institutional and extra-institutional actions aimed at accountability and justice— left a mark on the public sphere that continues to shape today’s political debate and the role of civil society during times of State repression and terrorism.
