The Futures of Reparations in Latin America is timely and asks what reparations do when they go beyond the legal, administrative and compensatory frameworks through which they are often understood. The editors of this volume, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Helene Risør and Karine Vanthuyne, bring together eight ethnographically grounded chapters, framed by an introduction and an afterword. The cases move across Central and South America to include Chile, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, Guatemala and Bolivia in the reparation debate. The key themes engage with dictatorship, Indigenous dispossession, environmental harm and the unfinished project of democratic transition.

The volume insists that reparations do not stop at retrospective responses to injury but also encompass forms of presence and future-making. In fact, the editors advance their own definition of reparations as ‘a set of material and ideological practices through which multiple futures are imagined and anticipated, past harm is translated into symbolic or material acts of repair, and emergent forms of belonging to the nation or other social collectivities are forged’ (p. 6). The editors suggest that imagination, translation and belonging go beyond being organising terms; they dive deeper to offer alternative ways of reading the political life of repair in Latin America. This grounding is valuable for readers because it suggests that the region’s histories of mestizaje, plurinationalism, dictatorship, and extractivism render possible their own theories of repair.

The opening chapter by Oriana Bernasconi insists on the power of the archive in Chile. Through the archives of the Comité de Cooperación para la Paz and the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, Bernasconi illustrates how civil society – the ‘we’ (p. 42) – documentation of Pinochet-era atrocities was itself a reparative practice. Readers see images of protests and documents from the disappeared interspersed with the text. The archive acts as ‘intellectual technology’ (p. 34) and a ‘space of visibility for the truth of the tragedy’ (p. 40). This chapter argues that repair commences even before the state recognises harm. The archive lives through the past and present, naming the disappeared despite the state’s efforts to render them into oblivion.

Henrik Ronsbo brings into sharp focus the everyday afterlives of violence, or ‘tragedy’ in El Salvador experienced in the 1980s through to the 2010s. Through what he calls ‘reparation ethnography’, Ronsbo deftly narrates psychosocial work with survivors of violence in the Indigenous Alchuapa village. ‘When we insert psychosocial reparations into such social spaces, what closure could we possibly hope for?’ (p. 70), he asks. Contrary to Bernasconi’s ‘we’, Ronsbo is interested in how the ‘I’ comes into question and how the body and mind relive these traumas (p. 56). The chapter soberly reveals what cannot easily be resolved by community-based interventions: fear, silence and repetition. Ronsbo’s contribution implies that reparations may open spaces for pain release and narration, but they cannot be expected to undo the sedimented effects of discrimination, poverty and militarised violence.

In Peru, transitional justice and environmental remedies are in dialogue with one another. María Eugenia Ulfe’s chapter oscillates between disappearances from the internal armed conflict (between 1980 and 2000) and oil-spill damage in the Amazon. Ulfe examines the state’s attempts to classify victims and translate harm into official remedies. Ulfe goes further by asking ‘But how are contaminated water, fish, animals, and bodies monetized or accounted for? How can an inventory of relationships be traced?’ (p. 85). Here, the book’s concern with translation is evident. This provocation invites us to question whether institutional categories can recognise and articulate relational, ecological, and embodied forms of loss.

Natasha Zaretsky and Karine Vanthuyne’s chapters tackle these concerns through public space and extractive conflict. Zaretsky examines ‘acts of repair’ (p. 94) in Argentina through memory activism in spaces haunted by dictatorship, disappearance, and impunity. Tita, one of the activists, shares ‘Porque un espacio de lucha, no se puede dejar. Porque si no, perdiste la lucha’/‘Because a space of struggle you can’t abandon. If you lose it, you have lost the struggle’ (p. 107), reflecting Zaretsky’s preoccupation with the politics of spatial repair. This chapter underlines activists’ refusal to abandon spaces where justice remains deferred. Vanthuyne transports readers to San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala, where Indigenous activism centres around mine-caused damage. The chapter describes the unbelonging of Indigenous Peoples in a state structured by colonial hierarchies and extractive dispossession. Vanthuyne urges scholars to attend to ‘fragile struggles’ and small wins that can easily be overlooked in reparation struggles (p. 134).

Amy Kennemore and Magalí Vienca Copa Pabón’s contribution explores Indigenous reparations in Bolivia through plurinational justice, land, sovereignty, and spiritual relations. This perspective troubles state-centred models of hope, reinforcing the fact that for many Indigenous communities, ‘justice extends beyond inclusion in state mechanisms and toward the restoration of sovereignty, kinship relations, and spiritual connections to land and ancestors’ (p. 141). Patricia Richards and Millaray Painemal’s chapter on Mapuche women elders is generative. Their attention to lived experience, gender-based violence, and Indigenous futurities demonstrates how self-repair can (and must) be narrated from within the Mapuche episteme rather than externally imposed. The authors ask: ‘What might things look like if we used the concept of consent as the starting point for thinking about reparations?’ (p. 169). As readers, we are encouraged to reconsider reparations as modes towards ‘ethics of consent, healing, and (Indigenous) self- determination’ (p. 157).

In the final chapter, Guillermo Salas Carreño brings readers back to Peru to examine involuntary resettlement linked to mining operations. By analysing how Indigenous socio-natural worlds are reduced to quantifiable categories, Salas exposes the violence of compensation frameworks that claim to repair while exacerbating dispossession. The afterword by Nancy Postero knits the chapter threads together and encourages reparations scholars to consider how their work might purposefully intervene in enduring social harms.

The Futures of Reparations in Latin America is a welcome contribution to disciplines such as Latin American studies, anthropology, Indigenous studies, human rights and transitional justice. While those working on Afro-descendant reparatory claims in Latin America may wish for a fuller engagement in this area, the volume superbly illustrates how reparatory praxes through an Indigenous lens are lived, imagined, translated, and archived. Reparation in action unfolds in the cityscape, community workshops, and intimate life histories. For scholars and students interested in how Latin American societies confront past and ongoing violence while imagining more just futures, this book is fundamental.