This book focuses on citizens’ attempts to address the human rights violations committed by murderous political regimes in Latin America, a well-traveled subject for students of Latin American politics. Since they began to return to democratic rule in the mid to late 1980s, after prolonged experiments with military rule, the new democracies of Latin America have been burdened by an ugly legacy of human rights abuses that, over the ensuing years, has given rise to a robust “transitional justice” movement. Along the way, a large and diverse scholarship has emerged to address, among other compelling questions, the political and legal mechanisms that are available to transitional justice seekers, how transitional justice is meant to influence the process of democratization, and why some nations are eager to pursue justice toward the old regime while others are more inclined to forget and move on.

Despite the familiarity of the subject, Jeffrey Davis’s book is a compelling and an important addition to the existing literature. The study’s core theoretical claim aims to chart new ground by arguing that “transitional justice” “is best understood as a process rather than a result, and that it is not a universal absolute but a continuum with subjective and objective elements” (p. 28). He adds that “the search for justice does not end when the truth is revealed, nor when the judgment is issued, nor when the convicted are punished. It returns home with the victims to become part of the domestic legal, economic and political struggle” (p. 28). Nor, according to Davis, is the process of legal justice constrained to domestic politics. Increasingly, “it crosses borders and oceans to inspire other who seek to overcome their own barriers of impunity” (p. 28).

These are key theoretical insights, ones that are generally obfuscated by the very term “transitional justice.” Whether intentionally or not, the term tends to bracket the search for justice and accountability against a departing authoritarian regime to the transition itself, neglecting to anticipate the possibility of a more prolonged and complex process of the kind outlined by Davis. Furthermore, the notion of transitional justice leans heavily toward the belief that whatever decisions about the past are made during the transition will forever shape the search for truth and justice. Clearly, such decisions are not set in stone. They can be revisited, and even overturned, years after the transition.

Animating Davis’s arguments is a set of well-chosen empirical stories drawn from Central America (El Salvador and Guatemala) and the Andean region (Peru). This is very welcome, if only because these regions have traditionally not generated that much attention, at least not when compared to South America’s Southern Cone countries. The latter have shaped the field, especially the case of Argentina, whose process of transitional justice has served as the template for Latin America and indeed much of the world. Argentina’s military trials were the first war-crimes trials to be held since the end of World War II, and the Argentine Truth Commission was the first commission of its kind to gain worldwide renown. Indeed, the commission’s final report, published under the title of Nunca Más (Never Again), became an international runway bestseller.

One of the virtues of Davis’s empirical analysis is to afford readers a different image of human rights victims and justice seekers in Latin America. Scholarly attention to human rights victims in Latin America has fallen disproportionally on intellectuals, labor leaders, and middle- and upper-class people generally of European descent. After all, it was Argentina’s Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the group of Argentine mothers and grandmothers, some of them hailing from the most privileged precincts of Buenos Aires society, whose advocacy during the transition on behalf of the “disappeared” put the Latin American human rights movement at the vanguard of international human rights activism. By contrast, the protagonists in Davis’s narrative are ordinary people, especially rural, poor, and indigenous people, those who bore the brunt of the violence of the Central American civil wars.

A more apparent virtue of Davis’s empirical work is its emphasis on “extra-territorial” justice, or the attempt to seek justice for an old regime outside of national borders, as a consequence of the limitations of domestic legal institutions. This aspect of the politics of transitional justice in Latin America is often overlooked, since Latin American governments, to their credit, have been more willing than those from other developing regions (most notably Africa) to undertake prosecution of the old regime through their own judicial systems. Hence, intervention in Latin America by major international justice organizations, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), so common in African countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the Sudan, has not been necessary. Tellingly, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, cut his teeth in Argentina, prosecuting former military officers. But clearly, as suggested by Davis’s study, numerous domestic impediments to justice in Latin America remain firmly in place, forcing many to seek justice abroad, especially in courts in Spain and the United States, and regional bodies such as the Inter-American Human Rights Court.

For all of its many virtues, Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America is vulnerable to familiar criticisms of works on transitional justice. First, and perhaps foremost, central to Davis’s analysis about the importance of legal justice is establishing the truth about human rights abuses, which the author regards as critical to restoring the dignity of victims and preventing future violence by discouraging victims from turning to revenge. For Davis, as for many others in the transitional justice field—whether academics or activists--the essence of the truth rests in victims’ testimony, as compiled by a truth and reconciliation commission and/or as revealed in judicial proceedings. But personal testimonies, especially in the absence of corroboration by other sources, are prone to manipulation and politicization, and, in any case, they are highly subjective and notoriously fallible. Not surprisingly, truth commission reports have often been criticized for conflating memory with history, a point underscored by the very popular but troubled concept of “historical memory,” which implies that history and memory always align with each other, to say nothing of creating and furthering a culture of victimization.

Moreover, while Davis makes a compelling case for the importance of truth commissions and political trials as building blocks for the creation of official narratives about human rights abuses that prevent states from denying the human rights abuses of the past, this “officializing” of the past is not without its problematic side. As several cases have shown, some of them from Latin America, the attempt to create a single, uniform narrative about the past can itself become the source of conflict rather than reconciliation. On the other hand is the experience of Spain, where, as my own book shows, democratization was pursued alongside a wholesale policy of letting bygones be bygones. Given the Spaniards’ penchant for politicizing the memory of the past, the Spanish Civil War in particular, the absence of a state-endorsed narrative about the past in Spain has for the most part been beneficial to the new democracy.

It is also doubtful—and despite vigorous theorizing to the contrary—that “official” narratives can achieve the kind of national cleansing that Davis and others hope for in any process of truth seeking. It may be, as suggested by several of the stories examined in the book, that the real virtue of human rights justice rests not in what it can do for the nation as whole but, rather, in what it might contribute to people as individuals. This point is underscored by the case of Wendy Méndez, a witness in a case of human rights abuses by the Guatemalan military heard by the Inter-American Human Rights Court. Prior to her testimony, Méndez’s lawyers warned her that her testimony about the rape that she endured the night her mother was kidnapped by the military might not be admissible, and that if the court agreed to hear the testimony, it could in the end decide to disregard it. Fortunately for Méndez and for the people of Guatemala, the court heard her account of the rape and ruled that sexual violence was part of the arsenal of weapons used by the military to terrorize the Guatemalan people. But it is hard to escape the sentiment that the real victory for Méndez was simply the act of being heard. As she observed to the author: “I was quite satisfied with the fact that the judges heard my testimony and the fact that representatives of the government had to sit quietly and listen to what had happened to me” (p. 222).

Lastly, one wishes that Davis had delved, however superficially, into the ironies of extraterritorial justice that his research so compellingly raises. It is hard to escape the irony of Spain, a country that never put on trial any of its military repressors under the long dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1939–75) becoming a haven for justice for Latin American citizens. Instead of justice and truth telling, impunity and forgetting ruled the day in Spain with the advent of “the pact to forget,” an attempt to set aside the memory of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship for the sake of consolidating the new democracy. Yet more surprising—and ironic—is the role of American courts in prosecuting the very political regimes whose rise was aided by U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. What these ironies say about Spanish and American politics can serve as the basis for a future book. For now, however, they powerfully underscore Davis’s key contention about the power of justice to transcend national boundaries.