Chapter 5 - Case Studies of Implementation

Summary

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (1889 – 1951)

What has happened to the roughly 1000 recommendations that Latin American truth commissions have made over the past four decades? Did they remain just words on paper, or have they been implemented? This is a highly relevant empirical question if one is concerned with the impact and relevance of truth commissions. This chapter zooms in on each of the 13 formal truth commissions established in Latin America between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s to provide a flavour of the implementation record of their recommendations. Whereas most qualitative comparative work on truth commissions focuses on their establishment, mandates, and operations (Bakiner 2016; Hayner 1994; Hayner 2011; Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2010), we present 13 mini case studies of truth commissions, focusing specifically on their recommendations and the degree of implementation .

The final reports of these commissions have, as suggested earlier in this book, made a wide range of recommendations covering numerous substantive issues. In Chapter 3, we introduced seven substantive categories plus an “other” category to group and systematize the recommendations: Institutional reform, legal reform, constitutional reform, criminal prosecution, reparations, nonrepetition measures, follow-up measures, and “other” measures. When coding the recommendations according to these categories, we ended up with 1512 coded recommendations, based on the fact that recommendations are sometimes crafted in complex ways such that one recommendation asks the state to do multiple things. Each of these coded recommendations is what we refer to as an action item. They are the units of analysis in this chapter.

The following analysis is based on three main types of source material: (1) data on implementation for each of the 13 truth commissions, specifically collected for the Beyond Words project, of which this volume forms a part; (2) the country chapters written for each of the truth commission cases, using the data collected for this project, which appear in a companion volume (Skaar, Wiebelhaus-Brahm, and García-Godos (eds.) 2022); and (3) secondary sources. Note that the secondary literature is very uneven. There is quite a large scholarly literature on some of the truth commissions, namely Chile's Rettig Commission, Argentina's CONADEP, Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification and Peru's CNV, though surprisingly few scholars have concerned themselves specifically with their recommendations.