Ethically Sourced? Terror Archives, Radio, and Dictatorship in Uruguay

Researching the history of radio and Cold War era dictatorship in Latin America is inseparable from the story and politics of how and under what circumstances the larger “terror archives” are made available to scholars, survivors, and the public at large. In Uruguay, these politics have been fraught and in turn raise important questions about the ethics of historians and archival access. Just because we can access key archival materials, should we? This paper will discuss the history, politics, and contents of Uruguay’s “Terror Archives,” uploaded by anonymous actors to the Internet Archive in 2023. It will discuss the place of radio transcriptions within the larger archive, and our ethical obligations as historians under these and other similar circumstances.