Keywords

Introduction

The process of transition that took place in Latin America in the 1980s has been the subject of much research in the social sciences for many years. Latin America introduced what today is known as “transitional justice ,” that is, various attempts to address past human rights violations committed in contexts of authoritarianism and armed conflict through a variety of judicial and non-judicial means, such as truth commissions and commissions of inquiry, criminal prosecutions for gross human rights violations, reparation programs for the victims, even institutional reform (Skaar et al. 2016). The relation between the various mechanisms of transitional justice , most experts would say, is an integral one and requires a comprehensive and holistic approach (Teitel 2000; van der Merwe 2009; Greiff 2012). The work of truth commissions has received significant international attention in the media and among scholars since the first Latin American commissions were established and their reports published. With the passage of time, an increasing number of prosecutions for human rights violations have taken place in the region as well, attracting similar attention. High-profile cases such as the Fujimori trials in Peru or the Rios Montt trial in Guatemala mobilized much needed media and political attention to the cause of criminal justice and accountability. Victim reparations have not enjoyed the same kind of attention, in spite of the fact that comprehensive reparations programs have been implemented in Latin America since the early 1990s. The region was no exemption, however, but part of an international trend.

As a focus of public international attention and academic inquiry, victim reparations are a relatively novel area. The issue gained momentum in the mid-2000s following the International Criminal Court ’s focus on victims’ rights at the turn of the millennium and the approval of the United Nation’s “Basic Principles on the Right to Remedy and Reparation” in December 2005 (García-Godos 2008a; van Boven 2013). This contrasts with the fact that the idea and practice of remedy and reparations for harm done is nothing new; it has existed for ages as legal categories in the civil and criminal codes of most societies across the world. What is new after the mid-2000s is the understanding of remedy and reparations in terms of victims’ rights: the right to truth, the right to justice and the right to reparation (García-Godos 2016).

What are victim reparations? In general terms, victim reparations can be understood as any kind of reparatory measures to address harm done to a person or a collective. It is useful to differentiate between a definition of reparations used in international law from the one used by reparation programs (de Greiff 2006). The first juridical definition is very broad, and it refers to “all sorts of reparatory measures implemented to address human rights violations,” without necessarily targeting specific violations; this includes various forms, such as restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-recurrence. The operational definition used by reparation programs is by necessity much narrower, referring to “reparatory measures for specific target groups who have suffered specific types of crimes or human rights violations.” The Basic Principles on the right to remedy and reparation operate with a broad definition of reparations, one which also addresses alternative or complementary transitional justice mechanisms (i.e., the right to justice, the right to truth), not excluding the right to justice, or the duty to prosecute violations that constitute crimes under international criminal law (García-Godos 2008a).

In the case of Latin America , the use of accountability mechanisms other than retributive justice was initially perceived by victims and human rights organizations as a cover-up for impunity, a sort of second-class accountability. Impunity has indeed been a feature of Latin American societies and their legal system in particular, both de jure and de facto (Sieder 1995). Blanket amnesties by the military juntas were common in the 1980s before giving way to civilian rule. However, what in many countries seemed impossible in the political context of the 1990s, to reverse amnesties and challenge impunity, is taking place today (Skaar et al. 2016). The legacy of the Pinochet case, based on the argument of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity (Roht-Arriaza 2005), and the establishment of the International Criminal Court made it clear that impunity was no longer accepted for the sake of peace and democracy. The consolidation of principles of accountability for past crimes paved the way for the possibility of broadening our scope and focus beyond perpetrators and towards the victims of human rights violation s.

It is within such context that the initial motivation for the research leading to this chapter emerged: to record the Latin American experience with victim reparations programs in order to fill the gap left by the academic focus on truth commissions and prosecutions. As I moved on and off the research, the central role that the definition and operationalization of the “victim” and “victimhood” categories have for the programs’ scope, performance and reach became clear. What was originally designed as a mapping exercise became thus an approximation to both fixed and flexible legal categories that turned out to be socially relevant for their capacity to affect the lives of so many individual victims and non-victims. By providing an overview of the Latin American experience with victim reparations programs ,Footnote 1 I am thus able to identify trends at the conceptual/normative level as well as at the level of operational design and implementation. I do this along four core issues of victim reparation: the need/will to repair victims for harmed suffered; the definition of “victim” that is applied; the types of reparations provided; and ultimately, the aim of reparations programs . Before that, I start with a brief presentation of the relation between reparation programs and truth commissions in Latin America.

Truth Commissions and Reparation Programs in Latin America

Latin America can be considered the first “laboratory” of transitional justice mechanisms of the late twentieth century. Indeed, Argentina led the way with the trials of the former military junta, which left power after the military defeat in the Falklands war in the early 1980s. This was followed by a truth commission and the official publication of the report “Never Again” in 1985. Since then, truth commissionsFootnote 2 have been established in 15 Latin American countries, numbering 19 experiences of truth-telling, of which 14 have been official processes (most of them completed), and 5 alternative (not officially sanctioned)Footnote 3 or very similar processes. By “similar processes” I am specifically referring to the Colombian case, where first the Group for Historical Memory and later the National Centre for Historical Memory have conducted very similar enquiries as formally sanctioned truth commissions in the region. A truth commission proper is to be established as agreed in the Final Agreement between the Colombian government and FARC-EP guerrillas signed in November 2016. In most cases, truth commissions dealt with human rights violations committed during periods of military dictatorships. In the case of El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru, however, the periods under investigation included internal armed conflict.

While most truth commissions put forward a set of recommendations, including the creation of victim reparations programs, there is no guarantee that these will be implemented immediately, if ever. Table 2.1 gives a general picture of truth commissions and victim reparations programs in Latin America. Up until 2016, 11 victim reparations programs had been established across the region to address human rights violations committed during the military dictatorships , authoritarian regimes and armed conflicts of the 1970s to the 1990s. The existence of victim reparations programs itself is, however, no guarantee of their timeliness, effectiveness or success in reaching out to the target population, the victims of human rights violations.

Table 2.1 Truth commissions (TC) and reparation programs in Latin America 1982–2017
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A comparative study on transitional justice in Latin America shows that most countries in the region have established victim reparation for victims harmed during periods of authoritarian rule or armed conflict following recommendations made by a truth commission (Skaar et al. 2016). Yet the span of time that has to pass for reparation programs to be established varies greatly, from 5 years (as in Peru) to up to 20 years (as in El Salvador). By March 2017, the only country in the region which had not established a victim reparation program in spite of the previous existence of an official truth commission was Haiti .

It is interesting to note that in 3 out of the 11 countries where reparation programs have been established, this was not following recommendations made by a former truth commission. In Paraguay , the reparations program was designed almost parallel to the work of the truth commission, and was actually created before the truth commission delivered its report. In the case of Bolivia, it is difficult to establish whether the reparations program was linked or not to the disbanded Comisión Nacional de Investigación de Desaparecidos created in the 1980s, given that it never completed its task. In the case of Colombia, victim reparations have been implemented as part of a peace process dating back to 2005 and in the absence of a formal truth commission.

Victim reparation schemes in Chile and Argentina are still among the most comprehensive programs of victim reparation implemented so far, combining individual, collective, material and symbolic forms of reparation. These two experiences have served as examples and inspiration for current practice around the world. The programs in Peru and Colombia are nowadays considered among international best practices in terms of types of reparation provided. Outside the framework of national reparations programs and at the regional level, the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights Court should be mentioned, as it has set powerful precedence with regards to the state’s duty to repair and compensate victims of human rights violations under international law (Carrillo 2006).

Having been established across the region since the 1990s, what do we know about the Latin American victim reparations programs? What are their main features? What continuities and changes can be observed since the start of their implementation in the early 1990s? More importantly, what does this tells us about the contemporary understanding of victims, victimhood and victim reparations in general? Tables 2.2a, 2.2b and 2.2c provide a summary of victim reparation programs developed in Latin America up to 2017, with some specific information about the programs, the types of violations they address and the measures put in place towards victims. Some of these programs are well known internationally, other less so. Some deal with tens of thousands victims (such as Argentina and Peru), some with less than 1000 victims (such as Brazil and Ecuador), but also in one case (Colombia ) with millions of victims. Some programs include just a few types of measures, others are more comprehensive. While today we may take for granted that it is legitimate to argue for victims’ rights and victim reparations, the categorization of what is and what is not established as legitimate victimhood in victim reparations has important implications for the interpretation and construction of a painful past. The role of reparations in transitional societies can thus be understood as an attempt to mend the past. On this basis, I suggest approaching victim reparations as a social process, one that starts from a particular interpretation of the past leading towards the transformation or re-interpretation of that past. Such an approach builds on four core issues of victim reparations, which I address below.Footnote 4

Table 2.2a Summary of victim reparations programs in Latin America since 1990 (I)
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Table 2.2b Summary of victim reparations programs in Latin America since 1990 (II)
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Table 2.2c Summary of victim reparations programs in Latin America since 1990 (III)
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Establishing Victim Reparation Programs

While truth commissions may recommend the need for reparations as an integral part of a transitional justice process, there is no immediacy in governments’ response, as the empirical record in Latin America has shown. Thus, the very first issue that arises when dealing with reparation programs is to decide for or against them. In order to opt for reparations, a political regime has first to acknowledge the existence of a situation that calls for reparations, as well as the existence of people who have been harmed and are in need of the attention of the state through a reparations program. Whatever the legitimacy of the claims and actors involved, these are not light decisions to take, as they will involve the initiation of comprehensive and highly contested processes of identification of harm done and groups to be assisted or ignored. These processes create high expectations among many actors, particularly among victim groups and potential beneficiaries. On the other hand, political will to develop and implement a reparations program might yield popular support and legitimacy to a new regime. Yet having said yes to victim reparations, regimes will need to act effectively and timely in order to prove their commitment and sustain credibility. In the case of post-authoritarian regimes, much will depend on the balance of power between former and current regimes. In the case of post-conflict situations, there may be a great number of pressing needs pending on the agenda.

How to assess the Latin American experience on this regard? Of the 12 official truth commissions that delivered a final report (Table 2.1), 10 included victim reparations or some form of redress to victims in their mandate, signaling at a very early stage an acknowledgement of a situation that called for reparations. As already indicated, eight countries established reparations programs following truth commission recommendations. Argentina and Chile took the lead in 1991, followed by Brazil in 1995. The rest of the region followed in a similar direction in the 2000s, with the establishment and implementation of new reparations programs providing redress for an increasing number of human rights violations, as we will see in the next section.

The establishment of national reparations programs that do not have a truth commission as a reference point contrasts the main trend in the region. These are the cases of Bolivia, Paraguay and Colombia. In these cases, the initiative to establish the programs came from the executive branch of power, that is, national governments, seemingly based on a consensus over the importance and relevance of the task. The Colombian case has attracted much international attention, among other reasons because it was originally linked to the demobilization and transitional justice processes established around the Law of Justice and Peace (García-Godos and Lid 2010). The singularity of this case lay not only in that reparations occurred prior a truth commission, but most noticeably prior to the end of the armed conflict. Victim reparations were considered an integral part of a larger framework of transitional justice aimed at ending the armed conflict. Transitional justice was seen as a means of peacebuilding and conflict resolution , thus taking place before rather than after the end of conflict.

The cases of Paraguay and Bolivia’s reparations programs are less known. In Paraguay, an administrative victim reparations program was established by law in 1996 and became operational first in 2001, in spite of the absence of a victims’ registry, a situation that raised a number of challenges (Collins 2016). In Bolivia , the program was created in 2004 and closed down in 2012 as, according to the Bolivian authorities, the state had fulfilled the task of addressing the needs of victims of human rights violations committed during unconstitutional political regimes (Amnesty International 2014: 15).

At the time of writing (2017), the overall trend in Latin America regarding victim reparations is that victims’ right to reparation is duly recognized by most states across the region. This presupposes, by necessity, the acknowledgement of groups of people across Latin America whose rights have been violated. The fact that some countries implement the right to reparation (although with various degrees of success) prior to the work of a truth commission , strengthens this observation. However, only the analysis of each country’s experience would reveal how well established and fulfilled a victim’s right to reparation actually is, and how comprehensive and inclusive the categories of victim and victimhood are.

Who Is the Victim? Defining the Victim-Beneficiary of Reparation Programs

In the fields of transitional justice and human rights, human rights violations are often described in terms of victim and perpetrator, those who have been harmed and those who have inflicted harm upon others, respectively. Establishing responsibilities for crimes committed is the realm of retributive justice. Identifying the victim is the realm of reparations. In the context of reparation programs , the identification of the victim is vital, as it is the individual victim or groups of victims who will be entitled to whatever form of remedies or benefits are to be provided by the program. Through the use of legal categories, reparation programs identify the universe of victims to which the program is addressed. This is most often done by reference to specific types of human rights violations.Footnote 5 In that manner, victims tend to refer to all those who have suffered a specific type of violation: the victim is identified on the basis of the type of violation inflicted upon him or her. In other words, victimhood is defined on the basis of the type of harm done. Alternatively, victimhood can also be defined on the basis of who the perpetrator is: state agents, guerrillas, paramilitaries and so on. In this case, specific measures can be established for victims harmed by a given type of actor. The combination of both forms of establishing victimhood also occurs, as we will see below.

Closely related to the identification of victims is the identification of beneficiaries of reparation programs. In the case of death and disappearance of a primary or direct victim, it is often the closest relatives who become the beneficiaries of reparations, often referred to as secondary or indirect victims. This immediately raises the issue of time: can descendants claim reparations for violations committed a generation or more ago? The combination of time passed between the specific violation and a reparations claim, and the degree of kinship/closeness to the primary victim can produce surprising combinations when it comes to the implementation of reparation programs.

In Latin America , the violations at the base of all national reparation programs have been those violating the right to life: arbitrary executions and disappearances. All reparations programs address these violations, identifying as beneficiaries the immediate family of the victim killed/disappeared and providing them with economic compensation as a form of reparation. Closely related to arbitrary execution and disappearance, the first victim reparation programs in the region considered also victims of torture to be entitled to reparations, but only if they had died as a result of torture. Survivors of torture , however, fell outside the operational category of victim and were thus not entitled to reparation.

Torture not leading to death became the basis of economic reparation benefits only in the mid-2000s. In the case of Chile , the first truth commission report (Rettig report) had identified “torture leading to death” as a defining category for victims, leaving survivors outside the scope of its mandate. The second truth commission in Chile (the Valech commission) repaired this unbalance by focusing solely on victims of torture and political imprisonment, and recommending appropriate reparation for torture survivors, including economic compensation in 2004. By that time, the Guatemalan National Reparations Program (Programa Nacional de Resarcimiento) had already introduced the category of victims of torture as a basis for economic compensation in 2003.

Given that the definition of victim in Latin American reparation programs is mostly based on the type of violation suffered, the inclusion of more types of violations to be addressed has immediate implications for the composition of the universe of victims potentially eligible for reparation. Reparation programs throughout the region have become more inclusive in terms of the types of violations to be addressed, and thus the number of victim-beneficiaries has also increased. One example is the explicit inclusion of sexual violence, particularly against women, as a type of violation to be prioritized both in the context of armed conflict and as a method of torture during dictatorships. The Peruvian reparations program , for example, includes victims of sexual violence in the priority group of victims entitled to economic compensation. This is now common among the newer reparation programs. In El Salvador, for example, one of the most recent programs, victims include also those whose rights to sexual freedom have been violated, a distinction not likely to be present 20 years ago. Other examples include the forced recruitment of minors, abducted children and internal displacement. As Balardini (2016: 56) points out, by identifying children born in illegal detention or abducted from their parents as victims, the Argentinian program expands the notion of victims to address the intergenerational aspects of victimhood. By defining internal displacement as a violation leading to reparation benefits, the internally displaced population in Colombia became the largest victim group in Colombia, numbering over 6 million people (Sánchez et al. 2016). It is thus clear that the definition of victimhood in terms of types of violations is key in determining the universe of victims in a given country. This in turn may play an important role in determining the types or forms of reparation to be designed and offered in specific countries.

Since the 2000s, an increasing number of reparation programs in Latin America identify also specific “disadvantaged groups ” or “people in vulnerable situations” as groups of victims to be prioritized. Such groups may include women, children or adolescents, victims of sexual violence , people with disabilities, internally displaced peoples and indigenous groups. This prioritization is often explained in terms of the moral obligation to support those in most vulnerable situations, people who risk being left behind without access to the benefits unless they are specifically prioritized. This must be seen in the context of a global trend in international development cooperation towards the identification of vulnerable groups. In Colombia , the Afro-Colombian population figures heavily among victims of internal displacement, thus a preferential treatment is given to indigenous groups in an attempt to balance out the realities of marginalization and discrimination. Similar prioritization and preferential treatment is given to women in the process of land restitution, in order to guarantee their rights and access to land, as well as to promote gender equality.

Equally important is an acknowledgement of the profile of the victim in particular situations. In Guatemala and Peru, the profile of the victims of the armed conflicts was people of indigenous peasant origin, non-Spanish speaking, living in rural areas, with low levels of formal education. Can prioritization be effective when these groups constitute the majority of the universe of victims? It is an irony of implementation that the international trend of prioritizing disadvantaged groups is accompanied by indifference towards the abandonment and need in which the indigenous Maya in Guatemala and the peasant population in the Peruvian Andes live while they wait for reparations to come (García-Godos and Salvadó 2016; García-Godos and Reátegui 2016). The ethnic element and internal displacement are features that were not present in other cases such as Chile and Argentina (or at least were not as marked), where the profile of the victim of arbitrary execution and disappearance was young men from urban areas, with formal education, employed or students, suspected of involvement with leftist political parties or unions (Collins 2016; Balardini 2016).

The definition of victimhood in terms of specific violations is in some cases restricted or limited to specific groups of perpetrators. In the case of Colombia , the Law of Justice and Peace of 2005 acknowledged victims’ rights for victims harmed by the paramilitaries and guerrilla groups, but not for victims of the Colombian armed forces, the implication being that such victims did not exist. After much pressure from victim groups and civil society, this was addressed by Law 1448 of 2011 (known as the Victims’ Law ), where the state recognizes the rights to reparation for all victims of the armed conflict, independent of whether their victimizers belonged to the paramilitaries, guerrillas or were agents of the state.

The experience or occurrence of a violation itself is, however, not enough to define a person as a legitimate “victim of violation ” and thus be entitled to reparation. It is the official acknowledgement of his/her victimhood as legitimate that counts. This legitimacy is mostly granted through national legislation and may or may not reflect the popular sentiment towards specific groups of victims. Perhaps the clearest example of this can be seen in the Peruvian case, where former members of the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path and their relatives are excluded from the category of victims even when their human rights have been violated. The reparations program explains this by refereeing to the law of creation of the Integral Reparations Program of 2005, a law approved by Congress and drafted along the lines of the national reparations plan presented by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, CVR) in its Final Report in 2003. In all of these instances, the argument remains the same: former Shining Path members are not to be considered victims because they took up arms against the legitimate power of the state (García-Godos 2008b). From a strict human rights perspective, this is indeed a controversial standpoint. From a socio-political perspective, this exclusion can be explained by the overall condemnation of the Shining Path, its cause and methods in Peruvian society. Almost two decades after the end of the armed conflict, Peruvians are still wary of anything and anyone that may bear resemblance or connection to the Shining Path. In such a context, few—if any, not even human rights organizations—dare to speak for the human rights of former Shining Path members. They are simply not considered as subjects of rights.

Peru is not alone in the exclusion of former guerrilla members from the category of victim. Colombia’s Victims’ Law also makes a clear distinction with regards to former members of armed groups at the margins of the law, who cannot obtain the status of victims. The difference between Peru and Colombia, however, is that while the latter does include some measures of support for the reintegration of former guerrillas as established in the Peace Agreement of 2016, such programs were not only inexistent but unthinkable in Peru. Thus, we see that while in international law and human rights standards the notion of victims’ rights apply to all human beings, in political and operational terms, in the context of victim reparation programs, victims’ rights are not immediately activated by the violation itself, but by the official acknowledgement of the legitimacy of victimhood.

Forms of Victim Reparations

When talking about types of reparation s, these can be understood in terms of their form (symbolic or material), or their distribution (individual or collective). Symbolic reparations include various forms of recognition and acknowledgement for the suffering of victims, such as commemorations, rituals in homage to the victims, changing street names, memory sites, and apologies in the name of the nation, in public acts or private letters. Material forms of reparation include all tangible assets provided to repair the harm done, such as money, goods or even services. These might in turn be provided as a single lump sum, a series of payments (such as pensions), the return of lost property or privileged access to educational and health programs.

Along with the expansion of the definition of victim in terms of types of violation, we can observe a similar expansion in the forms of reparation provided by reparations programs in Latin America. Since the Argentinian reparations program initiated in 1991, the most dominant form of reparation has been material reparations, particularly individual monetary compensation. Gradually there has been a move towards the inclusion of services, such as physical medical treatment, mental health therapy, legal counseling, educational programs and scholarships, housing support and more.

The expansion in types of reparations is also observed concerning how reparation benefits are distributed. While the ideal reparation program should include both individual and collective reparations, governments with limited resources tend to prefer collective reparation schemes, while human rights activists and not a few victims’ organizations prefer individual reparations. Collective material reparations are particularly relevant and in use in countries facing redress for massive human rights violations, such as Guatemala, Peru and Colombia. There are a variety of options, the most common being the provision of basic public infrastructure such as water and sanitation, health posts, schools, bridges and local roads. In such cases the distinction between development projects and reparations becomes blurred, and some argue that the development responsibilities of governments can never stand as reparation for human rights violations. At issue here is who is entitled to define and on what basis what appropriate reparations are: victims themselves, legislators, reparations officers or human rights advocates? Arguments in favor of different forms of distribution are many, based on pragmatic, normative and even philosophical reasons. We must bear in mind, however, that individual and collective reparations do not need to be exclusive; on the contrary, they ought to be considered complementary, as they address different dimensions of victimhood.

The type of reparation most applied in Latin American reparation programs since the 1990s has been individual monetary compensation. Argentina awarded lump-sum payments in national bonds. Chile opted for a monthly pension to the victims’ closest relatives. In both countries, compensation was accompanied by privileged access to health services but only Chile developed a wide variety of complementary measures that included educational services, exemption from military service and support to returning exiles, the politically dismissed and peasants excluded from agrarian reform or expelled from their land. In Chile and Argentina , reparation benefits were conceived mostly to be individual. The only type of collective reparations recognized was symbolic reparations.

The incorporation of an indigenous dimension as well as of arbitrary displacement in the definition of victim seems to have reinforced the role of collective reparations in the most recent programs. In Guatemala , for instance, the National Reparations Program includes a component of “cultural reparations” aimed at restoring the social fabric and cultural rights of indigenous Maya communities affected by the armed conflict. In operational terms, these involve symbolic reparations directed towards local communities, such as support for memorialization initiatives at the local level. However, if not accompanied by more tangible and direct measures addressing the real-life needs of victims, collective symbolic reparations are perceived simply as an empty gesture of passing-by solidarity (García-Godos and Salvadó 2016).

The Collective Reparations Program in Peru has become a point of reference in international practice. There, local peasant communities in areas affected by the armed conflict received lump-sum funding to carry out a locally selected project. Some communities chose to build a community house, others to develop small production projects and yet others the construction of a sports facility or a playground. This raised concern among human rights activists, who questioned the similarities of the program to development projects. Considering the poor socio-economic conditions of peasant communities in Peru, we cannot rule out that development projects may be considered an appropriate form of reparation by the local beneficiaries.

Peru’s collective reparations program also combined the symbolic and material aspects in an interesting manner. A detailed mechanism was designed for the selection and implementation of the project, which was to be executed by local governments and supervised by the community. The symbolic and memorialization aspects of reparation were gradually developed and incorporated in the official ceremonies organized at the start and at the end of the project. A common practice was public events where the community officially received “the check” from program officials, along with a diploma declaring this to be a heroic community; heroic for having survived the armed conflict and combated Shining Path in defense of the Peruvian state.

Today privileged access to health services and education have become common practice in Latin American reparation programs, accompanied by measures such as housing schemes, the restoration of citizenship rights, symbolic reparations of various kinds, mental health programs, restitution of land and property, and collective reparation programs that address both material as well as symbolic aspects. In other words, victim reparations programs in Latin America encompass today a wide variety of mechanisms that address many different aspects of victimhood. This reflects the complexity of human rights violations during dictatorship and armed conflict in the region.

Reflections on the Aims of Victim Reparation Programs

Based on the scope and trends shown by the Latin American reparation programs, we are in a better position to reflect on the aim or purpose that these programs serve or fulfill. The moral and normative weight of victim rights to remedy and reparation may render this question self-explanatory. However, there is one aspect concerning the aim of reparations that needs to be discussed more openly: the inherent political potential of victim reparations. In the words of Pablo de Greiff (2006: 555): “In transitional periods, reparations seek to contribute to the reconstitution or the constitution of a new political community. In this sense also, they (reparations) are best thought as part of a political project.”

What this means is that we ought to think of reparations in political terms, in the realm of politics, and as part of specific political projects. Through reparation programs states can put into practice the interpretation of the past forwarded by truth commissions, with all the advantages and limitations that this may convey. The implication of this for the study of victim reparation programs is that it no longer suffices to situate specific programs in their immediate socio-political context, but also needs to relate to contesting interpretations of the past and political/state-building projects. This observation becomes even more important in those cases where reparation programs do not emerge from a truth commission recommendations. While a discussion of the political projects that reparations programs across Latin America support is beyond the scope of this chapter, I want to conclude with some reflections around this issue for three specific countries: Chile, Peru and Colombia.Footnote 6

At a general level, it can be argued that reparations programs in Chile aimed at marking a clear break with the former military regime. The break was obviously led by the work of the truth commissions, which enjoyed widespread support and legitimacy in Chile. In the absence of retributive justice, the role of reparations was central. The programs clearly signaled that only full recognition of victim’s rights, addressing all types of violations, must be at the base of the democratic rule of law. The public recognition of torture survivors as victims and subjects of rights, entitled to victim reparations which were expeditiously implemented, would point in that direction. Today, the brutality of the Pinochet regime is no longer questioned in Chile. Victim reparation programs have played a vital role in establishing the legitimacy of victim rights and human rights standards in Chile.

In Peru, the Peruvian Truth Commission aimed at setting the foundation for a new social pact, one based on social inclusion and justice (García-Godos 2008b). However, its interpretation of the Peruvian armed conflict was not entirely shared by all Peruvians, much to the frustration of many Peruvian scholars, human rights activists and victims’ organizations. The public acknowledgment of the uncomfortable truths disclosed by the CVR set in motion a number of memory initiatives in Peru, most notably the establishment of a Place of Memory (Lugar de la Memoria—LUM) inaugurated in 2015. The LUM aims to build bridges and give room to different actors and voices on the basic idea of the armed conflict as a national tragedy and its audience as national (Del Pino and Aguero 2014). In contrast, the Peruvian reparations program has victims as its target group and, in spite of its limitations, it shows significant advances (García-Godos and Reátegui 2016). It can be argued that victim reparations in Peru are achieving what the CVR did not quite manage to do—conveying an interpretation of the past and, by doing so, indirectly supporting the development of a new social pact. The Collective Reparations Program acknowledges past suffering and the simple message it conveys to the communities included in the program could be summarized as “the state is with you.” At the same time, the same message is undermined by a counter-message of delay and indifference: individual reparations were severely delayed and it was difficult for victims to understand why it took so long. The ideal of a new political pact of inclusion was thus being undermined by the state’s inability to implement reparatory measures promptly.

In Colombia, the 2005 Law of Justice and Peace explicitly stated that the national reconciliation process was to be achieved by promoting victims’ rights to truth, justice and reparation, and thus the Justice and Peace process was conceptually oriented towards peacemaking and peacebuilding through the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms. While its achievements have been far from its ambitions, the process was instrumental in bringing forward an agenda on victims’ rights (García-Godos and Lid 2010). The 2011 Victims’ Law developed victims’ rights even further, showing more action towards the establishment of prompt and effective reparation programs. The recent peace agreement between the Colombian government and FARC-guerrillas in 2016 also recognized victims’ rights as a guiding principle. Despite their differences, the legal, political and administrative processes that followed are indicative of a political project of peace, where victim reparations play a key role. Obviously, the meaning of peace itself and its defining elements are highly contested among different sectors of Colombian society. The explicit inclusion of victims’ rights and victim reparations in both the Justice and Peace process, the Victims’ Law and the Peace Agreement are indicative of their centrality in the constitution of new political projects.

Conclusions

National reparation programs across Latin America have their own aims, instruments and plans of action. Reparation programs are mandated to address the needs of victims and, in doing so, they also mediate an interpretation of the past and the role that victims played in that past. They will apply the definition of victim differently, focusing on some violations for specific types of reparation, while applying other measures for other groups of victims. In Latin America the general trend has been an expansion of the definition of “victim” and “victimhood,” along an expansion in the types/forms of reparations provided by reparation programs. An expansion on these two fronts almost automatically implies an expansion of the universe of victims and potential beneficiaries of reparation programs. Although the region in general has experience some economic growth during the past decades, the financial resources available for programs such as victim reparations are still limited. The prioritization of one group of victims over the other, and one form of reparation over others, renders the definition of “victim” and “victimhood” even more important. By defining who is a victim and why, who cannot be considered a victim and why not, as well as how the state is to carry out its obligations towards victims, national reparation programs are actually redefining state-society relations. In this view, the questions of who is the victim and what is considered legitimate victimhood are not only full of moral and normative relevance, but also of clear political importance.