This panel explores the afterlives of perpetrators within contemporary memory practices. Moving across archives, memory sites, visual regimes, and testimonial spaces, it examines how societies represent, silence, or reimagine those responsible for state violence. Drawing on experiences from Chile, the panel asks how the figure of the perpetrator circulates between history, ethics, and aesthetics—how it endures as a troubling presence that both sustains and unsettles democratic imaginaries.
While memory studies in Latin America have largely centered on victims, a growing body of research invites us to examine the agents of repression themselves—not to humanize them, but to understand the institutional and symbolic conditions that made their violence possible. This “turn toward the perpetrator,” as framed in recent interdisciplinary debates, exposes the limits of binary frameworks—victim versus victimizer—and reveals the bureaucratic and everyday complicities that underpinned authoritarian rule. The panel situates this shift within broader global discussions on accountability, denialism, and the democratic uses of memory.
The four contributions approach perpetrators from distinct yet connected vantage points. The first revisits Chile’s dictatorship through state archives, analyzing how bureaucratic routines enacted repression and how archival description can confront institutional violence. The second explores Chilean memory sites, where perpetrators appear as spectral presences within exhibitions and pedagogical narratives. The third examines the roles of women as collaborators in authoritarian regimes—particularly in the Colonia Dignidad hospital—revealing the intersections of gender, medicine, and repression. The fourth proposes a typology of Chilean torturers based on literary, testimonial, and audiovisual portrayals, tracing how societies imagine and classify those who inflicted harm.
Together, these perspectives reveal the perpetrator as a site of epistemic and moral disturbance. By linking archival, visual, museological, and theoretical approaches, the panel rethinks the relationship between memory and democracy through the unsettling legacies of violence.
Constanza Dalla Porta, Princeton University - "Bureaucratizing Repression: Archival Traces of Perpetrators in Chile’s Dictatorial State"
This paper examines the Chilean dictatorship’s bureaucratic machinery of repression through the lens of the state archive. Drawing on the project Archivos con perspectiva de derechos humanos: patrimonio documental para la verdad, la justicia, la reparación y la memoria, developed with the National Archive of Chile, it analyzes administrative documents produced between 1973 and 1981 that reveal how violence was organized, legitimized, and enacted through everyday paperwork.
The archival revision of more than five hundred volumes from ministries such as Interior, Justice, and Defense uncovered the names of hundreds of civil servants, officers, and administrators who participated—often invisibly—in the functioning of the repressive state. Their signatures, decrees, and directives expose a dimension of perpetration that exceeds the figure of the torturer or executioner. Rather than focusing on scenes of physical violence, these documents illuminate what may be called the bureaucracy of violence: the set of administrative acts, appointments, and legal adjustments that made repression possible while preserving the appearance of institutional normalcy.
By tracing how violence left its mark on the state’s own documentary record, this presentation proposes an expanded understanding of the perpetrator as an administrative subject—one who produces, circulates, and authenticates the paperwork of authoritarianism. It also reflects on the ethical and methodological challenges of describing such archives: how to make visible the agents of repression without reproducing their logic, and how archival description itself can become an act of accountability. Ultimately, the study argues that within the state’s own files lies a neglected form of testimony—one that speaks not of victims, but of the structures, languages, and individuals through which the dictatorship sustained its power.
Keywords: perpetrators; archives; bureaucracy of violence; dictatorship
Omar Sagredo, Universidad de Valparaíso - "Disturbing Specters: The Figure of Perpetrators in Chilean Memory Sites"
This paper examines how perpetrators of human rights violations are represented in six Chilean memory sites: Estadio Nacional, Londres 38, Ex Clínica Santa Lucía, Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas, Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, and the Centro Cultural Museo y Memoria Neltume. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural memory studies, the “perpetrator turn,” and the notion of spectrality, it argues that even when these sites do not explicitly include perpetrators in their museography, they nonetheless emerge as spectral presences that unsettle the narrative, visual, and conceptual frameworks of memory.
Methodologically, the study combines documentary and museographic analysis, interviews with mediators and curators, participant observation, and photographic documentation of exhibitions. This corpus enabled the examination of perpetrator representation across three interconnected dimensions: concepts (the categories used to name perpetrators), narratives (pedagogical discourses and guided tour scripts in dialogue with audiences), and images (explicit visual presences or implicit evocations).
The findings reveal that perpetrator representation is relational and situated, oscillating between legal, political, and moral categories, and highlighting tensions between legal condemnation and the pedagogical need to explain the repressive apparatus. The central thesis of the research is that the figure of the perpetrator in Chilean memory sites operates as a spectral entity that challenges the boundaries of the sayable and the representable, raising ethical dilemmas for museography and activating controversies in dialogue with postmemory perspectives.
José Santos, Universidad de Santiago de Chile "Towards a Typology of Chilean Torturers"
Until recently, the issue of perpetrators received little attention from researchers. In the last years, however, it has gained relevance both internationally and regionally. Chile is an exception within this new context, as there are few studies devoted to the subject. The case of torturers in particular has been almost absent from studies on the dictatorship. This paper seeks to explore this uncharted territory with the aim of developing an initial proposal for a typology of torturers. The aim is to describe profiles that highlight particular characteristics distinctive to certain types of individuals. To do so, we assume what has been called in criminology the “principle of homology,” that is, the assumption that individuals who commit similar crimes would have similar identifying characteristics and personalities.
References to specific individuals will be based on the representations that have been made of them. There is not about the actual torturers, many of whom are now dead or cannot be located. Ferrer and Sánchez-Biosca speak of concepts, narratives, and images as ways of accessing the perpetrators. On this occasion, we will focus on the accounts in which their representations appear. In this way, we will draw up second-degree profiles, based on the sketches already outlined. We will focus on written works, although we will also consider some oral accounts and audiovisual works. We will distinguish three types of informants in the narratives: the torturer himself, the victim, and third parties (journalists, family members, and researchers, among others). The information provided by them will be traced in a wide variety of textualities, including interviews, biographies, and autobiographies of the perpetrators, testimonies of the victims, and journalistic and academic research.
20260730T140020260730T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires6.17. Representing the Perpetrator: Archives, Images, and Memory After ViolenceSV104MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
