https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241292509 Memory Studies 1–17 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/17506980241292509 journals.sagepub.com/home/mss Depicting truth and transition at national memorial museums in Chile and Peru Joseph P Feldman Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA Ponciano Del Pino Huamán Universidad Diego Portales, Chile Abstract Comparative analysis of Peru’s Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion and Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights reveals different perspectives on how to represent past truth commissions and processes of transitioning from violence in national memorial museums. Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights displays a foundational truth about state violence established through the work of the country’s truth commissions. Peru’s Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion was conceived as a space for presenting locally situated experiences of the country’s internal war; it is also characterized by subtle efforts to distance the museum from the narrative of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Owing in part to such departures, Peru’s Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion offers material for questioning the country’s post-transition present that has generally been absent in the human rights-focused exhibition of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. An assessment of these contrasts, evident in the museums’ institutional histories and permanent exhibitions, potentially unsettles assumptions about the role of official memorialization in the aftermath of truth commissions. Keywords Chile, memorial museums, Peru, transitional justice, truth commissions This article compares the experience of Peru’s Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (inaugurated in 2015) with that of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights (inaugurated in 2010). Analyzing the process of making these national museums as well as features of their perma- nent exhibitions, we assert that a crucial difference between the two institutions relates to the place of past truth commissions in the museums’ representations and the way these sites depict Corresponding author: Joseph P Feldman, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Campus Box 28, P.O. Box 173362, Denver, CO 80217- 3362, USA. Email: jofeldman@msudenver.edu 1292509MSS 0 0 10.1177/17506980241292509Memory Studies X(X)Feldman and Del Pino Huamán research-article 2024 Standard Article