Transitional Justice Archives

Latin America has amassed comprehensive expertise in generating, managing, and providing access to archives documenting widespread human rights violations. This book explores and traces the multiple pathways that led to the creation and production of transitional justice archives in selected Latin American countries. Examining how transitional justice mechanisms have gathered and organised evidence by way of comparing traditional methods used in previous cases with the innovations introduced by digital technologies, the work also shows that the methods used to produce and create transitional justice archives will significantly affect their future utilisation.

Presenting the viewpoints of archivists, scholars, and professionals engaged in truth commissions and trials, it incorporates perspectives from diverse fields such as law, human rights, archival studies, history, anthropology, and criminology. The volume is divided into two parts. The first focuses on case studies from Argentina, Chile and Peru. Argentina and Chile have played a leading role in the development, management, and accessibility of extensive records documenting human rights abuses that occurred during the dictatorships in both countries. In the second part, academics and professionals of the Integrated System for Peace, Colombia's most recent transitional justice framework, discuss current challenges and developments in building the archives of the ongoing transitional justice process.

This book will be of significant interest to researchers and academics of transitional justice and human rights, as well as archivists and historians specialising in human rights.

Introduction: Transitional Justice Archives: Documenting Human Rights Violations in Latin America

Part I
Chapter 1. From a Dangerous to a Usable Past
Chapter 2. The Archives about the System of Forced Disappearance of Persons in Argentina
Chapter 3. The Impact and Role of the Truth Commission Archives in Chile
Chapter 4. The Exhibition of Court Records at the Museum of Memory in Chile: When Law Meets Memory
Chapter 5. The Documentation Unit at The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

Part II
Chapter 6. The Role of Transitional Justice Archives in Supporting Justice, Reconciliation, and Memory in Colombia
Chapter 7. The Documentary Collection of the Truth Commission of Colombia: An Unprecedented Experience in Transitional Justice Archives
Chapter 8. The Precautionary Measures of the JEP and the DAS Archives: Fostering Public Dialogue on the Role of Secret Archives in the Colombian Armed Conflict
Chapter 9. Traces of Disappearance: A Groundbreaking Archive of Transitional Justice, from Investigation to Exhibition