ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between Chile’s 1990 Truth Commission (TC) and international human rights law (IHRL), and how this relationship continues to shape social and institutional relations after the Chilean 1973–1990 dictatorship. The argument in this chapter is twofold. First, it argues that there is a constitutive and creative relationship between the TC and IHRL, which informs, mediates and grounds the TC’s truth as authoritatively lawful. Second, in doing that, the TC’s ‘lawful truth’ subordinates ‘local’ legal forms to the ‘global’ legal form of IHRL. To show that, the argument is developed through an ethnographic analysis of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights. The analysis shows how the TC’s lawful truth-making silences coexisting accounts of the truth, and how the museum gives continuity to the silencing. The chapter concludes by showing how the TC’s lawful truth-making forecloses the possibility of living together after dictatorship beyond the normative forms and meanings carried by IHRL.
