Abstract
This chapter explores El Salvador’s two distinct discursive scaffoldings. Conservatives hail forgetting as the best way to achieve peace. This is El Salvador’s dominant discourse and it faces off against the human rights community’s truth-focused discourse. A crucial element in the development of how public discussions about the past are framed is the Salvadoran Truth Commission. Conservatives supported the Truth Commission’s work in preventing repetition until it became clear that the Commission would condemn the military for gross human rights violations. Conservatives then quickly passed an Amnesty Law and have promoted the work forgetting does ever since, and especially whenever the Amnesty Law, and so the forgetting it promotes, are challenged.
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Hatcher, R. (2018). Verdad or Olvido in El Pulgarcito de América. In: The Power of Memory and Violence in Central America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89785-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89785-1_5
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