Historicizing Recent Times

To most contributors, the proximity of events in time meant their closeness to them and writing on recent times implied historicizing one’s own past. This is often explicitly assumed. As Luis Alberto Romero warns at the beginning of his account of the economic crisis of 2001–2002, “there is a strong generational imprint [here], since I intensely lived three [previous] experiences: the mobilization and violence of the 1960s and 70s; the repression carried out by [the military dictatorship of] the Proceso; and the construction of democracy in 1983” quoted in the introductory essay.¹ And it is his own memories as a child growing up during the Dictatorship that are the starting point of Manuel Gárate’s study, “La Michita (1964–1983)”. Romero and Gárate are explicit about how their own experience and that of their generation shape their perspective, but it is a theme running through many other chapters. It is a basic tension inherent in the writing of recent history between a strong, personal identification and existential relationship with the period studied and a requirement of critical, intellectual distance if that time is to be properly historicized.

The book introduction discusses how this tension raises challenges to attaining critical historical distance. Several contributors address it directly. “What happens when it is our living experience we try to explain as historian and anthropologist?” wonders Peruvian anthropologist Pablo Sandoval at the beginning of “University Youth and Political Violence in Peru,” which examines a massacre by state forces at a university that had been taken over by the Shining Path. Chilean historian Mario Garcés, who lived through the Allende years (1970–1973) and the dictatorship, provides a practical answer: try to understand why things happened the way they did and not how we should have done otherwise.

Besides the issues around taking distance, many chapters also convey a sense of urgency—a felt imperative to explain past events that were manipulated or concealed at the time and that raise morally disturbing issues. Romero writes of this urgent need for answers to “questions born of our own anguished, confused experience.”² People want to know now and we are among them, these scholars seem to say.

One way to begin making sense of recent violence is to see it in the broader picture of the country’s history. In “Time of Fear (1980–2000),” U.S. historian Peter Klarén locates Peru’s most recent period of violence within the longer trajectory of its colonial and national history, comparing it to earlier major outbreaks of violence. But how do we know something is safely “behind,” no longer part of the current events studied by social scientists as they unfold? Between present and recent past, the line is often blurred, which makes study of recent history a multidisciplinary enterprise. A third of the contributors to Historizar are social scientists—sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists.

To trace the emergence of a historical process, some have gone back to the 1960s and 1970s. One notable example is anthropologist Carlos Iván Degregori in “Why Did Shining Path Appear in Ayacucho?” He traces the roots of the Maoist insurgency to a successful four-month strike in 1969 of students, parents, and teachers at a colonial-era university in a poor and marginalized region of the Andes, where a partially failed education reform led peasants to invest heavily in their children’s education and conferred prestige on the mestizo (mixed-blood) provincial middle class. University students directed by a charismatic professor, Abimael Guzmán, asserted control over the strike and a decade later would unleash a bloody armed conflict that would largely determine the dynamics of the following twenty years.

Another telling examination of the origins of political unrest in the 1960s is historical sociologist Mauricio Chama’s “Mobilization and Politicization”. Chama explains how a generally conservative legal profession took part in the political radicalization that swept Argentine society in that decade. A series of political coups marked the deterioration of institutional channels of protest and made illegal violence look like a normal way to confront the regime. In this context he demonstrates how a group of defense lawyers who took up the defense of political prisoners gradually moved toward actively assisting those opposing the regime with violence.

Not surprisingly, historians such as Romero also pay particular attention to this same period as a way to interpret subsequent developments during the military dictatorship (the Proceso) initiated in 1976. “In my opinion,” he explains in “Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Argentina,” “that episode is inseparable from what immediately preceded it, running from approximately 1969 to 1976, in which the use of political violence became normal and in a certain way accepted by a good part of society.”

The issue of sources is paramount to any historian. Recent history has to reckon with the fact that access to archives is usually delayed and often partial. Historical truth is always subject to the limitations of what is available to the researcher at the time, which makes interpretations of recent events particularly susceptible to revision as new sources become available. In “Anatomy of a Death,” Kenneth Serbin, a U.S. specialist on the Brazilian Church, provides an example about the military dictatorship (1964–1985). In a recently opened private archival collection, Serbin found records of regular high-level meetings between officials of the military dictatorship and the Catholic Church. Although Brazilian prelates had won national and international renown for denouncing the regime’s violations of human rights, these new sources modified understanding of Church–State relations in important ways, revealing the parallel secret dialogues through which Catholic leaders made their views known and sought common ground.

The use of oral sources is a well-established practice in the social sciences, but historians—who viewed their discipline as a conversation with the dead—long relied on written documents. This disciplinary division, however, has diminished with the turn to historical study of the recent past. Half of the articles in this publication use oral sources, and in doing so, scholars legitimate living witnesses in the writing of national history. But as described in the introduction to Historizar, many authors also encountered difficulties with such sources in societies still saturated with private memories of violence. One of these was a reticence to speak and relive painful personal experiences or to put themselves or others at risk. In a poor neighborhood of Santiago supportive of Allende, Garcés found this fear among those who had witnessed the violence unleashed by the military coup of September 11, 1973. “Breaking silence has been one of the greatest challenges of this research; fear, plastered on their skin, is perhaps one of the main legacies of the authoritarian experience,” he writes in “September 11, 1973 in La Legua.” In Peru where violence struck Andean Quechua and Aymara-speaking peasant communities disproportionally, anthropologists encountered this silence compounded by cultural and linguistic differences. Political scientist Katherine Hite addresses the disconnect between private memories and public policy in her analysis, “Overcoming Official Silence in Port-Authoritarian Chile.”

Distance in time seems to encourage those who have lived events to speak. This has proved true with the last witnesses of World War II in continental Europe. But consider a different European case much closer to Latin America’s recent history: the Ardoyne Commemorative Project described by sociologist Patricia Lundy and historian Mark McGovern, which deals with a single town in Northern Ireland devastated by bloody conflict over the past three decades of the 20th century. It took a remarkable effort by researchers to overcome an initial silence among residents, gain their trust, and make oral sources an important part of uncovering the historical truth of what had happened there. They eventually gathered 300 testimonies from families, friends, and witnesses in a study with the revealing title, of “Inside Silence.”

Collective Memory from a Historical Perspective

At the time Historizar was prepared, the concept of collective memory was emerging in Latin America as a way to understand how a violent past might shape transitions from dictatorship to democracy. In Latin America, as elsewhere, the study of memory was from the beginning a multidisciplinary enterprise where the past and present met. It asked who recalls what happened and also what their memories tell us about their society; it asked what has remained of those memories over time and how they continued to live on in people’s minds. Collective memory bears some relationship to past events and is in that sense a dimension of history, but at the same time it also encompasses the meaning of the past to a society in retrospect.

Several chapters of Historizar capture other dimensions of collective memory in a historical perspective. In “Malvinas”, historian Federico Guillermo Lorenz examines the changing representations of the war his country fought with the British in 1982 over the remote Malvinas (Falklands) Islands in the southern Atlantic. More specifically, he looks at how veterans of that war were perceived in Argentina between 1982 and 1987, the years of the dictatorship’s collapse and the return of democratically elected government. His piece vividly captures the confusing counterpoint of the period: while the searing Nunca Más report of Latin America’s first truth commission (known by its initials in Spanish as CONADEP) and the trial of Junta members made public the atrocities of internal military repression, the war heroes of Malvinas were turned into victims of the incompetence of military leaders and then marginalized as inconvenient reminders that the Junta had launched the war to legitimate themselves in power and had been rewarded with massive public support until it ended in defeat.³

“Irruptions of Memory”, by political scientist Alexander Wilde, focuses on the peculiar way the Allende years and the Pinochet dictatorship made their presence felt in Chilean politics and society during the first decade of democracy’s return. By the mid-1990s, notes the author, an official “conspiracy of consensus” seemed to muffle conflicting memories of the past. Yet public events—such as the discovery of the human remains of the “disappeared”—would “break in upon Chile’s national consciousness, unbidden and often suddenly, to evoke associations with symbols, figures, causes, ways of life that were to an unusual degree related to a political past still present in the lived experience of an important part of the population. Irrupting in the normal course of politics, disturbing bargaining over budgets and public policies,” these episodes of “memory” momentarily monopolized congressional debates and media attention. The article, which initially appeared in English (1999), provided the first interpretation of how Chile’s collective memory of the recent past manifested itself in the decade after democratic transition.⁴ Later, Pinochet’s long detention in London (1998–2000) proved to be a mega-irruption that turned into a redefining watershed after which memory of what had happened would not be confined to erratic, periodic reappearances of various symbols of the past.

Other contributors have taken a longer view in time. As discussed in the introductory chapter to Historizar, Las ardientes cenizas del olvido, by U.S. political scientist Brian Loveman and Chilean psychologist Elizabeth Lira, is a comprehensive study of the political amnesties granted by the Chilean parliament since 1932.⁵ The authors show that what had been an established practice to erase inconvenient memories of domestic political conflicts failed when the amnesty granted by Pinochet in 1978 ran into the resistance of a civil society organized to defend human rights. The stubborn insistence of human rights defenders on truth and justice would lead over the course of several decades to hundreds of judicial enquiries and trials for major violations of human rights that by international legal norms were excluded from statutes of limitation.

“Conflicts of Memory in Argentina”, by sociologist HugoVezzetti, focuses on the years following the dictatorship when Argentine society repudiated its immediate past and a new social memory was born with the advent of democracy. Although the stories that condensed the past for that society in 1984 were framed in different ways, they reflected a broad consensus condemning the human rights violations revealed by the official CONADEP truth commission and the trials of Junta leaders. Vezzetti contrasts this new regime of memory with that of the 1960s. This was a period that rejected the past—the traditions and experiences of an alleged common national history—in the name of a revolutionary myth that produced a formidable reorientation toward the future.

Peter Winn’s perceptive comment that historical study of memory is still “in its infancy” in “The Past is Present: History and Memory in Contemporary Chile” is as true of Argentina and Peru as it is of Chile. Collective memory remains an elusive reality we can only demonstrate on the basis of its social manifestations, as signs and symptoms, or syndromes, as French historian Henry Rousso put it. The authors who use it in Historizar have added to the existing list of symptoms, as has U.S. historian Steve Stern with Remembering Pinochet’s Chile (discussed in Winn’s and the editor’s chapters), which offers a typology of four “emblematic narratives” of the Chilean coup captured by the author in 1996 (the “ethnographic present,” as he describes it).⁶

The example of Stern reminds us that collective memory is not fixed but changes over time, a mutability that further challenges a fully historical perspective. Ideally, the historian would like to see turning points in memory, with remembrances before and others after. Writing on the “irruptions of memory” in Chile in 1998, Wilde was fortunate to live through the chain of events triggered by Pinochet’s detention in London in that year and to observe firsthand the watershed it created in the public expression of the past. His subsequent article, “A Season of Memory” captures the important changes that occurred in memory in the subsequent decade.⁷ Lorenz, who carried his research on changing Malvinas memory some twenty years beyond 1987, was rewarded when the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conflict marked a similar watershed. His book, Las guerras por Malvinas, captures the “re-encounter” between ordinary citizens and Malvinas veterans hitherto divided by divergent memories, the beginning of a process giving the war a fuller, more comprehensive place within national history.⁸ But human events have their own capricious rhythms that do not always produce readily intelligible “seasons of memory.”

Historiographies of 20th-Century Violence as a Reference

Some of the methodological points raised by Latin Americans in Historizar have parallels to issues that their European counterparts have reflected upon in their own research on a violent recent past. The volume’s introductory chapter identifies a number of similarities between the two groups that seem to point toward common purposes, stakes, and concerns, notwithstanding their different historiographical traditions and circumstances.

Among European historians of a violent 20th century, the French have particularly given thought to historicizing events still part of social consciousness and memory. Among them is Henry Rousso, a former director of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, whose seminal studies still await Spanish translation: Le syndrome de Vichy, 1944–1987 and Vichy, l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire, a collection of his major works published over twenty years.⁹ His chapter in Historizar, “The Trajectory of a Historian of the Present,” is a kind of intellectual biography that vividly captures what made Rousso rethink his priorities as a historian, and in the process articulate with others the character and challenges of histoire du temps présent. He retraces the steps that led first to the writing of Le syndrome de Vichy. His initial terrain, he tells us, was the political and economic history of the Vichy regime, but—intrigued by how the past of Vichy became part of the present in France despite the passage of forty years—he redirected his research toward collective memory of the era. “Vichy” came for him to include not only Pétain’s regime during World War II but also its evolution in French recollections and representations through subsequent decades, or, as he put it, “Vichy after Vichy.” In the 1970s, when Vichy reappeared in the media and public opinion, “I tried […] to understand what that presence meant and to place myself as a historian and a citizen facing these permanent reappearances of the past. What had been a digression became the central question: the survival of Vichy in French consciousness.”

More than seventy years have elapsed since the end of World War II, yet in Europe its memory does not seem to “go away.” Many countries regard the period as having defined “their times” and have found its moral complexity central to their collective identities. In this respect, European scholarship might help Latin Americans chart a route to the moment when the past comes to be felt distant to younger generations, to whom it speaks mainly for its historical and moral complexity. Poland is a case in point: it is a former socialist country in which the experience of Jews and their relationship to Catholics during World War II has in the past decade sparked a spate of widely read and debated new works. Jan Gross, whose Neighbors on the destruction of a Jewish community in Poland is a notable example of the genre, illustrates this phenomenon in “Blinded by Social Distance,” which examines how the Jewish issue elided in the historiography of postwar Poland.¹⁰

German historians who have significantly revised the understanding of Nazism and World War II are also an important presence and influence in Historizar, as explained in its introduction. When Martin Broszat wrote "A Plea For the Historicization of National Socialism" in 1985, Nazism was as distant to Germans in time as the dictatorship of the military juntas is to Argentines today.¹¹ His well-known essay argues that the Third Reich should be studied as a "normal" period of German history, a task Broszat and his colleagues were carrying out at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) with research on the social history of ordinary life in Nazi Germany.

“War, Genocide, Extermination,” by historian Michael Geyer, is an example of this revisionist German historiography and draws on other works, especially in German, published in the previous ten years (including his own research on specifically military aspects of the period). Geyer argues that war and extermination—often treated as separate topics—are best understood as a single complex phenomenon in which a demented Nazi ideology of ethnic purity was combined with the organization of an empire of “security” for the Reich through the use of limitless terror, confinement, and elimination of its enemies. These two forces came together with devastating effect in Poland, he argues, and then into the Soviet Union, where “the policy of ethnic cleansing and transfer of populations once again singled out the Jews as the first and foremost target.” In his account, the genocide perpetrated during World War II appears as the climax of the cycle of extreme violence running throughout 20th-century Europe—a position that has sparked substantial ongoing controversy, particularly regarding the specificity of the Holocaust.

The section “Truth, Justice and Memory” in Historizar highlights major scholarly contributions to the study of collective memory and recent history. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) was becoming a key reference in Latin America at the time of our project. His most important theoretical work, La mémoire collective, is not always easy to grasp and his analysis is often misread.¹² (The work was left unfinished and its Spanish translation, based on a faulty 1950 French edition, was only corrected with the authoritative version in France in 1997.) A specialist on Halbwachs with important works of her own on collective memory, French sociologist Marie-Claire Lavabre both synthesizes and clarifies Halbwachs’ central intuition—that individuals are only able to remember by recourse to common markers—dates, places, names, etc.—and that in using them, individuals experience being part of social groups. In Lavabre’s brilliant summation in “Maurice Halbwachs and the Sociology of Memory,” “collective memory is no longer a sociological abstraction or a metaphor to get at the idea that a society or a group remembers, commemorates its past, and celebrates its identity. It becomes the fundamental reality. It is not group memory, that is to say, collective memory patterned after the model of individual memory, nor is it the sum of individuals’ memories. It is, rather, the very condition that makes individual remembrances possible. And, as such, it fulfills a social function of integration.”

Paul Ricoeur has been another major reference in Latin America in conceptualizing the relationship of memory to history, especially following the Spanish translation of La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli.¹³ In addition to phenomenological and ethical analysis, the French philosopher conducts a dialogue with historians through the entire book on the epistemological issue of knowing the truth. Ricoeur’s contribution to Historizar “History and Memory” magnificently condenses this dialogue around how historians draw from others’ memory to explain the past. History and memory, he points out, are two ways of representing the past—one through scholarly reconstitution and the other through remembrance. This raises questions, he says, about how the unreliability of memory can be reconciled with historians’ commitment to truth and how they can keep their promise of a true account of what has happened. Ultimately, the philosopher exhorts historians to trust their capabilities to adequately represent past realities, that through reason one can know the past and not simply produce discourse about it. That is based on our consciousness of our own lives as time lived—the past did exist. It is this personal experience of “having been” that can give us our convictions about “that which once was.”

The theme of memory versus historical knowledge is also addressed by U.S. historian John W. Dower in “Three Narratives of our Humanity”. His subject is the public battle—fifty years later—over an exhibition in Washington, DC by the Smithsonian Institution about the climactic end to World War II in the Pacific. Curators hoped to encourage reconsideration of its significance in light of current historical scholarship and a half-century of diverse opinions but were met by fierce opposition from veterans’ associations and conservative members of Congress. A more critical, complex view of past events that included moral considerations lost out to an anodyne, celebratory memory of patriotic military action. From this vivid public conflict between collective memory and history, Dower discerns competing U.S. and Japanese narratives (“Hiroshima as Triumph” vs. “Hiroshima as Victimization”) and then offers a third (“Hiroshima as Tragedy”) that makes room for the “other,” something incompatible with the other two. It might have featured both the bravery of the pilots on their dangerous mission and the sufferings of the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki while also presenting, in light of current knowledge, possible alternatives to dropping the bomb, moral reservations expressed at the time, and Allied commitments regarding Japan. This narrative would have illuminated a central truth of World War II, the bombing of civilian populations—a collective failure, Dower believes, of all parties to the conflict.

Human Rights and Social Relevance of Recent History

The organized defense of human rights was a critical part of Latin America’s recent past, in contrast to its own earlier, often violent history and Europe’s experience during World War II. As used here, “human rights” refers to civil society organizations and government mechanisms of transitional justice, both dealing with the past, as well as to the moral principles inspiring them, embodied in a vast corpus of international legal norms with a specialized terminology. Historizar illustrates various ways in which the world and culture of human rights broadly speaking have informed an incipient recent history and charged it with social significance.

Although Latin American universities had not encouraged research and teaching of recent history, young scholars acquired a range of professional skills—for example, interviewing witnesses, doing archival research, processing data, preparing guides to museums and memorials, and conducting training workshops for history teachers—all derived from working with nongovernmental human rights organizations and official bodies concerned with transitional justice. This has been the experience of a majority of Latin American contributors to the publication. The book introduction points to parallel professional experiences earlier in Europe, such as that acquired by German historians at the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, active between 1958 and 1986, which shaped the research done subsequently by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, already mentioned.

Beyond professional skills, such work also brought young researchers close to the human tragedies caused by violence, an existential dimension that became integral to their historical research. One telling example is “Family, Culture, and Revolution,” by Peruvian anthropologist Ponciano del Pino, which originated in work with a humanitarian organization to rescue Asháninka indigenous communities that had fled from a zone controlled for five years by the Shining Path. Del Pino particularly remembered one group of 200 people, 80 percent of them children and women, who were found in a miserable state, all malnourished and ill, and their fate in human terms is an inseparable element of his larger analysis.

Participation in the official investigative truth commissions that marked this period of Latin American history had a major influence on other contributors to Historizar (which provides live links to truth commission reports). These commissions aimed to establish the occurrence of serious human rights violations and a precise historical record of what has happened. Their reports are the first authoritative accounts of the violence based on evidence and as such become a reference for all subsequent historical research. Following earlier commissions in Argentina and Chile, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001–2003) represented an unprecedented multidisciplinary effort of this kind, with a staff of lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians working with commissioners who themselves often had well-established expertise on the armed conflict. The pieces by Peruvians in this publication owe much to the numerous fresh insights of the commission and the major responsibilities they carried in its work. A notable example is the chapter by sociologist Nelson Manrique, “Thought, Praxis, and Political Foundations of the Sendero Luminoso Movement (1964–1983),” which is based on some fifty hours of interviews with jailed Sendero leader Abimael Guzmán that he conducted jointly with Iván Hinojosa, head of the historians’ team.

The Guatemalan Commission of Historical Clarification (1997–1999), which immediately preceded that of Peru, was the first in Latin America to include historians. In “The Experience of a Historian on the Guatemalan Commission of Historical Clarification,” Arturo Taracena describes internal differences within the commission, based in divergent disciplinary perspectives, which eventually led to a fruitful multidimensional account. While anthropologists focused on the appalling violence experienced by rural indigenous groups in the period after 1979, historians also considered the earlier expansion of the guerrilla insurgency and the initial stages of the armed conflict (1962–1978). There were no precedents, Taracena recognizes, for constructing such a historical narrative: “We had to use our creativity and intuition. (…) From the beginning we were barraged with questions such as, how should we balance the weight of collective memory against that of individual actors? How should we deal with the existing theses [interpretations] that attempted to explain almost four decades of civil war solely on the basis of the bellicose spirits of the army and guerrillas, or the evil of the CIA?” Working toward answers to these questions required them to begin historicizing Guatemala’s violence, putting it into historical time.

Taracena also reflects on his personal responsibility to help build a bedrock of historical truth about decades of political violence and up to 200,000 dead. “It seemed to me that in that context,” he writes, “I could and should accept the challenge of participating as both a professional and as a citizen. I [don’t] want to hide the difficulties of carrying out this work [as a professional] given my past as an activist, which conditioned and [still] conditions my interpretation of the events.” This was not a university research project that he had chosen to undertake but rather “something I did because of my duty as a citizen in a very special political context.”

Echoing other authors in this section of Historizar on “Recent History and Social Responsibility,” Peruvian lawyer Julissa Mantilla Falcón explains that “We found ourselves in an institution with a great responsibility on our shoulders, with a challenging mandate, […] with a difficult task to carry out in a short period of time (…); topics and situations came up unexpectedly.” In “Without Women’s Truth, History will be Incomplete,” she describes how her team in Peru’s Commission of Truth and Reconciliation worked to make sure that women as well as men were incorporated into the historical truth established by the commission’s report.