La construcción de la memoria de la experiencia represiva en el Cono Sur de América Latina: memoria, apropiación y elaboración

Between the years 1973 and 1989, the countries of the southern cone of Latin American underwent an abrupt and traumatic transformation of their social relations, by means of the implementation of military dictatorships which, based on the logic of the Doctrine of National Security implemented in the region by the United States since the 50’s and on the teachings of the French doctrines of counter-insurgence, deployed a concentrationist apparatus which bound up each of these societies. The core of these practices was based on the kidnapping –in most cases, clandestine– of thousands and tens of thousands of people and subjecting them to different forms of torture in environments that worked like concentration camps. In addition, in Uruguay, hundreds of people were killed; in Chile, the killings numbered in the thousands; and in Argentina, more than 20,000. The processes of “the transition to democracy” –in 1983 in Argentina, 1985 in Uruguay and 1989 in Chile– brought into discussion the problems of the manners of construction of memory, its connection to the possible “elaboration” of the traumatic consequences, the role of the judges and the levels of treatment of the different parties responsible for those actions. The objective of this work is to recount briefly some of these discussions. Key words: genocide, memory, elaboration of trauma, Latin America, State terroris

The Meaning of Concepts: Some Reflections on the Difficulties in Analysing State Crimes

The article analyses the different concepts used to conceptualise State Crimes (politicide, massacre, State Terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity) in order to explore the theoretical advantages and disadvantages in comparison with the concept of genocide. The article highlights the conceptual problems of the different terms and the theoretical strength of the concept of genocide when compared with any of the other possibilities

Human Rights? What a Good Idea! From Universal Jurisdiction to Crime Prevention

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a “comfort zone.” With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as a last resort, of military intervention. This paper analyzes the validity of such assumptions against different data about the levels of violence in the world and the use of the "human rights" discourse as a new and effective tool (a good idea!!) to justify the same "military interventions" and the violation of the soverignty produced in the past with worst excuses.Fil: Feierstein, Daniel Eduardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentin

Editors’ Introduction

This special section focuses on genocide and related mass violence in Latin America. Clearly there is a long history of genocide of indigenous peoples, from the arrival of Columbus and other conquerors to the present day. Perpetrated first by European colonial powers, particularly Spain and Portugal, genocidal activities continued in postcolonial settler states following the revolutions of the nineteenth century. Government shifted from Europe to local Euro-American, as well as in some cases indigenous, elites, who shared economic and thus political power with imperialist international actors—including, in many cases, the United States and some of its large corporations. Human-rights abuses continued. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War–era National Security Doctrine, as well as state- specific tensions and agendas, played out in various Latin American contexts in a new round of repression, genocide, and other forms of mass violence. The Guate- malan Genocide of the 1980s and systematic killings and general military repression under dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s are perhaps the best-known cases, but others abound

Neural mechanisms of economic choices in mice

Economic choices entail computing and comparing subjective values. Evidence from primates indicates that this behavior relies on the orbitofrontal cortex. Conversely, previous work in rodents provided conflicting results. Here we present a mouse model of economic choice behavior, and we show that the lateral orbital (LO) area is intimately related to the decision process. In the experiments, mice chose between different juices offered in variable amounts. Choice patterns closely resembled those measured in primates. Optogenetic inactivation of LO dramatically disrupted choices by inducing erratic changes of relative value and by increasing choice variability. Neuronal recordings revealed that different groups of cells encoded the values of individual options, the binary choice outcome and the chosen value. These groups match those previously identified in primates, except that the neuronal representation in mice is spatial (in monkeys it is good-based). Our results lay the foundations for a circuit-level analysis of economic decisions

Demixed principal component analysis of neural population data

Neurons in higher cortical areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, are often tuned to a variety of sensory and motor variables, and are therefore said to display mixed selectivity. This complexity of single neuron responses can obscure what information these areas represent and how it is represented. Here we demonstrate the advantages of a new dimensionality reduction technique, demixed principal component analysis (dPCA), that decomposes population activity into a few components. In addition to systematically capturing the majority of the variance of the data, dPCA also exposes the dependence of the neural representation on task parameters such as stimuli, decisions, or rewards. To illustrate our method we reanalyze population data from four datasets comprising different species, different cortical areas and different experimental tasks. In each case, dPCA provides a concise way of visualizing the data that summarizes the task-dependent features of the population response in a single figure

Introducción

Introducción al dosier Reduciendo el foco. El proceso genocida argentino en escala subnaciona

Introducción

Introducción al dossier Experiencias de tribunales nacionales en casos de genocidio y crímenes de lesa humanidad