Dear “Archives and Human Rights” Group members,
I have just joined the group and would like to introduce myself. I am an archivist in the Italian State Archives Administration. My interest in Archives and Human rights developed over the last few years, while I was working as history consultant for the Prosecutor’s Office of Rome. I participated in a judicial investigation regarding 21 Italian citizens (children or grandchildren of Italian migrants to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile) who were forcibly disappeared in different Southern Cone countries in the 1970s. According to our investigation, most of them were victim of the so-called “Operation Condor”, a secret system of cooperation among the security services of Southern Cone countries, to hunt down political exiles. (Right before Christmas, the Italian judiciary issued 140 arrest warrants related to this investigation)
My first involvement in this investigation occurred quite randomly (the prosecutor needed someone who could search US declassified documents for him). The Prosecutor Office was short of personnel (and especially personnel who could do historical research in an international environment); they asked me if I could continue help with the investigation and I accepted.
I ended up working very intensively for 3 and half years in this judicial investigation and doing a bit of everything, except for strictly archival work: my tasks ranged from writing a history of Condor to locating possible witnesses, and so on and so forth. But I am positive that my archival background provided me with conceptual tools that were crucial in my investigative work.
Different Latin American countries were involved in our investigation (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil were all Condor members) and so I became keenly interest in the sources for the history of the repressive regimes in such countries. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to do archival research in Condor countries, but we received thousands of documents from such countries, thanks to the help we received from the local judiciary, from desaparecidos’ family members, from local scholars, from human rights groups, etc.
I occasionally lecture on “archives and human rights” to archival-science students and am very interested in keeping updated on what archivists are doing on this front.

I take the opportunity to wish to each and all of you a happy new year.

Best regards,

Giulia Barrera

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Giulia Barrera, Ph.D.
Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali,
Ufficio del segretario generale, Area IV: archivi e biblioteche
Via dell'Umiltà, 33
00186 Roma, Italia
tel. +39 06 6965 4237