“Ni vivo, ni muerto”

Abstract

The battles of memory that take place in Central America in order to establish the truth about past armed conflicts are also “a war of figures”, as stated by the historian Arturo Taracena, who was part of the team of researchers of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) in Guatemala. Indeed, the number of victims can only be established based on estimates and projections due to the implementation of forced disappearance of people and collective massacres which were strategies of the State terrorism practiced in the region.Unlike Argentina and Chile who, at different times during their transition, promoted state-funded memory policies aimed at searching for and identifying the disappeared, the exhumation process in Central American countries directly affected by armed conflicts is in charge of family members, associations of victims and NGOs. In other words, the missing person in Central America still has no place in the Archive –in the sense of the law of what is possible to say given by Michel Foucault. How to represent this gap around which present and past, absence and presence converge? Whereas the literature of the Southern Cone provided several answers to this question, Central American production is still scarcely doing so. We deal here to analyse some novels and artistic works of the region that place the missing person at the centre of the plot, giving him a discursive place that he still lacks at the official level. In this way, we highlight the different strategies that make the disappeared visible as a way to fight against institutionalized forgetfulness.