There are two ways through which a society can face a traumatic past in which in a country human work left many victims, including people killed, displaced or exiled. A theme that in several countries has become a kind of Rubicon that polarizes political positions behind which the difference between tolerance and intolerance is usually hidden.
One path is the recovery of historical memory. Not only as a tribute to the victims, but as a message, for the present and future, of serious events that must be known – and known by the new generations – so that they are never repeated. The other way is the opposite: forgetting, what we might call the "turning of the page," in the name of an abstract idea of "reconciliation" that omits to know the truth. Erasing facts that generated thousands and even millions of victims, giving rise to impunity and a society that dispenses with their memory, under the pretext of conciliation.
What lies behind this contradiction is usually a terrible past. That goes, for example, from the Hitlerian or Polpotian genocides and the Spanish Civil War to those killed by bloody dictatorships in the Latin American southern cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay) in the seventies and eighties, reaching the tens of thousands of deaths in Peru, both by the action of terrorism and by agents of the State. And there are many other cases in the region and in the world.
Just as there have been very serious events that did not deserve particular expurgation, memorials or "truth commissions" or, finally, public policies to promote memory and pay tribute to the victims.
Undoubtedly, the most spectacular "sanatorium" public policy in recent decades has been that of Germany rebuilt after the tragedy of World War II. For anyone who visits the country there is nothing left but to bow with respect before the shocking results steps not to throw under the carpet the atrocities of Nazism since the 30s of the last century and during the Second World War with several million objectives of persecution, destruction or death for belonging to a certain race, ethnicity or nationality.
Millions of Jews, political dissidents, Gypsies, homosexuals, people with physical and mental disabilities were targeted for destruction or slaughter because they belonged to a certain race, ethnicity or nationality. The names of concentration camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen or Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland) remained for memory. Talking to people you can see the spectacular impact these memorials and German public education have had on generations that were not yet living when the horrors of Nazism.
In other countries the relative silence in the face of their own responsibilities in the history of terrible events and in the Second World War itself has not, however, been a matter of special "memorialization" as, for example, Japan.
But outside of these great global hecatombs of human work, it has been rather in conflicts and "internal" situations of some countries in which the existence or not of clear and consistent public policies has been seen more vividly. On this issue, on the contrary, for reasons of domestic politics many have been the subject of controversy and even regressive proposals. These days in Spain, for example, within the recently started electoral campaign for the July 23 election, the position of the right-wing candidates of, for example, repealing the Law of Democratic Memory is striking. One of the objectives of this law is precisely to recognize those who suffered persecution or violence, for political, ideological, thought or opinion, conscience or religious belief, sexual orientation and identity, during the period between the coup d'état of July 18, 1936, the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship until the adoption of the current Constitution in 1978.
In the Latin American context, several notable steps have been taken in recent decades – literally "memorable" – of the first, that is, the recovery of historical memory. Not without tension and contradiction with those who, from extreme conservatism, prefer oblivion and not talk about atrocious facts and responsibilities.
In the last 20 to 30 years, important steps have been taken in the region to maintain the memory so that terrible events are known by future generations so that they are not repeated. For example, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile referred to the long dictatorship of Pinochet or the Place of Memory (LUM) in Lima on the internal armed conflict generated in Peru by the terrorist actions of the Shining Path and the atrocities in which this resulted in serious responsibilities of agents of State institutions. Also the Museum Site of Memory, located in what was the School of Mechanics of the Navy (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, detention and extermination center during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 of thousands of detainees and disappeared, many of whom perished in the "death flights".
That being the case, the fact is that for a radical sector of societies remembering seems to be rather a threat and not a necessary step against the repetition of horror. If in today's Spain there are those who promote in their political discourse to turn a page of the past that seems uncomfortable for some, something similar happens in a Latin America already infected by the global virus of political polarization. Something of that same retarded spirit floats elsewhere.
This is what happened in Lima with the LUM, a space of memory inaugurated in 2015 with the cooperation of Germany. The exhibition begins precisely by recalling how the terrorist violence of the Shining Path that bloodied the country for twenty years began in 1980.
But, as it could not be otherwise, in the LUM the exhibition also deals with the victims of serious human rights violations committed by the State, something that for some extremists is better to omit. Thus, the municipal authority in Lima, in the hands of a far-right political group, abruptly ordered the closure of the LUM with administrative objections that could have had another handling. For the moment the crisis has been overcome but we already know of the sword of Damocles that hangs over its functioning within an increasingly tense and regressive general political context.
These currents of regression that seek to cancel memory and repeat and spread to other countries should not be surprising. And that, with this, it is intended to erase serious facts from history. That they must be known and remembered as data of history so that in the formation of future generations there are better and greater elements so that these tragedies are not repeated. Canceling memory, on the contrary, is how the encouragement of the repetition of tragedies becomes more possible.
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