Trente ans et douze commissions de la vérité en Amérique latine, 1984-2014

• Main Author: Anne Pérotin-Dumon
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Université d'Aix-Marseille 2021-02-01
• Series: Cahiers d’Études Romanes
• Subjects: Truth Commissions; Human Rights; Victims; Women; Latin America
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesromanes/10779

During her years teaching in Chile, 1993-2008, historian Anne Pérotin-Dumon contributed to developing the disciplinary field of historia reciente (as it is called in Latin America), or histoire du temps présent. In this article she gives a first historical reading of the dozen truth commissions in Latin America since 1984 – official national inquiries investigating massive regime violence and internal conflicts that affected their societies during the second half of the 20th C. In 2016 Colombia established the 13th such body; its work is ongoing. In her analysis Pérotin addresses basic questions about how these commissions did their work and coped with their impossibly ambitious missions, about what they borrowed from and contributed to the international human rights movement, and about how – sustained by the search for truth – these different bodies evolved and innovated over these 30 years of history.