Documents from the Uruguayan Dictatorship are Backed up on Blockchain to Preserve their Integrity

May. 05, 2023

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the General Strike of 1973, a response by the trade union movement to the coup d'état that unleashed the civic-military dictatorship in Uruguay from 1973 to 1985, which resulted in serious crimes against humanity, many of which remain unpunished.

Taking advantage of this context and to encourage reflection, Sitios de Memoria Collaborative is presented. This collaborative project seeks to back up documents and publications of popular organizations that resisted and denounced the authoritarianism of the period on blockchain, so that it cannot be hidden, manipulated, or destroyed, as has already happened in the past.

This project arises from the collaboration between Sitios de Memoria - Uruguay, a collective that aims to research and disseminate information about state terrorism and the previous years; Futuria, a Web3 Innovation lab that uses cutting-edge technology tools to generate solutions for journalistic organizations; and Innvented, a communication and innovation company focused on technology and digital solutions, with the support of Mothers and Relatives of Uruguayans Detained and Disappeared.

Since 2019, the Sitios de Memoria - Uruguay project has collected, digitized, and made available on its website materials such as documentation, newsletters, flyers, and posters generated by people and trade union, political, social, and student organizations as a way of denouncing and resisting the authoritarianism of the period 1968-1985.

The collaboration's objective is the decentralization of information, as the participating collectives in the project understand and share the risks of documents and information that should be widely, publicly, and freely accessible being centralized, restricted, or difficult to access - both physically and digitally. That is why Blockchain - more precisely IPFS - was chosen as the ideal technology to carry out this project.

IPFS is a decentralized protocol of encrypted data designed to create an addressable peer-to-peer content method to store and share hypermedia in a distributed file system. Although it may sound difficult to understand, the most important thing is the fact that it is a 'distributed file system' on the blockchain that makes documents practically unalterable and ideal for this memory preservation project.

Find out all the details of the collaboration at www.memoriablockchain.uy.