Enforced disappearances constitute an extreme form of state violence that radically disrupts family bonds, mourning processes, and the symbolic conditions of intergenerational transmission (Keilson, 1992; Lira, 2010). In the Chilean context, the persistence of absence and the incompleteness of truth have positioned families, particularly the sons and daughters of disappeared persons, as central actors in the production of memory and in claims for reparation (Jelin, 2002; Piper, 2015). Grounded in critical psychology and Latin American political psychology, this paper draws on the tradition inaugurated by Ignacio Martín-Baró (1998) and aims to analyze how family narratives configure memory practices that operate simultaneously as subjective, relational, and political processes.

Using a qualitative approach ("Groundesd Tehory", Strauss & Corbin, 2002), this study examines in-depth interviews conducted with sons and daughters of victims of enforced disappearance during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). The findings show that the family emerges as a privileged space for meaning-making, where memory not only preserves the bond with the disappeared person but also articulates demands for truth, justice, and reparation. Intergenerational narratives reveal tensions between silence, memory mandates, and processes of re-signification, giving rise to forms of reparation that exceed institutional frameworks and are embedded in everyday, relational, and symbolic practices (Lira & Weinstein, 2000).

This paper proposes understanding these narratives as psychosocial-political practices that resist the closure of the past and challenge linear conceptions of reparation in contexts of state violence.