CLAMOR: documentation and memory of a committee for human rights in the Southern Cone

Abstract

The CLAMOR project is centered on the preservation and dissemination of the archives; its goal is to make available to the public the archive of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in the Southern Cone, which existed in Brazil between 1978 and 1991, and has been recognized as one of the most important organizations that offered solidarity to refugees, prisoners and the politically persecuted by the dictatorships in the Southern Cone of South America, providing information on and denouncing the human rights violations committed by those dictatorships. The project has two main objectives: a) the completion of the Archive and the construction of a more complex history of the trajectory of the Committee in its relations with other entities and agencies for the defense of human rights in Brazil, Latin America, North America and Europe; b) the processing, organization and digitalization of the CLAMOR Archive. Chosen to be part of the National Register of Memory of the World by UNESCO in 2007, it constitutes the preservation of a fundamental space , not only the memory of those actions of solidarity and resistance, but also as evidence for reparations claims and other acts of transitional justice the CLAMOR Archive is consulted by a very diverse public, including prosecutors, the legal representatives or relatives of political prisoners and forcibly disappeared persons in neighboring countries, as well as researchers, both Brazilian and foreign. It should be noted that the Archive is still in a precarious level of organization, and each specific request that reaches us, demands a lengthy process of consulting the documentation, box by box, document by document. The completion of the specific project with the proposed objectives is critical to speeding up access to information and documents, and enabling the preservation of the collection through its reorganization. (AU)