Following the Uruguayan civic-military dictatorship (1973–85), the democratic government passed the Expiry Law, which prevented investigations into human rights violations. While successive governments have slowly made progress over time, impunity prevails in Uruguay even today. Despite this, Uruguayan filmmakers engage with the memory of the dictatorship in their films to call for truth and justice in a political context that has remained committed to the so-called peace and reconciliation model of transitional justice. This article demonstrates how two Uruguayan feature films depict the fight for truth in post-dictatorship Uruguay: Matar a todos ( Kill Them All ) (Schroeder 2007) and Zanahoria ( Carrot ) (Buchichio 2014). They offer distinct perspectives about Uruguay’s transition to democracy and the lasting effects of impunity, thus serving as particularly interesting case studies for showing how filmmakers intervene in discourses on democratic transitions. Even though both films were produced in the twenty-first century, they depict Uruguayan transitional justice as an unfinished project by ending without any definitive conclusions. I argue that by leaving the stories open-ended, these films reveal an expectation that truth and justice are yet to come.
Kristal Bivona (Sat,) studied this question.