This proposal aims to address exiles originating in contexts of displacement in Latin America by considering two important elements: first, that military dictatorships and states of emergency implemented novel forms of repression that included annihilation, disappearance, torture, and the mass and systematic exile of a portion of the population. Second, that these repressive mechanisms are being repeated today as a result of the authoritarian shifts experienced in the new millennium in various countries of the region. These shifts have seen a renewal of criminalizing discourses and strategies of political persecution through cases of judicialization, executions, arbitrary detentions, and the suppression of the civil and political rights of the population. In this sense, this Working Group takes a long-term view that aims to address the history of Latin American violence and exile from the second half of the 20th century to the present, considering the continuities, transformations and ruptures of these experiences and paying attention to the repertoires of action and resistance that expatriate communities deploy from abroad, as well as their memories and identities.

We adopt a critical perspective on exile, attentive to restoring the historical dimension of its production and reconnecting it with contexts of violence. A key premise of this Working Group is to deconstruct the notions of voluntary, "golden," privileged, or opportunistic exile, which form the basis of the discourses used by authoritarian powers to discredit the experience of violence and life-altering disruption that expatriation entails. Alongside this, this Working Group is concerned with restoring a collective and transgenerational perspective on exile; this means recognizing that the mechanisms of discipline and political persecution are not directed solely at the leading figures of political party systems, but also at social actors linked to protest movements and the defense of human rights in their plurality (political, social, environmental, gender rights, etc.). In this sense, we note that exiles are massive and dynamic processes, linked to political reasons, and that their explanation cannot be separated from the understanding of the contexts and the different legal and punitive devices used by corporations and elites to maintain their power (Jensen and Lastra, 2014; 2016).

While exiles have played a significant role in the formation of nation-states, we are interested in beginning our analysis with the Cold War and the affront that left-wing political movements (armed or unarmed) and student, rural, and popular movements, etc., had to endure in the face of US interventionism and the establishment of military dictatorships that stifled these processes of change. Exiles then became widespread and took the form of a diaspora; that is, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their countries of origin and settled temporarily in different parts of the world (Bolzman, 1993; Jensen, 2007; Sznajder and Roniger, 2013). The conflicts in Central America also contributed to a process of mass displacement that is currently being revisited by new generations of students, land defenders, justice system workers, and journalists (to name a few) in an exile that, for some, has already lasted more than seven years (Aguayo, 1985; Von Bogdandy, Morales, and Ripplinger, 2024). Alongside these displacements, there are also returns, such as those occurring gradually—and not without conflict—in Colombia, or those demanded by Honduran exiles in the face of an uncertain political landscape.

The members of this Working Group feel compelled to develop a critical perspective on the present situation in our region, which, although it has more efficient humanitarian protection mechanisms, is permeated by dynamics of violence and widespread exclusion. Furthermore, the presence, consolidation, and coordination that various right-wing movements are building across the continent, with the explicit support of the U.S. government, challenge researchers of exile, as the region is becoming a dangerous territory (Traverso, 2018). We believe it is essential to illuminate the repressive mechanisms that drive thousands of people into exile, and to explain and make visible why exile is a violation of human rights. Among our objectives is to reconstruct the role that exiles have historically forged as political actors, capable of creating a new identity as agents of transformation and of reflecting on Latin America and the limits of our democracies. In this sense, we start from a view of exile as a territory of action and renewal of political and social thought, as a space for building alliances and as a specific time for reviewing the history of power systems in the region.

Furthermore, this group adopts a socio-historical and interconnected perspective that is fundamental to understanding how current processes of violence stem from a shared doctrinal framework reinforced by discourses and strategies of criminalization aimed at neutralizing dissident and opposition actors (Alonso, 2007). In this sense, the Working Group will illuminate the shared aspects of various authoritarian regimes, past and present, that make exile a component of all Latin American history (Scocco, 2010; Serra Padrós and Slatman, 2014). We aim to examine how exiles construct strategies of struggle through the interconnectedness and circulation of knowledge, resources, learning, and memories; we are interested in understanding how these resistant paths between past and present have been forged, and how these circuits of knowledge have been established to confront new forms of authoritarianism.

Our experience working with and on exiles allows us to affirm that exile marks a before and after in the lives of individuals, families, and social groups. This rupture implies, for many, a review of their own history and that of their country, a revisiting of their question of identity, and a deeper exploration of the tensions of belonging to a country without being able to return. Exiles construct multiple meanings from their experiences of expatriation and the persecution they suffered, and incorporate new elements to build a new personal identity or a hybrid community identity. And since exiles are not something new to our continent nor limited to a specific conjuncture, we consider it important to include the voices of different generations and examine how the memories of exile are transmitted among parents, children, and grandchildren (Lastra, forthcoming). If we consider that different nation projects have been imagined from exile, the recovery of these generational memories will be fundamental to understanding the senses and meanings of the struggles waged from exile communities, both from family and everyday spheres and from international public forums.

The mobile nature of exile is also reflected in those of us who research these topics and in the different countries from which we carry out our work. Some researchers in this Working Group based in Europe study the dynamics of Latin American exile from France, Germany, and Spain; while others have built academic careers in different places, gaining access to new sources, testimonies, and archives that would not otherwise have been possible.

Finally, we assume an ethic of work and responsibility towards this study and the exile communities that comprise it.

We examine exiles from three main perspectives: firstly, their connection to the violence that gave rise to them and continues to do so; secondly, the deployment of resistance and struggles that made exile a frontier of denunciation; and thirdly, the social memories and identities that are built from and about exile.

We begin by understanding exile as an experience of violence, marked by repression from public authorities and by the systematic harassment of individuals who openly oppose the political elites governing a country. For Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger (2013), exile is an institutionalized mechanism of exclusion that expresses the closure of the public sphere and the violation of civil and political rights. This violence is intertwined with other repressive experiences (such as torture and imprisonment) that are inseparable from exile. Currently, there are discourses and practices that criminalize social protest and trigger judicialization in formally democratic contexts and under governments that invoke the language of human rights to persecute their opponents (Pirker, 2015). These governments have been categorized from various perspectives as right-wing populism, the new right, new authoritarianism, neo-fascism, dictatorships, or post-neoliberal governments. Furthermore, their practices of persecution have been linked to the lawfare processes deployed throughout Latin America. In this context, current exiles are framed within processes of judicial and discursive criminalization that, as in the case of Bukele's regime, are fueled by a doctrine against an "enemy"—a dangerous, threatening, or criminal figure.

We speak of internal repression and practices of surveillance and extraterritorial repression to understand that while exiles may find protection in other countries, they also remain vulnerable and at risk (Fernández Barrio, 2018; Lastra, 2020; Muñoz, 2015; Vitelli, 2016). Operation Condor, created in 1975, is probably the culmination of this situation (Lessa, 2022; McSherry, 2014). However, repressive coordination between two or more security forces, the exchange of intelligence information, and the alliances forged between authoritarian governments to protect repressors and maintain their impunity demonstrate the precarious situation in which exiles find themselves. In this regard, we draw on studies of state repression and state terrorism in recent history to explore how these impacted the experiences of exile (Aguila, 2018; D'Antonio and Eidelman, 2019; Marco, 2012). We emphasize that this is not a thing of the past. Currently, the presence of U.S. agents monitoring Central American exiles in Mexico has been identified, and exiles have been murdered in Costa Rica.

Faced with violence and contrary to the political powers' objectives of silencing dissenting voices, exiles have historically developed new transnational practices of resistance and denunciation on the international stage, strengthening a humanitarian arena of struggle (Baubok, 2013; Roniger, 2018). This characteristic has been investigated in various national cases and has allowed us to rethink exile not only as a violent experience but also as a facilitator of networks of denunciation, information production, and the definition of action repertoires for struggle on a transnational and multi-local scale (Sikkink, 1998, 2018; Keck and Sikkink, 1999; Østergaard-Nielsen, 2003). Secondly, this proposal again views exiles as actors in the international public arena with multiple political practices, often aimed at humanitarian denunciation and maintaining a transnational solidarity network with the persecuted and excluded whose lives are endangered not only in their country of origin. We consider exiles as paradiplomatic agents and mediators who contribute to cultural and political exchange between societies in different parts of the world; actors who become bridges of information and communication, strategists, activists, and human rights defenders, agents with their own voice in international forums, and professionals of transnational humanitarian knowledge with the resources to influence democratization and peace processes, as in the Colombian case (Martínez Leguízamo, 2017; Ortiz, 2021). Therefore, this Working Group aims to recover cultural, intellectual, and political exchanges (Espagne, 1999; Ludec and Fernández Domingo, 2019). The learning and appropriation of repertoires, practices, and narratives in contact situations, and the circulation of knowledge, books, and periodicals that make exiles visible in their role as passeurs (Ares Quejia and Gruzinski, 1997). It is worth noting that solidarity practices learned and transmitted from previous generations are currently being reproduced, such as the creation of resistance houses and committees and international activism networks. Thus, it is possible to identify a transmission of exile lessons, from the activation of an anti-Francoist front of the Spanish exiles to the formation of solidarity houses by Chileans, Argentinians, and Uruguayans in the 1970s and the current organizational forms adopted by Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, among others, with the aim of exposing the violence of power (Espinoza González, 2022; Gómez Abarca, 2023).

This proposal seeks to reconnect the histories and present-day realities of exile from a regional perspective and from scales attentive to the transnational and to networks (Jensen and Lastra, 2015; Lepetit, 2015). This approach allows us to highlight nuances, but also points of convergence, avoiding the treatment of experiences analytically separated by national boundaries as if they were strange, since no exile occurs in isolation. We are interested in foregrounding the integration of exiles into transnational or cross-border networks of solidarity and humanitarian assistance with the victims of widespread political violence and wars from the second half of the 20th century to the present. This aims to reconstruct the struggles and legal, intellectual, academic, artistic, and religious activism that projected causes and demands beyond state borders and contributed to the consolidation of a global arena.

Finally, this Working Group engages with studies on memory and identity from the field of exile, questioning the effects of exile on the frameworks of collective action (antifascism, anti-imperialism), the processes of identity configuration and reconfiguration that the displaced went through, and the impact of these transitions—which are neither linear nor identical in the different exiles nor throughout the reference period of the project—on the ways of doing and understanding politics and the political in processes of struggle and reconfiguration of democratic or authoritarian regimes (Bayle, 2010; de Hoyos Puente, 2012; Lesgart, 2004; Rollemberg, 2007; Perry Fauré, 2020). In addition to these processes of political subjectivation, we are interested in exploring the social memories of children in exile, the generational and familial transmission of the exile experience, its silences, and the new identities it can foster for those who had to leave the country at a young age or for those born into exiled communities. These memories generate new narratives about dictatorships, authoritarianism, and the agendas and demands for truth and justice (Levey, 2023; Montealegre and Sapriza, 2022; Pérez and Capdepón, 2023).