the sadness of the human condition, we must continue fighting for the primacy of the memory of victims over human cruelty. 120. In effect, in recent decades human conscience seems to have awakened for the duty to remember the victims of brutalities and atrocities. This has been materializing itself through the construction, in different parts of the world, of memorials, “awareness sites”, “pedagogical museums”, and monuments.84 Several times we have felt the need to engrave the traces of our memory in stone,85, so they can survive the passing of time. These efforts or initiatives of memorialization – in which the monument “The Eye that Cries” is included – seek to remember and honor the victims, meditate on the atrocities of the past (and the need for responsibility to be assumed for them), extract from them lessons for the present and the future, looking to guarantee that they do not happen again. 121. In effect, a more critical spirit and a greater awareness of past facts are favorable, trying to avoid that the grave abuses and violations of human rights occur again in the present and the future. Even though, - and as has been revealed by the recent attack on the monument “The Eye That Cries” in Lima, - the wounds of the past are still open, they have not healed. Many wounds take a long time, maybe decades or generations, to heal. It is true that compliance of the duty to remember is a symbolic form of reparation for the victims (and their next of kin), but it is also true that the preservation of collective memory has faced difficulties up to this date. 122. Among said difficulties, we have identified some, such as, for example: a) memorials do not guarantee that the abuses and atrocities of the past do not happen again; b) nor has there always been consensus on the inclusion of names of victims in memorials (v.g., the search to identify “innocent victims"); c) nor is the historic memory always the most acute little after the occurrence of the facts that violated human rights (it may occur that it become more acute with the passing of time); d) the perception of past facts is altered with the passing of time; and e) there is still not a lot of clarity with regard to the correlationship between the memorialization of past atrocities and the creation of a stable rule of law in democratic societies86 (in the terms of human rights treaties). 123. The recent attack on the monument “The Eye that Cries” in Lima has not been the only one in its kind in recent times. It has been preceded by others, and followed by three more in the course of the present year 2008, all of equal public and notorious knowledge. On 06.05.2008, the Belower Wald memorial, built in memory of the victims of a concentration camp (of Sachsenhausen, at the end of the II World War), and located in the Oriental State of Brandenburg in Germany, was attacked, as it had . Such as, v.g., the memorials in South Africa for the victims of the apartheid, the museum in memory of the victims at the headquarters of the old ESMA (School of Mechanics of the Army) in Argentina, Memory Park in Buenos Aires/Argentina, Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic, the Villa Grimaldi Memorial and park for peace in Chile, the memorial for the missing detainees at the Vaz Ferreira Park in the Hill of Montevideo/Uruguay, besides the monument “The Eye that Cries”, in Peru, among others. 84 . S. Lindeperg y A. Wieviorka, Univers concentrationnaire et génocide - Voir, savoir, comprendre, Paris, Éd. Mille et Une Nuits, 2008, p. 41. 85 . Cf. S. Brett, L. Bickford, L. Sevenko y M. Rios, Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action, Santiago de Chile, FLACSO/ICTJ, 2007, pp. 1-32. 86