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 Catolica de Chile. He is the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile and Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier. Helene Risor is a study associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and Senior Researcher, Millenium Institute on Violence and Democracy Research, VioDemos. Karine Vanthuyne is a professor of anthropology at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of La presence d'un passe de violences: memoires et identites autochtones dans le Guatemala postgenocide (Presses de l'Universite Laval, 2014), as well as co-editor of Power through Testimony: Residential schools in the age of reconciliation in Canada .
Introduction: The Futures of Reparations in Latin America 1 PIERGIORGIO DI GIMINIANI, HELENE RISOR, AND KARINE VANTHUYNE 1 On Insurgent Knowledge and Affiliative Powers: Human Rights Violations, Civil Society Archives, and Forms of Repair 28 ORIANA BERNASCONI 2 Memory Caught in the Everyday: A Case of a Salvadoran Reparation Ethnography 52 HENRIK RONSBO 3 Being Repaired: Reparations and Remediations in Peru 74 MARIA EUGENIA ULFE 4 "Here? Justice?": Enacting Repair on the Boundaries of Justice in Argentina 92 NATASHA ZARETSKY 5 Indigenous Belongings as Precarious: An Ethnography of Reparation Activism for Mine-Caused Damages in Guatemala 114 KARINE VANTHUYNE 6 Indigenous Reparations in Plurinational Bolivia: Entanglement, Hopefulness, and Restorative Futures 139 AMY KENNEMORE AND MAGALI VIENCA COPA PABON 7 Engendering Repair: Mapuche Women Elders' Life Histories, Violence, and the Future 156 PATRICIA RICHARDS AND MILLARAY PAINEMAL 8 Involuntary Resettlement Resulting from Mining Operations in Peru: The Illusion of Commensuration, State Responsibility, and Corporate Reparations 180 GUILLERMO SALAS CARRENO Afterword: The Politics of Reparations 203 NANCY POSTERO Acknowledgments 213 Index 215 Notes on Contributors 225