Memory & Justice

Memory and Justice: a Brief and Selected History of a Movement

By Louis Bickford and Debra Schultz

© 2009

Introduction

The international human rights movement was still very young when it started grappling with the legacies of past atrocity and human rights abuse. As the emerging global movement began to take shape in the early 1960s,¹ its primary concern was to stop ongoing violations of human rights such as torture, unjust imprisonment, extra-judicial execution, and restrictions of freedom and assembly.

In the 1970s, human rights groups and victims’ associations began to confront harsh dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, among other places, and demanded an end to authoritarian rule and the establishment of democracy. Responding to the fall of authoritarian regimes, activists involved in human rights and democratization movements started to develop a new set of strategies that would focus on accountability for periods of violence and repression in the recent past. They developed programs for confronting the complex legacies of human rights abuse that took place under those former regimes.

At least three important concepts inspired this new direction. The first two were justice and truth, the cornerstones of what civil society organizations such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina were demanding. The third was memory, as activists insisted on not forgetting the atrocities committed in their societies. Both drawing on and reinforcing repertoires from similar movements in other parts of the world – such as the slow emergence in the 1980s of a new wave of questioning the Holocaust in Germany – Southern Cone human rights movements articulated direct linkages between past, present, and future. They called for Nunca Más! (never again) and demanded historical accountability for crimes committed by authoritarian regimes.

A Burgeoning Field

Since the 1980s, when only a small number of organizations and individuals were confronting human rights abuse under prior regimes, the number of institutions working on dealing with the past has grown steadily and exponentially.

Consider the following snapshots:

At the end of military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983, family members of the thousands of people who “disappeared” were calling for truth, memory, and justice in the face of the military regime’s obfuscation, lies, and secrecy. In other countries around the world, human rights and democratization movements did little to try to come to terms with past abuse. On the international level, there was arguably only one report, written by human rights activist Juan Méndez in 1987, then at Americas Watch, that argued in favor of truth and justice for past abuses.²

A quarter century later, by 2008, dozens of NGOs, governmental institutions, university programs, and other organizations around the world have placed an emphasis on dealing with the past as the core of their work, complementing the important findings of other organizations that focus on current violations. These organizations include some of the most vibrant and innovative groups to have emerged in recent years, such as Memoria Abierta (Open Memory) in Argentina; Memorial in Russia; the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) in South Africa; the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) with 10 international offices representing every major world region; and the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, a network of dozens of memory sites around the world.

Dealing with the Past: Latin American Roots

Initiatives in Latin America and especially in the Southern Cone pioneered numerous approaches to dealing with mass atrocity. The drivers of these processes—NGOs, political activists, and governmental institutions—experimented with new ways of resolving what was a very old problem: how to come to grips with the terrible legacies of past societal trauma. They used novel instruments (such as truth commissions, oral history projects, and new forensic anthropology methods) and they enhanced existing methodologies (such as criminal trials, reparations programs, and constitutional reform) in order to do so. These novel approaches became the early elements of an emergent field of activity designed to answer the incidence of mass atrocity with a cry of “never again”. For example, the Vicariate of Solidarity in Chile documented more than 19,000 individual cases of human rights abuse. This information would become essential in future court cases and in the Chilean truth commission’s work.³

In the meantime, the Argentine human rights group Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), one of the organizations that would help define the human rights movement globally and whose work on dealing with the past in Argentina was vitally important, became interested in dealing with the past. In the mid-1980s, international organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and others worked closely with domestic organizations, such as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to focus on the ravages of dictatorship. During this period, the Grandmothers and other groups of victims’ family members worked––in some cases in collaboration with the new democratic government, in other cases as outside voices––to confront the legacies of past abuse.

The work in Argentina to confront past atrocity was groundbreaking; it led to the successful prosecution of former military leaders⁴ and the creation of the most significant early truth commission, the Commission on the Disappeared and Politically Executed (known by its initials in Spanish as the CONADEP). In fact, when the CONADEP began to undertake its work, it relied heavily on the human rights documentation that CELS had done. The Argentine transition also included significant reparations programs for the victims, as well as plans for the reform of institutions under democratic rule. Within civil society, law-based NGOs as well as associations of victims’ families consistently demanded truth, justice, and memory. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team identified the remains of individuals whose cases had been documented by the CONADEP.

In Chile, a democratic transition began in the late 1980s. In many ways significantly different from the Argentine transition, the Chilean experience was characterized by negotiations of a broad democratic opposition that won a plebiscite in 1988 and a return to elected government in 1990. In a context in which prosecutions of the former military rulers appeared dauntingly difficult, the new democratic government established an official commission chaired by Raúl Rettig on truth and reconciliation (1990-1991).

The Rettig Commission used a rigorous methodology to determine who had disappeared and who had been executed for political reasons between 1973 and 1990. The commission (as well as a second truth commission in 2003-2004 called the Valech Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture) relied heavily on the documents archived in the NGOs (including the Vicariate of Solidarity) that had been the core of the opposition movements under dictatorship. This information from within the human rights movement proved crucial since, in contrast to Europe and Japan after World War II, state archives on the previous dictatorship had been destroyed or hidden by the armed forces. Commission members stressed the enormous importance of these NGO records and called them fundamental to their work, even affirming that the commissions could not have completed their missions without the records.⁵ Meanwhile, interesting and inspiring developments around the region were both influencing and being influenced by the developments in the Southern Cone. In Guatemala, for example, two different truth commissions emerged to focus on the legacy of mass atrocity and violence committed during more than a decade of conflict. One of these, the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), was a UN-sanctioned official truth commission (1994-1999). The Catholic Church and affiliated organizations largely ran the other (1995-1998), the Recuperation of Historical Memory Project (REMHI). Both drew heavily on and made fresh contributions to the ideas and priorities being articulated in the Southern Cone about the importance of dealing with the past.

Elsewhere in the world, events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, and the dissolution of the USSR (discussed later) were also contributing to global debates about how to deal with the past.

Human Rights Activism at a Crossroads

As dictatorships ended, giving way to electoral systems, developments in Argentina and Chile posed novel challenges and questions for human rights activists and their supporters globally. On the one hand, the crimes committed by past regimes were horrific, and dealing with the legacies of past abuse seemed essential to building sustainable democracies in the region. On the other hand, even though the dictatorships had ended and state agents no longer terrorized citizens, human rights were far from being guaranteed by the fledgling democracies. How would the human rights movements, based in civil society, deal with ongoing abuse under these new regimes? A core challenge of the human rights movement would be “to understand better how the lingering authoritarian characteristics of transitional democracies are related to their pasts, and how they might be overcome.”⁶

Indeed, one of the ways to combat ongoing abuse would be to confront the legacies of the past. This would also present a key component for the future: In order to build strong democracies based on transparency, accountability, and tolerance, it was important to address the painful and complex legacies of dictatorship. As Martín Abregú, puts it, “It has been argued that working on themes related to the dictatorships in the region was somehow looking backwards, while the challenges in the region were more about the future. But we realized that this was a wrong way to put it … It is clear that to focus on recent history has become a central axis in the construction of deep and stable democracies.”⁷

Activists sought to grapple with these questions which formed the core of, for example, “What Now?” a two-day meeting in Lima in July 1999 of some 50 organizations throughout the region organized by the Legal Defense Institute (IDL) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).⁸

In this context, the Santiago office of the Ford Foundation launched the Historical Memory Initiative, a grant-making and research program that would ultimately involve a combination of grants, foundation-administered projects, and research consultancies focused on making a more in-depth exploration of the relationship between past, present, and future. Its goal was “to facilitate social learning to prevent repetition” of state violence associated with dictatorship and “to draw ongoing lessons useful to creating cultures of human rights.”⁹

In 2003 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), based in Paris, declared that the archives of a number of human rights organizations should be designated as documentary heritage/cultural patrimony within its Memory of the World Program. In designating the Chilean archives, UNESCO said: “The future cannot be built on oblivion, on concealing what has happened. This idea applies to individuals, societies, and humanity. To understand the raison d’être of democracy and respect for human rights, it is necessary to know and remember how the dictatorships functioned.”¹⁰

But these and other documents have had an even more direct impact. When former dictator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in October 1998, the effect was profound, not only in Chile, but also globally. Pinochet’s detention could not have occurred without the documentary evidence collected by Chilean human rights groups and archives.

One dramatic example of the importance of documents involves the National Security Archive (NSA), an NGO based in Washington, D.C., that specializes in U.S. government documents. The NSA’s research leading up to the 25th anniversary of the coup in Chile had unanticipated important results. The archive’s special anniversary Web posting of formerly top secret CIA, National Security Council, and Defense Intelligence Agency records on Pinochet and his repression, coupled with an article by NSA researcher Peter Kornbluh in a Chilean newspaper on the documents, contributed to massive negative publicity that convinced Pinochet’s daughter that he should grant an interview to The New Yorker while he was seeing doctors in London. The publication of the article helped call attention to his presence in Britain. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, the archive’s posting of documents became the single most sought-after and used Internet source of documentation on Pinochet’s human rights violations, with information from the declassified records incorporated into dozens of major newspaper articles around the world.

The NSA’s Chile documentation project became the leading advocate and strategist to force the Clinton administration to release thousands of never-before-seen documents on repression during the Pinochet dictatorship. Archive staff personally delivered the most important of those documents in terms of evidentiary value to judicial authorities in Spain where Pinochet was wanted for killing Spanish citizens in Chile, as well as to judges, lawyers, and victims’ families in his homeland.

Similarly, a project to develop an Internet site in the early days of widespread use also became a vital tool during the Pinochet proceedings both in London and after he returned to Chile. This was the Chile Information Project (CHIP),¹¹ a Web site that included pages on “Chronology of Human Rights in Chile,” “Sites of Memory” (which displayed an interactive map of sites of torture and detention throughout Chile), and “Human Rights Today.” The CHIP project allowed global audiences to quickly access a great deal of information about the dictatorship in Chile at a critical moment.

Projects also emerged in Chile that focused on academic institutions and particularly the discipline of history. The Universidad de Santiago de Chile and its partner, an organization called Education/Communication (ECO), for example, developed municipal histories of repression in a neighborhood of Santiago that the dictatorship had targeted and show the community how to tell its own history of the period. Other projects focused on the discipline of history and the ways in which history, memory, and justice are interwoven. For example, the Ethics Center of the Alberto Hurtado University emphasized the ethical dimensions of history research and teaching in a democratic culture of human rights. The project combined “the need for establishing the truth and of developing a historical consciousness of human rights” with a gender perspective, thus focusing on both “how do we research and write about a troubled recent past in Latin America” and “how do we teach history in Latin America so that it is the history of both men and women.”¹² Similarly, a bilingual electronic publication of 34 major studies on political violence was published under the title “Historicizing the Past in Latin America”, by Dr. Anne Perotin. This electronic publication has further contributed to the ways in which the discipline of history engages with the past in Chile.

One important project in the 1990s was an academic training program run by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for PhD students from Latin America on collective memory and repression in the Southern Cone, coordinated mainly by Professor Elizabeth Jelin of the Economic and Social Development Institute (IDES) in Argentina; Eric Hershberg at the SSRC; Professor Paul Drake, head of the SSRC Joint Committee on Latin American Studies as well as a dean and political scientist at the University of California, San Diego; and Professor Carlos Ivan Degregori of the Institute of Peruvian Studies. Sixty young scholars went through this program, linking it with their on-going doctoral programs at various universities, and went on to build the intellectual underpinnings of what later became known as transitional justice or historical memory.

Dr. Jelin now jokes that she did not go out seeking to start a Latin American field of memory studies. “Memory found me…when the actors in the human rights movement began to talk about it.”¹³ Thirteen books were published as a result of the program (these can be found at the SSRC website), and they have had an impact on the way that universities in Latin America confront the legacies of repression. Graduates have played important roles in subsequent truth commissions, educational reform, human rights NGOs, and public education.¹⁴

In Argentina, similar efforts to understand the past were also emerging, perhaps most clearly in the form of Memoria Abierta (a new NGO), which made efforts to record the social memory of human rights violations as well as the unprecedented movement that arose to protect those rights. Their efforts were meant to address impunity, facilitate social learning to prevent repetition of such traumas, and enhance public recognition of the authoritarian past in order to forge a broader consensus that expressed a shared vision of truth and justice.¹⁵

In fact, the methodologies and practices used by Memoria Abierta for dealing with the past in Argentina—from preserving archives, to opening public spaces to learning based on dialogue, to contributing to the creation of a “memory museum” project—have been revolutionary around the globe in terms of the development of memory and transitional justice work. Memoria Abierta has participated in numerous activities and events in Argentina and abroad, playing a key part in articulating what it means to remember past human rights abuse. As one of the founding members of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience (outlined later) the organization has contributed to the development of sites in places such as Bangladesh, the Czech Republic, Russia, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.

Continued in part 2.

References

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¹ It is possible to tell the story of the global human rights movement in different ways, including dating it back to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society's creation in 1839 (see William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: palgrave Macmillan, 2001), or the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 (see Samuel walker, In Defense of American Liberties, Second Edition: A History of the ACLU. Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). One reasonable place to begin the story, however, is with the founding of Amnesty International that began with a letter written by the group's founder in 1961 (see Margaret E. Keck, Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. New York: Cornell university Press, 1998).

² The report was "Truth and Partial Justice in Argentina," by Juan Mendez for Americas Watch. Additional contextual information provided by Aryeh Neier in an interview conducted on March 7, 2008, at the Open Society Institute in New York. For more information on this interview, see full transcription on file.

³ See Ford Foundation Report, "Forty Years in the Andean and Southern Cone" 2003, p. 37.

⁴ President Carlos Saul Menem later pardoned the junta leaders. But the fact that they were successfully tried in a court of law was of no small significance. See Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1996.

⁵ Peter Winn's Consultancy Report: "Ford Foundation Historical Memory Programming in the Andean Region and Southern Cone, Sept. 30, 2007, p. 6, quoting, respectively, Elizabeth Lira and Jose Zalaquett.

⁶ See Ford Foundation Grant #980-1010, p. 2. For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.

⁷ E-mail correspondence with Martin Abregu, April 15, 2008.

⁸ Alex Wilde, "Reflections on Building the Human Rights Field in Latin America: a discussion document," Nov. 29-30,1999, p. 2.

⁹ Alex Wilde, "Reflections on Building the Human Rights Field in Latin America: a discussion document," Nov. 29-30,1999, p. 2, fn.

¹⁰

¹¹ See Ford Foundation Grant #990-0297. For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.

¹² Grant proposal materials, available in Ford Foundation archives.

¹³ Interview with Elizabeth Jelin, March 13, 2008, at the International Center for Transitional Justice, New York, p. 4. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.

¹⁴ Peter Winn's Consultancy Report: "Ford Foundation Historical Memory programming in the Andean Region and Southern Cone," Sept. 30, 2007, p. 3.

¹⁵ See Ford Foundation Grant #1005-0337, p. 2. For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.