ABSTRACT
The “recent past” of the dictatorship is present in Uruguay even after almost forty years since the country’s transition years since the country's transition to democracy. In contemporary Uruguay, renewed contestation over the accountability for the dictatorship-era state terrorism and mass human rights violations reveal that battles over collective memory and human rights demands are social wounds that remain open. This chapter highlights the vital role of the “victims,” “survivors” collectives, and their domestic and transnational civic associations in the process of confronting state-sponsored master narratives through memory work, witnessing, and judicial narratives. It addresses the question through the lens of an emblematic post-transitional justice case of Mujeres, the first legal instance to ever bring charges for the crime of sexual abuses suffered by former female detainees during the dictatorship, brought to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2021. Our analysis shows (a) how a combination of domestic and transnational networks of solidarity and symbolic and legal resources helped the Mujeres collective resignify and reframe their own narratives through memory work about the traumatic past, from testimonial witnessing to reigniting the public circulation of new counter-narratives about previously silenced crimes, and (b) how these social and legal practices led to their case's judicialization and cultural productions. We found that transnational networks were (re)activated throughout decades of memory work even prior to the transition, dating back to the “convergence” work of the late 1970s and early 1980s among women's rights and feminist networks. The analysis of the domestic and transnational exchanges and mobilization for the criminal prosecution of sexual abuses using a gender-based lens during their political imprisonment reveals important continuities as well as changes in social memory despite the challenges of ongoing impunity in Uruguay's contemporary post-transitional battles. Despite the state policies limiting the victims’ rights, this women's emblematic case reveals openings in the culture of impunity that show the combined effects of domestic public initiatives,legal demands and transnational justice networking, learning to use the system of international law and human rights protections to generate changes in the ways in which Uruguayan society comes to terms with this legacy.
