A year after Elie Wiesel took the award, the president of Costa Rica won the Nobel Peace Prize for trying to broker peace in Central America, during a time where the Reagan administration was funding an armed insurgency to knock over the Nicaraguan socialist government (look up the Iran-Contra affair for all the juicy illegal details).

In his Nobel Lecture, he, like Wiesel, talks about trying to pursue peace after inheriting a really bloody past, full of dictators, prejudice, and all other assorted nastiness. Both speakers are really about shaking governments out of their passivity and cracking down on injustice.

And ultimately, the message is the same: history needs to be a forward-moving progression. It's unthinkable that, as time goes by, we should stagnate or get worse. Sanchez says this explicitly in this line:

History can only move towards liberty. History can only have justice at its heart. To march in the opposite direction to history is to be on the road to shame, poverty and oppression. (Source)

History often isn't a neat climb toward progress, but, according to Wiesel and Sanchez, it should be.