Justicia transicional y producción cultural: una cala en la transgresión de los discursos institucionales de Argentina, Chile y España

Abstract

The term ‘transitional justice’ is first used in the 90s in the field of Social and Legal Sciences. It “refers to the set of measures implemented in various countries to deal with the legacies of massive human rights abuses”, such as “criminal prosecutions, truth-telling, reparations, and different forms of institutional reform” (Greiff 18). In the diverse countries dealing with the past, these measures, which stem from an international legal tradition, are put into practice differently. In this essay, I examine how a selection of Argentinean, Chilean and Spanish cultural productions question the gaps in the political and legal reforms. Especially in the Spanish and the Chilean cases they criticise the perpetuation of amnesty laws that grant impunity to the people responsible for crimes against humanity. From the UN perspective, those crimes are not subject to statutory limitations. The chosen cultural productions belong to different genres: narrative, theatre and documentary film. They have in common the ability to denounce the legal vacuum through formal and expressive resources that transgress the institutional —and institutionalised— discourses on memory and justice of the three countries.