The Futures of Reparations in Latin America

Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by historical processes of dispossession, and citizens suffering from environmental harm. Reparations prompt us to face uncomfortable pasts and in so doing, create conditions for imagination of multiple futures. In representing the experiences and hopes of those affected by political violence in El Salvador and Argentina, environmental harm in Guatemala and Peru, and colonial dispossession in Chile and Bolivia, reparations are built upon conflictive forms of future imagination, translation of harm and new forms of belonging to and beyond the nation state, which reifies as much as challenges state authority over the promises of actual repair. In today’s Latin American political debate, hopes for justice and democracy remain anchored to the question of the kinds of future that can be imagined through and after reparation.
 

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor of anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad CatÓlica de Chile. He is the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile.
Helene RisØr is an associate professor of anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad CatÓlica de Chile, and director of the Millennium Institute on Violence and Democracy.
Karine Vanthuyne is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of La presence d’un passÉ de violences: mÉmoires et identitÉs autochtones dans le Guatemala postgÉnocide (Presses de l’UniversitÉ Laval, 2014), as well as co-editor of Power through Testimony: Residential schools in the age of reconciliation in Canada .