This book is the outcome of a three-year international research project funded by the Latin America Programme of the Research Council of Norway, entitled ‘Reconceptualising Transitional Justice: The Latin American Experience’. The project, anchored at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Bergen, Norway, has been overseen by a three-part consortium consisting of the CMI, the University of Oslo, and the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. Four more Latin American institutional partners have been part of this project from the start: Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) in Argentina; Instituto de Democracia y Derechos Humanos, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (IDEHPUCP); Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Guatemala; and Dejusticia in Colombia. We have also been fortunate to work with individual researchers from Brazil, Colombia, Italy, and Spain.
All 13 authors contributing to this volume have experienced or encountered, directly or at one remove, the hardships of dictatorship and internal armed conflict and the challenges of transition to democracy and peace in Latin America. They bring different disciplinary backgrounds and country expertise to the project of examining developments in transitional justice. Using a comparative approach, they have tracked trajectories in truth-finding, justice, reparations, and amnesties in nine Latin American countries emerging from periods of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
Completing this book has been a long journey, with many actors involved. In addition to the institutional partners and authors, the volume editors have worked closely with a vibrant and enthusiastic project reference group consisting of Leigh Payne, Catalina Smulovitz, Chandra Lekha Sriram, Hugo van der Merwe, and Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm. The process started with a brainstorming session on the impact of transitional justice held at Solstrand outside Bergen, among fjords and mountains, in September 2011. During an exciting intellectual exchange over several days, we decided to move away from our original concern with the impact of transitional justice on democracy and peace in favour of a focus on the more immediate consequences of transitional justice. This led us to an ‘accountability’ approach, which we hope represents a novel way of understanding and comparing the depth and significance of transitional justice processes across countries and over time. We want to thank all the chapter authors, as well as our reference group members present at the Solstrand workshop, for valuable input in hammering out the concept of accountability used in this volume. We also thank Knut Andreas O. Lid and Stener Ekern, initially part of the project, for their input at the workshop. A big thank you to Natalia Flórez Mejía for helping us organise the Solstrand event.
After a year of collecting data and working on the nine country chapters, the authors gathered once again in Santiago in November 2012 to present empirical findings and analysis. The central question of concern was how to compare the very different country experiences. This is where the ideas arose for the transitional justice graphs and accountability triangles, two of the visual representations used in this volume. We warmly thank the Human Rights Observatory (now Transitional Justice Observatory) team at the Universidad Diego Portales, particularly Florencia González and Boris Hau, for their hospitality and for making the Santiago meeting a memorable experience.
Chapter drafts were presented at several conferences and benefited from participants’ insightful comments. We thank panel members at the Latin American Studies Association congresses in San Francisco in 2012 and Chicago in 2014, as well as the European Consortium for Political Research conference in Bordeaux, France, in 2013.
Catalina Vallejo provided research assistance in preparing the section on the inter-American system in Chapter 1. For valuable comments on the theoretical framework, we are grateful to Juan Ochoa, Leigh Payne, Clara Sandoval, and Rachel Sieder. We would like to particularly thank Catalina Smulovitz and Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, who followed the project from its inception and provided critical input on several chapters, including the theoretical framework and the conclusions. We also thank three anonymous reviewers at Routledge for their constructive comments on the initial manuscript.
Many people helped us develop the country trajectories presented here, adding rigour and rich country detail. Heartfelt thanks to all who commented on drafts of the country chapters or worked as research assistants or translators: Mariel Alonso, Natalia Bermudez Qvortrup, Pelao Carvallo, Stener Ekern, Gabriela Fried, Boris Hau, Marcos Iglesias, Roberto Marcondes Cesar Jr., Soledad Pache, Leigh Payne, Andrea Rocha, Oliver Rogers, Luis Roniger, Elizabeth Salmón, Clara Sandoval, Rachel Sieder, Catalina Smulovitz, Catalina Vallejo, and Peter Winn.
We warmly thank the always helpful CMI administrative staff for providing important support functions throughout the project period: Steinar Hegre, Merete Leby, Reidunn Ljones, Guri Stegali, and Hong Kim Tran. CMI staff Marianne Skjold Ovaldsen, Pernille Jørgensen, and (especially!) Lars Ivar Høberg and Aksel Mjeldheim assisted us in the arduous task of preparing the accountability triangles and accountability graphs: thank you! Thanks to Howard Cooke for preparing the index. Our editorial assistant at Routledge, Laura Anne Muir and our project manager, Rebecca Willford have been helpful and accommodating in the process of preparing this book for publication. Our greatest gratitude is extended to our editorial magician, Cathy Sunshine, whose skill and professionalism helped us harmonise 13 different voices into a coherent publication. Any remaining errors are, of course, the authors’ responsibility.
We hope the book will be useful to scholars and practitioners in the fields of human rights, transitional justice, area studies, and peacebuilding, and that the ideas presented here will help advance the debate on how transitional justice may contribute to accountability for past human rights violations.
Elin Skaar, Jemima García-Godos, and Cath Collins
Bergen, Oslo, Ulster, and Santiago
September 2015