This article examines the social and political impacts of President Nayib Bukele’s 2023 opening of a megaprison in El Salvador by analyzing his government-funded international public relations campaign. We chronicle how the design of the prison, along with policies for arresting, detaining, and prosecuting Salvadorans for alleged gang-related crimes, offers a mirage of transparency that obstructs the visibility needed to protect the human rights of Salvadorans. Our analysis places empirical accounts of conditions in El Salvador in conversation with the largely Twitter/X-based public relations campaign announcing the new prison. We show how the campaign works to justify an alarming degradation of democratic principles and practices during the current régimen de excepción (state of exception). Bukele rationalizes an iron-fist-style approach to gang violence while simultaneously silencing political opposition and obfuscating the expanding scope of state human rights violations. We argue that the trade-offs being made in El Salvador between increased safety for some and human rights violations for others ultimately contribute to the corrosion of democracy. Moreover, we discuss how Bukele’s tough-on-crime populism simultaneously produces and exports an “authoritarian playbook” for wider regional democratic erosion in line with Bukele’s model.

This article examines questions pertaining to Indigenous people’s citizenship status, the problematic definition of orphanhood, rule of law, and structural racism in Brazilian society. The definition of orphanhood was articulated in a way that allowed for the extralegal abuse and racialized exploitation of labor to continue long past the legal end of Indigenous slavery (1755). Indigenous persons’ legal status, the definition of orphanhood, and guardianship laws worked together to legitimate the permanence of child separation as a means for wealthier Brazilians to get free child labor. The article uncovers the ambiguities in defining Indigenous people’s legal status, making citizenship status a subjective determination contested on a case-by-case basis. With this foreground understanding, the article presents the practice of child separation and the created discourse to legitimize Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race children as unpaid criadas de casa (housemaids).

This article analyzes structures of feeling among the generation of trauma carriers who grew up under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven cultural producers (including filmmakers, novelists, visual artists, and memory activists), we shed light on the generational memory work involved in processing cultural trauma, emphasizing the emotional force behind memory transmission in postconflict societies dealing with legacies of terror. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s notion of structures of feeling, we explore how the generational memory of children during Pinochet’s dictatorship is shaped by melancholic intergenerational identification with past struggles. This intergenerational bond is characterized by melancholic affect in representing the previous generation, which is rooted in experiences of state violence and resistance and plays a key role in processing historical trauma and shaping contemporary social critique in postconflict Chile.

This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

The women who have participated in memory-building projects in Colombia have shaped the formation of collective memory in important ways in official and informal projects. They have emphasized and highlighted their gendered experiences of the Colombian conflict and gained valuable experience working with and inside organizations. These experiences have provided women with a sense of feminist empowerment. The case of Medellín is particularly interesting because the city’s women have been engaged in constructing collective memory for decades, long before the ratification of the 2016 Peace Accord. As such, these women had a valuable skill set that they were able to employ in collaboration with the official transitional justice mechanisms supported by the state after 2016. The experience of having their voices recognized and acknowledged has raised the feminist consciousness of the women of Medellín involved with these projects. The Medellín case is somewhat distinct from other Latin American cases of women peace and human rights activists because Colombian women have had several decades to learn the importance of including and even centering their intersectional gendered perspectives. The women of Medellín are not unique among Latin American women, but they have had a significant head start.

Este artículo analiza las representaciones centradas en la víctima del conflicto armado interno peruano que propone el documental Tempestad en los Andes (2014), de Mikael Wiström. A partir de este objeto cultural, se examinan las limitaciones y posibilidades que presenta la memoria victimista en el posconflicto peruano. El análisis parte de los significados contrapuestos que el filme articula para Augusta La Torre (líder de Sendero Luminoso) y Claudio Gonzales (estudiante universitario desaparecido). Por un lado, se reflexiona sobre el posicionamiento reconciliador que esta película sostiene en torno a la búsqueda de una víctima neutral merecedora de compasión, la reconstitución de un supuesto mundo andino devastado por la guerra y el énfasis identificatorio con el sufrimiento padecido. Esta interpretación del pasado reciente fuerza una reconciliación (un perdón normalizante) que no permite comprender las complejidades surgidas y, por el contrario, las sutura en vías de alcanzar una cura y unificación del cuerpo social fragmentado con la guerra. Sin embargo, por otro lado, también se analizan las posibilidades de reconocimiento, esas renegociaciones y apropiaciones que suceden desde los márgenes de este proyecto audiovisual: una reivindicación, breve pero real, que intenta reparar el olvido.

This article examines one of the most violent episodes in Mexico’s recent history—the Corpus Thursday massacre orchestrated by the Mexican government against young students on June 10, 1971. The event marked the beginning of a period known as the guerra sucia (dirty war), marked by the systematic repression of students and dissenting political groups by government forces. The present work advocates for “making history with photographs,” urging readers to explore the historical moment through the narratives presented by three distinct historical actors: the press, independent photographers, and the perspective of power from governmental organizations.

This research note outlines the current state of preservation and accessibility of an audiovisual document that contains complete video footage of the Trial of the Argentine Military Junta, whose verdict in 1985 found the accused guilty of crimes against humanity perpetrated during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983).The project of digitization is the result of a joint effort by the University of Salamanca, the Argentine human rights organization Memoria Abierta, and the judges involved in the case, with the support of the Argentine Cámara Nacional de Apelaciones en lo Criminal y Correccional Federal. Its two main objectives are to preserve and provide open access to the audiovisual document. To date only digitized preservation has been attained, a nonetheless remarkable achievement. Despite legislation dates enforcing the protection of the parties involved in the trial, and the absence of legal constraints, open access to the document has not been obtained.

Since General Augusto Pinochet’s detention in 1998, an unprecedented number of human rights trials has taken place across Latin America. The main source of evidence employed in these proceedings are victims’ testimonies: in fact,records documenting human rights violations are generally unavailable, having either been destroyed or hidden. When archives do exist, they do not usually identify individual perpetrators or victims, nor do they directly establish criminal responsibility. This article focuses on two criminal trials that unfolded in Argentina and Italy and closely probed the atrocities of Operation Condor. It contends that archival documents only contain remnants of truth and fragments of evidence. These slivers have to be interpreted, contextualized, and sometimes even questioned in order to render them relevant and useful to criminal investigations of past atrocities. Specifically, the article deconstructs the role that different trial actors—including public and private prosecutors, archivists, experts, witnesses, lawyers, and judges—played in the courtroom, engaging in proactive efforts to piece together the evidence that archival records possess and activating their content.

Este trabalho analisa comparativamente alguns aspectos convergentes da obra do pensador alemão Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) e do escritor uruguaio Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015). Apresentam-se, assim, certas afinidades entre os dois autores no que diz respeito à proposição de uma crítica à história oficial, tal como concebida a partir das classes dominantes, em prol da recuperação da memória de grupos sociais submetidos à violência e à opressão. Destacam-se, ainda, correspondências metodológicas acerca do emprego de analogias e metáforas por ambos os autores.

The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. This article examines and contrasts three commemorative and transformative memorial interventions to show that in a context that lacks a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time.

This essay reviews the following works:

The El Mozote Massacre: Human Rights and Global Implications. By Leigh Binford. Revised and expanded ed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Pp. 400. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780816532162.

Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory. By Erik Ching. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 362. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469628660.

The Politics of Transitional Justice in Latin America: Power, Norms, and Capacity Building. By Ezequiel A. González-Ocantos Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. $18.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781108799089.

The Feathers of Condor: Transnational State Terrorism, Exiles and Civilian Anticommunism in South America. By Fernando López. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 375. £57.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781443897099.

Eruptions of Memory: The Critique of Memory in Chile, 1990–2015. By Nelly Richard. Translated by Andrew Ascherl. Pp. xxvi + 189. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Pp. 224. $22.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781509532285.

Exile, Diaspora, and Return: Changing Cultural Landscapes in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By Luis Roniger, Leonardo Senkman, Saúl Sosnowski, and Mario Sznajder. Pp. 304. $82.00 hardcover. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780190693961.

Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina. By Barbara Sutton. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. v + 325. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781479829927.

Memory, Truth, and Justice in Contemporary Latin America. Edited by Roberta Villalón. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Pp. vi + 274. $41.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781442267251.

La cifra de desaparecidos en Argentina motiva debates recurrentes. Durante la última dictadura militar (1976–1983) sus denunciantes elaboraron diversas cifras y estimaciones pero el número de 30 mil desaparecidos adquirió un carácter canónico. Tras retornar la democracia, la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas registró 8.960 casos. En los años noventa, en un contexto de impunidad, grupos de la sociedad civil elaboraron sus propias cifras y en los dos mil el Estado ofreció nuevos registros. El resurgimiento del negacionismo y la relativización del crimen revitalizaron este debate. Este trabajo historiza las cifras de desaparecidos y víctimas de desaparición forzada elaboradas por diversos actores y propone una aproximación académica sobre el tema. Comprende a estas cifras en su doble dimensión: como fruto de la elaboración de conocimiento sobre las desapariciones y como expresión de los combates por la memoria sobre las violaciones a los derechos humanos sucedidas en el país.