Abstract

JUAREZ-SALAZAR, Edgar Miguel. Memory and social signification: bureaucracy and historic archives about the dirty war in Mexico. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2017, vol.40, n.1, pp.83-100. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v40n1.61954.

The history on the dirty war in Mexico is transcendental to understand the devel opment of the extermination policies of the State and the later echoes of the coercion mechanisms of the Mexican government. This article reflects on the uses of memory and its institutionalization by the State to submit the archives to a systematic disappearance. With the support of the bureaucracy, the policies for the records of the dirty war are sub ject to a constant effort to limit and forget memory, which allows new manifestations of the situation, including revision of the institutional forms of memory, questioning its pos sibilities to think about subversive guerrilla movements. State policies that establish the archive are historical and social elements, publicly and privately delimited, that institute a political sense as memory point; laws, their unification and implementation and the consequent bureaucracy dictate the reference frames for memory. However, as an element that is structured by language, memory cannot be completely fixed to one interpretation; it escapes the designs of meaning provided by the laws: memory reinvents itself by each reinterpretation when the archive is analyzed. These elements are structured based on the notion of a memory contained in the other as containment field of signifiers, and conse quently, new reinterpretations of memory must avoid a function of unique meaning, to al low new ways and possibilities to use it in history and the social construction of meaning.

Keywords : archive; bureaucracy; dirty war; institutionalization; memory..

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