Over the past decades, "memory activists" in Chile have constantly struggled to preserve the memory of those who had been brutally killed, tortured or made disappear during the Pinochet dictatorship. One of the latest form of memorialization has been the struggle by civil society sectors and victims' groups to recuperate former secret sites of torture, death, and disappearance and turn them into sites of memory.
The paper analyses how and to what extent these sites of memory have, over the years, transformed themselves, sifting their role from commemorative sites to more dynamic, conflictive and provocative memory spaces. The sites of memory aim to build a collective memory of the past in a way that includes and actively engages Chilean society. Moreover, some of these memory sites have played an active role in denouncing and campaigning against current human rights violations in Chile such as, police brutality during demonstrations, torture in detention places and discrimination against the indigenous people.
In this way, memory sites represent a form of memory activism that aim to raise public consciousness and greater awareness of the current human rights violations in Chile. Finally, these "spaces of memory" aim provide a space where an open-ended process of memory building can take place through critical debate and reflection, allowing multiple versions of the recent past to coexist.
