Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America, and: Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone Beyond Market and State (review)

What could be simpler than agreeing on a memorial at the site of Ground Zero to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attack? As we have seen for ten contentious years, agreeing on how to remember is not simple at all. Various parties have stakes in the venture—the relatives of victims, the state, and the city of New York, to name a few.

“Who profits—and how—when stories of repression and violence are transformed into media spectacles for mass consumption?” This is the question at the heart of Accounting for Violence, an important new book that asks questions, and provides some tentative answers, that have been swept under the rug in the international human rights community’s unequivocal embrace of victim and survivor storytelling as an effective transitional justice mechanism. Many have long argued transitional democracies, indeed all nations, must account for past wrongdoing in which the country was involved; that putting the past behind and getting on with it are simply bad ideas and problematic politics. It is not the necessity of remembering and accounting for the past that is at issue; rather it is, as Luisa Valenzuela writes in the Foreword to Accounting for Violence, “how to keep remembrance alive without losing respect. . . . Those who seek to profit in one way or another from others’ pain and the morbid curiosity of some audiences . . . degrade the word ‘memory,’ misusing it to the point where it loses its meaning.”¹ Two recent books take up this memory problem, laying bare the problems, and suggesting alternatives.

Accounting for Violence grew out of a panel that took place at a Latin American Studies Association meeting and comprises eleven separately authored pieces—in addition to a substantive introduction and conclusion—focusing on diverse countries—Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile—all taking up the questions of who profits and whether it matters. Each chapter hones in on a particular instance in a country and analyzes the economics surrounding the “memory market,” which, as the editors explain in the Introduction, “offer[s] a variety of competing products,”² including bookstores, cinemas, theaters, music, television shows, trauma sites, and memory museums. Like it or not, this market exists, and, in part because of globalization, is expanding and resulting in sometimes questionable profits.

Here’s an example of the dilemma, from a chapter called A Prime Time to Remember. In 1992, the Globos television station in Brazil premiered a mini-series called Anos Rebeldes (The Rebel Years), which became fantastically popular. Set in the past authoritarian period, the show featured a group of high school friends who came of age during the worst phase of the dictatorship. Central to the group are the star-crossed lovers, Joāo, a student activist who joins the rebels, and Maria Lucia, who loves him but has little interest in politics. On the one hand, the program educated a new generation of Brazilians about the repressive past: the detentions, tortures, and extra-judicial executions, most of which went unpunished because of a blanket amnesty. On the other hand, Globos, which had been complicitous during the dictatorship, made enormous profits from the show itself, from advertising and savvy product-placement, and from a line of related merchandise including a paperback novelized version, most of which feature the lovers, not the memory of the past. The author of this chapter calls the result “Repression Lite,” as it successfully laundered Globos’s reputation, but did little to recover the truth of the past.

Another example comes from Peru. In the chapter called Accounting for Murder: The Contested Narratives of the Life and Death of María Elena Moyano, the author recounts the ethical and political problems that arise when an individual’s memory is used...