Observatorio de Justicia Transicional, Centro de DDHH, Facultad de Derecho

In recent years, the transitional justice field has tended to expand both the time horizons and the thematic focus of its concerns.  Today, it is more likely than previously to address the mid and long-term impacts of the human, social and environmental catastrophes left behind by political violence, human rights violations, and infractions of international humanitarian law.  Post-authoritarian Chile has always tended to downplay its truth and justice concerns, or even attempt to declare them a thing of the past.  They nonetheless re-irrupt time and again into national public life.  The impact of the 1973-90 dictatorship era and its violence is not, moreover, limited to the generations who most visibly or most directly lived through it: it also explains many of today’s social, political and economic faultlines.  This year’s report accordingly focuses on the economic, social and cultural rights legacies of the dictatorship, and on the unfinished business of reparations.  It does so at a time when national life is demonstrably under strain, suffering the negative and dangerous consequences of belligerent public discourse that cares little for the truth, and tends toward selective amnesia about the recent past.

La Guia ofrece analisis resumidos de las experiencias transicionales de diversos paises, buscando alimentar la toma de decisiones en procesos actuales y prospectivos ofreciendo evaluaciones y lecciones aprendidas.  Los temas cubiertos incluyen reformas politicas y constitucionales, reformacion y depuracion de servicios de seguridad, justicia, verdad, archivos, reparacion y etc.  El capitulo para Chile incluye entradas por Cath Collins sobre Lustracion y sobre Persecucion Penal de Crimenes del Regimen

This article analyses how judicial activity in domestic prosecution of dictatorship-era human rights violations shapes and contributes to the accumulation and verification of archival evidence. In particular, it discusses the ways in which trials challenge the status of existing sources of truth, such as truth commission findings, as well as producing new kinds of information and new sources of doubt about crimes of the recent past. The paper argues that novel 'truth orders' are produced by transitional artifices such as the truth commission and other administrative instances. Trials constitute another such order, with a separate and in some senses more socially established claim to legitimacy. It is in some senses inevitable, therefore, that competing truth claims arise when prosecutions are added to the post-transitional mix. Particular aspects of the technically challenging process of investigating long-ago crimes introduce additional professional considerations. The procedures and protocols applicable to forensic science and police work must be assimilated and evaluated by judges charged with turning old and new data into usable evidence. The particular rules of evidence, probatory value, and standards of proof that judges are mandated by law to apply challenges and transforms, in sometimes unpredictable ways, the social legitimacy or veracity previously attributed to such data. This challenge is particularly significant when the imperative of judicial truth interacts with sources of social truth. The production and diffusion of verdicts in criminal trials affects public perceptions of past and present judicial neutrality and legitimacy, and also alters relatives', survivors' and bystanders' views about past events and present responsibilities. Investigations carried out under written judicial procedure lead, eventually, to the production of a new meta-archive, a repository of tested and validated truth which may reinforce, challenge, complete or utterly discredit previous versions of events.

This article offers an empirically grounded, practitioner-focused analysis of the present-day search for Chile's dictatorship-era disappeared. It treats this search as a transitional justice process within which rights and duties around truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition are explicitly or implicitly performed and (re)negotiated by, inter alia, state agents. Drawing on close observation of, and ongoing engagement with, the police, forensic, and legal actors who are involved in this search day to day, it provides insights into how these state actors understand their task, and manage related challenges and professional dilemmas. These include divergence in what is meant, and sought, when the terms 'truth' and 'justice' are used; the effect of generational replacement; and the necessary limits of victim-centredness within a criminal justice frame. Finally, the article argues for greater attention to this type of closely observed, supply-side analysis of how, and by whom, states' transitional justice duties are actually carried out. This is important, not least because such routinization of transitional justice functions provides learning opportunities for the field, exposing incompatibilities, gaps or contradictions in or between core transitional justice tenets.

El presente paper investiga los valores, actitudes, y practicas de las y los forenses, policias y abogad@s quienes, desde la institucionalidad estatal, hoy se encargan de tareas de busqueda e identificacion de las y los detenidos-desaparecidos de la epoca de la dictadura chilena.  Analiza su actuar como practica(s) de justicia transicional, y revela como sus compromisos personales, identidad profesional, y cultural institucional confluye en la busqueda de verdad y justicia desde el Estado, por crimenes estatales del pasado.  Se basa en entrevistas y observacion en terreno realizadas en 2014 y 2015 en el marco del proyecto bilateral “Policing, Forensic and Informational Issues in the Search for Truth and Justice”, entre Chile e Irlanda del Norte. Una version en ingles se publico en el Journal of Human Rights Practice en 2016

This chapter examines the attitudes to formal justice system(s), and to legal pluralism, that are present or latent when actors in Latin America call for and achieve the present-day prosecution of past or ongoing atrocity crimes, most - but not all - perpetrated by state forces. It asks whether and how this accountability for past crimes, in the specific form of prosecution, can be made less exclusionary, more accessible and more meaningful for communities, societies and institutions,  including by enhancing its functions in reforming present-day policing and justice system capacity: creating 'enclaves of accountability' where previously 'enclaves of impunity' prevailed.  Exploring the potential for 'microchanges' in the form of generational replacement in justice institutions in some post-transitional societies, it also considers and values, the many home-grown innovations in legal repertoire by activists, survivors and lawyers acting in relation to domestic (not international) courts.  However it notes that successful accountability activism produces pushback from perpetrators and their defenders, and calls for formal justice advances to be protected and complemented by strategies for political and cultural change.

Este capitulo considera de manera critica los modelos y conceptos de justicia que informan el activismo a favor de la persecucion penal de crimenes atroces en tiempos recientes en America Latina.  Concluye que los multiples defectos de los sistemas de justicia penal en la region obligan a que la busqueda de justicia procure ser menos excluyente y mas concretamente provechosa para las comunidades, naciones, e incluso las instituciones involucradas, inter alia buscando fortalecer el uso de la persecucion penal para reformar y mejorar instituciones policiales, forenses y judiciales. Llama a cultivar 'microespacios' de cooperacion con operadores estatales, instalando asi enclaves de rendicion de cuentas, para contrarestar a los enclaves de impunidad. Insta tambien a que los esfuerzos de procuracion de justicia penal formal se complementen con esfuerzos en los ambitos culturales y politicos

Informe relatoria de paneles realizados en Lima, Peru durante la conferencia LASA 2017 entablando dialogos entre las ciencias forenses, el derecho, y las ciencias sociales en relacion a la busqueda, identificacion, y recuperacion de personas (detenidas) desaparecidas.  Con la participacion de Adam Rosenblatt, Cristian Orrego, Ariel Dulitzky, Silvia Dutrenit, Paloma Aguilar, Eden Medina, Daniela Accatino, John Dinges, Rodrigo Lledo, Carolina Robledo y Cath Collins

English translation of rapporteur document from a civil society workshop and two academic conference panels held in Lima, Peru in 2017 stimulating dialogue between relatives, activists forensic scientists, legal scholars, and social scientists around approaches to search, identification and recovery of disappeared persons. With the participation of Doris Caqui, Cromwell Castillo, Adam Rosenblatt, Cristian Orrego, Ariel Dulitzky, Rainer Huhle, Eduardo Gonzalez-Cuevas, Leonor Arteaga, Iris Jave, Silvia Dutrenit, Paloma Aguilar, Eden Medina, Daniela Accatino, John Dinges, Rodrigo Lledo, Carolina Robledo and Cath Collins

Rapporteur document of a panel event held at Cardozo Law School, New York in 2018 to discuss recent developments in the notion of the right to truth, state duties to search for the Disappeared, and the possible impact of both on the status of the El Salvador Truth Commission files, currently held in reserve at UN headquarters in New York.  With the participation of Benjamin Cuellar, Leonor Arteaga, Trudy Peterson, Eduardo Gonzalez-Cuevas. Kate Doyle and Jocelyn Getgen

Informe relatoria de un evento realizado en la Escuela de Derecho Cardozo, Nueva York, en 2018 sobre el desarrollo moderno del derecho a la verdad, los deberes estatales en busqueda de las personas desaparecidas, y el impacto de ambos en el estatus actual de los archivos de la Comision de la Verdad para El Salvador, los cuales se encuentran actualmente alojados, bajo reserva, en la sede de la ONU en Nueva York.  Evento con la participacion de  Benjamin Cuellar, Leonor Arteaga, Trudy Peterson, Eduardo Gonzalez-Cuevas, Kate Doyle y Jocelyn Getgen