Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences in Chile

Millennium, 2009

This article analyses the commemoration of political violence and its victims in the aftermath of the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973—90). We assess the varied political processes involved in commemoration, and we identify those whose struggles to reclaim sites and spaces associated with past human rights violations represent a new political, and in some cases antipolitical, repertoire. We also examine shifts in official stances and action regarding human rights and political commemoration.

Valentina Infante Batiste, 2023

Introduction and context In this paper, I would like to share with you some of the conclusions of my doctoral thesis, in which I studied pro-regime memory and memorialisation in democratic Chile (1990-2022). I term it the 'other side of memory' because it is the memory that opposes victims' narratives of the Chilean dictatorship. My specific focus was on pro-regime memory sites described as a monument, memorial, statue, or symbolic marker (e.g., street name) built to celebrate a past authoritarian regime. In Chile, these sites either praise the military coup of 11th of September 1973, glorify General Augusto Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship (1973-1990), or celebrate Military Junta members and regime civil collaborators. Thus, pro-regime memorialisation is the phenomenon in which former military regime icons or dates materialise in celebratory symbolic markers, that is, become heritage and public art, or public manifestations of memory. Some of these pro-regime memory sites were created during the dictatorship (1973-1990), while others were inaugurated in democracy (after 1990) by regime supporters and Pinochetistas (General Augusto Pinochet admirers). Thus, it should be noted from the outset that pro-regime memory groups-in other words, groups that pay tribute to Pinochet or his dictatorship-have been, throughout democracy in Chile, very active in creating public memory sites to counter Victims' memorials. I could recount at least 13 proregime memory sites created in democracy. One of the best well-known cases is the statue of José Toribio Merino in front of the Navy Museum in Chile, which paid tribute to one of the instigators of the military coup of 11 September 1973. The statue was placed there in 2002 and was removed in 2022 after human rights activists demanded its elimination, and after the courts accepted the demand.

A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, 2019

We argue that the defense of the Museum of Human Rights speaks to the power of memory as possibility, as foundational to ways collectivities understand the genealogies of violence and injustice in order to imagine otherwise. Moreover, memorial site protagonists have successfully challenged and accessed state resources toward representation and education regarding the violence of the past and toward alternative ways of imagining justice and human rights in the present and future

Londres 38 with its message of November 2015, 'Break the pact of silence'. On the darker flagstones are inscribed the names of the detained-disappeared believed held here, and their political affiliation.

A contra corriente: Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos, Vol. 16, Num. 3 (Spring 2019): 1-16, 2019

Here we will first reflect on the rise of sites of memory marking atrocious pasts across the Americas, south and north, including tension-ridden and contrasting memorialization-state relations. We will then explore two grassroots-led Chilean sites, Londres 38 and Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional, that have drawn powerfully from the repressive histories and memories to become dynamic places of connection, dialogue, and activism, toward distinct possible presents.

2012

This thesis investigates the creation of collective memory by exploring the case of a new government-sponsored Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. The exhibit commemorates human rights violations perpetrated by the State during the country's dictatorship (1973-1990). Being the first government-sponsored memorial of its kind and magnitude, the exhibit speaks to Chile's post-authoritarian democratization efforts and to the multiple challenges still facing memory-making today. Remembering traumatic events, which defy and often threaten a social group's core sense of collectivity, can be a taxing and daring task. Memory-makers or "carrier-groups" that framed this trauma narrative for others to use were faced with difficult questions when attempting to tell a story about controversial and painful events. The way the museum's narrative is framed also carries implications for human rights and for the quality of democratic development today. To better understand this case, the thesis asks (1) how were individual stories transformed into a collective representation?; (2) given that defining memory is often polemical, how is this representation sustained as legitimate?; and (3) what are the implications of this official portrayal of national memory for human rights and democratic development in Chile today? Negotiation and mythification are identified as two processes by which memory-makers transformed individual accounts of the past into a legitimate and single collective representation. My analysis shows the museum chose to focus its narrative on honoring dictatorship victims (of forced disappearance and extrajudicial executions). It does so through a Catholic narrative of salvation, whereby victims are provided a sacred space for reverence. While this myth helps establish a broadly recognized symbolic grave for dictatorship victims, it also depoliticizes and dehistoricizes Chile's authoritarian period. The narrative helps secure the Chilean State as a guarantor of civil and political rights, but not of social, economic and cultural rights, which have become prominent in democratization agendas since the 2000s and whose inclusion in the exhibit would allow for a deeper interrogation of the past in light of current social challenges. i TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… Wider Audience …………………………………………………………… 4.3 An Awaited Public Statement: The Museum and Scholars of Memory in Chile …………………………………………………………………. 4.4 Apolitical Redemption …………………………………………………………… 4.5 The Human Rights Lens ………………………………………………………….

How does Santiago, Chile, remember its dead, the victims of political violence of the 1970s and 1980s? The existence of dozens of memorials, monuments, and sites dedicated to the memory of victims of the dictatorship would seem to indicate a settled national cultural politics that recognizes the injustices and crimes committed by a terrorist State. The public, nongovernmental nature of the initiatives is, nonetheless, the first indication that we are dealing with an ambiguous political story. While the central government has supported these initiatives, they are mostly the result of efforts by social organizations and victims’groups. The spatial-temporal reading of the scenario of commemorative markers proposed in this article offers evidence of a geography of memory that is configured, on one hand, by a memory project that has inherited political trajectories which have been passed down for a long time, articulated by small groups that at certain junctures manage to form into producers of local memory. On the other hand, the high socioeconomic segregation in residential areas shapes politics of memory that are territorially discontinuous and that encourage forgetting in residential settings of the country’s elite.

My thesis will examine how Chileans of different social, ethnic, and political backgrounds remember the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973 to 1990 and how the events and memories of that time period are contested. My paper will also examine secondary memories by looking at how Chileans who were not alive during the Pinochet regime remember the dictatorship. In order to gain a thorough understanding of how Chileans remember the Pinochet regime and how Chile should move towards reconciliation I conducted extensive interviews with a variety of Chileans about these topics and also visited numerous memorial sights within Chile.

International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2017

Sociological Forum, 2010

The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state-making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorialization: What is the role of a former concentration camp turned memorial park in Chile’s process of democratization? I argue that public memorials like Villa Grimaldi Peace Park can be important complements to the incomplete process of transitional justice in nations that have experienced grave human rights violations. Such sites provide significant forms of sociability, which I call “witness citizenship” (human rights participation, generational transmission, and other forms of civic action) that deepen the reach of democracy, especially in the social spaces where truth commissions and institutional processes have not been able to reach.