Recent history in Latin America: between complexity and uncertainty

Abstract

Validating a history of the recent past has meant conceiving of history as all-embracing, advanced knowledge in a theoretical construct applicable to all periods, including the present. In that context, scholars have developed new categories of analysis on phenomena of complexity, crisis and uncertainty. At the same time, there have been paradigmatic transformations in several scientific disciplines. Despite the lack of unified criteria, the rise of totalitarian governments in Latin America, mainly in the Southern Cone, in the 1970s leads us to trace the beginning of recent history back to those years. After a period in which historical memory was suspended and the free discussion of ideas banned, democracy has opened the door to a cultural, dialogistic approach to recent history. At times, requests for a construction of historical knowledge and claims for memory and justice have overlapped (though not always happily). A dilemma has also been generated over a single event being conceived not only as the product of a recent past experience, likely documented by several witnesses, but also as a mass media construction with images and words as documentary evidence in real time. If the quest for verisimilitude is mandatory, to distinguish what is believable through the quality of being true or real, then the challenge for recent history is not a small issue: it must face the diversity of testimonies, validate criticism, discern the hesitations of protagonists and translate uncertainties and dualities into narrative forms