Human Rights Review (2021) 22:253–278

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-021-00626-0

Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial

Relationship

Anita Ferrara1

Accepted: 18 June 2021 / Published online: 23 July 2021

© The Author(s) 2021

Abstract
The article, through the case study of Chile, explores the interconnections between
archives, human rights and transitional justice. Chile represents a unique case glob-
ally for the early creation of thousands of records documenting the human rights
violations committed under Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. In post-Pinochet Chile,
the human rights archives have provided extremely important sources of evidence
that have proven crucial in the development of transitional justice mechanisms.
Truth commissions have, in turn, created their own archives, which have strongly
contributed to later processes of reparation, justice and memory. The article aims
to develop a better understanding of the multiple roles that archives have played as
tools for achieving truth, justice and reparation over the long transitional period in
Chile. The article argues that a combination of several factors and the intervention
of different actors led to the archives having a significant impact in the development
of subsequent transitional justice mechanisms.

Keywords Archives and transitional justice · Source of evidence · Archives and

memory · Transitional justice in Chile · Memory struggle

Introduction

The relationship between archives and transitional justice mechanisms remains an

under-researched field of inquiry. While in the past decade the topic of archives and
human rights has received increasing attention from scholars, archivists and civil
society, the interaction between archives and transitional justice (TJ) in post-conflict
and post-authoritarian societies deserves further analysis and investigation.
Transitional justice is the process through which states and societies address
the legacy of gross and systematic human rights violations, in order to facilitate

* Anita Ferrara
[email protected]; [email protected]
1
Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, National University of Ireland, University Road,
Galway, Ireland

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254 A. Ferrara

transitions from authoritarian regimes and conflicts to democracy and peace. The
main mechanisms used to achieve these objectives include, but are not limited to’
truth commissions, trials, reparations, memorialisation initiatives, grassroots recon-
ciliation practices and guarantees of non-repetition.
Human rights archives have been broadly defined in the literature as records
that document egregious human rights violations everywhere (Caswell 2014). Jelin
and Da Silva Catela have grouped human rights archives into three main catego-
ries: archives of repressive institutions, such as secret agencies, police and military
services; archives of human rights organisations and victims’ organisations who
opposed and resisted the repressive regimes; and finally the archives of courts, truth
commissions and memory sites created to deal with the legacy of violations com-
mitted in the past (Da Silva Catela and Jelin 2002).
While in the literature different types of archives documenting human rights vio-
lations have been included under the umbrella of ‘human rights archives,’ this arti-
cle claims that there should be more definitional clarity around the different sets
of archives documenting violent and systemic abuse of power. This article defines
‘human rights archives’ as those created and owned by civil society groups, includ-
ing but not limited to human rights organisations, victims’ groups, and religious
groups that systematically monitor and collect evidence of human rights violations.
In turn, ‘transitional justice archives’ are those archives left behind by transitional
justice mechanisms created to deal with the legacy of past atrocities such as truth
commissions, courts and memorialisation initiatives.
Even though human rights archives and TJ archives both document human rights
violations, it is important to highlight some of the aspects that differentiate them.
First, a temporal factor : human rights archives are usually created while the
violations are actually taking place, while TJ archives are created some time after
the violations have been committed. Furthermore, while human rights archives are
mostly private archives and privately owned, those created by TJ mechanisms are
usually state-owned even though in many cases, the former have dramatically con-
tributed to the formation of the latter. These differences have important implications
in terms of safekeeping practices, management and access policies. Archives of
repressive institutions, security and secret agencies are not analysed in this article as
in Chile they have remained mostly secret or have been destroyed, thus contributing
very little to the process of transitional justice.
The theoretical framework for this article emerges from the literature on the
instrumental role of archives in societies coming to terms with widespread human
rights violations (Alberch I Fugueras 2008a; Baumgartner et al. 2016; Caswell
2010; Harris 2014; Weld 2014).
Scholars and practitioners have devoted increasing attention to the role of
archives as instruments of human rights protection and accountability (Blanco-
Rivera 2012), vehicles of collective memory (Da Silva Catela and Jelin 2002; Harris
2002; Schwartz and Cook 2002) and as mechanisms of social justice (Duff et al.
2013; Jimerson 2007; Strauss 2015).
Quintana’s report highlighted the crucial role of human rights archives for
achieving a set of collective and individual rights (Quintana 2009. In addition, the
UN Principles to Combat Impunity claim that archives play a fundamental role in

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Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 255

realising the right to truth, justice and reparation (UNHCHR 2005). Moreover, the
experience of many transitional countries is increasingly showing that demands for
truth, justice and memory are closely linked to people’s ability to access documents
and records. Hence, several organisationshave conducted important research on the
issues of preservation, access and safekeeping archives (Swisspeace; International
Council on Archives). Beyond having a role in human rights protection and account-
ability, archives are increasingly playing a role in building a country’s collective
memory and are often conceptualised as independent ‘memory spaces’ themselves.
For Pierre Nora, archives contribute to the open-ended process of memory creation
around a recent past and are situated amongst objects/artefacts that provide spaces
for contesting the past through dynamic and infinite processes (Ketelaar 2008; Nora
1989).
Despite the increasing recognition of the multiple roles that archives play in tran-
sitional contexts, the interconnections between transitional justice and archives have
not yet been conceptualised and/or fully explored. Questions related to what fac-
tors contribute to the activation of the archives during transitions (Ketelaar 2001),1
how and under what circumstances archives are used, to what extent and duration,
deserve further investigation.
This article, through the case study of Chile, furthers the debates on the relation-
ship between archives and transitional justice and analyses the multiple, varied and
unexpected ways in which selected collections of archives have contributed to and
interacted with subsequent transitional justice mechanisms in different moments of
the long transitional period.
The article offers an original contribution aimed at developing a better under-
standing of the interaction between the archives and transitional justice mechanisms
in two ways: First, it traces the multiple and sometimes-unexpected roles played
by human rights and truth commissions’ archives over a transitional period lasting
40 years. Second, it investigates the factors that facilitated the interaction between
archives and later transitional justice mechanisms.
The article finds that the archives alone were a necessary, but not a sufficient con-
dition to contribute to the broader process of transitional justice. The study claims
that the combination of several factors, including contextual dynamics, intervention
and motivation of different actors and timing, have activated the archives analysed in
this article, thus facilitating their contribution to the realisation of truth, justice and
reparation.
In the past few years, there has been a greater focus in the literature on the
archives in Chile, which has mostly centred on the modes of production, preserva-
tion and access to the numerous archives documenting the violations perpetrated by
Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Bernasconi’s work provides an in-depth explora-
tion of the complex processes of registration, organisation and categorisation of the
Vicariate archives during the dictatorship (Bernasconi 2019). The latest research on
the archives is dedicated to the complex relationship between archives and memory
(Acuña Flores et al. 2016).

1
Activation is a concept originally used by Ketelaar in relation to the infinite possibilities of an archive.

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256 A. Ferrara

Nonetheless, very little has been written on the role played by both Chilean
truth commissions’ archives in advancing subsequent transitional justice mecha-
nisms and no study has analysed which factors, or combination thereof, facilitated
the uses of the archives in the subsequent years. In addition, this study provides
a comprehensive overview of the changing and multiple roles that different sets
of archives have played in pursuing truth, justice, reparations and memory during
a period spanning more than four decades. Finally, the temporal distance of the
Chilean case offers important insights and lessons on the interconnection between
archives and transitional justice from a long-term perspective. Time itself, as the
article shows, becomes a critical factor determining whether an archive can be
discovered and re-discovered in different spaces for different purposes.

Methods

The methodology used in this research is largely empirical and is based upon a
combination of qualitative data collection methods including fieldwork research
carried out at multiple intervals over many years, archival research, one-on-one
interviews, personal observation, oral history and secondary sources.
Semi-structured interviews have been conducted with human right lawyers,
members of human rights organisations, state actors, judges, academics and per-
sonnel of state agencies in charge of the archives, such as the National Institute of
Human Rights, the Human Rights Programme and the Museum of Memory. The
interviews have been transcribed and a deductive thematic analysis was carried
out according to the following themes: uses of archival sources, methods of clas-
sification and systematisation, goals and objectives of documenting and access
policies. The themes have been identified in the literature as relevant concepts to
examine the relationship between archives and transitional justice and they are
the most relevant to the scope of this study.
The thematic analysis was complemented by extensive analysis of both gov-
ernmental documents, NGOs’ reports as well as other secondary sources. In
addition, NGOs’ annual reports including the Observatory for Human Rights,
the National Institute for Human and Rights and the Human Right programme
Reports have been extensively revised. Archival sources and documents used
for this article come mainly from the Vicariate of Solidarity public archive. Par-
ticular attention has been devoted to the analysis of press files, media outlets,
monthly bulletins and public declarations released by multiple actors when both
truth commissions were established. These sources helped the author to under-
stand the methods of work of the truth commissions as well as the role and moti-
vations of relevant actors in the utilisation and selection of the existing human
rights archives. Finally, a selected numbers of first and second instance judge-
ments and other judicial documents have also been extensively examined. These
helped the author to explore the judicial use of the truth commissions’ archives.
The main findings of this study have been drawn by the triangulation of these
multiple qualitative data sources.

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Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 257

Human rights archives

On 11 September 1973, a rightist military coup d’état, headed by General Augusto

Pinochet, brought to an end the democratically elected government of Salvador
Allende. Following the coup, a four-man military junta was established, which
assumed all constituent, executive and legislative powers (Decree Law N.5 11 Sep-
tember 1973). During the dictatorship, gross and systematic human rights violations
were committed, political opponents were systematically executed or disappeared,
and thousands of persons were imprisoned, tortured or exiled.2 The dictatorship was
strongly challenged on its human rights record by a group of domestic organisations
and by the international community.3 Within the country, the Catholic Church, other
religious bodies and human rights organisations strongly opposed the dictatorship.
Chief among these was the Comité de Cooperación para la Paz en Chile, COPACHI,
an inter-faith organisation created in October 1973 and then replaced in 1976 by
the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity). Its staff, composed of law-
yers, social workers and medical personnel, provided legal and social assistance to
those who had suffered human rights violations under the dictatorship (Smith 1986).
Other organisations became protagonists of the human rights defence: the Social
Aid Foundation of the Christian Churches (FASIC), the Agrupación de Familiares
Detenidos-Desaparecidos (Group of Families of the Detained Disappeared, AFDD),
and the Chilean Commission of Human Rights and the Committee for the Defence
and the Rights of the People (CODEPU). These civil society organisations worked
together tirelessly to gather and organise a vast amount of documentation with the
utmost accuracy and precision. They carefully filed, systematised and preserved the
records that documented how the systematic practice of repression operated, as well
as the extent and magnitude of the human rights violations committed. The way in
which Chilean human rights organisations and the Catholic Church, in particular,
were able to record evidence of the human rights violations while they were actually
happening is what makes the Chilean case a quite unique example globally (Bara-
hona de Brito 1997).
The main reason why these organisations were systematically collecting the infor-
mation was as a form of denunciation of the state crimes (Lira 2017). The organisa-
tions wanted to document and raise awareness of the human rights violations being
committed and record what was happening for future generations. The creation of
the archives did not follow an archival methodology, but the documentation and

2
There is a vast literature on Chile’s dictatorship and its legacy: Wright (2007), Stern (2010), Ensalaco
(2000b), Valenzuela and Constable (1991), Collier and Sater (1999).
3
While the Catholic Church and other organisations started to register and document the cases of human
rights violations, also the international community devoted great attention to the human rights situa-
tion in Chile. The UN, the OAS and Amnesty International strongly relied on the human rights groups’
reports to activate the regional and international human rights protection mechanism, establishing one
of the first cases of close cooperation between domestic and international groups in defence of human
rights. ‘Chilean human rights organizations came to be widely considered by the international human
rights community as among the most effective groups working within a context of dictatorship’ (see
Report of the TRC, p. 11). This paper does not look at this early phase of registration and documentation,
but it starts its analysis from the end of the dictatorship.

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258 A. Ferrara

testimonies were systematically filed and preserved in an attempt to collect evidence

that could be used to punish the perpetrators in the future (Lira 2017). In the words
of Elisabeth Lira, ‘many perceived their collecting of elements of proof as a form of
moral resistance to injustice and abuse’ (Lira 2017; p.193).
All the abovementioned organisations created their own archives and records
(Universidad Alberto Hurtado 2017). Their archives included different types of
records, from administrative records documenting the work of the organisation
to legal files, social assistance records, medical records, media archives, data-
bases, statistics, collections of public documents of the time such as speeches
and statements, legislation and any other information documenting how the
repressive regime worked.
The most complete archive documenting the state terrorism is the Fundación de
Documentación y Archivos de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Documentation and
Archive Foundation of the Vicariate of Solidarity). When the Vicariate concluded
its work in 1992, the Archdiocese of Santiago created the Archives Foundation as
an institution that would protect and preserve the thousands of files and folders that
the Vicariate of Solidarity had created over 20 years. The records contain informa-
tion related to victims of the period between September 1973 and March 1990 and
document all the actions the Vicariate staff undertook in the defence and promotion
of human rights.
The archives of the Vicariate constitute a unique, national human rights archive
including the files of 47,000 people that asked for legal assistance at the Vicariate
during the dictatorship. These include copies of court records and other similar files
such as habeas corpus appeals in favour of detainees and exiled, political prison-
ers and people who had been subjected to torture (Lowden 1995; Labbé and Tagle
2019).
The following section analyses the interconnection between the human rights
archives, particularly the Vicariate archives, and the first National Commission on
Truth and Reconciliation as well as the contribution the archives made to the devel-
opment of other transitional justice mechanisms. The rather constrained political
context that existed in the early years of the transition allowed only limited truth and
reparation measures to be established. The Vicariate archives later proved to be criti-
cal for achieving both truth and reparation.

The Uses of Human Rights Archives

The Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, TRC (also known as
the Rettig Commission), was created in 1990 through Supreme Decree no.355, by
President Aylwin to investigate and report on the cases of enforced disappearance
and political execution, committed under the Pinochet dictatorship between 1973
and 1990.4 The Chilean TRC completed its work 1 year after it was established and

4
Supreme Decree N.355, Undersecretary of the Interior, 25 April 1990, Santiago de Chile.

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Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 259

issued its final report in 1991 (known as the Rettig Report),5 documenting 3197 per-
sons as victims of enforced disappearance and illegal execution. The Rettig Report
is a massive document providing a detailed description of the main phases of the
dictatorship, laid out according to the different kinds of violations committed and
the methods of repression used.
In the constrained political context under which the first TRC was created, its
mandate was extremely limited and it lacked subpoena powers.6 In this context, dur-
ing the early information-gathering phases, the human rights organisations were
asked to provide all the evidence they had gathered on the cases of the disappeared
and victims who had been extra-judicially executed between 1973 and 1990.
The Chilean TRC had access to the legal archives of the Vicariate composed of
85,000 documents related to all the people the Vicariate had assisted (Vergara Low
2012). The information the Vicariate collected on the disappeared and executed was
very detailed in each individual case. The Vicariate had in fact created an individual
folder on each victim that had received assistance from the Vicariate. The folders
included all the background information related to the circumstances of the victims’
disappearance or death and the efforts made by the relatives and by the Vicariate
to find out what had happened to them. The legal archive contained the records of
the individual legal proceedings, including habeas corpus cases, war council pro-
ceedings, defence and denunciation briefs, stories and affidavits on the situations of
human rights violations and so on. The records also included the sworn statements
of relatives, eyewitness accounts of persons arrested and statements by witnesses
who had been detained in the same place alongside the victims. Many people who
had been arrested went to the Vicariate to give their testimony after their release,
becoming irreplaceable witnesses to the detention of victims who later disappeared.
It is important to remember that these files were created while the abuses were hap-
pening. This gives high value to these documents since they reported the details of
the various detention centres where victims were detained or later transferred, the
methods of torture they were subjected to, who they had been arrested with, the
names of the perpetrators and more. It would have been very difficult to reconstruct
all these factual details related to thousands of people many years after the events
had happened (Vergara Low 2012).
Another organisation, the Chilean Human Rights Commission also shared its
folders documenting cases of victims of political execution and disappearance,
together with copies of the legal actions undertaken in their defence and the trial
records. The Truth Commission crosschecked the information contained in these
records against different sources verifying the reliability of the information. The
Rettig Commission heavily relied upon the documentation provided by the human
rights organisations and, in particular, by the Vicariate of Solidarity (Report of the
Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation 1993).
Even though the Truth Commission collected extensive information from many
other sources, the human rights archives, particularly the Vicariate archive, constituted

5
The Chilean TRC is commonly known as the Rettig Commission, named after President Raul Rettig.
6
For a detailed analysis of the methodology and work of the Chilean TRC, see Ensalaco (2000b).

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260 A. Ferrara

an irreplaceable source of evidence upon which the Truth Commission’s report and its
conclusions were built. In the TRC’s view, the human rights organisations had docu-
mented and monitored the human rights abuses with the utmost accuracy.

The Interaction between the Vicariate archives and the National

Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (‘the Chilean TRC’)

This section analyses the main factors that enabled the interaction between the
Vicariate archives and the Truth Commission.
First, the context of the early transition period was extremely constrained; the
balance of power was very delicate and civil-military relations were very tense. The
Chilean democracy of the 1990s remained constrained under the military’s tutelage;
far from being subject to the civilian authorities, the armed forces maintained the
strong political role granted to them under the constitution and by the organic law
of the armed forces, and held key positions within the institutional structure. Moreo-
ver, there was a strong alliance between the armed forces and the right-wing con-
servative parties, which were bent on defending the political project of the military
regime. Pinochet also remained Commander-in-Chief of the Army, which guaran-
teed that the armed forces would not be prosecuted and that the institutional frame-
work of the protected democracy remained intact. Finally, Pinochet and his allies
still had fairly strong popular support (Fuentes 2000; Rabkin 1992).
In this context, in the earlier phases of the transition, there was strong cooperation
between the Concertación,7 the centre-left coalition party that won the first dem-
ocratic elections, and the human rights movement (Barahona de Brito 1997). The
human rights issue had cemented relations between the centre-left coalition of the
Concertación, which placed the discourses about the past abuses and the traumatic
experience of violent repression at the centre of their electoral campaign to defeat
Pinochet (Barahona de Brito 1997).
The governing political parties and key human rights organisations, such as the
Vicariate and the Chilean Human Rights Commission, thus shared a high degree of
consensus around the establishment of a truth commission (Barahona de Brito 1997;
p.110). The Vicariate of Solidarity had expressed public support for the work of
the truth commission and considered it an important step towards reaching a recon-
ciliation. This cooperation aided the process of sharing the information stored in the
Vicariate archives.8
Moreover, according to a recent study the Vicariate had collated the informa-
tion it possessed on the cases of persons disappeared and politically executed in a
manner that enabled the information to be easily accessed by the following truth

7
The Concertacion was a multi-party coalition of the centre-left, including the Christian Democratic
Party, the Socialist Party. It won the election in 1989.
8
Archival material consulted by the author at the Vicariate archives on the early years of the transition,
including press files, public statements from human rights groups, political parties’ leaders, Vicariate
public statements during the working of the TRC.

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Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 261

commission and by the relatives of the victims who wanted to bring their files before
the TRC (Bernasconi and Lira 2019).
In addition, the truth commission members were aware of the work of the human
rights organisations and fully trusted their work.9 This kind of cooperation was
greatly facilitated by the presence of members of the Truth Commission that were
strongly associated with the human rights movement. President Aylwin had carefully
chosen the members of the commission from both sides of the political spectrum to
ensure a balanced and consensus-based outcome (Otano 2006). He appointed two
influential figures among the human rights community, Jose Zalaquett and Jaime
Castillo Velasco. Jose Zalaquett, who actively supported the establishment of the
TRC, was a former legal adviser to the Vicariate of Solidarity and had been exiled
by the regime. Jaime Castillo Velasco was a former member of the Christian Demo-
cratic Party (PDC) and the president of another prominent human rights organisa-
tion, the Chilean Human Rights Commission (Otano 2006). Both had achieved rec-
ognition for their work in the defence of human rights. Their appointment as TRC
Commissioners was welcomed by the human rights organisations (Otano 2006). The
fact that prominent TRC members had previously been themselves protagonists of
the defence of human rights during the dictatorship and were well aware of the mas-
sive amount of work carried out by civil society in recording the violations commit-
ted, facilitated the use of the human rights archives by the Rettig Commission.
Finally, when the Vicariate closed in 1992, many of the social workers and law-
yers who had assisted victims at the Vicariate went to work for the Rettig Com-
mission and the follow-up bodies that administered and delivered the reparations in
the years that followed. All these people knew very well how the Vicariate archives
were created and filed, and could act as mediators between all the information con-
tained in the archives and the state agencies. The expertise of social workers and
lawyers was crucial in utilising the archives to develop later transitional justice
mechanisms (Johansson and Lopez 2019).
A combination of the above factors and the synergy between the truth commis-
sion and the civil society sectors facilitated the use of thousands of records collected
by the Vicariate and other human rights organisations. Had these records not existed,
it would have been very difficult to document in only 9 months the extent and mag-
nitude of the violations committed over a period of 17 years. In turn, all the organi-
sations working in defence of human rights saw for the first time their work recog-
nised and publicly acknowledged. In the words of Elisabeth Lira, the civil society
organisations had collected copious documentation with the aim to reveal the fac-
tual truth of the violations that occurred and to punish those responsible.10 The Ret-
tig commission legitimised the work of the human rights organisations, which had
previously been discredited by the regime and its allies as communist propaganda.
Therefore, the truth commission members and its staff, in a context of cooperation
with the civil society actors, including social workers and human rights lawyers,

9
Ibid.
10
Professor Elisabeth Lira, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Member of the Valech Commission I and II
and Roundtable Dialogue, Personal Communication, April 2021.

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262 A. Ferrara

activated the human rights archives in a complex political context that only allowed
for limited truth and reparation. The analysis of data collected for this study shows
that the constrained political context, the synergy of social and political actors and
a high degree of trust in the newly formed Truth Commission constituted the main
factors that activated the human rights archives in a way that they could contribute
to the public disclosure and acknowledgment of the human rights violations com-
mitted during 17 years of dictatorship.
Many years later and in a very changed political context, the archives of the
Vicariate became essential documents for the realisation of subsequent reparation
and justice measures implemented in the wake of the TRC. The legal archive of the
Vicariate is confidential, but it remains open to judges and governmental agencies
that require these records to take further action in order to provide justice and repa-
rations to the victims of past abuses. Judges regularly request access to the legal
archives of the Vicariate of Solidarity, which has become an important source of
judicial evidence in the current human rights trials (Hau et al. 2019). Finally, the
individual folders containing information on each victim who had received legal or
social assistance from the Vicariate constitute critical evidence needed to certify the
status of ‘victim’ so that relatives and survivors could be granted access to repa-
rations benefits (Vergara Low 2012). The TRC had recognised only the victims of
disappearance and political execution, therefore the Vicariate Archive turned out to
be an extremely reliable source of evidence to certify the status of other categories
of victims of human rights violations, which were progressively recognised by the
Chilean state in later years. Since the early 1990s, many reparations packages have
been available and delivered by the state to different categories of victims, including
the politically exonerated, returnees and others.11 The role of archives and records
in facilitating the delivery of the reparations is not fully explored in this paper, as
it would require a separate paper due to its extensiveness. In sum, the Vicariate
archives have been fundamental in achieving a disclosure of truth in the immedi-
ate post-transition phase, andin contributing to legal justice and reparation in later
years. At the time, no one could foresee that the human rights records would be the
basis of all future transitional justice developments in the country.12

The Rettig Commission’s Archives

Beyond the archives of the national and international human rights organisations, the
Rettig Commission collected thousands of declarations from victims’ relatives, wit-
nesses and political prisoners who offered their testimony before the Commission.
The Commission gathered direct testimony on around 3400 cases (Americas Watch
1991). The Commission also solicited information abroad from Chilean exiles.
The armed forces did not cooperate with the truth commission and the only rel-
evant information sent by them was related to the armed forces members who had

11
Ferrara (2015), pp 60–64.
12
Interview with Roberto Garreton, Human Rights Lawyer, Santiago, Chile, March 2019.

13
Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 263

been killed during military confrontations. However, few military officers provided
testimony. The TRC cross-checked the records obtained from the civil society organ-
isations with the records of various governmental and public agencies, including the
Civil Registry, the Electoral Registry, the National Archives, the General Comptrol-
ler’s Office and the Chilean Police. Many hospitals provided medical reports, autop-
sies and death certificates.13 The TRC investigated carefully each individual case
on which antecedents existed and opened a file, which included all the documen-
tation related to the victim in question.14 It also created a database to track cases
(Peterson 2005). The truth commission collected documentary evidencefrom a huge
variety of sources collecting 217,000 pages filed in 3500 folders.15 Based on all the
above records, testimonies and documents, the TRC members were able to reach a
conviction on thousands of cases of enforced disappearance or political execution.
The examination of each individual case was the methodology chosen to qualify the
cases. Therefore, the TRC followed a methodology of classification and systema-
tisation similar to that of the Vicariate, whereby it collated in one file all existing
documentation, records and testimonies related to each victim of disappearance and
extrajudicial execution.16 This practice was very successful as it not only offered the
possibility of restoring the dignity of the individual victim but it also strongly aided
the subsequent delivery of symbolic and material reparations.
The Rettig Commission’s archives are confidential and data protection law
restricted its use, but they were left open for the lawyers and judges who requested
them for their investigations.17 For this reason, it is very difficult to find out about
the exact content of the Rettig archives or the ways in which the Commission used
all the sources of information it collected.

The Uses of Rettig Archives: Reparations and Trials

The most important direct consequence of the Chilean TRC was the delivery
of reparation measures to the relatives of the victims qualified by the TRC. A
follow-up body, the National Corporation on Reparation and Reconciliation
(NCRR), was established in 1992 to complete the investigations on the unre-
solved cases of the previous TRC and to offer victims’ families legal and social
assistance and administer a broad programme of reparations, which included
monetary pensions, health care and educational benefits. The Corporation pub-
lished its final report in 1996 documenting 3197 people as victims of enforced
disappearance and illegal execution (Corporacion Nacional de Reparacion y

13
Report of the Chilean TRC, vol. I, part I, p. 17.
14
Cristina Luz Garcia Gutierrez, ‘Fuentes Para El Estudio De La Represion En Iberoamerica: Entre
Archivos Y Centro Documentales’ (paper presented at the Congreso Internacional 1810–2010: 200 anos
de Iberoamerica, Santiago de Compostela, Espana).
15
Ibid.
16
Interview with Jorge Correa, Executive Secretary of the Rettig Commission. Santiago 2009.
17
Ley N. º 19.123 de 1992, states that the archives are confidential, except for the tribunals that need to
investigate (art. 2.3).

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264 A. Ferrara

Reconciliacion 1996). More importantly, the NCRR established an archive and

documentation repository with the purpose of collecting and safekeeping all the
documents and information gathered by the TRC and the Corporation. These
archives constituted the basis upon which different reparation programmes have
been delivered in Chile to different groups of victims during the long transitional
process.18 The creation of a detailed archival record containing information on
each individual victim recognised by the truth commissions greatly facilitated
the subsequent payment of reparations to the families of the disappeared.
When the NCRR concluded its work in 1996, all the archives and documents
of the TRC and those belonging to the Corporation were passed to a new pro-
gramme organised by the Ministry of Interior, called the Programme for the
Continuation of Law 19.123, which later became the Human Rights Programme.
Since 2001, the Human Rights Programme has played a major role in the pros-
ecution of human rights cases and became the custodian of the archives of the
Rettig Commission and its follow-up body, the Corporation. The programme has
been transferred under the Ministry of Justice and currently renamed as Human
Rights Programme Unit.
As shown in the following paragraphs, the importance of the preservation
and systematisation of these archives under this public body only became
apparent years later.
Although the Chilean TRC did not have any judicial powers, all the evidence
it had collected that seemed new, useful or relevant for judicial investigations
was sent to the Chilean courts shortly after it concluded its work (Report of the
Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation 1993). At that time,
the majority of cases originally submitted by the TRC to the courts had been
dismissed by the Chilean tribunals, which had applied the Amnesty Law passed
by the Pinochet government in 1978. During the early transition phase, the
judiciary was reluctant to investigate the human rights violations and, despite
numerous attempts by many different actors to obtain justice and accountability,
few cases had progressed (Ferrara 2015). After the arrest of Pinochet in London
in 1998, the political context changed dramatically in Chile and Chilean judges
became more inclined to provide justice for victims’ families. The Amnesty Law
was reinterpreted allowing new cases to be investigated and many cases that had
previously been dismissed without investigation were reopened. Moreover, after
the creation of the Mesa de Diálogo (Roundtable Dialogue),19 special judges
were appointed, exclusively dedicated to investigating the human rights cases.20
All this started a new phase for the human rights investigations and hundreds of

18
Again, the TRC archives have been crucial to certify the status of victims and have been accessed by
state agencies to prove the status of the victims claiming reparations. As previously stated, the topic of
reparations, archives and lists is very broad and contested, and requires a separate study.
19
The Mesa de Dialogo was created in 1999 to facilitate a dialogue between the armed forces, Human
Rights lawyers and civil society representatives.
20
Cath Collins, Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

13
Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 265

cases started to progress.21 In later years, the Human Rights Programme would
be empowered to initiate criminal proceedings in the cases of detained-disap-
peared persons and those extra-judicially executed. This strengthened the role
of the Programme that became the main state agency prosecuting human rights
cases.22 It was within this context that many judges re-discovered the documen-
tation and records contained in the truth commission’s archives. After Pinochet’s
arrest, the archives of the truth commission reappeared on stage having acquired
a new role, becoming the basis of the main prosecutorial efforts that then fol-
lowed in Chile. Two former judges who were among the most important pro-
tagonists of the late justice cascade in Chile, Juan Guzmán, who first indicted
Pinochet in 2001, and Alejandro Solís Muñoz, frequently requested access to
the TRCs archives and records to the Human Rights Programme. This body has,
over the years, played a critical role in facilitating access to the Rettig archives
from investigative judges.23 Both judges stated that their cases had largely relied
upon the documentary evidence contained in the TRC archives.24 They had both
used the records and archives of the TRC as probative value in the human rights
trials.25 In recent interviews, judges exclusively dedicated to investigating the
human rights cases stated that they continue to actively use the archives of the
truth commissions as probative evidence to build their cases and attach to them
a great importance in the investigative phases of the proceedings.26 Judge Car-
rozza declared that the TRC archives are an invaluable contribution in his inves-
tigations. He claimed that the Rettig records contain witness statements and
relatives’ declarations, which constitute elements of proof that allows the recon-
struction of the crime under examination.27 Equally, judge Cifuentes uses regu-
larly the records of the truth commissions either to locate witnesses and/or rela-
tives or to access the statements of those that are no longer able to testify.28 Both
Judges attach great value to the archives and said that they consider the truth
commissions’ archives today to be even more valuable than before as the more
time that passes, the more evidence is eroded and both victims and perpetrators
are dying.29 It is important to remark here that the truth commission archives
constitute one type of evidence, among many other sources, upon which judges
rely to build their cases. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the evidentiary weight
of the Rettig archives would require more attention and is outside the scope of

21
Ibid.
22
Observatory for Human Rights, Annual Human Rights Report, of the Centro de Derechos Humanos,
UDP 2010. Santiago, Chile.
23
Interview with Francisco Ugas, Human Rights Lawyer and former Director Legal Department of the
Human Rights Programme, April 2019.
24
Former Appellate Judge, Juan Guzman, Personal Interview. Santiago 2009.
25
Former Special Judge, Alejandro Solis, Personal Interview. Santigo 2009.
26
Personal Interviews with several investigative judges: Judge Mario Carrozza, Judge Marianela
Cifuentes, Former Supreme Court Judge Milton Juica, Santiago, April 2019.
27
Personal Interview, Judge Mario Carrozza, April 2019.
28
Personal Interview Judge Cifuentes, April 2019.
29
Ibid.

13
266 A. Ferrara

this article. Investigative judges actively use all the archives and records docu-
menting the human rights violations that they can gain access to, including the
Vicariate Archives and/or the armed forces archives. The Rettig archives have
such great value for the progress of current investigations that former head of
the legal department of the Human Rights programme, Francisco Ugas, tried to
make all Rettig Commissions and Corporation archives immediately available
to the courts in order to expedite the proceedings and avoid request for access to
the Human Rights programme for each case under investigation. Unfortunately,
this proposal nevermaterialized and there continues to be a piecemeal approach
on access to these archives.30

The Interaction between the Rettig Archives and Justice

This study found that a combination of several factors might explain why the
archives of the truth commission could unexpectedly become a means of account-
ability years later.
First, the armed forces and/or secret agencies’ records have always been and still
are largely inaccessible, because they have been destroyed, concealed or intention-
ally kept secret by former perpetrators. In this context, the value of human rights
archives and the Truth Commissions’ archives is enormous if one considers that in
Chile, they represent the most important documentary evidence available, which
reconstructs the history of repression and provides details on how the authoritarian
state structures operated (Alberch I Fugueras 2008b).
Second, in the early transition phase in Chile, victims were eager to testify before
the TRC and be heard by a state that had marginalised them and their traumatic
experiences for far too long. At the time, they believed that nothing more would be
done and therefore they provided all the information they had to the TRC. Accord-
ing to former judge Solis, the lack of protection from the courts caused a paradoxi-
cal situation, where the victims’ families and other witnesses, after the end of the
dictatorship, rushed to testify before the truth commission officers to provide all the
information that they had kept on the human rights abuses. They provided the Com-
missioners with witnesses’ names, court records and any documents they held, all of
which allowed the Commission to carefully determine and prove what had happened
in every case under their scrutiny.
Third, given the difficult political climate in which the Commission was estab-
lished, the information received from a variety of sources was collected and sys-
tematised in a very meticulous way. The commissioners were very thorough and
cautious in every single case under examination so that the chances of mistakes
would be reduced to a minimum (Otano 2006). In addition, the fact that those who
collected the evidence and heard the testimonies were mostly lawyers and legal
assistants probably influenced the manner in which the evidence was collected
and organised. The latter greatly facilitated the evidence being used in subsequent

30
Interview with Francisco Ugas, April 2010.

13
Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 267

prosecutions. The combined result of the abovementioned aspects was reflected in

the creation of thousands of documents and files which possess, as the current trials
are demonstrating, a high level of reliability.
The data collected for this study shows that the probative value of archives
depends on several factors, including how and when the information was collected
and systematised, the manner in which testimonies were collected, the legal context
in which the archives were created and the way in which they have been preserved.
However, the truth commission archives alone could not have helped the subsequent
prosecutions of human rights cases. The information has existed since the early
1990s but only started to be used 10 years later. In 1991, when the TRC report was
delivered, the Supreme Court refused to acknowledge almost all the criticisms put
forward by the report and considered it too passionate, reckless, political and biased
(Centro de Estudios Públicos 1991). Years later, it was a dramatic change in attitude
by the courts towards investigating human rights cases that re-activated the informa-
tion collected by the truth commission. In this way, the TRC archives unexpectedly
became one of the most reliable sources of evidence in the subsequent human rights
trials. With the passing of time and in a profoundly different political environment,
judges invoked the same information that had been available to them before but now
that information acquired new life as judicial evidence.
Since 1998, in Chile, substantial progress has been made in the judicial inves-
tigation and resolution of human rights crimes, reversing the long-standing impu-
nity that had existed in relation to these crimes. According to data provided by the
courts, there are more than 1459 criminal cases ongoing for dictatorship-era human
rights violations involving thousands of former military agents. This caseload is
shared between 13 investigative magistrates, seven of them operating in the Greater
Santiago jurisdiction.31
It is important to highlight here that the domestic courts are also archiving the
documentation associated with their trials, which will be invaluable for revealing
other aspects of the dictatorship that are still unknown. Courts’ archives are part of
the collective memory of the nation and will end up in the national archives. Finally,
the judiciary’s archives will provide more information on how the national jurispru-
dence on mass atrocity evolved over time and the extent to which there has been a
dramatic shift in attitude by the judiciary as an institution towards the investigation
of these crimes.

The Valech Commissions’ Archives

The second official Truth Commission, the National Commission on Political

Imprisonment and Torture (hereinafter the ‘Valech I Commission’), was established
in November 2003 to investigate the cases of torture and political imprisonment
committed during the period between 1973 and 1990. The Valech I Commission
produced a massive report divided into seven chapters, which documented 33,221

31
Observatory for Human Rights, Annual Human Rights Report, UDP, 2020. Santiago, Chile.

13
268 A. Ferrara

cases of arbitrary detention and certified 27,255 persons as victims of political

imprisonment and torture, in line with its mandate. The Commission’s report pub-
lished in 2004 concluded that throughout the military regime, torture and political
imprisonment were systematic and institutional policies of the state, routinely prac-
tised by the armed forces and Carabineros, as well as by the intelligence services,
especially the DINA and CNI. It stands as the only truth commissions in the world
to deal exclusively with surviving victims of torture and political imprisonment.
Following a work method similar to that previously used by the Chilean TRC,
the Valech I Commission undertook a series of steps which included interview-
ing the victims of torture and political prison and collecting documents provided
by them, the corroboration of this information with that provided by many other
public institutions of the state, as well as with human rights organisations, victims’
organisations, and eyewitness’ testimonies.32 Once all the information had been col-
lected, the commissioners proceeded by deciding which cases were eligible.33 The
Commission established information-sharing agreements with several human rights
organisations34 in order to gain access to their archives (Comision Nacional sobre
Prision Politca y Tortura 2004). Extensive information was also obtained from inter-
national organisations, foreign embassies and the national and international press.
As with the Rettig Commission, the archives of the human rights organisations, pri-
marily the Vicariate archives, as well as archives of trade unions were again exten-
sively relied upon to corroborate the thousands of survivors’ testimonies and wit-
ness statements.35 In a very changed political context, the Valech I Commission had
access to a substantially larger amount of information from some branches of the
armed forces. The latter provided the Commission with registries of detention cen-
tre locations, lists of people held in such detention camps, the period of detention
and other relevant information (Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura
2004).
One of the main advancements of the Valech I Commission was that it dramati-
cally expanded upon existing information on the extent and the magnitude of torture
and documented the existence of more than a thousand places throughout the coun-
try that had been used as centres of torture and detention. As with the Rettig Com-
mission, the Valech I Commission created a single folder on each victim of torture
and/or political imprisonment that testified before the Commission.
As shown above, the practice of recordkeeping, documenting and collecting evi-
dence was a systematic practice of most human rights organisations during the years
of the dictatorship. The main goal of those organisations that painstakingly filed and
preserved the archives documenting human rights violations was to leave behind
an irrefutable evidence of what happened. For this reason, as it happened with the

32
Informe Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Santiago, Chile: Comisión Nacional
sobre Política y Tortura, 2004), p. 80 (hereafter ‘Valech Report’).
33
Ibid.
34
The NGOs were the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Social Aid Foundation of Christian Churches
(FASIC), the Committee for the Defence of the Rights of the People (CODEPU) and the Foundation for
the Protection of Children Damaged by States of Emergency (PIDEE).
35
Interview with Professor Elisabeth Lira, April 2021.

13
Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 269

Rettig Commission, civil society organisations rushed to the Valech I Commission

to deliver all the relevant information they possessed. To them, the public and offi-
cial acknowledgement of the state would represent the main achievement of their
tireless work of documenting.36 In addition, some members of the Valech I Com-
mission had an extensive trajectory in defence of human rights and again they were
well aware of the work carried out by human rights organisations during the dic-
tatorship. The Commission President, Bishop Sergio Valech, was the head of the
Vicariate of Solidarity during the years of the military regime and later responsible
for the archives of the Vicariate. Maria Luisa Sepulveda had worked as social assis-
tant at the Vicariate of Solidarity; Alvaro Varela was also a human rights lawyer
at the Vicariate and Elisabeth Lira a renowned psychologist for her extensive work
with the victims of repression during the military dictatorship.37 Therefore, the anal-
ysis of the data collected on the Valech I Commission shows that the combination
of a strong civil society mobilisation, the sustained activism of survivors’ groups’
together with the presence of members of the Valech I Commission closely linked
to the human rights organisations enabled the interaction between the human rights
archives and the Valech I Commission. In 2010, the last truth-seeking initiative, the
Comisión Asesora para la Calificación de Detenidos Desaparecidos, Ejecutados
Políticos y Victimas de Prisión Política y la Tortura (hereinafter ‘Valech II’) was
set up to deal with the cases of victims of political imprisonment and torture, and
victims of disappearance and political execution, which had either been previously
rejected or never presented before a Truth Commission.38 The Valech II Commis-
sion followed the same criteria and methodology to qualify cases as the Valech I
Commission. The Valech II Commission submitted its final report in 2011, docu-
menting a further 9795 victims of torture and political imprisonment and 30 more
cases of enforced disappearance and illegal execution (Comision Asesora Presiden-
cial 2011).
All truth commissions in Chile inherited the copious documentation that many
civil society organisations had previously collected and, in many ways, they fol-
lowed the same methods of work and classification criteria used by the Vicariate
of Solidarity. As shown above, as the Rettig Commission created an individual file
containing all the information related to each victim of disappearance and illegal
execution, so too did the Valech Commissions by opening a file for every alleged
victim of torture and political prison. Both Truth Commissions relied on this clas-
sification method in order to organise their records in such a waythat their findings
would prove to be irrefutable. The Chilean truth commissions’ reports and archives
offer a vast amount of documentation, testimonies and evidence on the massive
human rights violations that occurred during the dictatorship, which has been very
difficult to contest. In later years, also the Valech I and II archives have played an
important role as tools of justice, reparation and memory within Chilean society.

36
Ibid.
37
Ferrara, Assessing the Long-term Impact of Truth Commissions, p. 168.
38
Decreto Supremo no .43, Ministerio del Interior, 5 Febrero de 2010.

13
270 A. Ferrara

The following section discusses some of the most heated debates surrounding these
archives and their role in advancing the struggle to obtain truth and justice.

The Interaction between the Valech Archives, Justice and Memory

While the government had regarded the Valech I Commission and its reopening in
2011 as the closing chapters of the Chilean transitional justice process, the archives
they created have become a source of controversy and contention since the Valech I
Commission concluded its work in 2004. The Valech I and II archives have sparked
a national debate, which mobilised multiple actors around different issues related to
the opening, access, ownership and role of these archives.
In contrast to the Rettig archives, a law regulating access to the Valech I archives
established that all testimonies, documents and evidence collected by the Valech I
Commission were confidential and could not be disclosed to the public for 50 years
nor used by the courts.39 While a draconian secrecy law surrounded the Valech I
archives, the law creating the Valech II Commission established a different regime
of confidentiality, which established a reservation rather than a full secrecy clause.40
The strict confidentiality of the Valech I archives had two consequences: first, it
had the immediate effect of curtailing the relationship between these archives and
the ability to use them to obtain justice. In contrast to the increasingly judicial role
of the Rettig archives, the judicial impact of the Valech I archives was severely lim-
ited from the start.41
Second, it slowly sparked a debate within Chilean society on the importance of
having access to the records documenting past atrocities in order to challenge the
legacy of authoritarianism that is still present in Chilean institutions (Meza Lop-
ehandia 2016). Several actors from civil society, primarily survivors of torture, have
engaged in a prolonged struggle to gain access to the archives of the Valech I and
II Commissions. Other official bodies including the National Institute for Human
Rights, the Comptroller General Office of the Republic (Contraloria General del
Estado) and the courts have played a role in this battle. According to many survivors
of torture, the secrecy surrounding the Valech archives is not there to protect the
confidentiality of the victims but to shield the perpetrators from justice. Although
the law prevents the use of the Valech I archive in court, a group of survivors of
torture challenged the secrecy of the archives through all the legal and political ave-
nues open to them. In 2015, Popular Declassification (DP), a political-artistic col-
lective was created to demand the declassification of the Valech I archives and to
guarantee that survivors who testified before the Valech Commissions could gain
access to their own documents (Campos and Sáez. After a legal battle won by the

39
Ley n.19.992, 24 Diciembre de 2004, Titulo IV, articulo 15.
40
Interview with Leonardo Urrutia, Head of Memory, Archive and Documentation Departnent, National
Institute of Human Rights. NIHR, Santiago, March 2019.
41
The state has, on many occasions, declared that the confidentiality clause established for the Valech I
archives was essential for the success of the Valech Commission and represented a formal commitment
by the Government to the victims who gave their testimony before the Commission.

13
Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 271

Declassification Movement, the NationalInstitute of Human Rights (NIHR), cur-

rently the legal custodian of the Valech I and II archives, started to provide to every
survivor on request, a copy of their individual file, including all the documentation
related to their case. In this way, former political prisoners can bring their docu-
mentation to the courts and demand the opening of an investigation. However, the
NIHR took the decision to cross out all the information contained in the individual
file that is related to third parties (victims or witnesses’ declarations contained in the
same file). While the decision to cross out certain information from the individual
folders has been contested, in the words of Leonardo Urrutia, it protects the rights
to privacy of those individuals who never gave their consensus to publicly disclose
their testimonies. It is relevant to note that the NIHR does not delete any information
related to alleged torturers or perpetrators.42 The NIHR has frequently expressed
concern about the secret nature of the archives and often requested the Government
and the National Congress to lift the 50 years’ secrecy clause, at least for the courts,
in order to respect international standards regarding access to information and the
right to truth (Fries 2015). Moreover, the courts’ lack of access to the Valech I and
II archives has been the subject of at least five legal opinions of the Comptroller
General Office of the Republic (CGR) (Meza Lopehandia 2016). After interpreting
an opinion delivered by the Comptroller General Office, the NIHR has decided to
provide only the records of the Valech II Commission to the courts when the latter
request access to them (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos 2014).43 However,
the NIHR pointed out that lack of uniformity in the management of the antecedents
of the truth commissions ‘infringe the principle of equality and non-discrimination’,
because in some cases the judges do have access to those records (Rettig and Valech
II) but not in others (Valech I) (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos 2014; Meza
Lopehandia 2016). Judge Carrozza, currently investigatingcases of torture, declared
that the Valech archives could contribute to ongoing investigations in the same way
that the Rettig archives contributed to investigations in cases of the detained-disap-
peared and politically executed. Judge Carroza expressed concern around the uneven
criteria of access to the Truth Commissions’ archives.44 The issue surrounding the
secrecy of the Valech archives and the different access policies should be resolved
by appropriate Congress legislation and it remains a pending obligation of the Chil-
ean state.45 The political context of the Valech Commissions was radically changed
in comparison to the early transition years and thousands of judicial investigations
were already ongoing. Therefore, the choice to impede the judicial use of the Valech
archives has been contested and challenged since the early days of the release of
the Valech I report. As this section showed, despite the more favourable political
climate, the main factors that facilitated the use of Valech archives for justice were

42
Interview with Leonardo Urrutia, Head of Memory, Archive and Documentation department,
National Institue of Human Rights, NIHR, Santiago, March 2019.
43
The reason behind that decision is that that Valech II archives have a different regime of confidenti-
ality, which do not explicitly establish the prohibition of access to the courts as in case of the Valech I
archives.
44
Personal Interview, Judge Carrozza, April 2019.
45
Interview with Leonardo Urrutia, NIHR, Santiago, March 2019.

13
272 A. Ferrara

the persistent mobilisation of the torture survivors, the sustained activism of civil
society organisations, and the intervention and motivations of several state actors,
including the National Institute for Human Rights, the Comptroller General Office
of the Republic (CGR) and the courts.
Beyond their judicial use in cases of torture that are still under investigation, civil
society organisations have led a political struggle to gain access to these archives
as means of advancing democratisation and expanding the public’s ability to con-
front the past. Since 2013, a collective and a site of memory, called Londres 38,
has conducted a vocal campaign called ‘No more secret archives’ demanding access
to all the truth commissions’ archives as well as the military and police archives
that are still sealed (Londres 38 2019). This campaign formed the beginning of a
much broader movement involving other sectors in society that started to challenge
state secrecy as a legacy of authoritarianism still present in contemporary Chile and
which continues to shield the state from public accountability and transparency. The
long battle to gain access to the secret archives in Chile has, over the years, seen
many survivors groups mobilising in their struggle to achieve ownership over the
past. Different sectors in society are challenging the state’s exclusive ownership of
the decision on what can be disclosed and when. The public campaign also testi-
fies to the survivors’ current demands for their stories to be made public. While the
Valech I and II archives seemed initially to have had a more limited impact than
other archives documenting state crimes, the secrecy clauses that sealed them have
had quite the opposite effect. Not only has it contributed to fuelling the debates in
Chilean society on the role and importance of archives, it has also kept the issue of
the past alive. The battle to make the archives public has now become one to pre-
serve the collective memory of the country (Bernasconi et al. 2019). Only time will
tell what contribution the Valech archives will make in the longstanding battle for
truth, justice and memory in Chile.

Archives as Vehicles of Memory

In the past 10 years, archives are increasingly playing different roles as instruments
of ‘memory building’ around a contested past. A wide range of scholarship has been
dedicated to the relationship between archives and memory and the topic is cur-
rently at the centre of a very active and lively debate (Acuña Flores et al. 2016;
Archivos en Chile: Miradas, Experiencias y Desafios 2016; Da Silva Catela 2002). It
is not the intention of this article to discuss this important topic, but it is essential to
recognise that the archives analysed in this paper, together with sites of memory and
other artistic and cultural forms of expression all form part of the contemporary ter-
rain for renegotiating the past. Archives are performing a role as spaces of reflection
and contention, as well as sources of education and knowledge about the history of
state repression. More importantly, there is an understanding in society that archives
offer a unique heritage that is critical for the reconstruction of the country’s histori-
cal memory and the strengthening of democracy.

13
Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 273

A testament of this is the incorporation of the archives of the Chilean human

rights organisations in its Memory of the World Register in 2003 by UNESCO. This
constituted an important acknowledgment and the beginning of a series of aware-
ness-raising initiatives on the importance of the preservation and protection of the
archives as well as on the need to provide greater access to these archives.
Most of the historical human rights organisations have donated part or nearly all
of their archives to the Museum of Memory. The Museum of Memory and Human
Rights was inaugurated in Chile on 11 January 2010 and it has become the most
important and well-known site of memory in Chile. Truth Commissions’ archives
are also physically hosted in the Museum of Memory even though they remain
sealed to the public to this date. Truth Commissions’ archives contain critical infor-
mation on many aspects that remain to be investigated such as how the Truth Com-
missions’ members reached their conclusions, how they built the different categories
of victims, how they systematised the myriad of sources received, the role played
by domestic and external actors, and most importantly what has been left out of the
official reports and why. All this information will also allow researchers to compare
the work of the two truth commissions with that of former human rights organisa-
tions’ and how and to what extent their narrative(s) concur or clash. The archives
constitute a legacy left by the truth commissions and their permanent status makes
them fundamental instruments for the fulfilment of the right to truth. Hence, it is
critically important to make the truth commissions’ archives public and allow Chil-
ean society to continuously engage with its much-contested past.
Regrettably, there is a big piece missing in the reconstruction of the collective
memory around state terrorism as there is currently no access to the security ser-
vices and armed forces’ archives. The lack of availability of information is further
intensified by a national law (Law 18.771), which allows the Ministry of Defence
and the Armed Forces to eliminate and destroy the documents every 5 years, unlike
other public agencies which are required to send their documents to the National
Archive. This law has not yet been modified and there is a fear that most of the infor-
mation documenting state crime has already been destroyed. Therefore, the value of
the Vicariate’s archives, human rights organisations’ archives and the Truth Com-
missions’ archives is enormous since they all have the merit of preserving informa-
tion that would otherwise be lost forever.

Conclusions

This article demonstrated that archives have played multiple roles at different points
in time during the long transitional path in Chile as tools of truth, justice and repa-
rations, and they are currently playing a crucial role in the construction of the col-
lective memory on the past. Chile has witnessed the establishment of four Truth
and Reconciliation Commissions. Hundreds of perpetrators have been convicted
and prosecutions are still taking place; different reparation programmes have been
implemented and gradually expanded over time; many memorials have been erected
including a Museum of Memory and Human Rights. All the above measures and

13
274 A. Ferrara

processes have strongly benefited from the existence of records and archives that
had been adequately preserved and kept.
As the article has shown, the Vicariate archives and other human rights archives
were extensively relied upon by the later Truth Commissions to complete their
work. Truth Commissions have, in turn, collected thousands of statements from vic-
tims, relatives and witnesses, a vast number of records and documents from multiple
sources, which, with the passing of time, have played a vital role in enhancing sub-
sequent accountability, reparations and memory efforts in the country. The archives
of the Truth Commissions have been used as essential evidence to obtain reparations
for the families of the disappeared and the survivors of torture and political impris-
onment recognised by the Truth Commissions’ reports. Moreover, as shown above,
the Rettig archives were used as probative evidence in the belated human rights tri-
als against perpetrators of human rights violations. Furthermore, even though the
relationship with justice was initially curtailed, the Valech archives have also been
made partially accessible to the courts. Moreover, the Valech archives have been a
source of contention within Chilean society for many years, giving rise to intense
debates on the role and importance of access to archives and are hence playing a
crucial role in the battle for memory.
The article finds that the interaction between archives and transitional justice
in Chile has been possible thanks to a combination of factors that this study has
analysed and discussed. The study claims that the ways in which archives are col-
lected, filed and systematised together with the aims and goals of documenting are
all necessary but not sufficient conditions to determine their future uses. Other fac-
tors, including the political context, the intervention and motivations of different
actors, the mobilisation of social sectors and timing, played a major role for the acti-
vation of archives in the service of transitional justice. For this reason, the findings
from the Chilean case study offer a number of important lessons on the relationship
between archives and transitional justice.
First, archives do not exist in a vacuum; they are not neutral artefacts and they
need the intervention of several factors and interaction with different actors to
acquire meaning.
While the manner in which archives were collected, organised, classified and sub-
sequently preserved has contributed towards the future uses to which they have been
put, the article demonstrates that archives have acquired life owing to the interven-
tion of additional enabling factors. These include the political context, the role and
motivations of the actors that used the archives, the activism of certain sectors with-
incivil society, the cooperation of state actors and the passage of time. In Chile, a
combination of the above factors has enabled the archives to be used as a tool for
transitional justice at critical moments during the long transitional period.
The Vicariate archives were activated by the Truth Commission members and
staff that were aware of the high value of the work carried out by this institution dur-
ing the dictatorship. Likewise, in a complex political context, the Catholic Church
and other human rights organisations supported the work of the Rettig Commis-
sion and made available their archives to this body. The cooperation between state
actors and civil society sectors during the earlier phases of the transition facilitated
the activation of the human rights archives. Furthermore, as shown in the article,

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Archives and Transitional Justice in Chile: A Crucial… 275

given the difficult political climate in which the Rettig Commission was established,
its members felt the urgency and importance of their undertaking. Therefore, the
commissioners were very detailed and cautious with the information they released
in every single case under examination so that the chances of mistakes would be
reduced to a minimum. A few years later, the archives so painstakingly created by
the Rettig Commission and its follow-up body, the Corporation, were re-discovered
and used by the judges who started to investigate the human rights violations that
took place under the dictatorship. These records have become one of the most reli-
able sources of evidence upon which thousands of cases were built against those
responsible for the past abuses. Although many other factors also led to the subse-
quent human rights trials, such trials relied heavily upon the information and docu-
mentation that had been collected and filed earlier by the Rettig Commission.
As in the case of the Vicariate archives, the manner in which the documentation
was collected and systematised certainly facilitated its subsequent use for prosecu-
tions. However, the article found that it was the changed attitude of the judges in
a profoundly different political environment that re-activated the Rettig archives as
judicial evidence in later years.
Similarly, the Valech I and II Commissions produced an extensive amount of evi-
dence and records documenting the huge impact of torture and political imprison-
ment; yet, as the section on the Valech archives showed, it required strong activism
by survivors’ groups, extensive social mobilisation and the participation of several
state actors for survivors to gain access to their files and testimonies, and for judges
to gain partial access to these archives. In this way, the Valech archives also could be
unexpectedly activated for judicial use in later years.
Second, the Chilean case shows that time is an important factor as the archives
have been used multiple times over the longer term; while the institutions that cre-
ate archives are temporary and limited, the archives and the records they leave behind
may serve multiple purposes in the future, often in unprecedented ways. Nobody had
anticipated that the documentation so painstakingly collected by civil society organisa-
tions during the dictatorship would acquire multiple roles in protecting victims’ rights
many years after they were created. Likewise, the archives of the Rettig Commission
acquired a probative value in the human rights trials many years after they had been
created. Furthermore, heated debates around the secrecy of the Valech Commissions’
archives has provided new opportunities for social and political actors to challenge the
issue of the secrecy of state archives as the starting point of a much broader campaign
to obtain more transparency and accountability from Chilean institutions. As shown in
the article, time is an important factor in that archives can be activated and re-activated
multiple times and acquire different meanings and purposes.
Finally, archives have over time revealed themselves to be powerful instruments
against the wall of secrecy erected by state institutions on many occasions through-
out the transition. Since the beginning of the transition, civil society actors have
constantly demanded and negotiated with the state for the creation and expansion
of transitional justice mechanisms in order to deal with the past and to respond to
the needs of the thousands of victims that the dictatorship had left behind. While
the state has on many occasions attempted to close the book on the past, mount-
ing evidence revealed through testimonies, records and archives has proven to be a

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276 A. Ferrara

means of resistance against silence, revisionism and closure. While truth commis-
sions have been regarded several times as closing chapters, the archives that con-
stitute a permanent legacy have contributed in multiple ways to the development of
other mechanisms to deal with the past. The Chilean case demonstrates the impor-
tance of preserving the archives of truth commissions for the purpose of later pros-
ecutions, making reparations and memorialisation. While the literature has devoted
much attention to the archives created by human rights organisations to advance
truth commissions, trials and memory, further research is needed to systematically
compare and explore the multiple uses of truth commissions’ archives after the truth
commissions have completed their work. The use of truth commissions’ archives
as evidence in prosecution deserves further investigation as it has become a grow-
ing practice at both the national and international levels to prosecute international
crimes, especially in the Latin American region. It is equally important to further
investigate the relationship between truth commissions’ archives and ‘memory
building’. Human rights archives and truth commissions’ archives are playing a cru-
cial role in confronting and renegotiating the past, becoming an essential vehicle
of memory. Archives uniquely preserve not only victims’ voices and their sorrow
but also their stories of political struggle and activism, usually omitted from the
mainstream narratives on the past violence. This makes them an essential means of
integrating multiple and diverse experiences and narratives into society’s collective
memory and of providing safeguards against historical revisionism and future nega-
tionism. To conclude, the multiple roles archives have acquired over time in Chile
demonstrates that records are powerful instruments and through appropriate chan-
nels of activation the power of archives will eventually become manifest.

Funding Open Access funding provided by the IReL Consortium

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