The truth as a road: truth commissions in Latin America

Abstract

Many countries in the world, especially in Latin America, Asia and Africa, have been going through difficult process in the last decades - dictatorships and armed conflicts - that generated the systematic and widespread perpetration of serious human rights violations. And several of these nations have implemented a Truth Commission in their transitional processes towards the consolidation of the post-conflict or democracy, in order to settle accounts with that violent past. It is the historical memory that is built there and that seeks to leave behind a complicated period to give way to a new type of State.

This article seeks to review the various Truth Commissions in Latin America, proposing a classification of them in terms of the great challenges they had to face to fulfill their mission, which is valid in the sense that these instances constitute the closest references of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition that is working today in Colombia and which aims to lead to “a route to permanently close the armed conflict and leave to the new generations a nation in which human dignity can be lived together and respected”.

The methodology addressed here is that of the Case Study, within the framework of the Comparative Method. The choice of qualitative analysis based on the comparative method is based on concepts expressed by specialists such as the English Tom Mackie and David Marsh, who support the importance of comparing political phenomena between two or more study units, as it is practically impossible in research social, use a perfectly controlled experimental design, with exact variables.