I am sincerely grateful to Professor Encarnación for his generous review of my book, Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America. I have only a couple of matters about which to respond. First, Encarnación is of course correct that constructing the truth about human rights violations should not rely entirely on the victims’ testimony. This is a point I make repeatedly in my book. One of my seven chapters is devoted entirely to the importance of proving the factual truth with empirical evidence such as government documents like the Guatemalan Death Squad Dossier. As I point out in that chapter, advocates are “revolutionizing the pursuit of justice by uncovering and analyzing documentary evidence that often contradicts decades of state denials. Moldy police files, clandestine communiqués and lost bureaucratic records are being pieced together to elevate truth over the din of impunity” (p. 117).

I devote another chapter of the book to describing and defining the human right to truth. In it I assert that truth is an “imprecise term” and I recognize that “[T]he perpetrator’s truth may be quite different from the victim’s truth” (pp. 111–12). “The right, therefore, must be to objective truth” and “must entitle victims and families to information, documents, testimony, images and other forms of recorded evidence with which an empirical analysis can be conducted” (p. 112). In fact, the power of the right to truth lies in its ability to compel disclosure of evidence that can more fully explain the violations committed.

Second, I do not make the argument that constructing official narratives through truth commissions and trials can achieve national cleansing. The foundation of my argument in the book is that legal justice is but one component of transitional justice—one that must be conceptualized in light of domestic social, political, and historical conditions. Legal justice is a multifaceted process with objective and subjective elements. I argue that conceptualizing legal justice simply as a result—for example, as a guilty verdict or a prison sentence—“misses the important contribution that each element of the legal process can make on legal justice for human rights violations… [and] fosters a diminished view of the importance of legal justice in the transitional justice system” (p. 48). On the other hand, if we view legal justice as a process, “we fully appreciate how each step along that process contributes not only to legal justice, but also to transitional justice, and its ultimate goals of restoring human dignity and ending cycles of violence” (pp. 48–9). Testimony, I argue throughout the book, is one important element of the process of legal justice that can help victims and survivors reclaim dignity denied to them by years of government denials. It is by allowing testimony that the truth commissions and trials effectively become part of the process of justice for victims and survivors. The key is not to equate testimony with history, but to view it as an expression of the victim or survivor’s experience that through corroboration can help build historical truth.