The perpetrator in its own labyrinth. A comparative analysis of how perpetrators inhabit the sites of memory

Abstract

The study of the sites of memory of mass violence is related to the practices of violence and, at the level of memory, to the management of the memory of the victims. However, we know that violence is constituted as a shared action in which together with the victim or victims, there is (visible or hidden, as often happens) the figure of the executioner or executioners. Based on a comparative analysis of the role of those who are not victims in the construction of the collective memory of traumatic pasts, from Choeung Ek to Buenos Aires, and from Madrid to Kiev, an analysis proposal is presented that discusses the complexity of the presence of the absent in terms of the memory regimes of our time. In a trip through spaces, memorials and places of denial and amnesia, we would observe the way in which the figure of the perpetrator is represented or hidden in its own labyrinth.