LA MEMORIA EN LOS TIEMPOS DEL CÓLERA: VERDAD, JUSTICIA, REPARACIONES, Y GARANTÍAS DE NO REPETICIÓN POR LOS CRÍMENES DE LA DICTADURA CHILENA

In recent years, the transitional justice field has tended to expand both the time horizons and the thematic focus of its concerns. Today, it is more likely than previously to address the mid and long-term impacts of the human, social and environmental catastrophes left behind by political violence, human rights violations, and infractions of international humanitarian law. Post-authoritarian Chile has always tended to downplay its truth and justice concerns, or even attempt to declare them a thing of the past. They nonetheless re-irrupt time and again into national public life. The impact of the 1973-90 dictatorship era and its violence is not, moreover, limited to the generations who most visibly or most directly lived through it: it also explains many of today’s social, political and economic faultlines. This year’s report accordingly focuses on the economic, social and cultural rights legacies of the Chilean dictatorship, and on the unfinished business of reparations. It does so at a time when national life is demonstrably under strain, suffering the negative and dangerous consequences of belligerent public discourse that cares little for the truth, and tends toward selective amnesia about the recent past.