Terror, Memory, and Archives

Abstract

Taking into account the efforts to declassify the records currently subject to the secrecy rule, itself established by the same statute that put in place the so-called ‘Valech Commission’, the paper analyses the significance of the archives that document the suffering resulting from the criminal violence exercised by the Chilean civilian-military dictatorship from the perspective of a potential constitution-making process. To this end, it is argued that the display of that violence should be understood as an aggression against the people, which rests upon a specifically democratic reinterpretation of the concept of human rights violations. After sketching an argument directed at demonstrating the radical insufficiency of the bare expedient to law’s application for the political overcoming of the past marked by terror, the notion of memory is brought into consideration. The central claim then made is that the records documenting the victims’ experiential memory of violence are essential for the construction of a collective memory which may come to express itself in a constitutional reversion of the re-foundational pretension which animated the display of the dictatorial terror.