Abstract
Salvadorans and Guatemalans continue to argue about the place of the past in the present and what role it might play in cementing peace and democracy. A common, though not uncontested, discursive scaffolding exists in Guatemala that celebrates the work memory does to prevent repetition and promote reconciliation. Those who want to forget the past (i.e., conservatives) must promote forgetting from within this framework. Public discourse in El Salvador is distinct. While the human rights community speaks of the work that truth does in much the same way their Guatemalan counterparts speak of memory, conservatives quite openly declare that what Salvadorans need to do is forget and look to the future. In both countries, contradictory versions of that past nevertheless exist.
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Hatcher, R. (2018). Introduction: On the Calle del Olvido. In: The Power of Memory and Violence in Central America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89785-1_1
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