Kirsten Weld

Panel IV
Kirsten Weld , Harvard University
Cold War Archives and Democratic Aspirations in Latin America

This presentation explores efforts to secure citizen access to the archives of formerly repressive Cold War regimes in Latin America. The opening of such state records, especially the records of security and intelligence services, has come to be considered essential to processes of transitional justice post-war and post-dictatorship societies like Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile, and civil society movements have fought ardently for their release. Yet such records’ greatest social value may lie not only in their potential evidentiary use in court, but, rather, to bolster what some analysts have called an “ecological approach to social repair.”