Leadership Quote by Ricardo Lagos

“Healing wounds” is politician-speak that sounds soft until you remember what it’s usually smuggling in: a fight over memory. Ricardo Lagos, a central figure in Chile’s post-Pinochet democratic era, is operating in a landscape where trauma isn’t metaphorical. It’s detention centers, disappeared relatives, tortured bodies, and institutions that learned to look away. The brilliance of the line is how it tries to move the country forward without detonating the fragile bargain that made “forward” possible.

“Important to see” puts the speaker in the role of national diagnostician, not combatant. It’s an invitation to step back from outrage and treat justice as a process problem. Then “how we can advance” frames reconciliation as progress, a modernizing project with a direction and a timetable. That’s consequential: it subtly recodes accountability into something that must be balanced against governability, economic stability, and social peace.

The phrase “healing wounds” is ethically loaded because it implies that the injury is shared and collective - not only suffered by victims, but carried by the nation. That can be humane, but it can also flatten asymmetry, easing perpetrators into the same “we” as those they harmed. Lagos’ intent is likely pragmatic: keep a plural society together while nudging it toward truth commissions, institutional reforms, and symbolic recognition. The subtext is the constraint: Chile can’t afford endless re-litigations, yet it also can’t build legitimacy on amnesia.

The quote works because it offers moral urgency without naming enemies, letting listeners project their own version of “healing” onto it - a rhetorical bridge built over contested ground.