Between justice and memory, between public and private. Contemporary politics of archives in Latin America

There is no doubt that access to contemporary Latin American archives is more open nowadays than three or four decades ago. The sequence of militarization that marked the 1960s-1980s was followed, with the end of the Cold War, by the so-called time of transitions and then of democratic consolidation. This new era has profoundly transformed access to archives and the conditions for practicing the profession of historian. The examination of these recent transformations cannot, however, avoid a certain number of structural considerations on the long history of Latin American archives, marked by the negligence of weak States that never had the means to implement a reasoned and sustainable policy of patrimonialization of the past. Moreover, the recent dynamics of the opening of archives or the creation of new collections attest to two great singularities: on the one hand, the role played by private actors in making available sources that make possible an informed writing of the history of the twentieth century in Latin America; on the other hand, the powerful political engine constituted by the double judicial and memorial dynamics at work in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, in the context of the “turn to the left” in Latin America.