This article asks how the elites of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party contributed to the construction of emblematic memories in the period of military dictatorship. We propose that in the commemorations political elites meant the past according to the present found that inserts and their future horizons. Thus, the redefinition of the past would be conditioned by the political situation that developed between 1973 and 1988, and especially the ways in which parties oppose and make visible the end of dictatorship.