Oriana Bernasconi
Professor at the Department of Sociology and researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Universidad Alberto Hurtado. My research sits in the field of cultural studies, where I analyze issues of subjectivity, inequalities, and violence; post-conflict transitional processes (truth, justice, memory, education); the production and uses of knowledge regarding human rights violations; human rights movements, democracy, and citizenship; and cultural artifacts like archives.
I collaborate interdisciplinarily with colleagues from Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and the UK to explore these topics. Our research emphasizes the importance of documenting human rights violations and creating archives in societies' capacity to come to terms with evil pasts.
The book “Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America. Documenting Atrocity” (Palgrave, 2019) provides an in-depth analysis of state violence documentation, denunciation, and resistance and how it affected civilians, activists, and victims.
The purpose of the Human Rights Centre at Universidad Alberto Hurtado is to serve society by strengthening democracy, social justice, and peace through an interdisciplinary platform that promotes, coordinates, and fosters research, education, and creation on human rights topics, in close collaboration with actors and institutions nationally and internationally.
https://memoriayderechoshumanosuah.org/
https://www.instagram.com/memoriayddhh_uah
https://www.facebook.com/memoriayderechoshumanosuah
I collaborate interdisciplinarily with colleagues from Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and the UK to explore these topics. Our research emphasizes the importance of documenting human rights violations and creating archives in societies' capacity to come to terms with evil pasts.
The book “Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America. Documenting Atrocity” (Palgrave, 2019) provides an in-depth analysis of state violence documentation, denunciation, and resistance and how it affected civilians, activists, and victims.
The purpose of the Human Rights Centre at Universidad Alberto Hurtado is to serve society by strengthening democracy, social justice, and peace through an interdisciplinary platform that promotes, coordinates, and fosters research, education, and creation on human rights topics, in close collaboration with actors and institutions nationally and internationally.
https://memoriayderechoshumanosuah.org/
https://www.instagram.com/memoriayddhh_uah
https://www.facebook.com/memoriayderechoshumanosuah
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Books by Oriana Bernasconi
Este libro examina una labor de documentación sin precedentes desplegada por la sociedad civil en Chile durante la dictadura de Pinochet (1973-1990). El libro demuestra que la documentación de la violencia política es una eficaz estrategia de resistencia pacífica a las masivas violaciones a los derechos humanos.
Mediante investigación archivística y el análisis de los testimonios de quienes realizaron esta labor, el libro ofrece una historia de la emergencia, sostenimiento y efectos asociados a documentar el terrorismo de estado mientras ocurre. Examinando las prácticas, procesos y artefactos de registro que sostuvieron una infraestructura informacional sin precedentes, el libro demuestra que, junto con permitir asistir a los afectados y asumir su defensa legal, esta infraestructura permitió comprender, tipificar y conmensurar la violencia estatal. Transformado en denuncia, el conocimiento acumulado reveló la verdad sobre las acciones represivas negadas por las autoridades del gobierno de facto y condujo al repudio mundial a la dictadura y sus prácticas criminales. Derrocado el régimen, la documentación producida ha devenido prueba judical en casos de crímenes de lesa humanidad, material museográfico para prácticas de memoria y memorialización y evidencia clave para procesos estatales oficiales de reconocimiento, calificación y restitución de los derechos de las victimas de esta, la peor catástrofe sociopolítica del Chile contemporáneo.
La premisa del libro es que el registro de la violencia política desarrollado por organizaciones de derechos humanos en Chile creó las condiciones de enunciación y legibilidad de la tragedia, un requisito para dar a conocer los abusos y el horror, para resistir las representaciones distorsionadas ofrecidas por la dictadura y para imaginar que otra forma de vida era posible. Además, el registro confiere a las denuncias de violencia política durabilidad y estabilidad en el tiempo, base para la aplicabilidad de su información en otros momentos y arenas sociales en el futuro. Desde esta perspectiva, el libro propone que las prácticas de registro de la violencia política contribuyen de manera concreta a la capacidad de una sociedad para enfrentar este tipo de atrocidades en el futuro.
En todas estas dimensiones, el libro sostiene que la documentación de la atrocidad es una estrategia pacífica de resistencia que impide la represión sin traza, la impunidad y el olvido.
Papers by Oriana Bernasconi
sociaux des documents écrits qui inscrivent des épisodes massifs de violence politique; ce que nous appelons des « documents de l’atrocité ».En se centrant sur les usages et les effets contemporains des documents
passés qui attestent des violations massives des droits humains, ce numéro
spécial élargit la recherche sur les actes d’écriture vers le domaine des
droits humains, inexploré par la revue à ce jour. En abordant la question
de la documentation des violations des droits humains dans différents
contextes répressifs, ce numéro prolonge aussi la discussion entreprise
sur la politique contemporaine vers le domaine de la violence politique.
Ce numéro s’interroge sur les utilisations actuelles des documents et
des archives qui documentent les violations passées des droits humains,
en considérant les archives comme des lieux de luttes et de transformations sociales et politiques à la fois passées et présentes
close to the epicenter of the protests. He worked at a local clinic attached to a
public university, where student protests and clashes between masked demonstrators and police were common. Ricardo comes from a right-wing family: only he and his sister have left-wing leanings. He has never been a member of a political party, group, or organization, and in fact he expresses
mistrust of them, and of Chilean politics in general. However, the neighborhood he lived in as a child bordered on another, Villa Francia, which has a
long history of political and community organizing and is considered a combative place. Ricardo used to go there to get involved in protests on emblematic days.1
A few years ago, he began to take part on and off in a musical
troupe that often appears at popular street events and commemorations of
September 11, the date of Pinochet’s coup d’état.
In Ricardo’s account, two main hermeneutical and agential phenomena configured the uprising as a critical event with the capacity for political
subjectivation.2
First, Ricardo’s identification of the revolt as a historical
event from his own lifetime, as he drew parallels between the social uprising
and the 1973–90 dictatorship, the biggest sociopolitical catastrophe of
Chile’s recent history. Second, the power of the masses in public demonstrations, which activated Ricardo’s desire and spurred him on to a total and systematic immersion in the front line of the protests,3
evoking memories of the urban street fights he knew in his childhood. Once the dictatorship was over,
Ricardo and his friends had repeatedly asked themselves, “What would I
have done if I’d been there?” Faced with the social uprising, at first an unintelligible event, Ricardo returns to, and brings into the present, that generation-specific question: “Where am I going to be now?” His response rose to
the occasion: an extraordinary level of immersion in, and by means of, street
combat. The memory of the anti-dictatorship movement, the power of the
spontaneous masses, and the street as a place of encounter and struggle will
activate Ricardo’s political subjectivation, and the configuration of the uprising as a critical event, one that he interprets in the light of the past.
Some academic accounts of Chile’s social uprising refer to the “irruption of memories” through this protest cycle. These may be long-standing
memories—such as of the violence visited on the Mapuche people4
by the
Chilean state—memories of the feminist or neighborhood movements, and/
or memories of the recent dictatorship (Angelcos and Pérez 2017; Vivaldi and
Sepúlveda 2021; Garcés 2019; Han 2012). Certainly, the repressive policing of
the protests, and the decreeing of “states of exception” revived memories of
the dictatorship the length and breadth of the country. The protests became
places of commemoration and homage to victims of dictatorship-era violence,
and spaces in which to denounce remaining gaps in truth and justice.
The demands that inspired the uprising also referred back to the
period of the political transition (1990s), which had first denounced the legacy of the neoliberal societal model imposed at gunpoint under the military
regime. The relationship between these memorialization practices and new
processes of political subjectivation however remains unexplored, above all
among actors who do not belong to political and protest movements such as
the student, feminist, or environmental movements (Bravo and Pérez 2022).
In this context, Ricardo’s case demonstrates the intergenerational staying
power of certain subterranean memories in the trajectories of people who
either did not live through the dictatorship or lived it as children and do not
have a history of activism or involvement in social organizations. Decades
later, during the social uprising, memories of resistance to the dictatorship
evoked an ethical imperative in this ordinary citizen. Ricardo experiences
this as a form of duty to his time and to his own history. This experience
blurs the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics, as it becomes
the engine of mobilization and a desire for social transformation not through political militancy or trajectories, but rather in unexpected and sudden awakenings and agency arrangements.
Without aspiring to exhaustiveness, by reviewing this literature, we identified studies that inquire into the constitution of this type of facts; the practices of documentation, classification, nomination, and quantification by means of which human rights violations come to be described as such and are processed to confront the damage caused, including the circulation of truth accounts, and the irruption of controversies and countermemories around processes of accountability of human rights violations. Research has also been done on the history and role of science and technology in the human rights field, and on the human rights knowledge infrastructures addressing these abuses and their legacies.
In the following, we briefly outline this background that serves as a basis for introducing the two processes we proposed to explore in this Cluster: factualization and commensuration of human rights violations and violence. Analyzing what this Cluster was able to encompass, we will end this introduction with a reflection on the lines of research, themes, and problems that remain as future challenges.
how truth, justice, and memory are accomplished, and what societies, communities, and individuals can do to prevent events of this type to ever happen again (Straus and Waldorf 2011).
Without aspiring to exhaustiveness, by reviewing this literature, we identified studies that inquire into the constitution of this type of facts; the practices of documentation, classification, nomination, and quantification by means of which human rights violations come to be described as such and are processed to confront the damage caused, including the circulation of truth accounts, and the irruption of controversies and countermemories around processes of accountability of human rights violations. Research has also been done on the history and role of science and technology in the human rights field, and on the human rights knowledge infrastructures addressing these abuses and their legacies.
In the following, we briefly outline this background that serves as a basis for introducing the two processes we proposed to explore in this Cluster: factualization and commensuration of human rights violations and violence. Analyzing what this Cluster was able to encompass, we will end this introduction with a reflection on the lines of research,
themes, and problems that remain as future challenges.
and the term liminal the subject sustained in society as an effect of successive, contingent and disputed acts. Through archival work and the analysis of textual, graphic and scenic artefacts, the paper traces the citational structure that in the play between biopolitical and resistance forces has sustained the disappeared detainee between 1973 and 1991 in Chile, granting this subject different statuses and capacities.
En el imaginario de los crímenes de las dictaduras sudamericanas la primera imagen es la de los desaparecidos. Desde esta experiencia represiva de los años setenta y ochenta, esta imagen ha circulado y devenido consigna global para la representación política de los crímenes de Estado. A partir del caso chileno, y tomando elementos del enfoque medial, los estudios de la visualidad y la teoría e historia del arte, este artículo aborda la condición específica de esta fotografía como un eslabón de la historia de la representación del rostro humano y como una imagen cuya eficacia retórica también descansa en procesos de editorialización, circulación, selección y enmarcamiento que no han sido tomados en cuenta en los estudios sobre memoria. El trabajo sugiere este contenido invisible que se actualiza cuando la imagen funciona como ícono trasnacional de violaciones a los derechos humanos.
Palabras clave Fotografía; Archivo; Atrocidad; Medialidad; Teoría e historia del arte; Memoria
Abstract
In the imaginary of the crimes of South America dictatorships, the image is, in the first place, that of the disappeared. From this repressive experience of the seventies and eighties, this image has circulated, becoming a global icon for the political representation of state crimes. Taking the Chilean case, and drawing on elements of the medial approach, the studies of visuality and the theory and history of art, this article addresses the specific condition of this photograph as a link in the history of the representation of the human face and as an image whose rhetorical efficacy also rests on processes of editorialization, circulation, selection and framing that have remained disattended in the literature on memory. This paper suggests that this “invisible” content is updated when the image becomes a transnational icon of human rights violations.
Keywords Photograph; Archive; Atrocity; Mediality; Arts theory and history; Memory
El “giro métrico” está configurando el conocimiento, la gobernanza y la política de derechos humanos a nivel global. Este artículo busca contribuir al emergente análisis de los números en materia de derechos humanos desde una perspectiva latinoamericana. Examinamos un fenómeno que es difícil de contar; el número de víctimas de desaparición forzada –esto es, el secuestro y asesinato de personas seguido de la disposición de sus cuerpos– en tres contextos de violencia política institucional en el continente –la dictadura en Chile (1973–1990), el conflicto armado de Colombia (1958–), y las guerras sucias (1964–1998) y narco-conflictos (2002–) de México. Abordando los números como procesos y centrándonos en su vitalidad, mediante análisis de entrevistas, documentos institucionales y archivos, examinamos la trayectoria del número de desapariciones forzadas para explorar su capacidad de movilizar y ser moldeado por asuntos de derechos humanos. La transitividad es crucial en la trayectoria y vitalidad de los números. Desafiando la opinión de que los números solo resultan efectivos cuando se descontextualizan, mostramos que la transitividad es un logro matemático, cognitivo y político e identificamos los efectos en el campo de los derechos humanos de números transitivos pero también de aquellos referenciales y provisionales. En particular, evidenciamos cómo contribuyen al reconocimiento y tratamiento de las violaciones a los derechos humanos, impulsando la producción de regímenes de rendición de cuentas.
Este libro examina una labor de documentación sin precedentes desplegada por la sociedad civil en Chile durante la dictadura de Pinochet (1973-1990). El libro demuestra que la documentación de la violencia política es una eficaz estrategia de resistencia pacífica a las masivas violaciones a los derechos humanos.
Mediante investigación archivística y el análisis de los testimonios de quienes realizaron esta labor, el libro ofrece una historia de la emergencia, sostenimiento y efectos asociados a documentar el terrorismo de estado mientras ocurre. Examinando las prácticas, procesos y artefactos de registro que sostuvieron una infraestructura informacional sin precedentes, el libro demuestra que, junto con permitir asistir a los afectados y asumir su defensa legal, esta infraestructura permitió comprender, tipificar y conmensurar la violencia estatal. Transformado en denuncia, el conocimiento acumulado reveló la verdad sobre las acciones represivas negadas por las autoridades del gobierno de facto y condujo al repudio mundial a la dictadura y sus prácticas criminales. Derrocado el régimen, la documentación producida ha devenido prueba judical en casos de crímenes de lesa humanidad, material museográfico para prácticas de memoria y memorialización y evidencia clave para procesos estatales oficiales de reconocimiento, calificación y restitución de los derechos de las victimas de esta, la peor catástrofe sociopolítica del Chile contemporáneo.
La premisa del libro es que el registro de la violencia política desarrollado por organizaciones de derechos humanos en Chile creó las condiciones de enunciación y legibilidad de la tragedia, un requisito para dar a conocer los abusos y el horror, para resistir las representaciones distorsionadas ofrecidas por la dictadura y para imaginar que otra forma de vida era posible. Además, el registro confiere a las denuncias de violencia política durabilidad y estabilidad en el tiempo, base para la aplicabilidad de su información en otros momentos y arenas sociales en el futuro. Desde esta perspectiva, el libro propone que las prácticas de registro de la violencia política contribuyen de manera concreta a la capacidad de una sociedad para enfrentar este tipo de atrocidades en el futuro.
En todas estas dimensiones, el libro sostiene que la documentación de la atrocidad es una estrategia pacífica de resistencia que impide la represión sin traza, la impunidad y el olvido.
sociaux des documents écrits qui inscrivent des épisodes massifs de violence politique; ce que nous appelons des « documents de l’atrocité ».En se centrant sur les usages et les effets contemporains des documents
passés qui attestent des violations massives des droits humains, ce numéro
spécial élargit la recherche sur les actes d’écriture vers le domaine des
droits humains, inexploré par la revue à ce jour. En abordant la question
de la documentation des violations des droits humains dans différents
contextes répressifs, ce numéro prolonge aussi la discussion entreprise
sur la politique contemporaine vers le domaine de la violence politique.
Ce numéro s’interroge sur les utilisations actuelles des documents et
des archives qui documentent les violations passées des droits humains,
en considérant les archives comme des lieux de luttes et de transformations sociales et politiques à la fois passées et présentes
close to the epicenter of the protests. He worked at a local clinic attached to a
public university, where student protests and clashes between masked demonstrators and police were common. Ricardo comes from a right-wing family: only he and his sister have left-wing leanings. He has never been a member of a political party, group, or organization, and in fact he expresses
mistrust of them, and of Chilean politics in general. However, the neighborhood he lived in as a child bordered on another, Villa Francia, which has a
long history of political and community organizing and is considered a combative place. Ricardo used to go there to get involved in protests on emblematic days.1
A few years ago, he began to take part on and off in a musical
troupe that often appears at popular street events and commemorations of
September 11, the date of Pinochet’s coup d’état.
In Ricardo’s account, two main hermeneutical and agential phenomena configured the uprising as a critical event with the capacity for political
subjectivation.2
First, Ricardo’s identification of the revolt as a historical
event from his own lifetime, as he drew parallels between the social uprising
and the 1973–90 dictatorship, the biggest sociopolitical catastrophe of
Chile’s recent history. Second, the power of the masses in public demonstrations, which activated Ricardo’s desire and spurred him on to a total and systematic immersion in the front line of the protests,3
evoking memories of the urban street fights he knew in his childhood. Once the dictatorship was over,
Ricardo and his friends had repeatedly asked themselves, “What would I
have done if I’d been there?” Faced with the social uprising, at first an unintelligible event, Ricardo returns to, and brings into the present, that generation-specific question: “Where am I going to be now?” His response rose to
the occasion: an extraordinary level of immersion in, and by means of, street
combat. The memory of the anti-dictatorship movement, the power of the
spontaneous masses, and the street as a place of encounter and struggle will
activate Ricardo’s political subjectivation, and the configuration of the uprising as a critical event, one that he interprets in the light of the past.
Some academic accounts of Chile’s social uprising refer to the “irruption of memories” through this protest cycle. These may be long-standing
memories—such as of the violence visited on the Mapuche people4
by the
Chilean state—memories of the feminist or neighborhood movements, and/
or memories of the recent dictatorship (Angelcos and Pérez 2017; Vivaldi and
Sepúlveda 2021; Garcés 2019; Han 2012). Certainly, the repressive policing of
the protests, and the decreeing of “states of exception” revived memories of
the dictatorship the length and breadth of the country. The protests became
places of commemoration and homage to victims of dictatorship-era violence,
and spaces in which to denounce remaining gaps in truth and justice.
The demands that inspired the uprising also referred back to the
period of the political transition (1990s), which had first denounced the legacy of the neoliberal societal model imposed at gunpoint under the military
regime. The relationship between these memorialization practices and new
processes of political subjectivation however remains unexplored, above all
among actors who do not belong to political and protest movements such as
the student, feminist, or environmental movements (Bravo and Pérez 2022).
In this context, Ricardo’s case demonstrates the intergenerational staying
power of certain subterranean memories in the trajectories of people who
either did not live through the dictatorship or lived it as children and do not
have a history of activism or involvement in social organizations. Decades
later, during the social uprising, memories of resistance to the dictatorship
evoked an ethical imperative in this ordinary citizen. Ricardo experiences
this as a form of duty to his time and to his own history. This experience
blurs the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics, as it becomes
the engine of mobilization and a desire for social transformation not through political militancy or trajectories, but rather in unexpected and sudden awakenings and agency arrangements.
Without aspiring to exhaustiveness, by reviewing this literature, we identified studies that inquire into the constitution of this type of facts; the practices of documentation, classification, nomination, and quantification by means of which human rights violations come to be described as such and are processed to confront the damage caused, including the circulation of truth accounts, and the irruption of controversies and countermemories around processes of accountability of human rights violations. Research has also been done on the history and role of science and technology in the human rights field, and on the human rights knowledge infrastructures addressing these abuses and their legacies.
In the following, we briefly outline this background that serves as a basis for introducing the two processes we proposed to explore in this Cluster: factualization and commensuration of human rights violations and violence. Analyzing what this Cluster was able to encompass, we will end this introduction with a reflection on the lines of research, themes, and problems that remain as future challenges.
how truth, justice, and memory are accomplished, and what societies, communities, and individuals can do to prevent events of this type to ever happen again (Straus and Waldorf 2011).
Without aspiring to exhaustiveness, by reviewing this literature, we identified studies that inquire into the constitution of this type of facts; the practices of documentation, classification, nomination, and quantification by means of which human rights violations come to be described as such and are processed to confront the damage caused, including the circulation of truth accounts, and the irruption of controversies and countermemories around processes of accountability of human rights violations. Research has also been done on the history and role of science and technology in the human rights field, and on the human rights knowledge infrastructures addressing these abuses and their legacies.
In the following, we briefly outline this background that serves as a basis for introducing the two processes we proposed to explore in this Cluster: factualization and commensuration of human rights violations and violence. Analyzing what this Cluster was able to encompass, we will end this introduction with a reflection on the lines of research,
themes, and problems that remain as future challenges.
and the term liminal the subject sustained in society as an effect of successive, contingent and disputed acts. Through archival work and the analysis of textual, graphic and scenic artefacts, the paper traces the citational structure that in the play between biopolitical and resistance forces has sustained the disappeared detainee between 1973 and 1991 in Chile, granting this subject different statuses and capacities.
En el imaginario de los crímenes de las dictaduras sudamericanas la primera imagen es la de los desaparecidos. Desde esta experiencia represiva de los años setenta y ochenta, esta imagen ha circulado y devenido consigna global para la representación política de los crímenes de Estado. A partir del caso chileno, y tomando elementos del enfoque medial, los estudios de la visualidad y la teoría e historia del arte, este artículo aborda la condición específica de esta fotografía como un eslabón de la historia de la representación del rostro humano y como una imagen cuya eficacia retórica también descansa en procesos de editorialización, circulación, selección y enmarcamiento que no han sido tomados en cuenta en los estudios sobre memoria. El trabajo sugiere este contenido invisible que se actualiza cuando la imagen funciona como ícono trasnacional de violaciones a los derechos humanos.
Palabras clave Fotografía; Archivo; Atrocidad; Medialidad; Teoría e historia del arte; Memoria
Abstract
In the imaginary of the crimes of South America dictatorships, the image is, in the first place, that of the disappeared. From this repressive experience of the seventies and eighties, this image has circulated, becoming a global icon for the political representation of state crimes. Taking the Chilean case, and drawing on elements of the medial approach, the studies of visuality and the theory and history of art, this article addresses the specific condition of this photograph as a link in the history of the representation of the human face and as an image whose rhetorical efficacy also rests on processes of editorialization, circulation, selection and framing that have remained disattended in the literature on memory. This paper suggests that this “invisible” content is updated when the image becomes a transnational icon of human rights violations.
Keywords Photograph; Archive; Atrocity; Mediality; Arts theory and history; Memory
El “giro métrico” está configurando el conocimiento, la gobernanza y la política de derechos humanos a nivel global. Este artículo busca contribuir al emergente análisis de los números en materia de derechos humanos desde una perspectiva latinoamericana. Examinamos un fenómeno que es difícil de contar; el número de víctimas de desaparición forzada –esto es, el secuestro y asesinato de personas seguido de la disposición de sus cuerpos– en tres contextos de violencia política institucional en el continente –la dictadura en Chile (1973–1990), el conflicto armado de Colombia (1958–), y las guerras sucias (1964–1998) y narco-conflictos (2002–) de México. Abordando los números como procesos y centrándonos en su vitalidad, mediante análisis de entrevistas, documentos institucionales y archivos, examinamos la trayectoria del número de desapariciones forzadas para explorar su capacidad de movilizar y ser moldeado por asuntos de derechos humanos. La transitividad es crucial en la trayectoria y vitalidad de los números. Desafiando la opinión de que los números solo resultan efectivos cuando se descontextualizan, mostramos que la transitividad es un logro matemático, cognitivo y político e identificamos los efectos en el campo de los derechos humanos de números transitivos pero también de aquellos referenciales y provisionales. En particular, evidenciamos cómo contribuyen al reconocimiento y tratamiento de las violaciones a los derechos humanos, impulsando la producción de regímenes de rendición de cuentas.
Metodología: estudio exploratorio de metodología mixta. Considera un análisis estadístico descriptivo de los fondos documentales donados al Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos según tipo de donante y género; un análisis del perfil, motivación, procedencia y tipo de experiencia relevada en las donaciones de mujeres para proponer una tipología de sus archivos y el análisis de 37 fondos documentales seleccionados para ilustrar dicha tipología.
Resultados: pese a las severas restricciones impuestas por la dictadura al ejercicio de la política, la asociación y la expresión pública, y a los profundos daños que el terrorismo de Estado produjo en el tejido social, los archivos personales revelan el rol fundamental que las mujeres desempeñaron en el campo de la defensa y la promoción de los derechos humanos, y también en el campo político, social y cultural organizado y movilizado contra la dictadura en Chile.
Poniendo los resultados de nuestro estudio a disposición pública a través de este documento de trabajo, buscamos contribuir al fortalecimiento y rol público de los archivos y centros de documentación de derechos humanos y facilitar el uso y apropiación de sus acervos por parte de las víctimas y sus familiares, la política pública, la educación y la ciencia, la sociedad civil, las nuevas generaciones y los futuros públicos.
Research aims and methods
The report ‘Archives of Violence: Case studies from South America’ draws on a research project funded by the British Academy within its Sustainable Development Programme, which intends to work towards fulfilling the UN’s Sustainable Development ambitions. In particular Goal 16, that seeks to promote ‘peaceful, just and inclusive societies including through building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions’, is relevant to the ambitions of this research project. The research was entitled ‘Documentality & Display: Archiving and Curating Past Violence in South America’. The research was conducted in Argentina, Chile and Colombia, and was carried out by a team of four international researchers, led by Professor Vikki Bell. The focus was on three important archives, one in each country, that have documented human rights abuses. In the cases of Argentina and Chile, these archives concern the abuses that occurred immediately before and during military dictatorships that took place in those countries (in Argentina between 1976 and 1983; in Chile between 1973 and 1990). In the case of Colombia, the archive is an institution that has attempted to address the on-going violence of the armed conflict.
The research aims were: first, to share the stories of the origins of these archives, which are distinct in each case, and to offer these histories as ways of understanding the dynamics at stake within and across the three countries; secondly, to explore how the archives have been put to use, with an emphasis on how they have been and continue to be used by legal institutions, as well as their educational and artistic uses; thirdly, to offer recommendations for those who may be considering or in the process of setting up comparable institutions in other countries. To facilitate this, interviewees were asked directly about the challenges that their work had faced, and where relevant, how these challenges had been overcome.
As a sociological project, we mostly employed face to face qualitative interviews with individuals and sometimes small groups. The interviews were semi-structured and in-depth, lasting an average of two hours. In total, 31 individuals were interviewed in 16 interviews. The team also engaged in library-based research, including at the archives themselves. Additionally, there were research trips to other institutions, and the team interviewed other individuals beyond the archives themselves, to give context and to deepen our understanding.
Key findings
The archives each have complex histories entwined with the social and political dynamics of the countries and times in which they have been established. The report takes each archive in turn in order to explain these histories. We adopted this approach in order not to lose the context and the nuances of the stories we gathered at each locale. That said, we can say that there are issues that are shared between all three institutions. These included the following: the importance of ethics and confidentiality; the fragility of the archival institution, at all stages, and in terms of both state and non-state financial support; the complexities of archival systems and the navigation of the materials; the challenges of safety and care for those working at and for these institutions; the issue of how to delimit the archive’s scope with limited resources; the question of how to facilitate and maintain access to the collections; how to preserve vulnerable documents; the question of ownership of the archives; the importance of support networks and relationships with other archives and collecting institutions such as museums; the role of research originating from within the archives; the relationship to users of the archives, including victims’ families, groups and lawyers; the relationship of the archive to law, both its status as an entity in law and as a resource for use within legal cases and processes; the involvement of photographers and artists within and as users of the archives.
The conclusion offers some more general conceptual areas for discussion around the archive, suggesting that the dynamics at stake revolve around key questions that we answer in relation to the three archives. These are: What is an archive? When is an archive? Who owns the archive? Who is the archive for? What is the future of an archive? These questions point to the most important questions that have surrounded, and continue to surround, the conceptualisation and institutionalisation of the archives studied here.
In seeking to offer recommendations that could be useful elsewhere, a list of ‘do’s and don’ts’ in building and archive of violence is offered. These recommendations have been extrapolated from the interviews, that is, they are inspired by them but do not use direct quotations. They are offered here in the hope that they may contain useful advice or spark productive conversations elsewhere.
usuario y usos de archivos de Derechos Humanos en Chile”, es el resultado de un trabajo iniciado en marzo del 2019 en el marco del
Proyecto de Investigación Anillos en Ciencias Sociales SOC 180005
“Tecnologías políticas de la memoria: usos contemporáneos y apropiaciones de los dispositivos de registro de violaciones a los derechos humanos perpetrados por la dictadura cívico-militar en Chile”
desarrollado por la Universidad Alberto Hurtado, la Universidad
Austral de Chile y el Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos.
El propósito general de esta investigación es estudiar la apropiación
y usos actuales de los dispositivos de registro1 de las violaciones de
los derechos humanos cometidas durante la dictadura cívico-militar
en Chile, en el campo de la producción cultural, la educación, los
sitios de memoria y los mecanismos de la justicia transicional.
en América Latina’ se basa en un proyecto de
investigación financiado por la British Academy y su
Programa para el Desarrollo Sustentable, que busca
alcanzar los objetivos de desarrollo sustentable de la
ONU. El objetivo 16, que busca promover ‘sociedades
pacíficas, justas e inclusivas mediante la construcción
de instituciones eficaces, responsables e inclusivas’
es especialmente importante para las metas de este
proyecto de investigación. Esta investigación titulada
‘Documentalidad y exhibición: Archivo y curación del
pasado violento en Suramérica’ fue llevada a cabo en
Argentina, Chile y Colombia, por un equipo
compuesto por cuatro investigadores internacionales,
liderados por la profesora Vikki Bell. El foco estuvo
puesto en tres importantes archivos que han
documentado abusos de los derechos humanos, uno
en cada uno de estos países. En los casos de
Argentina y Chile, se eligieron archivos que
documentaron los abusos ocurridos inmediatamente
antes y durante las dictaduras militares ocurridas en
esos países (en Argentina entre los años 1976 y 1983;
en Chile entre 1973 y 1990). Mientras que, en el caso
de Colombia, el archivo elegido es una institución
que ha intentado abordar la violencia del conflicto
armado que en la actualidad continúa en curso.
Los objetivos que se propuso esta investigación eran
los siguientes: primero, contar las historias de cómo
se originaron estos archivos, las que eran diferentes
en cada caso, y dar cuenta que estas historias
permitían entender las dinámicas que estaban en
juego al interior y que cruzaban a los tres países;
segundo, explorar como han sido utilizados estos
archivos, poniendo énfasis en cómo han sido y como
continúan siendo utilizados por instituciones legales,
como también los usos que se les ha dado en el
campo artístico y educacional; tercero, formular
recomendaciones para quienes estén considerando o
estén en el proceso de poner en marcha
organizaciones similares en otros países. Para facilitar
este proceso, los entrevistados fueron consultados
directamente sobre los desafíos que habían
enfrentado en sus trabajos, y cuando era pertinente,
cómo habían sido superado esos desafíos.
Por su carácter de proyecto sociológico, llevamos a
cabo principalmente entrevistas cualitativas, cara a
cara, con individuos, y en ocasiones con pequeños
grupos. Se realizaron entrevistas semi estructuradas y
en profundidad con una duración promedio de dos
horas. En total, 31 individuos fueron entrevistados en
16 entrevistas. El equipo igualmente llevó a cabo
trabajo de revisión de documentos en la biblioteca, y
en los archivos mismos. Adicionalmente, se realizaron
viajes de investigación para visitar las instituciones
estudiadas, y el equipo entrevistó a otros individuos
que no pertenecían a los archivos para comprender
mejor el contexto y profundizar el conocimiento
sobre el tema.Cada archivo estudiado consta de historias complejas
que se entrelazan con las dinámicas sociales y
políticas de los países en donde se emplazan, y el
momento en que fueron creados. Para poder explicar
estas historias, en presente informe analiza cada uno
de los archivos por separado. Se adoptó este enfoque
para no perder los contextos y particularidades de los
relatos recogidos en cada lugar. Ahora bien, hay
aspectos que son compartidos por las tres
instituciones, entre los que se cuentan: la importancia
otorgada a la ética y la confidencialidad; la
precariedad de la institución archivística, en todas sus
etapas, y en términos de apoyo financiero tanto
público como privado; las complejidades de los
sistemas archivísticos y de navegación para búsqueda
de documentos e información; los desafíos de la
seguridad y el cuidado de quienes trabajan en y para
estas instituciones; el asunto de cómo delimitar el
alcance del archivo con recursos limitados; la
pregunta sobre cómo facilitar y mantener el acceso a
las colecciones; el cómo preservar documentos
vulnerables; la discusión sobre la propiedad de los
archivos; la importancia de las redes de apoyo y las
relaciones con otros archivos e instituciones que
poseen colecciones como los museos; el papel de la
investigación que se origina desde dentro de los
archivos; la relación con los usuarios de los archivos
incluidas las familias de las víctimas, grupos y
abogados; la relación de los archivos con la ley, tanto
en su condición de entidad jurídica como de recurso
para ser utilizado en casos y procesos legales; la
participación de fotógrafos y artistas desde dentro y
como usuarios de los archivos.
La conclusión brinda algunas áreas conceptuales más
generales de discusión en torno al archivo, sugiriendo
que las dinámicas en juego giran en torno a
preguntas claves que respondemos en relación a los
tres archivos. Estas son: ¿Qué es un archivo? ¿Cuando
se hace un archivo? ¿De quién es el archivo? ¿Para
quién es el archivo? ¿Cuál es el futuro de un archivo?
Estas preguntas apuntan a las cuestiones más
importantes que han rodeado y continúan rodeando
la conceptualización e institucionalización de los
archivos aquí estudiados.
En la búsqueda de formular recomendaciones que
pudiesen ser útiles en otras partes, ofrecemos un
listado de ‘qué hacer y qué no hacer’ a la hora de
elaborar un archivo sobre violencia. Estas
recomendaciones han sido extrapoladas de
entrevistas, es decir, están basadas en ellas, pero no
utilizan citas literales. Son entregadas aquí con la
esperanza de que puedan convertirse en consejos
útiles o susciten conversaciones productivas en
otros lugares.
Research aims and methods
The report ‘Archives of Violence: Case studies from South America’ draws on a research project funded by the British Academy within its Sustainable Development Programme, which intends to work towards fulfilling the UN’s Sustainable Development ambitions. In particular Goal 16, that seeks to promote ‘peaceful, just and inclusive societies including through building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions’, is relevant to the ambitions of this research project. The research was entitled ‘Documentality & Display: Archiving and Curating Past Violence in South America’. The research was conducted in Argentina, Chile and Colombia, and was carried out by a team of four international researchers, led by Professor Vikki Bell. The focus was on three important archives, one in each country, that have documented human rights abuses. In the cases of Argentina and Chile, these archives concern the abuses that occurred immediately before and during military dictatorships that took place in those countries (in Argentina between 1976 and 1983; in Chile between 1973 and 1990). In the case of Colombia, the archive is an institution that has attempted to address the on-going violence of the armed conflict. The research aims were: first, to share the stories of the origins of these archives, which are distinct in each case, and to offer these histories as ways of understanding the dynamics at stake within and across the three countries; secondly, to explore how the archives have been put to use, with an emphasis on how they have been and continue to be used by legal institutions, as well as their educational and artistic uses; thirdly, to offer recommendations for those who may be considering or in the process of setting up comparable institutions in other countries. To facilitate this, interviewees were asked directly about the challenges that their work had faced, and where relevant, how these challenges had been overcome. As a sociological project, we mostly employed face to face qualitative interviews with individuals and sometimes small groups. The interviews were semistructured and in-depth, lasting an average of two hours. In total, 31 individuals were interviewed in 16 interviews. The team also engaged in library-based research, including at the archives themselves. Additionally, there were research trips to other institutions, and the team interviewed other individuals beyond the archives themselves, to give context and to deepen our understanding.
Key findings
The archives each have complex histories entwined with the social and political dynamics of the countries and times in which they have been established. The report takes each archive in turn in order to explain these histories. We adopted this approach in order not to lose the context and the nuances of the stories we gathered at each locale. That said, we can say that there are issues that are shared between all three institutions. These included the following: the importance of ethics and confidentiality; the fragility of the archival institution, at all stages, and in terms of both state and non-state financial support; the complexities of archival systems and the navigation of the materials; the challenges of safety and care for those working at and for these institutions; the issue of how to delimit the archive’s scope with limited resources; the question of how to facilitate and maintain access to the collections; how to preserve vulnerable documents; the question of ownership of the archives; the importance of support networks and relationships with other archives and collecting institutions such as museums; the role of research originating from within the archives; the relationship to users of the archives, including victims’ families, groups and lawyers; the relationship of the archive to law, both its status as an entity in law and as a resource for use within legal cases and processes; the involvement of photographers and artists within and as users of the archives. The conclusion offers some more general conceptual areas for discussion around the archive, suggesting that the dynamics at stake revolve around key questions that we answer in relation to the three archives. These are: What is an archive? When is an archive? Who owns the archive? Who is the archive for? What is the future of an archive? These questions point to the most important questions that have surrounded, and continue to surround, the conceptualisation and institutionalisation of the archives studied here. In seeking to offer recommendations that could be useful elsewhere, a list of ‘do’s and don’ts’ in building and archive of violence is offered. These recommendations have been extrapolated from the interviews, that is, they are inspired by them but do not use direct quotations. They are offered here in the hope that they may contain useful advice or spark productive conversations elsewhere.
Palabras clave: comisiones de verdad, infraestructuras de conocimiento, justicia transicional, secreto, residuo, violaciones a derechos humanos.
Silences and Official Truth. Silencing Operations in the Case of Chile’s National Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture
Abstract: This article explores silence as a constitutive and constituent practice of the production of official and state truth regarding serious human rights violations, using the case of Chile as a starting point. We focus, in particular, on Chile’s National Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture (2003-2005), and its counterpart, the Advisory Commission for the Qualification of Disappeared Detainees, Political Executed, and Victims of Political Prisoners and Torture (2010-2011), whose objective was to qualify and repair the victims of the last Chilean civil military dictatorship (1973 and 1990). We discuss four silencing operations in which we identify the ways in which they relate and act in/with different artifacts and procedures of the Truth Commission (TC) device, after addressing its performative capacity on testimony, residual truth, and official truth. This qualitative research included interviews with declarants and ex-officials of the commissions, and professionals of the National Institute of Human Rights, along with a study of secondary sources. Drawing from a post-structuralist theoretical-methodological approach and from the field of science, technology, and society studies, we conduct a rhizomatic analysis and an exercise of infrastructural inversion, focusing on that which is not part of the official truth, or that which is not public and visible. We strive to contribute to the field of study of ecologies of visibility/invisibility in knowledge infrastructures, and to memory and human rights studies. We do this based on a critical reading of the production of truth about human rights violations that, overcoming the dichotomous approach of what is said and not said, proposes that the official truth is not reduced to the information and data collected. Rather, it also includes operations of silencing that provoke actions within the Truth Commission and in its public reception.
Keywords: Human rights violations, knowledge infrastructure, residue, secrecy, transitional justice, truth commissions.
Silêncios e verdade oficial. Operações de silenciamento no caso da Comissão Nacional sobre Prisão Política e Tortura do Chile
Resumo: neste artigo, é explorado o silêncio como prática constitutiva e constituinte da produção de verdade oficial e estatal relacionada a graves violações dos direitos humanos, a partir do caso chileno, em especial, na Comissão Nacional sobre Prisão Política e Tortura do Chile (2003-2005), e sua seguidora, a Comissão Assessora para a Qualificação de Detidos Desaparecidos, Executados Políticos e Vítimas de Prisão Política e Tortura (2010-2011), cujo objetivo foi qualificar e reparar as vítimas da última ditadura militar chilena (1973 e 1990). São analisadas quatro operações de silenciamento nas quais as formas em que estas são relacionadas e atuam são identificadas em/com diferentes artefatos e procedimentos do dispositivo Comissão de Verdade, após abordar sua capacidade performativa sobre o depoimento, a verdade residual e a verdade oficial. Esta pesquisa qualitativa considerou a realização de entrevistas com testemunhas e ex-funcionários/as das comissões e com profissionais do Instituto Nacional de Direitos Humanos, além do estudo de fontes secundárias. A partir de uma abordagem teórico-metodológica pós-estruturalista e do campo de estudos da ciência, da tecnologia e da sociedade, são realizados uma análise rizomática e um exercício de inversão infraestrutural, enfatizando aquilo que não faz parte da verdade oficial ou que não é público e visível. Pretende-se contribuir para o campo de estudo de ecologias de visibilidade/invisibilidade em infraestruturas de conhecimento e para os estudos da memória e dos direitos humanos, por meio de uma leitura crítica da produção de verdade sobre violações dos direitos humanos que, superando a abordagem dicotômica do dito e não dito, propõe que a verdade oficial não se reduza à informação e aos dados coletados, mas sim inclua operações de silenciamento que provocam ações dentro da Comissão da Verdade e em seu acolhimento público.
Palavras-chave: comissões da verdade, infraestruturas de conhecimento, justiça de transição, resíduo, segredo, violações dos direitos humanos.