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This chapter examines how Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile fared with truth and justice policies after the transition from authoritarian rule, looking at the issue from an institutional and political angle, and at the social politics of memory. Efforts to deal with the past and their significance in the overall politics of transition to democracy are shaped by country-specific historical conditions and developments: the nature and legacies of repression and authoritarian rule; and the nature of the transition process and the various political, institutional and legal factors conditioning the post-transitional period, among which are the nature of repression, the presence and strength of a human rights movement, inherited legal or constitutional limitations, relations between political parties and Human Rights Organizations (HROs), the degree of executive or party commitment to policies of truth and justice, the unity of democratic parties, the ability of the military to mobilise against any policies of accountability as well as their relations with the democratic executive, the attitude of the judiciary to past violations, the presence of a strong legislative right, and the degree to which repression penetrated the social fabric. The way in which the first democratically elected authorities deal with the past, together with the relative strength of the human rights movement in the post-transitional period, sets the agenda for the subsequent evolution of the issue; more specifically, the past remains a source of open conflict if there are loopholes in official policies that preclude full closure or amnesty, and if transnational groups or regional and international human rights bodies challenge national policies favouring impunity. The past also remains a source of conflict if there are strong HROs that continue to contest official decisions on how to deal with the past, and have allies in the formal political arena or the courts. Official policies to deal with the past are not of themselves directly relevant to the process of democratisation, and what is more, during the first transitional period, truth and justice policies are unrelated to (or may even place obstacles in the way of) wider institutional reform; the reverse is also true, but whatever the case, the past becomes part of the dynamic of democratic politics. Indeed, although the continued pursuit of truth and justice and its links to wider reforms may be difficult to establish across the board, the politics of memory more widely conceived are important for a process of democratization in all four countries examined here, as it is about how a society interprets and appropriates its past, in an attempt to mould its future, and as such it is an integral part of any political process, including progress towards deeper democracy.

The main aim of this book has been to analyse what determines how new democracies face an authoritarian past (and human rights violations in particular) and, in turn, the way in which policies of truth and justice shape the process of democratization. Thus, eighteen cases are analysed in detail, covering a good part of the processes of democratization that have taken place since the beginning of the 1970s; countries experiencing a political change that did not undergo a transition to democracy have been left out, as have countries in which truth and justice policies are the result of the end of a civil conflict where there is no accompanying movement towards democratization. The key obstacle to theorizing about this topic is the enormous influence of the particular historical evolution of each country, and various factors emerging therefrom, on policies of truth and justice in transition. Thus, a general overview to categorize different experiences of transitions from dictatorial rule according to the balance of power between authoritarians and democrats is immediately useful, although the aim of the editors has been to keep sight of the peculiar nature of national experiences while providing some kind of useful guidelines for approaching the subject. It is in this spirit that the two sets of conclusions offered here provide a way of looking at the issue of transitional truth and justice: the first pertains to the probability that a new democracy will undertake policies of this kind; the second refers to the consequences that such policies may have for democratic life or democratization.

An examination is made of various aspects of justice and legitimacy in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in South Africa. The major part of the chapter discusses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The different sections of the chapter are: Introduction; Race, Nationalism, and Political Violence – a discussion of the causes of the massive levels of political violence in the recent history of South Africa; The Negotiations for a Transition; Negotiating an Amnesty; and the TRC as a Liminal Institution; and Concluding Remarks.