Abstract

MANSILLA SANTELICES, Daniela  and  BERNASCONI RAMIREZ, Oriana. Silences and Official Truth. Silencing Operations in the Case of Chile’s National Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2023, n.51, pp.131-157.  Epub May 10, 2023. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda51.2023.06.

This article explores silence as a constitutive and constituent practice of the production of official and state truth regarding serious human rights violations, using the case of Chile as a starting point. We focus, in particular, on Chile’s National Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture (2003-2005), and its counterpart, the Advisory Commission for the Qualification of Disappeared Detainees, Political Executed, and Victims of Political Prisoners and Torture (2010-2011), whose objective was to qualify and repair the victims of the last Chilean civil military dictatorship (1973 and 1990). We discuss four silencing operations in which we identify the ways in which they relate and act in/with different artifacts and procedures of the Truth Commission (TC) device, after addressing its performative capacity on testimony, residual truth, and official truth. This qualitative research included interviews with declarants and ex-officials of the commissions, and professionals of the National Institute of Human Rights, along with a study of secondary sources. Drawing from a post-structuralist theoretical-methodological approach and from the field of science, technology, and society studies, we conduct a rhizomatic analysis and an exercise of infrastructural inversion, focusing on that which is not part of the official truth, or that which is not public and visible. We strive to contribute to the field of study of ecologies of visibility/invisibility in knowledge infrastructures, and to memory and human rights studies. We do this based on a critical reading of the production of truth about human rights violations that, overcoming the dichotomous approach of what is said and not said, proposes that the official truth is not reduced to the information and data collected. Rather, it also includes operations of silencing that provoke actions within the Truth Commission and in its public reception.

Keywords : Human rights violations; knowledge infrastructure; residue; secrecy; transitional justice; truth commissions.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )