ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author looks at trauma, memory and recovery in post-transitional justice efforts, and discusses the art of memory production in contemporary trials in Argentina. Based on her fieldwork in Tucuman in 2011, the author argues that the children of the victims and other justice agents activate and use memories and the 'presence of absence' of the disappeared as micro-resources of a political struggle to regain socio-political ownership of history. She demonstrates that the recollection and representation of their inherited trauma finds some redemption in the recovery of their parents' personalities and the transgenerational belonging bound to ideals of social justice. The crime of forced disappearance as the regime's preferred strategy of unlawful combat against its own citizens produced fear and death and traumatised Argentine society collectively. In the early 1970s, various revolutionary forces, guerrilla movements and an activated civil society fought for social justice and demonstrated resistance to the existing socio-political order in Argentina.