Seeking the Missing

Chile is a paradigmatic transitional justice case illustrating the sequencing, coexistence, and intermingling of the types of victim engagement that this book examines. This chapter traces active (co)-creation by relatives in the search for the Disappeared in dictatorial and post-dictatorship Chile. It outlines the gradual accretion of different forms of engagement: denunciation and resistance, legal activism and political lobbying, and protagonism in calling for, and calling forth, a new state policy response in the form of a National Search Plan, launched in 2023. Analysing relatives’ participation in design of the Search Plan meanwhile reveals divergent and changing views about the relative importance of trials, truth, recovery, and identification of those still disappeared. Overall, Chile’s trajectory shows how many now-familiar categories of transitional justice demands were originally hard won from below. It also suggests the state may at times be needed to mediate between contrasting or contradictory victims’ voices.