Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez , When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier's Story (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. xxiv + 128, £54.00, £13.99 pb.

Abstract

acknowledge abuses under Stroessner's dictatorship and the recovery of the memory of the country's authoritarian past and, on the other, the current criminalisation of protest and social movements together with the enduring remnants of authoritarianism and the culture of impunity in contemporary Paraguay. Third, the chapters demonstrate, although with varying degrees of success across the region, that a culture of human rights emerged and consolidated in Latin America in such a forceful way that few would have predicted just decades ago. On the one end of an imaginary spectrum of human rights culture, we find countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay where the dictatorial past and the forceful denunciation of atrocities triggered the development of a profound human rights consciousness. Chapter  on Uruguay, for instance, underscores significant events such as the prosecution and conviction of two former dictators and other high-ranking civilian and military officers for dictatorship-era crimes after . At the other end of the spectrum, human rights problems endure in countries like Brazil, Guatemala and El Salvador. For instance, at least , people were killed by the police in Brazil in , according to the latest Brazilian Public Security Forum report (see http:// www.forumseguranca.org.br/storage/download//anuario_.retificado_.pdf), the actual number is likely to be higher since some killings go unreported. In chapter , Cynthia Milton identifies human rights challenges for Peru. She shows how, although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission considered that holding perpetrators to account 'was a central act of reparation' and 'crucial for restoring the population's trust in democratic institutions' (p. ), there have recently been substantial setbacks in the search for justice for past crimes and that social inequalities and racismkey causes of Peru's conflict in the recent pastremain largely unchanged. The volume editors have put together an excellent collection of essays that will become a go-to volume for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Latin American Studies, Memory Studies, and Human Rights, as well as for researchers looking for an overview of the struggles for memory in Latin America.