How the Military Remembers: Human Rights and Countermemories in Latin America

This groundbreaking collection of essays examines how Latin American militaries construct memories of past human rights violations in ways that challenge established public memory and human rights discourse. While previous studies have focused on democratization, transitional justice, and victim-centered narratives, this volume takes a different approach. It highlights the importance of deconstructing the military’s own active memory work, or their ＂countermemories＂--a term the editors use to describe military narratives that are both counterintuitive and that run counter to the victim-oriented memories that have long dominated the region’s public memory.

With attention to the distinct cultural, political, and historical contexts across Latin America, the essays reveal how military figures and institutions appropriate mechanisms of truth-telling and accountability to reframe the past, blur the lines between perpetrator and victim, and weaponize memory itself.

Contributors: Mariana Achugar, Gabriela Fried Amilivia, Rebecca Atencio, Jo-Marie Burt, Rachel Hatcher, Nicolás Rodríguez Idárraga, Michael J. Lazzara, Cynthia E. Milton, Carla Granados Moya, María Emma Wills Obregón, Leith Passmore, Valentina Salvi, Gladys Vásquez Zevallos

Cynthia E. Milton is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru and Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru.

Michael J. Lazzara is a professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the associate vice provost of academic programs and partnerships in Global Affairs at the University of California, Davis. His books include Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile Since Pinochet, Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile: Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence, and Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory.