Introduction

Some conflicts begin long before the first shot is fired. The loss of interpersonal and community trust often has a history. It’s not uncommon to find that trust dissolves when a person or community feels betrayed, when the truth has been distorted, and even more so, when they cease to believe in truth and the value of their word, which should be like their home. In such moments, it’s very easy for coexistence to become fragile: institutions are perceived as partisan tools, the law as a cover for vested interests, the adversary as an absolute threat, and the victim as an inevitable cost.

Therefore, to speak rigorously about peace, we must begin by speaking of the truth. Not a truth wielded as a weapon, nor a truth reduced to a slogan, but truth as a humble and demanding recognition of reality in its complexity and multidimensionality.

Truth is not a speculative luxury. Taking the nature of truth for granted gives rise to all kinds of frivolities and oversimplifications. In contemporary philosophical debate, we can only celebrate when, through diverse means, the power of ontological truth is rediscovered, along with its cognitive participation in logical truth and the necessity of intersubjectivity for its gradual uncovering. We cannot elaborate further on this point; however, I cannot fail to mention that reading  St. Augustine’s Against the Academics  remains a great help in inspiring both classical and contemporary approaches to overcoming, from within, the most diverse forms of skepticism. Moreover, this work always offers us the pleasant surprise that truth  reappears precisely  when someone most radically seeks to manipulate, instrumentalize, or deny it ^.

Indeed, truth persists and endures. It is the moral condition that allows us to recognize that the world is not available for the pure will to dominate and that people cannot be reduced to mere pawns in a strategy. When a purely pragmatic rationality eclipses truth in its entirety, the world appears as manipulable material. The eclipse of the non-instrumental dimension of the world and of human life immediately renders the poor, migrants, prisoners, exiles, the disappeared, and the marginalized expendable.

In terms of moral and legal philosophy, war, repression, torture, enforced disappearance, or extermination are not merely “excesses” of misused power. They are the extreme consequence of a perspective that has ceased to perceive the truth about the dignity of the other as an absolute limit. Leo XIV recently formulated this with remarkable precision when he warned that the shared search for the truth of the facts, assumed to be the common good, is the basis of just communication; and he added that when pragmatism is content with what is useful or effective, democracy is weakened from within ^.

 Transitional justice is  situated at this dramatic juncture: where a society has been wounded by public lies, systematic violence, and impunity; where truth has vanished and social trust has eroded. The task of  transitional justice  is not simply to close the door on the past. Its task is to open a morally possible future, restoring to the community the capacity to speak the truth, judge wrongdoing, repair what can be repaired, and rebuild social bonds without denying the pain of the victims. The expression “morally possible” indicates that  transitional justice  attempts to achieve the “possible good”—not the lesser evil—within a complex social and political context. ³

Transitional justice

Transitional justice emerged as a practical and theoretical field to answer the question: how can a society emerge from a dictatorship, a civil war, or a regime of mass violence without falling into either  revenge  or  oblivion ?

The question is not abstract. It arises when the ordinary legal order has been degraded, when the courts have been subjugated, when the public administration has participated in or tolerated violence, when official memory has concealed real suffering. Thus, transitional justice is not a “lesser” justice, but a historically situated justice, oriented toward rebuilding institutions, recognizing victims, and restoring social trust. ⁴

Strictly speaking, transitional justice refers to the set of judicial, political, institutional, and cultural processes through which a community confronts the legacies of serious human rights violations. The pillars of transitional justice are usually articulated around five inseparable requirements: ⁵

• The truth  seeks to publicly clarify what happened: patterns of violence, those responsible, victims, contexts, and mechanisms of cover-up.
• The justice system  seeks to investigate, prosecute and punish —at least in the most serious cases— massive human rights violations, avoiding both impunity and revenge.
• Reparation  seeks to acknowledge the harm suffered through material, symbolic, individual and collective measures: compensation, restitution, psychosocial care, public apologies, memorials and recovery of rights.
• The guarantees of non-repetition  seek to transform the conditions that made the violence possible: reform of security forces, institutional cleansing, judicial independence, education in human rights, civilian control and democratic strengthening.
• Finally,  memory  preserves the recollection of the victims and the harm suffered, not to perpetuate the conflict, but to prevent denial, to dignify those who were silenced, and to morally educate society. These pillars do not function as mechanical stages, but as complementary dimensions of a process aimed at rebuilding trust, citizenship, and peace.

These pillars should not be understood as a mere  checklist . They constitute moments in a  political anthropology  of reconciliation.  To put it another way: truth restores language; justice reestablishes responsibility; reparation acknowledges the harm; guarantees of non-repetition reform institutions; memory prevents the victim from being expelled from the public consciousness. ⁶

Transitional justice, therefore, cannot be reduced to criminal punishment, although holding those most responsible accountable is essential in cases of serious crimes. Nor can it be reduced to truth commissions without legal consequences or to general amnesties in the name of a hasty peace. Its task consists precisely in prudently balancing goods that often appear to be in tension: peace and justice, stability and truth, clemency and accountability, institutional continuity and the moral purification of the state.

In this matter, it is important to avoid two symmetrical temptations. The first is impunity disguised as reconciliation: “Let’s look ahead,” people say, as if the victim could move forward without truth. The second is revenge disguised as justice: “Let everyone pay,” people assert, as if transition could arise from an indiscriminate purge. Transitional justice requires discernment: distinguishing degrees of responsibility, protecting due process rights, listening to victims, dismantling repressive structures, and opening pathways to reintegration for those who do not bear serious responsibility.

The dignity of the person as a normative criterion

The ultimate criterion for any transitional justice process cannot be political expediency, international pressure, or mere stability. The ultimate criterion is the dignity of the individual. Every victim possesses a value that precedes the state, the party, ideology, ethnicity, economic utility, and strategic effectiveness. Therefore, the victim cannot be reduced to a file, a symbol, a statistic, or an instrument of legitimization.

The personalist tradition helps to formulate this requirement with particular clarity. Karol Wojtyla expressed the personalist norm of action by affirming that the person is such a good that only benevolent love constitutes an adequate response to it: *  Persona est affirmanda propter seipsam!* (Person is affirmed in his own name! ); negatively, this means that he cannot be used as a mere means. This intuition has decisive legal consequences: human rights are not concessions of power, but historical demands derived from the intrinsic value of each person. When power departs from this norm, it degenerates into pure will to dominate. ⁷

Leo XIV takes up this line of thought, affirming that the value of the person does not depend on what they do or produce, and that there are rights that belong to everyone simply by virtue of being a person. Ontological dignity—the Encyclical states—belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created, and loved by God; therefore, no failure, humiliation, or exclusion can destroy the profound value of a human life. ⁸

From this perspective, transitional justice cannot sacrifice victims in the name of governance. But neither can it deny that even the perpetrator remains a person. This assertion does not weaken justice, but rather purifies it. It prevents punishment from becoming degradation and the language of human rights from being used only for “some” and not for “all.” Authentic transitional justice does not depersonalize anyone: it recognizes the innocence of the victim, the responsibility of the perpetrator, and the possibility of a different political community.

The case of Latin America: wounds, polarization and reconstruction of the “us”

The Latin American case is very instructive. Latin America knows well the grammar sown by wounds and humiliations. Military dictatorships, guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency, disappearances, extrajudicial executions, political prisons, judicial corruption, organized crime, and successive exiles have left scars that cannot be overcome simply through electoral changes. Formal democracy, while indispensable, is not enough to heal fractured societies.

The region is also experiencing a decline in public trust. Recent reports on democracy and development warn of increased polarization, disinformation, the influence of organized crime, and citizen dissatisfaction with institutions. “International IDEA” has noted the global deterioration of democratic representation; “V-Dem” describes a prolonged wave of autocratization; and the UNDP has warned that Latin America and the Caribbean are under particularly intense democratic pressures, including political polarization, the impact of digital technologies, and the penetration of organized crime. ⁹

This means that the underlying problem is more serious than mere political-partisan competition. When the adversary becomes an absolute enemy, public life loses its deliberative capacity. When the law is perceived as a tool of factionalism, justice ceases to inspire confidence. When truth is replaced by tribal narratives, each group inhabits its own memory, and the national “we” becomes almost unutterable.

Therefore, Latin America needs more than just electoral reforms or security policies. It needs processes for rebuilding the social fabric and trust. The experiences of transitional justice in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia show different, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory paths, but they all teach us something: without public truth about the victims and without institutions capable of acknowledging responsibility, democracy remains built on silences that sooner or later return as resentment, fear, or violence. ¹⁰

I think about the current scenarios in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico, El Salvador, and so many others in the region. These scenarios will require, when the time comes, a transitional justice process that is not improvised. We will need to consider truth commissions, reviews of political convictions, institutional reform, reparations for prisoners and exiles, reconstruction of archives, guarantees of non-repetition, judicial reform, and the social reintegration of those who participated in control structures without being the highest-ranking perpetrators of serious crimes.

In polarized and impoverished societies, the challenge will not only be punishment; it will be rebuilding trust where, for years, people have been taught to distrust their neighbors, judges, journalists, teachers, priests, and family members who think differently. Thus, transitional justice is a long cultural and structural journey. And we do not wish to hide the fact that it is extremely arduous, since it demands that those in power see themselves as in a mirror, and that, besides being uncomfortable, it often has undesirable consequences for those who undertake this peculiar asceticism aimed at giving a face to this fundamental aspect of social justice. ¹¹

In conclusion

Transitional justice is not a closing technique. It is a way to begin anew without lying. Where there has been systematic violence, peace can only be born from a truth that does not humiliate, a justice that does not destroy, a memory that does not paralyze, and a reconciliation that does not prematurely absolve those responsible. The social doctrine of the contemporary Church offers us ample material for envisioning diverse projects of transitional justice, always tailored to their specific historical context.

For example,  Fratelli tutti  offers a crucial key: social peace requires recognizing that truth is the inseparable companion of justice and mercy; and that those who have suffered unjustly have a right to truth, justice, and reparation. Pope Francis warned that forgiveness does not imply impunity or forgetting, because only from the historical truth of the facts can an authentic path to reconciliation emerge. ¹²

For his part, Leo XIV, in  Magnifica Humanitas,  extends this intuition when he describes social justice also as restorative justice: a justice that mends broken bonds, reintegrates those who have been excluded, heals collective memory, and restores dignity and voice to those who have been ignored. In his chapter on the culture of power and the civilization of love, Leo XIV adds that the civilization of love is not a naive utopia, but the demanding project of translating charity into structures of justice and giving institutional form to ^{fraternity.13}

This, ultimately, is the task of any transitional justice worthy of the name: to translate truth into institutions, memory into responsibility, pain into reparation, justice into trust, and trust into peace. We must not try to disguise the gravity of the evil, nor demand premature embraces or cosmetic reconciliations from the victims. It is about recognizing that a society can only breathe again when it dares to look at its wounds without turning them into weapons.

In Latin America, and especially in the high-risk scenarios we have mentioned, future peace will depend on our ability to develop a shared language now. Not a language of conflict, but one that fosters trust and the restoration of the social fabric: a language that disarms rhetoric, listens to the victims, recognizes the poor and the marginalized as cornerstones of reconstruction, and reaffirms, against all cynical reasoning, that no person is expendable. Only in this way does transitional justice become a path to building peace. Peace with truth, peace with justice, peace born of recognized dignity and patiently restored social trust.