Secrecy, Silence, Declassification, and Use of Victim’s Declarations at the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture of Chile

Abstract

This article examines the residual documentation revealed from the partial lifting of the 50-year secret imposed on the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (2003), a second instance of this type carried out in Chile to qualify and repair people victimized by the last civil-military dictatorship (1973-1990). I seek to show the relationships, effects, and uses that the modification of the field of the visible/invisible has produced in relation to the declarants and the official truth. The study uses a qualitative methodology focused on the analysis of registry present in the 23 declassified Valech Commission qualification folders that make up the corpus, and interviews carried out with various actors involved in the lifting of the secret.