The aim of this panel is to rethink the interpretative frameworks through which testimonies of political violence and military repression in Latin America have been approached, not only taking into account their Criterion of truthfulness, but the narrative procedures and strategies which enable us to read a tale as a verdict and a verdict as a tale. The corpus includes heterogeneous narratives composed of final and binding judgements, ruth-seeking reports, documents of the investigative committees reports and testimonies written in foreign languages which, in every case, sheds light on the questions about the witness’s word and on the multiple reflections surrounding the testimony itself. Furthermore, the corpus presents other territories within the map of the Latin American memories which turns the hegemonic account of the humanitarian narrative even more complex: the Andean highlands of Peru, the province of Tucumán in Argentina, and testimonies written from Italy.
This proposal is located within the long-standing Latin American literary tradition that conceives colonial legal documents as discursive formations, consequently displacing the classical logic of literary genres in the construction of a historiographic imagination. Within this tradition, there is no strict separation between history and fiction. On the contrary, the boundaries between one status and the other have always remained porous.
It is the possibility of reading verdicts, reports, and testimonial accounts as narratives, what permits to think that in every text there is someone who edits it. The position from which the editor operates is what determines the boundaries. At the opposite end of that porous zone, and in light of the research presented by this panel, we might affirm the following: if the editor is a judge, the testimony becomes a verdict; if it is done by a writer, the testimony becomes fiction.
Rossana Nofal, INVELEC- CONICET – National University of Tucumán "The word of the witness: the editing of testimony in judicial contexts and the narrative drifts of sentences for crimes against humanity in Argentina." The essay seeks to display a series of hypotheses concerning a corpus of judicial documents, approached as conflicting narrative memories that contest legitimacy in an edited version of a final and binding judgment. The logic of the judge who edits the witnesses’ testimonies, issues a verdict, and sentences those found guilty. Material evidence cannot escape the grey zone of testimony as a genre. This proposal to organise the corpus as stories articulated between political and legal narratives, entails a reconsideration of the hypothesis concerning the relationship between legal discourse and literature, as formulated by Roberto González Echevarría in Myth and Archive. Una Teoría de la narrative latinoamericana (1990) which organizes the literary historiography arround a question about the contemporary validity of a judicial bureaucracy involved in both, the origins of the colonial system and in the processes of construction of constructing narratives about the of Latin American reality. Although he incorporates the variable of the dead bodies of unidentified victims, he does not acknowledge the inflection of state crime. While in the narrative the search for meaning characterizes the narrator, in the judicial testimony the position of the victims of violence, and their words, is shaped as experience. The inquiries into judicial sentences, understood as narrative forms, are situated within a divergent hiatus between the witness’s story, the judicial dossier, and the sentencing of the guilty, as the political logic underlying the disappearance of bodies in Latin America structures a particular narrative configuration in each national literature, in dialogue with the processes of judicialization of memories in conflict.
Emilia Perassi, University of Turin "Ectopic Testimonies: the labours of transnational memory" My presentation will focus on three Argentine testimonial works written “from the outside”, mainly in Italy, and from both, political and linguistic displacement. These works are Donne ai tempi dell’oscurità. Voci di detenute politiche nell’Argentina della dittatura militare (2009) by Norma Berti, victim of arbitrary detention in Villa Devoto; La solitudine del sovversivo (2022) by Marco Bechis, the director of Garage Olimpo, imprisoned in the Club Atlético; Il sale del ricordo (2023) by Malena Scunio, daughter of the repressor Alberto Scunio. Those works belong to a vast testimonial constellation which are not usually studied by the Latin American theorists and critics as these works tend to be less accessible and, consequently, less legible. These testimonies are emblematically “out of place” as they were written from a political and historical space different from that of the traumatic events they account, and in a language other than Spanish, or even published only abroad and in a translated version without an original edited rendition. We may classify these testimonies within the realm of "ectopic" narratives, or consider them as ex-centric testimonies when compared to the testimonial corpus produced "from within." Their circulation and integration into the testimonial imaginary of the Southern Cone are hindered by editorial or linguistic borders, leading to the loss of voices that articulate distinctive testimonial rhythms. Even when translation does occur, it does not intervene in the narrative construction process, which unfolds not only from a temporal distance from the events but also from a spatial and contextual lenght. These conditions shape the political and poetic specificities of the ectopic testimony: deterritorialized, such testimony finds in distance, solitude, and isolation its own ways of working on memory which, in this case, is unmistakably and irreversibly transnational.
Betina Campuzano, ICSOH, National University of Salta “My sorrow follows me and wants to seize me: storytellers and witnesses in Hatun Willakuy (2004), by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” In the early stages, there was a silence surrounding the internal armed conflict between Sendero Luminoso, the Armed Forces, and the campesino populations in Peru. Subsequently, a range of narratives emerged that bore witness—through diverse verbal and material forms, to the llakis, or painful memories, and the hacer runakuna, that is, the processes of rehumanization in the face of fratricidal violence. Political violence in the Andes demands interpretive frameworks that are ethnic, social, and cultural in nature, capable of revealing localized memories, that is, ways of seeing and interpreting the world that either give meaning to events or render them silent. The name of the master narrative is particularly significant: Hatun Willakuy. Versión abreviada del Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (2004), and its translation, “the great account”, refers to the magnitude of a community’s suffering. Truth commissions emerge with the aim of documenting and denouncing human rights violations that have been denied or minimized by their perpetrators. In Peru, the category willakuy adds an interpretative framework and establishes a genealogical link with the narrative tradition explored by Arguedas: The oral tale refers to the act of telling and transmitting experience and knowledge in the Andes, while also referring to a performative dimension tied to the collective memory of the runakuna—that is, the people. It is necessary to pause and examine the diverse modulations of the witnesses, who become storytellers. Women who witness massacres transmit their fear to their children; children who witness the arrest and disappearance of their parents; runas who, overwhelmed by sadness, express their suffering through body language.
Victoria Daona, INVELEC- CONICET "The political historiography and narrative of the report of the Bicameral Commission investigating human rights violations in the province of Tucumán (1974–1983)" This paper examines the political and narrative historiography of the Report of the Bicameral Commission Investigating Human Rights Violations in the Province of Tucumán, as well as the complex circumstances surrounding its drafting, its failure to be published in book form, and its subsequent silencing. The report was produced in 1984 in response to demands from local human rights organisations calling on the provincial government to investigate crimes committed during the period of state terrorism, but it was not made public until 1991 when it was published in Spain. The demand put forth by these organizations had been the same throughout the country, yet it only found fruition in Tucumán and Corrientes. The remaining provinces aligned themselves with the national executive’s proposal through the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), whose report, Nunca Más, achieved the status of exemplary memory. In Tucumán, the bicameral commission carries out its work amid the assembling of the electoral platform of Fuerza Republicana, the political party founded by the perpetrator of genocide Antonio D. Bussi. Bussi’s public image gained strength both through the interruption of judicial proceedings and through the so-called civic action tasks carried out during the period of state terrorism. The notion of “contested memories” explains the support he gained, which ultimately led to his election as governor in 1995. Within a complex context, the Bicameral Commission submitted its findings in 1985 before both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate; however, the report received limited public attention. Although it constitutes a valuable precedent in the reconstruction of historical memory, the document remains largely inaccessible in its entirety for its reading.
20260729T154520260729T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires3.12. The word of the witness and the editing of the testimony: narrative strategies and procedures in the Latin-American literature tradition.SV104MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
