This article revolves around the contested meanings and disputed senses of the recent past through the case study of the last Uruguayan dictatorship (1973–1985). The emphasis is set on two sense–making and discursive dynamics that over the past 50 years have been central in the Uruguayan public sphere regarding collective memory. The first one is the “theory of the two demons” [teoría de los dos demonios], a narrative strategy that, as we argue, seeks to balance the contested actions of the state and those of the armed groups in terms of actorial constructions. The other is the figure of the desaparecido [disappeared] as an absent, open and traumatic sign that triggers discursive strategies of meaning and sense regarding the recent past, specifically within the political domain. Our goal is to show how these phenomena trigger and organize conflicting semiotic regimes, and how the narratives that grew and sedimented around them construct different (and even opposite) senses of the historical reality of the Uruguayan recent and traumatic past.