“‘Nations are a plebiscite every day, and they are constructed on the basis of great rememberings and great forgettings.’  If the French were still thinking about the Night of St. Bartholomew, they’d be slaughtering each other to this day.

This is a political, and not a moral, decision.  It has to be resolved politically because it’s a political conflict.  Uruguay didn’t fall apart by chance, and it’s not going to be reconstructed by chance, either.”  A Miracle, A Universe, pg. 191

“How can you have a period, end of paragraph, end of story, without any preceding paragraph, let alone any preceding story?  Here in Uruguay, we’ve had no commission of inquiry, no officially sanctioned truthtelling.  We’ve had no trials, no verdicts.  All we have now is this period, hovering there in the middle of a blank page.  It’s unreal.”  pg. 175

“Neither amnesia nor vengeance—justice!”  pg. 192

What is to be done with legacies of violence, and above all, the institutions and sponsors of violence, who remain ensconced in the state structures of fledgling and newly-restored democracies?  What is the balance between preserving the democratic gains that exist now, in the present, with the demand for justice by those who were the victims of the horrors of the past?  What prevails, the moral or the practical?

Patricio Aylwin, right, with Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, in 1993.

More on Aylwin here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/world/americas/patricio-aylwin-president-who-guided-chile-to-democracy-diesat-97.html