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The Memorial de los Detenidos Desaparecidos: Fragile memory and contested meaning in Post-dictatorship Uruguay

Nearly thirty years after the Uruguayan civil-military dictatorship (1973–1985) ended, the ways in which memory of this period is treated remains the subject of considerable contestation. In early 2010, controversy erupted over the filming of an advertisement for Sprite. During the shoot, the Memorial de los Detenidos Desaparecidos, conceived and constructed between 1998 and 2001 in homage to the victims of state terrorism, was covered up by the production company, rendering it camouflaged against the landscape of its location in Montevideo's Parque Vaz Ferreira. This episode demonstrates that rather than draw a line under the past, the construction and continued presence of the Memorial precipitates new debates over how memorial sites are interpreted and preserved. It provides an interesting point of departure from which to explore the fragility of memory in post-dictatorship Uruguay and the open-ended meanings of memorials, particularly within shifting judicial, political and urban contexts. Through analysis of the Memorial's aesthetics, peripheral location and the consumer-driven context it inhabits, this paper examines the Memorial's complexities and the threats to memorialisation in Uruguay, arguing that they are intimately tied to the broader struggles of state and society to address recent repression, which go beyond the dichotomies of remembering versus forgetting.