In 2011, truth commission expert Priscilla Hayner noted “the weak record of implementation of the often very strong recommendations of truth commissions” (Hayner 2011, 6). Her conclusion is impressionistic, based upon a selection of 25 – strong as well as weak – truth commissions that had been established around the world over the previous four decades. In this chapter, however, we find that Hayner's conclusions are oversimplified, at least with respect to Latin America. A decade after Hayner published her book, we show that truth commission recommendations are, in fact, often implemented. By taking a systematic, fine-grained approach to studying implementation, we find much greater success, at least in Latin America, than has been commonly acknowledged in the transitional justice field.

Implementation of truth commission recommendations matters for several reasons. If we truly care about what impact truth commissions have on the (re)construction of peace and democracy after periods of authoritarianism and/or armed conflict, we cannot avoid taking into consideration the recommendations that such commissions make in their final reports. As we will argue in this chapter, it is hard to gauge a truth commission's potential short-term or long-term impact without taking its recommendations into consideration. Moreover, as our analysis shows, the recommendations made by truth commissions may potentially have importance for democratization and post-conflict reconstruction way beyond the mandates of the truth commissions themselves.

This chapter analyses the implementation record of nearly 1000 recommendations made by 13 Latin American truth commissions. We draw on an extensive database and 11 rich country studies (Skaar, Wiebelhaus-Brahm, and García-Godos (eds.) 2022), supplemented with secondary sources. As Chapter 3 demonstrated, in their final reports, most Latin American truth commissions have made recommendations in a wide range of areas, spanning institutional and legal reform, reparations, non-repetition measures and many more – in addition to measures to promote truth and justice. In addition to providing an empirical analysis of the kinds of recommendations that have been implemented in the Latin American context, we go beyond the purely descriptive to offer explanations for why we find different degrees of implementation across the different truth commissions and across different types of recommendations.