The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet 9781685854232

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THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN CHILE

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THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN CHILE From Pinochet to Bachelet

edited by

Cath Collins Katherine Hite Alfredo Joignant

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Published in the United States of America in 2013 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com www.firstforumpress.com and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2013 by Lynne Rienner Publishers. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collins, Cath, political scientist. The politics of memory in Chile : from Pinochet to Bachelet / Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-935049-59-3 (alk. paper) 1. Political culture—Chile. 2. Memory—Political aspects—Chile. 3. Chile—Politics and government. I. Title. JL268.C65 2013 323.4'90983—dc23 2013017335 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This book was produced from digital files prepared by the authors using the FirstForumComposer. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword, Steve J. Stern Acknowledgments

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

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The Politics of Memory in Chile Katherine Hite, Cath Collins, and Alfredo Joignant

1

A Season of Memory: Human Rights in Chile’s Long Transition Alexander Wilde

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The Politics of Prosecutions Cath Collins

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Torture as Public Policy, 1810-2011 Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman

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Memorials, Silences, and Reawakenings Cath Collins and Katherine Hite

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Pinochet’s Funeral: Memory, History, and Immortality Alfredo Joignant

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The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra

197

Afterword Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant

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Bibliography Note on Contributors Index

251 269 271

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Foreword Steve J. Stern

On 8 December 1982, as the life-and-death drama of military dictatorship in Chile continued on for a tenth year, the moment had arrived for the writer Gabriel García Márquez to deliver his Nobel Prize lecture to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.1 The dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet had begun on 11 September 1973 with the bombing of the presidential palace, while the elected president, Salvador Allende, remained inside. Allende had promised a democratic path to a socialist revolution that captured the imagination of democratic socialists and radicals across different parts of the world, including Europe. He had garnered thunderous applause after eloquently putting forth his vision and his struggle against the odds, including imperialism, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in December 1972. On that day of extreme crisis, he refused a surrender ultimatum, preferring to die under assault after delivering a radio address of loyalty to workers and the pueblo, rather than seek an escape into the comfortable life of an exiled former ruler. The spectacular visual image of the palace engulfed in flames and smoke captured the violent force of the coup, quickly circulated in world media, and—along with reports of mass imprisonment and execution— provoked the sense of consternation and urgency that inspires solidarity. In the 1970s the Chilean emergency galvanized networks that crossed Europe’s Cold War boundaries of East versus West, from Italy and France to East Germany and the Soviet Union. Even in the Americas, the fate of Chileans catalyzed mobilization and political influence in rich countries of the North as well as poorer countries of the South—in the United States and Canada as well as Mexico and Venezuela. In the United Nations the violence of the Chilean dictatorship sparked a special Ad Hoc Working Group on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile. Annual General Assembly resolutions of disapproval drew wide support, not

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only from Soviet bloc countries but also Western Europe and most of the Third World.2 In sum, in the making of an international culture of human rights, Chile was a key force, both as symbol of a wider cause and as transnational learning experience through networking and mobilization. The networks often included exiled Chileans themselves. The Chilean emergency inspired new forms of transnational consciousness, testimony, and insistence on human rights. Put differently, relative to its demographic and economic size, Chile acquired an outsized significance as icon. It was not simply the image of the bombing of the palace that circulated and inspired constant reproduction. It was also Pinochet himself, stiffbacked in dark glasses shortly after the junta took power, who turned into the visual symbol of a wider controversy and malevolence. Pinochet stood not only for the Chilean emergency, but also for the problem of “dirty war” dictatorships that spread more generally across South America. In Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, as well as Chile, dictatorial regimes engaged in projects of policide, a killing off of the earlier polity and retraining of citizens, through shockingly violent and fearsome determination to stamp out forever ways of imagining and doing politics through democratic mobilization and direct action.3 Pinochet and the Chile he ruled stood not only for Latin American malevolence but also US complicity, especially notorious under the Nixon–Kissinger regime, with evil in the name of anti-Communism. Moral awakenings related to human rights emergencies in the 1970s owed much to the impact of Chile. As the moment approached for Gabriel García Márquez to speak on a world stage in Stockholm, then, there were many reasons to remember Chile. That nation’s epic struggle and catastrophe—the arc from democratic experiment to ruthless suppression, accompanied by a connecting David vs. Goliath story, in which Goliath (US) emerged triumphant— had acquired significant general resonance in international culture. But there were also some specific reasons to remember Chile in Stockholm. In the wake of the coup, the Scandinavian countries and Swedish Ambassador Harald Edelstam, particularly, had taken leading roles as hosts for Chileans seeking asylum and in the formation of early transnational networks of solidarity and mock tribunals placing the military junta on trial for its crimes. The junta declared Ambassador Edelstam persona non grata in December 1973. Also, the last Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to a Latin American had honored the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, a Communist and supporter of Allende. Neruda delivered his Nobel address in Stockholm in 1971, a year when Allende’s experiment with a democratic path to a socialist revolution had chalked up some

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early political and economic successes and perhaps had a fighting chance to succeed. Beyond the Scandinavian connection, moreover, the experiences of “dirty war” in Latin America had not let up. Central America was in flames. In Nicaragua, “contra” guerrillas supported by the United States invaded from Honduras to bleed the Sandinista revolution. In El Salvador and Guatemala, ruthless regimes engaged in scorched-earth raids against peasant and Indian communities as well as social justice activists. Meanwhile, the United States had moved from Carter to Reagan, and history had turned as if in a circle, back to the Nixon–Kissinger alignment with violent brutality and lawlessness. Given the political emergencies, then, the writer could not escape the role of ambassador. So after García Márquez hooked his audience with a review of the “staggering” narratives of colonial and seafaring times that seem fantasy yet were actually depictions of “our reality of that age,” he moved forward toward the present. Since the time when Neruda had spoken here, he observed, “We have not had a moment’s rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone. . . .” The allusion to Chile and Allende, so well known to his audience, was the beginning of an eloquent review of a human reality too extreme to be believed, yet unfolding relentlessly in South and Central America. “I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters.” That reality bred creativity as well as hurt, but it also created a special problem for writers. “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

*** The magnitude of what was at stake in Chile in 1973 and under the state terror regime that followed somehow resonated in world culture. Human actors from Chile and many other countries found the story moving, outrageous, and irresistible at a time when human rights awareness itself was taking a new turn in world culture. Allende, Pinochet, and Chile as epic symbols, accompanied by the real-life testimonies of many ordinary people and activists in exile and by the emergence of transnational activist networks, provided means to make the outrageousness and the urgency believable. The world-culture impact of Chile—resurrected during

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the precedent-setting arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity, under the legal theory of universal jurisdiction—is one reason this book matters, forty years after the original bombing and coup. Another reason is that inside Chile itself, the politics of memory proved fundamental to the making of political legitimacy and illegitimacy, both under military rule in the 1970s and 1980s and during the vexed democratic transition of the 1990s and beyond. Chile has been a society profoundly divided about the facts and meaning of what transpired in 1973 and under military rule, yet widely aware that the crisis of 1973 was foundational. The military regime enjoyed a substantial social base of support, probably a majority at the outset, and engaged in a profound remaking of political, social, and economic life. In addition, the regime and its secret police engaged in denial and misinformation to dispute the factual reality of state terror including executions, disappearances (abductions that vanished citizens permanently), and torture of prisoners. In a real sense, misinformation sought to disappear from culture and memory not only the persons abducted and mysteriously gone but also the victims and facts of repression more generally. Under the circumstances, “memory struggles” to define the true and fundamental facts that could not be forgotten, as well as their meaning for present and future, worked their way into politics and public culture, even under the dictatorship of 1973–1990. For the regime and its supporters, human rights violations were occasional “excesses” by individuals, not systematic state policy. They were far less prevalent than claimed by critics, and they were the understandable, albeit regrettable, by-products of the effort to bring modern progress to a society while stamping out threats by those who had brought society to the edge of civil war under Allende. For critics, the point was precisely the state terror that ruptured life in so many families and tore apart the social fabric—and that was cruelly compounded when the violence of the wound was met with denial. For the human rights camp struggling against the odds, memory—that which must not be forgotten—raised issues that were moral and existential as well as political. Memory was a value closely aligned with the sense of reckoning that haunted the democratic transition—the coming to terms with longdenied truth and justice in ways that undergirded the legitimacy and staying power and fundamental values of democratic transition, notwithstanding continuing divisions over the legacy of Pinochet’s regime and notwithstanding his continuing power as army commander until March 1998. As this book’s editors astutely observe, in dialogue with political science as a field of study, what the politics of memory offers conceptu-

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ally is analytical awareness that “the relations of both voice and silence” require attention to understand the difficult rebirthing of democratic polities after atrocity, precisely because collective memories proved “both foundational to and constitutive of collective political identities.” Put differently, the epic quality of the Chilean story—the struggle for survival of the Allende experiment, followed by the life-and-death struggles of families under a dictatorship embarked on policide—played out inside Chile and its remaking of political culture, not just abroad. The official story under military rule was one of heroic memory—a narrative of soldier-saviors who saw the ruin of society and the threat of a bloodbath by the left and who reluctantly but patriotically responded to the clamor of a populace in need of salvation. In the weeks that immediately followed the coup, the new regime mounted a spectacular propaganda campaign of revelations about “Plan Z”: an alleged leftist conspiracy under Allende to install a dictatorship, with foreign assistance, through a massacre of military officers massed for Independence Day celebrations and followed up with assassinations of leaders in politics and civil society. Secret weapons arsenals, guerrilla training camps, war clinics and hospitals, underground tunnels and storage depots, and assassination lists targeting key people and their families throughout the country turned into a staccato of chilling revelation. When Pinochet delivered an address to the nation to mark the one-month anniversary of the coup, all understood the allusion at the heart of heroic memory: “The sinister plans to massacre a people that did not accept their ideas had been prepared by underground means. Foreign countries sent weapons and mercenaries of hate to fight us. However, the hand of God made itself present to save us, a few days before consummation of the crime.” A heroic memory of salvation, and the linked idea of a continuing war against an underground enemy determined to rise up from defeat, proved crucial to the legitimacy and social base of support of the regime and to the creation of a free hand for the secret police. The Plan Z allegations do not stand up under historical scrutiny, but many people believed them at the time and remembered them as “true” years later. Allende, on his last day, also understood that memory would prove crucial to the future. In his last radio address, transmitted via the one loyal radio tower the air force had not yet bombed, he took the measure of the moment. His words would become “moral punishment to those who have betrayed the oath they took,” and he would not end constitutional government by resigning. “Placed at a historical turning point, I will repay with my life the loyalty of the people [pueblo].” He was sure “that the seed we give to the dignified conscience of thousands upon thousands of Chileans cannot be definitively destroyed.” The violent

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force would in the end prove transitory, because “social processes cannot be stopped. . . . History is ours, and it is made by the people [los pueblos].”

*** Yet if the violence and magnitude of the 11 September 1973 crisis, and the political awareness of the actors themselves, ensured that the politics of memory would prove decisive to the future, no one could foresee the irony that would ensue in the long run. The epic moment gave rise to heroic memories and countermemories, but it also marked a turn toward post-heroic conceptions of politics. Heroic memory did not come from nowhere. Since the 1930s Latin America and Chile had passed through a time of heroic political conceits. These attached to both the idea of the state and the idea of the pueblo. Each would bring about transformation—uplift to a society in need of redemption. New kinds of political leaders, from populists to revolutionaries, would sweep away the legacy of rule by a small oligarchy and its corollary, social backwardness and injustice. The leaderheroes would usher in an era of political inclusion and material advance for the nation’s once excluded and exploited people—the workers, the urban poor including rural-to-urban migrants, the peasants, and the struggling lower-middle-class sectors who together constituted the pueblo, the social majority of humble people historically denied a just pact with the state and elites. Such sectors comprised lo popular, the modest people at the root of the authentic historical nation yet whose day of fulfillment had long been postponed. State support of wage advances and trade union influence, housing and health access, and land reform and affordable prices for basic commodities, along with state-led industrialization projects and tax and credit policy to promote importsubstitution, would yield a new society with a new social pact—not only a social welfare-and-development state but also a kind of romance between the heroic leader and the pueblo. In some countries the new kind of state was indeed personified in a major leader who rose to prominence, built a new state architecture, and left an enduring imprint: Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico in the 1930s and Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina in the 1940s are the most famous examples. In Chile the new kind of engaged state (estado de compromiso) emerged out of Popular Front coalition politics of center and left in the late 1930s and out of a culture of competitive multiparty elections. By the 1960s, however, the

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heroic state also came to be embodied in two rival leaders who captured popular imagination: Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva, elected president in 1964, and Socialist Salvador Allende, elected president in 1970. Each promised a revolution. Yet the idea of heroic action to lift up a nation did not accrue only to state leaders and did not reduce to a top-down vision of social change. Simultaneously, and especially on the left, the idea of the pueblo creating the nation’s new future also assumed heroic dimensions. The popular sectors long victimized and excluded by History had nonetheless forged their own histories of resistance and mobilization. In the twentieth century, their combativeness, organizing, and struggle for social rights had finally gained effective political expression and would finally yield results. When Allende said goodbye in his eloquent radio speech, he addressed workers, the ultimate symbol in this conception, and thanked them for placing their confidence “in a man who was simply an interpreter of great longings for justice.” He was as much servant as hero. He went on to address others: the women who supported him in their roles as peasants, workers, and mothers; the patriotic sectors of middle-class professionals; the youths who “sang and offered their joy and spirit of struggle.” As Allende understood from the direct-action seizures that reshaped factory life and ownership, the agrarian reform process, and the urban housing landscape during his presidency, the project to transform Chile was both a bottom-up affair, led by social and political activists who saw themselves as leaders of a determined pueblo, and a top-down affair, led by an elected president navigating legality and negotiations with Congress. The two dynamics had proved very difficult to reconcile. But when Allende assured his radio listeners that their combined effort would one day triumph—“History is ours, and it is made by los pueblos”—they knew what he meant. The makers of the great transformation that would someday arrive would be popular social actors, not merely political leaders. When the experiment of democratic socialist transformation turned into a nightmare, the new wielders of state power also saw themselves as heroes embarked on a great transformation. They would undo the excesses of a democracy gone wild, retrain the suffering populace into a model of tutelary and technocratic governance, and come around to an altogether new conception of the relationship between state, society, and economy. The economic role of the state would be radically scaled back, and the citizen would find self-actualization as a consumer emancipated from the state, not as a bearer of economic rights negotiated with the state through group organizing and political mobilization.

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In sum, the state simultaneously promoted policide and the neoliberal economic revolution. Chile was the world’s vanguard state, not only as a leader in the political battle against world Communism but also as the forerunner of an economic revolution later promoted and generalized by Reagan and Thatcher. Put differently, the defenders of social privilege in the era of Frei and Allende had also participated in the political culture that gave rise to heroic conceits—but from the opposite end, with alarm about the experiments tearing down the proper social order. By attaching their destiny to an anti-Communist crusade, led by soldiers who would rescue society from ruin and bloodbath, conservative social forces regained the initiative and built an alternative heroic memory. In the case of Chile, whose dictatorship was the most personalized of all the policide regimes that spread across South America in the 1960s and 1970s, the political hero had a name and turned into an icon at home and abroad: General Augusto Pinochet. For a quarter-century, first as leader of the military junta that ruled Chile during 1973–1990, then as the army commander whose constitution constrained democratic transition and did not allow elected civilian presidents to remove him during 1990–1998, Pinochet was the focal point of the effort to drape military rule in a politics of heroic memory. Providence had selected him to save Chile.

*** Political heroes fall back to earth, and short-term consequences do not always align with long-term effects. The irony of memory politics in Chile is that the heroic memories and countermemories that defined the 1973 crisis moment could not endure without suffering a new transformation. However, the world changed. The crusading metanarratives that defined political projects during the era of Cold War and Third World Revolution in the mid-to-late twentieth century gave way to new paradigms of politics and thought: the neoliberal restructuring of global economics, the rise of social movements less tethered to political party conceptions, the postmodern skepticism about metanarrative in general, the far less statist conceptions of the social good, and global rights advocacy. Put differently, when skepticism undermines the politics of megatransformation, a new kind of appreciation may arise for the leader who refrains from promising a revolution but also carries on persistently to accomplish the social good, in a manner consistent with professed val-

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ues, notwithstanding constraints and the inherent frustrations of incremental change. Chile has not been immune from this paradigm shift. Yet as this book shows so well, the shift did not prevent forward motion, driven in large measure by determined civil society actors, on human rights and memory politics. The long-term irony deepens when considering the central public policy issues that define political agendas and contention. As I have argued elsewhere, even as the politics of human rights memory gained traction, reshaped cultural sensibilities, and broke new ground by addressing torture issues systematically during 2003–2004 and beyond, the cumulative advances in memory politics and human rights are in some ways illusory. Such advances do not imply a continuing central place on the political agenda. During the administration of Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010), the politics of memory stretched to new issues in powerful ways—not only the classic human rights violations against integrity of life, body, and psyche of victims but also other legacies of the dictatorship including policies shaping educational opportunity, socioeconomic inequality, and retirement income. At the same time, the central public policy issues in play did not reduce to memory politics as traditionally understood or practiced. Urban mass transport, gender equality, birth control access for young poor women, economic reserves for spending to mitigate the world financial meltdown, massive hydroelectric investment projects, indigenous community rights—these and other issues shaped the agenda and political legitimacy. Bachelet finished her presidency with high popularity, not only because she was closely identified with a politics of human rights but also because she engaged new issues. Equally important, she projected a style—a dialogical president more interested in collaborative citizen participation in public life than in party politics—well suited for a post-heroic political age. The irony of 1973, then, was that it generated heroic memory and countermemory but at the same time unleashed a long-term transformation—in state-society-economy relations on the one hand, in the tenor of civic life and public policy agendas on the other—that eventually undermined heroic political conceits. Chile did not exist as an isolated political island during a world transition toward post-heroic politics and the collapse of projects shaped by intersections of Cold War and Third World Revolution. Arguably, however, the contradictory dynamics were particularly intense in Chile. The 1973 crisis generated a powerful herodictator cult and the struggle to eviscerate it, and at the same time paved the way for Chile to become an early laboratory of neoliberal shock policy to restructure state, economy, and society.

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However, it was not only the long-term structural trends that brought the eventual demise of heroic memory. Pinochet as political hero also fell back to earth for very specific reasons. The combined effect of new revelations of human rights abuses, shocking corruption scandals, and criminal litigation abroad and at home turned him toxic— an albatross even for his own shrinking loyalist base. Pinochet went from frying pan to fire after his return from house arrest in London to Chile in 2000. Particularly during 2004 to 2006, the discovery of large foreign bank accounts incompatible with the image of the austere selfsacrificing patriot, and a series of criminal indictments and human rights revelations, sparked embarrassment and political liability that drove even some of his own base away. To preserve and defend the legacy of military rule—and in particular the economic policies that had reshaped the structure of property, income, and life opportunities—required depersonalizing the military regime. To defend the regime required more than ever that one draw distance from the leader who now seemed exposed as a mafioso, responsible for human rights crimes as well as secret self-enrichment, rather than a hero. For those who had been Pinochet’s partisans and loyalists, this was a situation bound to produce ambivalence—a certain imperative to reaffirm gratitude of some sort, even if briefly, in the immediate aftermath and emotion of Pinochet’s death in December 2006. For hard-core loyalists, his passing could also induce a desire to begin a long-term rehabilitation of the image. To understand how the politics of memory, voice, and silence redefined the Chilean world—by building new sensibilities about human rights, by sparking reckonings with justice and torture, by creating geographies of memorialization, by shaping public opinion and ritual moments—this book offers vital research and insight. In so doing, it draws to the fore the ultimate irony: memory is essential for the creation of political identity, community, and democracy after times of atrocity, but its effects can also undermine the impulse to create the political hero. Coming to terms with the catastrophic failure of a social justice dream in 1973 does not in the long run reinforce a heroic political conceit. Documenting and coming to terms with the atrocities of a dictatorship bent on policide, and turning violently against unarmed citizens redefined into the demonized enemy: this hard and painful work undermines the cult of the hero-dictator. What is left standing, when the myth of the political hero disintegrates, is the moral hero: the person whose values and consecuencia, or record of constancy with professed values notwithstanding the political odds, inspire others. In Chile during the human rights struggles under dictatorship and democratic transition, such people emerged

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from many walks of life—from civil society and church society as well as political society. The memory question that emerged during the life-and-death drama of Chile is an issue existential, and moral, as well as political. Forty years ago, on September 11, a Tuesday morning that changed Chile and the world, Salvador Allende understood this. He needed to plant a moral seed. 1

For the text of the Nobel Lecture of García Márquez, and for those of other winners including Neruda, see www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ (accessed 9 September 2012). 2 For the intersections of Third World Revolution and Cold War in the making of heroic political projects in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and for dynamics as seen from Latin American grassroots experience and in relation to human rights and solidarity politics, three excellent starting points are Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and Jessica Stites Mor, ed., Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2013). 3 Although I did not focus on the irony theme as such in my trilogy on the memory question in Chile, the empirical foundation for the events described in this foreword is presented and documented in those books. See Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989– 2006 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Specifically, for the concept of policide, see Remembering Pinochet’s Chile, pp. 31–23, 180–181 n. 27. For Allende and Pinochet quotes in context, see Battling for Hearts and Minds, pp. 12 and 51; and for Chilean memory politics in relation to a world-history context, see Reckoning with Pinochet, pp. 377–383.

Acknowledgments

This volume grew from conversations among the coeditors that led first to a panel, “The Politics of Memory from Pinochet to Bachelet,” at the July 2009 International Political Science Association XXI Congress, held in Santiago, Chile. Since then, we are fortunate to have gathered a terrific, patient group of social scientists from or based in Chile, the United States, and the United Kingdom to contribute to the book. The idea of a volume reflecting on the various ways in which memory politics continue to shape Chile’s political self-definition gained additional relevance in the runup to the 40th anniversary of the military coup of 1973. We hope the book is able to make a modest contribution to the associated national and international debates about the overcoming of authoritarian pasts. The coeditors wish to thank our institutional homes during the research, writing, and editing of the book, namely the School of Political Science and the Observatorio Derechos Humanos of the Instituto de Investigación en las Ciencias Sociales at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile, and the Department of Political Science and the Program in Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. We also appreciate the financial support of the Vassar Committee on Research for providing funding for travel and translation, and of the Universidad Diego Portales Press for translation funding. For the Spanish edition, Jesús Cuellar provided excellent chapter translations, as did Cath Collins for the present edition. Rodrigo Hernández provided invaluable technical assistance with graphics and table formats, as did Eliana Loveluck with the index. We would like to thank Lynne Rienner and Laura Logan of Lynne Rienner Publishers for shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. Grateful thanks are also due to Felipe Agüero, Alan Angell, Alexander Wilde, and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful critiques of early drafts of various sections of the book. Finally, we are deeply appreciative of the skillful and erudite editorial work done by Sanford Thatcher, a dean of the US Latin America social science community.

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1 The Politics of Memory in Chile Katherine Hite, Cath Collins, and Alfredo Joignant

This book examines Chilean politics and the nature of democratization in the country since 1990, with an emphasis on how the politics of memory about the recent past visibly shapes the country’s political community in the present. The term “politics of memory” is most often associated with study of policies specifically designed to address the legacy of past atrocities—primarily, prosecutions, truth-telling, memorialization, and reparations. Several of this volume’s chapters take up these issues in regard to Chile’s military-led authoritarian regime of 1973 to 1990, presided over by Augusto Pinochet. Memory politics is also associated with what is commonly referred to as “transitional justice” literature, tracing the dynamic post-authoritarian interactions of particular political institutions, policies, and actors including the judiciary, the military, and human rights organizations. Transitional justice literature also often highlights the potential or actual influence of international actors and institutions on local power dynamics. Yet we suggest that the politics of memory is an equally and in some ways potentially more illuminating framework for study of human rights trajectories, given the heavy symbolic load that human rights policies carry and the fact that they often become vectors for broader political contestation.1 In addition, a politics of memory frame allows us to reach back in time, going beyond exclusive attention to human rights violations from the 1973–1990 dictatorship period to consider lived experiences of violence that mark distinct temporalities for distinct collectivities. It is clear, for example, from the works of Florencia Mallon and Claudio

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Barrientos that Chile’s indigenous Mapuche communities possess deep historical understandings of what constitutes trauma, as well as what constitutes continuity, in Chile.2 For the Mapuche, dictatorship-era state violence was in some sense unsurprising and in another important sense hardly exceptional.3 The Chilean right, for its part, consistently refers to the 1960s land reform and land takeovers that preceded the pre-coup Popular Unity government of 1970–1973 as a haunting traumatic memory, ushering in a polarized political climate that the right experienced as chaos and lived through in genuine fear.4 Indeed, the imprint of this period is so strong that, when the recently inaugurated national Museum of Memory and Human Rights was first announced, there were serious calls from the right for its narrative to begin in 1964, rather than 1973. For the right, the earlier date marks not only the origins but also the chronological beginning of the political violence at issue. Politics of memory studies heighten our analytical sensitivity to these distinct temporalities, and in general to the importance of timing and subjective periodization in understanding actor motivation and hence political processes. We suggest that what is gained conceptually from study of the politics of memory is greater emphasis on the relations of both silence and voice to rebuilding a democratic polity. Collective memories are both foundational to and constitutive of collective political identities. These memories are experienced in intersubjective, often tension-ridden, relationship to others. For countries needing to work through atrocious pasts, reconstructing a rich, plural state and society might mean the cathartic airing of memories of conflict, in pursuit of the constitution or reconstitution of a public sphere in Arendtian terms. Alternatively, the recall and expression of conflictive memories may not simply be catharsis—something to be “gotten through”—but itself a perennial and healthy constituent of the new polity. The idea that there is any version of history that cannot be tolerated may, after all, itself lean toward the totalitarian. This volume makes explicit and examines the appropriation of memory for varied political ends. We emphasize how key actors and powerbrokers politically deploy or react to distinct narratives of the past, an approach that distinguishes it from political learning literature in which the political class itself is the dependent variable. The political learning approach is undoubtedly important for examining the effects of memories of past political trauma on elites during democratization.5 Yet a memory approach may recast questions such as “what is learned?” or “is it learned?” into “how are memories of particularly traumatic periods interpreted and utilized?” Such an approach guards against portraying

The Politics of Memory in Chile

3

democratic politics as inherently or inescapably about moderation and compromise and also avoids a normative construction of democracy as a self-evident value or innate good that needs to be (re)learned. Instead, we can examine the active appropriation or instrumentalization of memories of both democratic and nondemocratic periods and show how each acts upon present-day politics. One ought not perhaps even to expect the (re)construction of a public sphere to be straightforward. Powerful incumbents or exincumbents will resist particular versions of the past unfavorable to their self-images or interests. Conflictive memories can be perceived as destabilizing, while many may quite understandably not want to hear, much less be invited to relive, traumatic narratives.6 Those who have reconciled themselves to a particular version may meanwhile be disturbed if internal contradictions are exposed.7 Let us place the dramatic run-up to the 2009 Chilean presidential elections in a politics of memory frame. Thirty-six-year-old congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami renounced his Socialist Party membership and emerged as a viable independent presidential candidate. It was a major blow for the center-left Concertación coalition that had governed the country for two decades and that fielded former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000) as its (finally unsuccessful) candidate. Enríquez-Ominami’s campaign slogan was Chile Cambió (Chile Changed). This seemed to mean that the political leadership that sought in the 1980s to bring the dictatorship to an end, and in the 1990s to rechart a democratic course, had now accomplished its objectives and needed to step aside. Enríquez-Ominami called for open political debate, for loosening the grip of those at the top who monopolized the reins of power and stifled the emergence of new voices and ideas. Enríquez-Ominami’s harsh criticism of the political elite clearly resonated with many Chileans, even if they did not see him as ready to govern. Although a mainstream political alternative finally won the day, the desire for change was sufficiently strong to end two decades of Concertación ascendancy. The narrow second-round triumph of rightwing presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera also implied a preference for someone who was not, or not exclusively, a career politician.8 Although Piñera’s fortunes did not ride high for long, both the 2011 wave of popular, primarily student, discontent that contributed to Piñera’s disapproval ratings and the subsequent fate of EnríquezOminami speak volumes about the generalized desire for “something different.”

4

The Politics of Memory in Chile

Enríquez-Ominami’s emergence as a would-be popular hero did not, finally, last long beyond his unsuccessful presidential effort (although he did resurface in 2012, announcing another independent candidacy for the 2013 presidential race). Although his relative youth and readiness to dispense with politics as usual might have entitled him to expect a following among the disaffected student leaders who virtually monopolized the political agenda during 2011, the student movement’s “antipolitics” stamp was so strong that overtures from established politicians were firmly and publicly rebuffed. In this respect, EnríquezOminami’s complex personal history may in the end have served merely to reinforce the similarities with his fellow politicians—anecdotally, as one student remarked, “in the last analysis he’s just another hijo de [son of].”9 Born in 1973, only months before the Chilean military coup, Enríquez-Ominami has strong ties to two men who symbolize, respectively, revolutionary intransigence and post-transitional pragmatism. He is the son of famous left-wing revolutionary leader Miguel Enríquez, killed in 1974 during a shootout with military intelligence agents. The young Enríquez-Ominami subsequently grew up in exile in France with his mother Manuela Gumucio, daughter of a Christian Democrat senator, and Carlos Ominami, a former comrade of his father’s. Ominami in effect adopted the boy—hence the second surname—and introduced him from an early age to political work, including campaigning and media strategy.10 Despite the disorientation and even alienation he experienced on returning to Chile after a childhood and adolescence spent in Europe, Enríquez-Ominami ran for and won a Socialist Party congressional seat in the 2006 elections, in the same district in which his adoptive father was a senator.11 In the run-up to the 2009 polls the Socialist Party (PS) appeared to be unraveling at the seams. Party president Camilo Escalona was unable to prevent the resignation of several leading party stalwarts, two of whom went on to launch presidential campaigns of their own. Escalona refused Carlos Ominami’s petition to the Socialists to be allowed to support both the Concertación’s official candidate, Frei, and his own son in the campaign. “The PS has worked hard in coalition for thirty-five years,” Escalona argued, “and this includes supporting one coalition candidate for the past twenty years.”12 Escalona’s assertion contrasts strongly with historical memories of the Socialist Party in the years preceding the long transition back to democracy initiated in 1990, memories of political intransigence and bitter divisions with the political center. Underlying Escalona’s stalwart support for a single candidate not of his own party is a haunting memory of the three-way, left-center-right split in the 1970 presidential elections

The Politics of Memory in Chile

5

that brought Salvador Allende to power. Acrimony between the Socialists and centrist Christian Democrats, in opposition, proved fatal to Allende’s subsequent stormy three-year term. “Chile changed,” said Marco Enríquez-Ominami, while Escalona might say “Don’t be so sure” or “What changed is that we work in coalition, not in division.” These are clearly distinct, generationally influenced claims of what has changed and what has not. Thus if we look at the story about Marco Enríquez-Ominami in a politics of memory frame, we can observe how the candidate makes selective use of the memory of his revolutionary father in ways that might have been unimaginable a decade before.13 One might argue that the predominant image of Miguel Enríquez circulating in Chile today has shifted notably away from the “terrorist” persona constructed by regime propaganda towards the left’s memory of him as a “man of conviction” who died for his ideals.14 If this transformation really has taken place, many factors are probably at work. They include the effect Enríquez-Ominami himself had on public opinion, as well as the resurgence of principled antiparty street politics so clearly visible in the 2011 student movement. Today a range of alternative memory narratives about the conflictive past is publicly surfacing. Traumatic memories seem inevitably both to resurface and to trouble society when they do so. Calls to remember atrocious pasts and to bring perpetrators to justice can also raise other pressing concerns, including very immediate problems of ongoing violence and injustice. Impunity for past human rights violations may signal impunity for perpetrators of violence in the present, in which case demands to right past injustices will probably shade into demands for social justice in the here and now. In Chile, for example, the persistent advance of judicial investigations since 1998 has at different times called into question the presence of Pinochet-era regime collaborators in public office or academia,15 the fitness of former members of illicit security services to continue to serve in the army, and the dictatorship-era service record of police officers accused of present-day acts of brutality. On a more systemic scale, 2011’s social and student protests clearly represented at some level the rejection of persistent inequalities now seen not as unfinished business for the neoliberal model but rather as a direct consequence of it. Political Science and the Politics of Memory

Political scientists once steered clear of the study of memory. There seemed to be three principal reasons for this neglect. First, political

6

The Politics of Memory in Chile

scientists saw memory as too subjective, properly the realm of psychology and accordingly difficult to measure, quantify, or operationalize in ways that could generate understanding of the actual practice of politics. Second, political scientists tended to hold that the aspects of memory relevant to social science belonged more properly to historians or sociologists. Sorting facts, debating validity, and accessing particularities were simply not the interests then driving the discipline. Third, those political scientists who did admit the importance of collective memories took the view that, since these were to be found codified in social and political institutions, it was more useful to study these institutions than to adopt memory as a direct object of study. Despite these biases against the study of memory as a lens on politics, some political scientists have come to appreciate how a range of historical memories that powerfully influence politics in observable ways fall outside the rubric of institutional analysis. Both Alfredo Joignant’s and Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra’s chapters for this volume powerfully illustrate how political memories—constructions of fact, myth, and interpretation that constitute, precisely, the noninstitutionalized dimensions of politics—provide rich seams of associations actively mined for purposes of contestation and palpably expressed through the media, public opinion, and political discourse. In contexts that involve transition from conflict, repression, and trauma, memories prove difficult to ignore politically. Memories are often mobilized by all actors, including the state, to challenge opponents. One can imagine a continuum at one end of which civil and social conflict has been so extreme, with society so polarized, that there is little hope of reconstructing a viable national project inclusive of the formerly persecuted. Political elites in such a society would continue to appeal to the most negative images and sentiments of their particular, victorious, constituencies, portraying secession, banishment of the vanquished, or the resurgence of open conflict as the only possible futures. One might, for example, place the discourse of Slobodan Milošević at this end of the spectrum, given his determination to resuscitate a suppressed collective memory and channel it towards destructive ends.16 Such resuscitation reflects the timeless quality of memory, particularly traumatic memory. This can be recalled, manipulated, and filtered through the current political moment to serve an array of political objectives, just as it can on occasion prove the genuine origin of current grievances. At the other end of the continuum would sit a society that, despite experiencing a similar conflict, with clear winners and losers, had managed to arrive at an inclusionary national project featuring both a representative political society and a participatory civil society. Such an

The Politics of Memory in Chile

7

outcome might occur, for example, where political elites have cast or recast political discourse into nonessentializing terms, some form of pardon and blame has been assumed or shared, and new political institutions grant freedom from fear and allow for a wide—through probably not unlimited17—range of political expression. Framed in this way, memory can be deployed in the service of various political projects. As Alexander Wilde’s chapter for this volume also signals, both classic and more contemporary works in sociology18 and history19 argue persuasively that memory is reconstructed over generations to fit (as well as to shape) particular social and political contexts. The first transitóloga to study this phenomenon deeply was Spanish political scientist Paloma Aguilar. Documenting the reinvention of political discourse during and after the Franco era in Spain, she traces the emergence of a progressively more consensualist elite interpretation of conflict that facilitated political transition.20 For Chile, Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira have traced cycles of conflict and subsequent elite amnesia stretching back to the nineteenth century.21 They record a recurring tendency to apply amnesty to perpetrators while subsequently expunging violent incidents from the official record. The myth of exceptionalist Chilean democratic and republican traditions is thereby preserved. Common to these works are at least three arguments: first, that different generations are entirely capable of interpreting the same political events differently; second, that political ideology or partisanship continues to weigh heavily on current interpretations of past political events; and third, that in the aftermath of traumatic conflict, a substantial portion of both citizens and elites profoundly desire consensual collective memory images, crafted by the political class, that convey national unity and peace. Such consensual images may overcome ideologically driven memory divides, at least for a while. The studies also remind us that, though national political trauma may have occurred decades before, memories of it continue to influence politics at all levels. Memories can also be powerfully enduring in spite of attempts by the dominant political discourse to shape them or blunt their force. ‘Official memories’ can feel far more imposed than embraced, and as Cath Collins and Katherine Hite’s chapter for this volume emphasizes, grassroots memory mobilizing in countries like Chile often seems to be defined in direct opposition to the expressed views of state actors and institutions. Social historians of Chile document how individual and collective memories part dramatically and are not obviously reconcilable, generating the uneasy coexistence of radically incom-

8

The Politics of Memory in Chile

patible memories of one single period or event: matter and antimatter, never to be brought together for fear of the destruction that would ensue.22 Through the 1990s, students of memory politics in Chile often commented on the “muffled” quality of public discussions of the past.23 In a country with a highly institutionalized political party system, the fact that party leaderships retreated from memory politics relegated memory debates to the margins of public life. Alexander Wilde captured this marginalizing effect best in a seminal article on what he termed “irruptions” of memory in 1990s Chile in an otherwise seemingly silent, evasive political scenario.24 He extends that analysis to the Concertación’s second decade in his chapter in this volume. Interestingly, while opinion polls often indicate that human rights is relatively low on the list of Chilean citizens’ daily concerns, memoirs and other types of cultural production including documentaries, feature films, and theatrical accounts of the repressive past were, and are, avidly consumed. The beginnings of this renewed visibility were evident around the 25th (1998) and 30th (2003) anniversaries of the coup. TV footage from 1973 was aired extensively around these dates, and the LOM publishing house brought out a special “September Collection” dedicated to confessional biographies and other first-hand accounts. A steady stream of film productions25 has more recently been complemented by two fictionalized TV series26 directly or indirectly addressing 1980s repressive violence. The two series drew considerable ratings and much social comment. There is, then, a sense in which “human rights” as a polling question did not capture a broader, demonstrable interest in the political events of the dictatorship. Carlos Huneeus’s long-running public opinion studies show a remarkable continuity in the political divisions underlying Chilean views of the coup, Pinochet, and the military’s human rights record.27 The data indicate a strong intertwining of political affiliation with opinions regarding the past, and it is difficult to separate cause and effect. Do present-day political-ideological commitments determine citizens’ interpretations of the past, or have sharply differing memories of the past defined current political commitments? Despite overall continuities in public opinion about the traumatic past, Huneeus also detects some shifts over time as well as along generational lines. For example, when asked in 1990 whether there had been a civil war-like situation in Chile in 1973, 41 percent of Chileans responded affirmatively. In 1999 this percentage dropped to 33 percent.28 Asked in 2003 whether they would describe the coup primarily as the end of democracy or as the liberation of the country

The Politics of Memory in Chile

9

from Marxism, 60 percent of young Chileans opted for the former. Those over sixty years of age divided almost evenly into two groups: 43 percent agreed with the majority youth preference while 41 percent preferred the description of “liberation from Marxism.”29 The suggestion is that memories are malleable only to some extent, within the parameters of some basic continuities. Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra provide a chapter for this volume that presents a deeper analysis of these trends. The Pinochet Effect

On 11 September 1998, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chilean coup (and, unbeknownst to all, the month that would precede Pinochet’s arrest in London), Chile's Televisión Nacional, TVN, produced a "talking heads" exchange among four leading politicians, two from the right and two from the center-left. The first participant was Sergio Diez, Chilean ambassador to the Organization of American States during the dictatorship, and at the time of the television program a senator for the right-wing Renovación Nacional (RN) party. The second right-wing politician was Sergio Fernández, a former interior minister under the dictatorship and in 1998 a senator for the other leading rightist party, the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI). Next was Gutemberg Martínez, a congressman and past president of the centrist Christian Democratic Party, Partido Demócrata Cristiano (DC). The fourth participant was Socialist Party (PS) senator Carlos Ominami, at that time campaign manager to PS presidential candidate Ricardo Lagos. The four panelist congressmen were asked to reflect on how Chileans should remember the 1973 coup and its aftermath, and suggest how the country might move toward reconciliation regarding the period. What follows is an excerpt from this conversation. TVN “Programa de Medianoche”, broadcast 11 September 199830 Sergio Diez, RN: “It is important that we remember, we must understand, very calmly, what happened to us. I think that the departure point was verbal violence coming from the heads of the parties that became more and more violent. There were parties that incorporated, as part of their doctrine, the language and doctrine of armed struggle, from those like Corvalán [Communist Party leader], who incorporated the banner of armed struggle even after the victory of Allende. All the parties had, perhaps not exactly paramilitary units, we'll call them defense units . . . .We must be very careful, all of us

10

The Politics of Memory in Chile

who have responsibility, to watch our words, for they become more important than the victory of our beliefs.” Carlos Ominami, PS: “I agree that this was a particular moment, of social convulsion, of economic crisis . . . . I used violent language and I have been very self-critical. But what comes after is the systematic practice of violence. What comes after the actual 11th of September is a project founded on violence, when they bomb La Moneda [the presidential palace], when people are killed, when there are concentration camps . . . .” Sergio Fernández, UDI (when asked if such violence was necessary): “We have to ask why we reached that point. The seeds of hatred began before. Unfortunately, they released things that could not be controlled. But clearly this came from before. [Here the interviewer interjects, “But was the repression necessary?”] We were in chaos, convulsion that had to be stopped, which was stopped, which allowed us to reach 1990 in which a peaceful transition could occur . . . .”

The television program then continued with previously recorded questions for the guests, including one from Communist Party leader Gladys Marín, directed to Sergio Diez. Marín asked Diez why, during his time as ambassador, he had denied the human rights violations that were occurring, including the disappearance of her own husband. Diez replied, as on other occasions, that he only had the information the government supplied to him. Gutemberg Martínez then attempted to press Diez to admit the government had lied. Diez, evading the issue, shifted the conversation back to the underlying reasons for the 1973 coup and claimed that during his time as a senator in the Popular Unity period the political right had clear reasons to believe in the imminent possibility of a civil war. Ominami challenged this claim, while Sergio Fernández emphatically argued that the Popular Unity government had repeatedly violated the Chilean constitution after 1970. Later in the program, a recorded question from right-wing columnist and ardent Pinochet supporter Hermógenes Pérez de Arce asked Ominami to clarify recent comments from presidential candidate Ricardo Lagos. These had been to the effect that one of Lagos’s selfimposed missions in office would be to “complete the inconclusive legacy of Allende”. An interviewer opened the question to all four panelists, not before rephrasing it in even starker terms as “whether Ricardo Lagos presents a destabilizing risk to Chile.” Diez, the first to respond, stated: “Lagos is untested . . . . The potential danger is

The Politics of Memory in Chile

11

regarding his ability to manage, to lead [not just the country, but] his party, as we are not confident about some sectors of his party”. In many ways, this conversation encapsulates a larger political struggle over memory, filtered through the lens of seventeen years of dictatorship and, at that time, eight years of post-authoritarian rule. The right depicts the left as unpredictable and a threat; the left reminds the country that it was the right who finally unleashed extreme violence.31 The exchange perfectly demonstrated how thorny a task the four panelists found the reconciling of past and present, particularly when the past is “difficult,”32 inconvenient, or denied. In such a context, repeated exhortations to “look forward” suggest not so much resolute vision as a desire to escape toward the future, thus rendering the past evanescent. The country stays eternally “in transit” somewhere between a guiltridden past and an uncomfortable, imperfect present. Arguably, the image of the Allende government and subsequent coup that dominated the Chilean mass media pre-1998 was the one put forward by Diez and Fernández. These right-wing litanies held that violence, chaos, social convulsion, and crisis had their origins in the Popular Unity years before the coup when, according to their collective memory, angry left-wing leaders and activists had preached armed struggle, preparing the ground for a violent seizure of power.33 According to this view, the Popular Unity government had repeatedly violated the Chilean constitution, and so memories should focus on why the coup was necessary, rather than on its subsequent effects. By this logic, the only important question about Ricardo Lagos’s 2000 presidential candidacy is whether he would be capable of managing his own party, and the country, better than Salvador Allende had done twenty-five years before. Socialist senator Ominami, on the other hand, placed the locus of political memory in the violence and brutality of the dictatorship, whose possible “causes” must take second place to the moral outrage occasioned by its consequences. Ominami’s position throughout the broadcast was that the left, for all it had recognized its past errors, was not responsible for the violence of the coup and its aftermath.34 He also defended Lagos as someone who had more than proven his leadership credentials. Lagos himself, despite being the Concertación’s first Socialist president,35 generally sought to downplay his associations with Allende and the pre-dictatorship Socialist Party during his campaign and the first part of his period in office (2000–2006). According to Socialist senator Ricardo Núñez, the Socialists were acutely conscious during this time of the need to prove their ability to govern:

12

The Politics of Memory in Chile

We had to show we could govern well. And the countries that govern well are those that recognize the socioeconomic realities of their countries. And in the first years the economic success of the transition was spectacular. Because we had a budget surplus, 7 percent growth rates, we moved one million poor people out of absolute poverty, the market flourished, and we felt this had to be a constitutive factor of the Chilean transition. Political success, economic success. This required not returning to the past, not returning to ’73.36

Nevertheless, Pinochet’s detention in London and subsequent return to Chile finally forced Lagos to confront the past more directly. Images of Pinochet returning triumphantly to Santiago from his 503-day UK detention just as Lagos assumed the presidency in early 2000 belied the Chilean and British governments’ assertions that the dictator was too old and infirm to be prosecuted. The time had come for Lagos to take the offensive, however reluctantly, on the past. The administration opened the doors of the presidential palace to the public, and Lagos went on to take a much more vocal stance on the life and death of Allende through a series of symbolic and discursive acts around the thirtieth anniversary of the coup, in 2003. Lagos began publicly to cast, even to embrace, Allende as a fallen democrat committed to his country.37 One of the assertions commonly made by members of the Chilean executive during Pinochet’s detention was that Chileans had "chosen" their handling of Pinochet for better or for worse. Foreign ministry officials, and high-ranking members of the 1994–2000 Frei Ruiz-Tagle administration that Lagos had replaced, implied that some kind of preexisting agreement had been struck with the right and the military about how transition and, in particular, questions of accountability were to be managed.38 In ways analogous to the Spanish experience, there had been an attempt in the final years before the return to electoral democracy to craft consensus and perception of shared responsibility around issues including the fate of the former dictator. It is in this sense that Chile’s redemocratization is often treated as a classic case of socalled pacted transition, with an underlying set of blueprints that the military and civilians, right and left, were to follow. This effort to buy in all the major players was in one sense almost unnecessary in Chile, where the prevailing conditions of transition in fact left very little room for maneuver. Felipe Agüero questions the supposedly “negotiated” character of this transition precisely on these grounds, holding that Chile’s changes were not so much pacted as dictated by the outgoing regime in accordance with its own 1980 Constitution.39 Through a number of constitutional authoritarian enclaves, the transition conceded to the military as an institution, and to

The Politics of Memory in Chile

13

Pinochet personally, substantial continued power and autonomy.40 It was not until the late 1990s that the democratic government began to see success in rolling back some of the more significant enclaves, amending the constitution to better subordinate the military to civilian authority.41 In addition, military generational turnover appears to have produced important shifts regarding dispositions toward the past. The 1998 retirement of Pinochet himself, finally vacating the position of army commander in chief, was without a doubt the single major turning point in this regard. How much this process of gradual change was aided by the socalled Pinochet effect42—the putative impact of Pinochet’s London arrest and lengthy detention on the Chilean judiciary—is a moot point. Few would deny, however, that Pinochet’s detention and prolonged physical absence opened space for alternative memory voices. The detention reconfigured those actors and institutions previously most allied with the former dictator, including the Chilean military, the judiciary, and the right, and produced a post-seismic terrain when it came to prosecuting human rights violations. As the very title for Wilde’s chapter for this volume emphasizes, the year 1998 can be conceptualized as the opening of a new “season of memory.” This new season poses an interesting paradox. Given the regimedominated transition, impunity for past crimes was largely preserved through the 1990s. Issues about the legacy of violence were subordinated and to a large extent superseded from 1995 by a modernization agenda, seen by the Concertación as a neutral topic upon whose importance both left and right could agree. Since 2000, however, memory-related issues have resurfaced in notable and highly visible ways. The Chilean judicial system charged hundreds of former and active-duty military officers for crimes related to dictatorship-era human rights violations.43 Many more are currently under investigation. These included, until his death in December 2006, former dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose family and estate are still under investigation for tax fraud and other financial irregularities. During 2003 and 2004 an official truth commission on political imprisonment and torture, known popularly as the Valech commission, heard testimonies from tens of thousands of survivors. Its final report recommended reparations that would finally treat the thorny issue of survived political violence with the same seriousness as that of deaths and disappearances.44 Both Alexander Wilde’s and Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira’s chapters for this volume explore the contours of this commission. In addition, and as Cath Collins and Katherine Hite’s chapter analyzes, monuments and memorials to victims of human rights

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

violations have sprung up across the country. In 2010 outgoing president Michelle Bachelet inaugurated the national Museum of Memory and Human Rights. These redoubled efforts at prosecutions, truth-telling, reparations, and commemoration, almost all catalyzed by nonstate actors, represent a fundamental set of shifts in post-Pinochet Chile’s official and unofficial narratives of its traumatic past. It could be argued that an initially subdued or even absent official narrative gave way, at least briefly, to one that visibly legitimated survivors as well as absent (dead or disappeared) victims of dictatorship-era human rights violations. In all these ways Chile at the close of the first decade of the new millennium seemed to be undergoing a veritable flowering of truth-and-justice initiatives. On the other hand, neither prosecutions, public revelations, nor memorials seemed to capture sustained, as distinct from sporadic, national attention, while some of the symbolic advances mentioned above have proven themselves susceptible to reversal under a subsequent right-wing administration (2010–2014). Episodes such as Pinochet’s 1998 detention, the 2003 commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the coup, and the charging and detention of the entire Pinochet family in October 2007 for financial crimes certainly made headlines at home and abroad. However, memory-related politics and policies seem to have failed to enter the majority public imagination in any sustained way. As the Collins and Hite chapter for this volume shows, it is difficult to find evidence for a real impact of private and public memory sites beyond the preordained constituencies of the already conscientized. As Collins explores in her chapter on the politics of prosecutions, a steady stream of court verdicts finding the same individuals repeatedly guilty of the same offenses has become almost routine news, and does not in any case prevent a “hard core” of individuals continuing to believe in the innocence of those convicted.45 When a right-wing candidate won the presidency in early 2010, demonstrators in Santiago’s wealthiest districts openly celebrated what they believed would be the impending release of those who had tortured and kidnapped in the name of the state. Although their expectations have not to date been met, a clear renaissance of revisionist tendencies under the new government saw various ambassadorial appointments of highlevel regime supporters or apologists (most of which had finally to be rescinded); a frontal assault on suspected cases of fraud in reparations programs, and, most starkly, official toleration of a district mayor’s sponsorship of a high-profile event paying homage to a convicted multiple murderer.46 Neighboring countries have begun to remove street

The Politics of Memory in Chile

15

furniture and other installations that smack of obeisance to former authoritarians,47 but in Chile the capital’s most prominent uptown monument is to one of the dictatorship’s chief ideologues. A statue of former junta member Admiral Merino has pride of place outside the country’s main naval museum, and the remote Patagonian highway called the Carretera Austral continues to boast an imposing cast iron banner reading “Carretera Austral—General Augusto Pinochet.” These developments and continuities raise important questions about how citizens receive, absorb, interpret, and appropriate the performative and communicational dimensions of public monuments, memorials, and gestures. The Politics of Prosecutions

For some time, dominant political science literature on transitions from military rule suggested that holding former repressors accountable through prosecutions was politically risky where outgoing powerholders retained political influence and/or military might. Yet where transitions are toward democracy, incoming regimes bear a legal and arguably also a moral responsibility for prosecuting human rights violators. Postponing or evading prosecutions may in fact weaken the legitimacy of new democratic institutions by suggesting there is no or little substantial difference between the new regime and the old. A sense that the new regime is relatively powerless to hold the old one to account may also contribute to a generalized decision to actively forget, or perhaps simply to become indifferent to, what is past. By establishing a dramatic break from the violence of the previous regime, incoming elites can earn political legitimacy and attempt to avoid a premature democratic desencanto, or disenchantment. Argentina’s televised junta trials, held shortly after the 1983 transitionby-collapse, were explicitly designed to convince citizens of both the potency and the right intentions of the new democratic polity. Carlos Nino, a chief architect of the policy on prosecutions, claimed that retroactive justice strengthened “the moral consciousness of society. . . [to] help overcome the corporatism, anomie, and concentration of power that all too long have been hallmarks of Argentine society.”48 Much depends of course on whether citizens, as distinct from incoming elites, accept the need to perfect democracy in this quite specific way. In this sense the experience of Chile, with its highly controlled transition and still-popular outgoing authoritarians, is particularly instructive. Is it enough to break with former violence by quietly ceasing to practice it, or is it necessary also to forcefully and

16

The Politics of Memory in Chile

immediately seek to punish it? Does the act of prosecution lose force if it is long postponed? In Argentina, after all, early trials backfired, generating counterpressures that threatened democratic stability and led, eventually, to pardons. In general, prosecutions of former human rights violators have become most far-reaching in the Southern Cone after transitioning countries have achieved a comfortable degree of democratic political stability. Chile may be the paradigmatic case, and accordingly the chapter by Collins in this volume discusses the causes and consequences of trials as a political, rather than a solely juridical, phenomenon. Truth-telling

Government-sponsored truth-telling processes are mainly intended to produce societal acknowledgment of past atrocities and to drive home the message of nunca más, never again. Nevertheless, government and/or United Nations-orchestrated processes of truth-telling are fraught with debate over political intent: which truths should be privileged and which downplayed, where remembering should begin, whether testimonies should be private or public, whether witnesses and/or perpetrators will be subpoenaed, and how findings will be deployed. Anthropologist Richard Wilson argues that official truth commissions attempt to craft narratives of the past that, in rendering the present more governable, “manufacture bureaucratic legitimacy” for the state.49 Aspirations such as this one often, however, neglect to define the precise judicial status or consequences of truths thus revealed, and lack the necessary tools to engineer the genuine transformation of official pronouncement into social truth. The backstory and immediate political fate of Chile’s first official truth commission report is an important illustration of the constrained approach to truth-telling that prevailed during the first decade of Chile’s transition. President Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994), the country’s first elected leader in the wake of the seventeen-year military regime, set the need to clarify the truth and do justice to the subject of human rights, as a moral exigency necessary for reconciliation, as a high priority on his program of governmental tasks.50 As had happened in Argentina under Alfonsín, the Aylwin government in Chile established a blue-ribbon truth commission, the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Comisión Nacional sobre Verdad y Reconciliación, CNVR). Its mandate was to acknowledge and document individual deaths and disappearances (though not survivors of political imprisonment or torture) under the dictatorship. Denied subpoena powers,51 the

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17

commission gathered documentation—some official, though none of military origin—and heard testimony behind closed doors from relatives and witnesses. Commissioners also drew extensively on existing investigative work by major national human rights organizations, leftwing political parties, and labor unions. In 1991, after working for nine months, the CNVR (known popularly as the Rettig commission after its chairman) produced a succinct interpretation of the country’s recent violent past, a list of recognized victims,52 and a series of recommendations for reparations for victims’ families and for reforms to help establish a “human rights culture” in Chile.53 In a neat illustration of the political importance of how the past is temporalized, the report’s historical section sets Chile’s radical domestic left against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution. The first Chilean political grouping discussed is the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement), a Cuba-inspired group that advocated violent socialist transformation and spurned electoral participation. The choice to frame Chile’s political violence in a Cold War context is deliberate. Despite the fact that all systematic state-sponsored repression occurred under the dictatorship and not before, commissioners determined that it was in the interest of national reconciliation to begin with discussion of the radical left and show how revolutionary discourse had contributed to the violent overthrow of the Allende government. Although the report went on to stress that political polarization by no means justified subsequent attempts to physically eradicate the left, this choice of starting point was undoubtedly designed to appease the powerful Chilean right. Right-wing views were also guaranteed a direct voice in the commission’s deliberations: to produce “political balance,” commissioners were drawn equally from center-left and right-wing affiliations. They included the influential conservative historian Gonzalo Vial, who took part in the drafting of the historical section of the report. Equally striking in any consideration of how the Rettig commission’s terms of reference were shaped by the memory politics of the time is the fact that, although the report goes to great lengths to explain that only states have international human rights obligations per se, it also documents fatal political violence of unknown or leftist political origin.54 Following general practice in such commissions at the time, and citing its own nonjudicial status, the report did not name alleged perpetrators. The commission appeared to view its role less as specific repudiation and more as meticulous recognition of the most heinous abuses, in a format underwritten by the state and with a solid, defensible methodological grounding. Interestingly, while the report discussed ways to prevent repetition, it did not provide a definition of or

18

The Politics of Memory in Chile

blueprint for the “reconciliation” that was an integral part of its official title. Officially receiving the report in a publicly televised speech, Aylwin issued an emotional public apology as head of the state to survivors and victims’ relatives. He exhorted the military to cooperate voluntarily with the search for further information and the judiciary to assume a proactive, human rights-minded agenda. Neither was to prove forthcoming under his four-year tenure. The politically motivated assassination just three weeks later of outspoken right-wing senator and Pinochet loyalist Jaime Guzmán moreover aborted plans to engage the public in a collective exploration of Chile’s past through public promotion and discussion of the Rettig commission’s conclusions.55 These events reflected a correlation of forces in which Chilean military prerogatives remained firmly in place: the armed forces publicly dismissed the report in the strongest possible terms.56 By 1998 conditions were somewhat different. Pinochet’s detention signaled a new level of vulnerability for the military, leading to a major shift in the military institutional position with respect to truth-telling. While Pinochet and the Chilean right had been fortified in the 1997 congressional elections, Pinochet’s arrest destroyed their confidence. For the first time, and assisted by the comparative friendly relationship of the military to then defense minister Edmundo Pérez Yoma, the military as an institution engaged in limited cooperation with the government to discuss the whereabouts of the disappeared.57 Known as the Mesa de Diálogo, the government-organized dialogue included top military brass, civilian officials, and human rights lawyers. The document finally produced by the military in 2001 as a result of the Mesa’s final agreement acknowledged approximately 200 cases of death and disappearance, and supposedly gave details of the final destination of remains.58 The testimonies of relatives of the dead and disappeared meanwhile began to gain new visibility, particularly in the television media. Relatives rallied in support of both Pinochet’s arrest and Chilean judge Juan Guzmán’s efforts to continue investigating him on his return.59 Human rights associations found new space for their accounts and demands and, crucially, survivors began to become publicly and judicially visible for almost the first time. Sensing a changing wind, some relatively moderate Chilean right-wing leaders met publicly with relatives’ associations. Lagos’s Valech commission, discussed above, was largely a rearguard action to prevent these changes challenging the governing coalition’s moral monopoly in the human rights field.60 It was also prompted by a civil society campaign pointing out the contradiction

The Politics of Memory in Chile

19

of Chile’s being represented on the UN Working Group on Reparations while its own survivors had received no individual recognition or reparation.61 As discussed in the chapters by Alexander Wilde and by Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, the Valech commission would mark a distinct turning point in truth-telling, after whose two separate iterations62 the torture or political imprisonment of more than 38,000 victims would be officially acknowledged. In the more immediate term of 1998 and 1999, Pinochet’s arrest “fronted” the past to the present, sending ardent supporters and opponents into the streets to rally to his defense or to celebrate his detention. Emotions initially ran high, with pro- and anti-Pinochet rallies confronting one another in high political drama. Pinochet’s arrest demanded a response, a public debate.63 His arrest forced conversations and arguments among political and not-so-political citizens, between parents and children, in public and in private. Chileans questioned whether Pinochet would have ever been put on trial at home, whether it was right for the Spanish, in particular, to attempt to prosecute him, and whether the former dictator deserved to be lionized or demonized. In terms of memory politics, there is no question that Pinochet’s detention granted voice even to the former dictator himself: in a relatively rare direct address to the country, Pinochet sent an open letter from detention proclaiming his innocence. The arrest even altered Chile’s exceedingly hamstrung media environment: satirical newspaper The Clinic, which survives to this day, was founded in the aftermath of the arrest in disgust at the “party line” toed by much existing media and is named after the London Clinic where Pinochet was served with a UK arrest warrant on 16 October 1998. The paper has become an important outlet for some serious alternative journalism alongside its more puerile elements, and to this day politicians of all stripes fear being lampooned on its irreverent and often vulgar front cover. In summary, truth-telling, like justice, has proved a drawn-out and complex process in Chile: the sporadic dispensing of “official truths,” always disputed by the major players involved, has been complicated further by the addition of a layer of judicial truths. More recently, the return of right-wing government has seen the consecration of the idea of many simultaneous truths or even of an official line that can step back in important interpretive, if not factual, ways from previously sanctioned accounts. Commemoration across the Political Spectrum

Commemorations from above and below are proliferating throughout the globe. They are deployed politically toward a vast array of purposes.

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

States have always recognized the political value of dates, naming, funerals of important leaders, monuments, and memorials. Symbolic remembrance can convey national unity, a sense of overcoming violent legacies, a commitment to political stability, or the strengthening of democracy. State-sponsored commemorations can also seek to silence unsavory dimensions of the past. On the other hand, grassroots groups may find that commemorations can be both cathartic and useful assertions of political identity. Memorials increasingly represent fitful negotiations between states and societies to symbolically right wrongs, recognize loss, or assert subaltern historical narratives. Commemorations can be windows into a complicated history and politics of past and present struggle. Since 2000 Chile has witnessed an explosion of commemoration and memorial-making of various kinds. The predominant form is civil society-driven activity, involving often prolonged and fitful struggles among and between relatively small numbers of actors at both local and national levels. A wide variety of civil society-driven groups press an almost equally varied universe of official bodies in efforts to have memorial projects recognized and realized. A central thread, and recurring theme, is the question of the “right relationship” between official and private initiatives and constituencies in the design, construction, and interpretation of memorials. Political elites from across the ideological spectrum are coming to accept the inevitability of the continued unearthing of traumatic pasts. Accordingly, they increasingly recognize the strategic value of taking the offensive when it comes to symbolic representations of those pasts. In Chile presidents Lagos and Bachelet visibly allied themselves with successful memorialization initiatives. Bachelet continued the trend of rehabilitation of the figure of Allende begun by Lagos, and also made a series of high-profile memorial visits within her first few months in office. Nor has it been lost on the Chilean right that symbolic remembrance is a crucial political arena, as Alfredo Joignant’s chapter on the Pinochet funeral attests. While Pinochet’s 2006 death and funeral or the Guzmán memorial constitute more recent examples, the dictatorship’s renaming of a prominent thoroughfare as “September 11th Avenue,” in celebration of the coup, illustrated this early symbolic prowess. Nonetheless, the Collins-Hite chapter in this volume explores how the Concertación’s actions stopped deliberately short of identification with a single, bold memory statement or narrative. The relationship of a right-wing government from 2010 with this same symbolic arena has predictably been even more cautious.

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Overview of the Volume

Alexander Wilde’s chapter, “A Season of Memory”, addresses how and why issues of justice and memory derived from a receding period of the past became increasingly prominent into a second decade of democratic transition. The chapter examines the courts as a political arena; government and opposition political initiatives; the changing human rights community; the role of the media; major “irruptions of memory” in public events, and burgeoning memorialization as policy and practice. It shows how the court- and media-centered dynamic of this period changed the way political leaders dealt with human rights issues. Cath Collins’s chapter, “The Politics of Justice”, examines the dramatic shift from virtual impunity in the early post-dictatorship years to a judicial scenario with one of the highest numbers of human rights case prosecutions of any country in the region. She explores how reviving pending justice demands in the courts, while apparently more fruitful than continued political lobbying, may in the end have consigned families and activists again to a secondary role as the particularities of the investigative process dictate a hermetic, behind-closed-doors approach where judicial politics can seem more important than the facts of a case and outcomes fail both to satisfy protagonists and prove meaningful to a broader public. In their chapter, “Torture as Public Policy”, Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman signal focal historical-political moments in which political torture was at its height against so-called enemies of the state. The authors also explore how torture was denounced, even if such denunciations never featured prominently in Chilean politics. As in their seminal work on the history of political amnesties in Chile, Lira and Loveman tease out how torture was used alternately as an instrument of suppression and of exposure during key moments of political and social conflict. Their work affirms the contention that alternative temporal frames, looking beyond and preceding 1973–1990, reveal new possibilities for inviting a broader public into the discussion of human rights violations. Moreover, Lira and Loveman make the strong case that torture of political prisoners is an ongoing reality in Chile. Cath Collins and Katherine Hite’s chapter, “Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences, and Reawakenings in Twenty-First Century Chile”, analyzes the processes of memorialization in the aftermath of the Pinochet regime as a lens into contemporary Chilean politics. The authors identify a range of grassroots memorial activists whose struggles to reclaim memory sites represent a new political, and in some cases antipolitical, repertoire. The chapter suggests that memorials and

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

museums can invite, but do not guarantee, a conversation among a broader public about conflict and tragedy, toward understandings of political difference. They can also become vital spaces for political activism as well as for societal soul-searching, not only about the past, but also about the present and future. In his chapter, “The Pinochet Funeral: Memory, History, and Immortality,” Alfredo Joignant analyzes the intense, albeit brief, historiographical debate occasioned by Pinochet’s death in December 2006. The dictator’s death set in motion struggles over interpretation of his regime, legacy, and posterity. History became the material of vigorous commemorative battles, oscillating between the idea of immortality (an “active” memory transcending Pinochet’s death) and the notion that his death would mark the extinction of public memories about the regime. The death of Pinochet resuscitated a recurring assertion that Chile’s long transition had finally come to a close, as if the death of the dictator promised to eradicate any future “irruptions of memory.” Drawing primarily from public opinion data, Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra’s chapter, “The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion”, analyzes several specific dimensions of the Pinochet legacy in Chilean political culture. Huneeus and Ibarra examine what continuities remain in terms of a “divided Chile” regarding attitudes, memories, and judgments about the past. In addition, the authors examine how public opinion has shifted since the 1970s, as well as what these shifts and continuities mean for Chilean politics. Conclusions

Globally, in Latin America in general, and in Chile in particular, there has been no avoiding the sustained, occasionally small but steady stream of voices and demands keeping painful pasts alive. Elite-level silences seem mostly to hamper rather than to lead society’s efforts to come to terms with the past. In the case of Chile, both elite-level silences and rote-learned elite and nonelite responses have arguably exacerbated societal disaffection with post-transitional politics. Since political leaders are central to creating the norms, rules, and institutions that frame societal explorations of contentious issues, coming to terms with potentially difficult historical memories is in large part contingent upon the ways in which such memories are vocalized and articulated between elite and citizenry. Human rights issues narrowly defined have, perhaps deliberately, not been central to the national political agenda over the course of the

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Concertación’s twenty-year rule and the center-right Alianza’s interregnum to date. Nonetheless, as we have shown in this introductory chapter, the overarching memory “tropes” involved have been central to political thinking, instincts, and action over the same period. These tropes or memory debates have undergone several iterations over the years. In 1980s Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, and in 1990s Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru, cries to remember centered primarily on demanding that governments and societies recognize heinous human rights abuse and victims’ suffering. Underneath these cries, memory debates were also tightly bound up in left-wing political-ideological positions dating back to equally potent memories of heady political victories, bitter political defeats, intense fractionalization, and even fratricidal conflict. However, memory discourse throughout the Americas is increasingly emphasizing agency over victimization, resurrecting commitments to social justice at the same time as it challenges the left to a full, not merely instrumental, commitment to rights standards. In this sense it has profound and important challenges to offer to past and current domestic and regional political agendas of both left and right. At a deeper level, it also raises the question of what can possibly become of the notion and praxis of reconciliation around a past that no one is actively willing to remember. A richer collective reflection such as the one this volume seeks might instead produce, at least for Chile, a collective memory with clear and well-articulated reasons for defining Pinochet as more dictator than general, of violence as violations and not as “excess,” and of a brutal coup rather than an inevitable and reluctant military intervention. In order to be successful, such a memory might well have to accept a certain amount of sleight of hand from Chile’s “new right,” prepared to adapt itself to this new environment if it is to be allowed to do so with a certain regard for proprieties. These would almost certainly include a reconciliation purchased by allowing the present-day right to be selective about which aspects of the Pinochet period they lay claim to, permitting them to continue defending the regime’s economic, and many of its political and moral, legacies while marking a clear and somewhat artificial line around its now indefensible criminal elements.

                                                                                                               

We thank Felip Agüero, Alfred Stepan, and Alan Angell for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 As one example, a 2012 debate about the correct use of the terms “military government,” “military regime,” or “dictatorship” in school history texts both reprised and revived old left-right cleavages, with the right claiming the latter terms were unduly pejorative.

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2 Florencia Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Claudio Barrientos, “Emblems and Narratives of the Past: The Cultural Construction of Memories and Violence in Peasant Communities of Southern Chile, 1970–2000,” University of Wisconsin PhD thesis, 2003. 3 Anecdotally, the point is supported by an experience recounted to two of this chapter’s authors by a prominent human rights activist. Attempting to exhort an indigenous leader to take action over the probable underreporting of disappearances from Mapuche communities during the dictatorship, she was told: “Madam, for your information, we Mapuche have been disappearing more or less since the time of Pedro de Valdivia [i.e., since the Spanish conquest].” 4 A very real “fear of barbarism” gripped Chile’s privileged class before and during the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, UP) government presided over by socialist Salvador Allende. The strength of this fear should not be underestimated. It is not uncommon for even measured academic discussions of the period to prove emotive to the point of evoking anguished tears and impassioned pleas. In one example, chapter co-author Alfredo Joignant was invited in October 1999 to take part in a closed session of the governmentsponsored Mesa de Diálogo roundtable. (See below and the following chapter by Alexander Wilde.) The Mesa’s assorted human rights advocates, military officers, government and church authorities gathered to hear a paper on the historical setting in which human rights violations had taken place. A prominent rightist historian broke down in tears at the session, recalling the tumultuous period preceding the military coup and reiterating that “we were very afraid.” 5 See, e.g., Jennifer McCoy, ed., Political Learning and Redemocratization in Latin America (Miami: North-South Press, 1999), especially McCoy's introductory chapter and the chapter by Manuel Antonio Garretón. McCoy develops a useful political learning framework recognizing a range of conceivable learning that can be gleaned from traumatic events. Garretón documents contrasts in learning between the political left and the political right. Based on interviews with members of the political class, Garretón argues that, whereas the left learned in a self-critical way from its past, the right continues to be triumphalist and shows little discursive evidence of normative change. See also Katherine Hite, When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1998 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Her book argues that cognitive political orientations of individual political leaders change very little after traumatic political experience. 6 Alfredo Joignant, “Los enigmas de la memoria: Entre el pasado muerto y la historia viva,” Revista UDP. Pensamiento y cultura, vol. 3, no. 06/07 (2008), pp. 27-30. 7 Thus, for example, ongoing trials in Argentina have led to uncomfortable revelations about the extent of collaboration forced from some survivors after torture or prolonged imprisonment. 8 Piñera, the candidate of the right-wing coalition, was a former senator and party leader but also a billionaire businessman with varied interests including a major television channel and LAN airline. Opponent Frei Ruiz-Tagle, although also previously in business, was unmistakably the continuity candidate, seeking a second term as scion of a traditional political family and son of another former president, Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970).

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25

9 The phrase is particularly evocative in Spanish: hijo de, meaning “son of”, is also used as shorthand for the abusive phrase hijo de puta, “son of a bitch”. Currently, as is traditionally the case in Chilean politics, various prominent congressmen from both right and left are direct descendants of previous holders of high political office. 10 The Enríquez-Ominami campaign website was a testament to media savvy, featuring a series of videos—available, of course, on YouTube— allowing followers carefully orchestrated glimpses of his daily routine and family life. The 2009 videos convey a telegenic, politically flexible politician who borrows a bit from the left, a bit from the right, and they offer a sharp contrast with the candidate’s earlier foray into the medium. The would-be filmmaker’s 2002 documentary, Chile: Los héroes están fatigados (“Chile’s Tired Heroes”), featured interviews with well-known former revolutionaries who went on to become champions of capitalism, and feels much more like the work of a young, disillusioned, and fairly alienated leftist. 11 Carlos Ominami continued as a senator until March 2010, when the Socialist Party insisted he resign his post if he wished to continue actively supporting his son’s presidential ambitions. 12 “Escalona: Enríquez-Ominami hace todo lo posible por socavar a la Concertación,” El Mercurio, 14 July 2009. 13 A decade ago dictatorship-era language portraying 1970s left-wing leaders as “extremists” and “terrorists” was still largely in vogue, and politicians running for office shied away from any such associations. 14 See, e.g., Carlos Peña, “La adolescencia como política,” El Mercurio, 14 June 2009. 15 Such as Emilio Meneses, who finally lost his senior post at Santiago’s Catholic University after Felipe Agüero publicly accused him of involvement in torture. See the chapter by Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman in this volume. 16 For the playing out of old fears toward destructive ends in the former Yugoslavia, see Aryeh Neier's War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Times Books, 1998). See also Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 17 The question of whether to tolerate revisionism and denial will always be the Achilles heel of post-atrocity reconstruction, since these directly threaten the historical and/or moral injunction to remember. 18 Most social science collective memory studies begin with Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). Among sociologist Barry Schwartz’s works, see Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies from ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology (1998), p. 24. 19 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 20 Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra Civil española (Madrid: Editorial Alianza, 1996).

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21 Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Las suaves cenizas del olvido: Vía chilena de reconciliación política 1814-1932 (Santiago: LOM, 2000); Las ardientes cenizas del olvido: Vía chilena de reconciliación política 1932-1994 (Santiago: LOM, 2000); and El espejismo de la reconciliación política: Chile 1990-2002 (Santiago: LOM, 2002). 22 Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Florencia E. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood. See also Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 23 Alexander Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (May 1999), pp. 473-500. See also Katherine Hite, “Breaking the Silence in Post-Authoritarian Chile,” in Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney, eds., Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 55-73. 24 Wilde, ibid. 25 Including Estadio Nacional (Carmen Luz Parot, 2002), The Judge and the General (Patricio Lanfranco and Elizabeth Farnsworth, 2008), Calle Santa Fe (Carmen Castillo, 2007), and the feature film Machuca (Andrés Wood, 2004). 26 Los 80 and Los archivos del Cardenal. The former aired on the mixed public-private ‘Canal 13’ station, the latter on national terrestrial channel TVN. 27 Carlos Huneeus, Chile un país dividido: La actualidad del pasado (Santiago: Catalonia, 2003) and www.cerc.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). For similarly segmented poll results, this time with a generational axis, see Jorge Manzi et al., “El pasado que nos pesa: La memoria colectiva del 11 de septiembre de 1973,” Revista de ciencia política, vol. 23, no. 2 (2003), pp. 177214. The intergenerational transmission of pro- and anti-dictatorship views is also graphically illustrated in La memoria obstinada, a documentary in which filmmaker Patricio Guzmán screens and discusses his own Allende-era films with Chilean schoolchildren and university students of the 1990s. 28 Huneeus, Chile un país dividido, p. 43. 29 Ibid., p. 49. 30 Video transcript, Katherine Hite’s translation. 31 These question marks over the potential danger posed by the left given its associations with the Popular Unity period were addressed head on by both the Concertación and the regime in their competing TV spots for the 1988 plebiscite campaign. The Concertación’s “No” campaign opted for resolutely upbeat, positive messages, with a rainbow motif and liberal use of the Chilean flag to combat regime attempts to depict the left as antipatriots in thrall to a foreign ideology. Meanwhile, one of the most poorly regarded spots of an exceedingly lackluster “Yes” campaign purported to show the opposition’s colorful dance troupe dressed in balaclavas and carrying Molotov cocktails. The voiceover to another Yes segment intoned: “In a country governed by the ‘No’ [brigade], fear will once again walk our streets [and] the first innocent victims could include a member of your family.” Original video extracts, translation by Cath Collins. 32 See the treatment of the notion of a “difficult past” in Robin WagnerPacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

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27

Commemorating a Difficult Past,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 97, no. 2 (September 1991), pp. 376-420. 33 A fear difficult to understand rationally, since at least from 1970 these forces were already in power, having been legitimately elected. 34 Cf. later comments by Jorge Arrate, former Socialist Party president and Concertación cabinet minister, pointing up the stark contrast between the “errores” (errors) of the left and the “horrores” (horrors) of the dictatorship. Opinion column “Errores, horrores: El golpe de Estado y los derechos humanos”, El Mostrador, 15 December 2004. Arrate went on to resign his Concertación affiliations, competing against Enríquez-Ominami in the 2009 presidential elections on an alternative leftist platform. 35 The previous two Concertación candidates had been from the centrist Christian Democrat wing of the coalition. 36 Author interview by Katherine Hite with Ricardo Núñez, Santiago, 25 June 2002. 37 See Alfredo Joignant, Un día distinto: Memorias festivas y batallas conmemorativas en torno al 11 de septiembre en Chile 1974-2006 (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2007). 38 See “Chile’s Anger over Pinochet,” BBC News, 26 September 1999; “Pinochet Arrives in Chile,” BBC News, 3 March 2000. 39 Felipe Agüero, “30 años después: La ciencia política y las relaciones fuerzas armadas, estado y sociedad,” Revista de Ciencia Política, vol. 23, no. 2 (2003), p. 258. 40 Regarding the concept of authoritarian enclaves, see Manuel Antonio Garretón, Incomplete Democracy: Political Democratization in Chile and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). On military prerogatives in transitions, see Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 41 Although the incoming Concertación had managed to negotiate some changes in 1989, the 2005 version of the constitution is generally regarded as marking a final turning point, with the cumulative weight of accumulated minor modifications marked by the replacement of Pinochet’s signature by Lagos’s in printed copies of the text. 42 See Naomi Roht-Arriaza’s book of the same title and the conference report “The Pinochet Effect: Ten Years on from London 1998”, electronically published by the Universidad Diego Portales in 2009 and available from the Publications section www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos (accessed 20 January 2013) 43 As of mid-2012, 799 living former security service agents were under investigation or charges, or had been convicted, for at least one relevant offense. Around a dozen more had been acquitted of all outstanding charges, and a further thirty-one, now deceased, had been under active investigation or charges at some point since 2000. This latter group included Augusto Pinochet. See www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos (accessed 20 January 2013) for the most recent figures available. 44 The commission’s official title was the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura). Like the Rettig commission before it, it was more commonly referred to by invoking its eponymous chairman, in this case senior Catholic cleric Monsignor

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

Sergio Valech. The work of the Valech commission was updated in 2005 and again in 2011, keeping the issue in the news and giving a final, and probably still incomplete, total of 38,254 recognized victims of torture or political imprisonment at the hands of state agents between 1973 and 1990. 45 A November 2011 poll found that 11 percent of respondents (around 20 percent among right-wing voters) believed Miguel Krassnoff, a former secret police agent definitively convicted by the Supreme Court of twenty-seven murders or disappearances, to be innocent of any crime. (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporáneo, CERC, November 2011, see www.cerc.cl, accessed 20 January 2013). 46 Miguel Krassnoff. The mayor involved was Cristián Labbé, a former member of military intelligence who served for a time as part of Pinochet’s personal bodyguard. The 2011 event went ahead in an atmosphere of open and occasionally violent confrontation among attendees, police, and street protesters. See the chapter on memorialization in this volume for a fuller account. 47 Thus in 2008 then-president Nestor Kirchner famously supervised the removal of portraits of the Argentine juntas from the main military academy. In December 2011 the names of dictators Videla (Argentina) and Méndez (Uruguay) were removed from the international Gualeguachú-Fray Bentos bridge, a joint public works project that had been completed in 1976 when the two were de facto heads of state. 48 Carlos Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 104. 49 Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 17-20. See also Sandrine Lefranc, Politiques du pardon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002). 50 Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. 1989. “Programa de Gobierno.” Santiago: Editorial Jurídica Publiley Ltda. 51 The right refused to vote for the project, forcing Aylwin to set it up as a presidential commission. This status denied it legal powers to compel witnesses. 52 The initial list numbered over 2,000, with subsequent additional investigation of unresolved cases bringing the officially recognized total to 3,197 by 1996. Subsequent minor revisions gave a final victim total of 3, 216 in August 2011. The details and evolution of this figure can be obtained from www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos, section Publications (accessed 20 January 2013). 53 Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Notre Dame, IN: Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame Law School, 1993), tr. Phillip E. Berryman, vol. 1, pp. 48-49. 54 A full 11 percent of the final victim total was initially attributed to these actors. As judicial investigations have advanced, this proportion has dropped (though by an as yet undetermined amount) since no judicial case has to date found anyone other than state actors responsible. The category nonetheless represents an important and often overlooked difference with the later Valech commission, which only acknowledged cases where state actor involvement could be proven. 55 Guzmán was also subsequently adopted by the right as a “martyr” and presented—incorrectly—as a victim of human rights violation whose existence

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29

could be used to demonstrate that there had been casualties on both sides. On Jaime Guzmán and the ideology of the gremialista movement to which he belonged, see Renato Cristi, El pensamiento político de Jaime Guzmán: Autoridad y libertad (Santiago: LOM, 2000) or Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Nacionales y gremialistas: El ‘parto’ de la nueva derecha chilena, 1964-1973 (Santiago: LOM, 2008). 56 Specifically, the Army declared that the report had “neither legal nor historical validity,” and the Navy called it a “serious threat to national security” (Estudios Públicos no. 41, 1991, Cath Collins’s translation). The Supreme Court, meanwhile, called it “an absurd critique . . . tinged with political passions” (Estudios Públicos, no. 42, 1991, p. 239, and cited in Loveman and Lira, Las suaves cenizas del olvido, p. 521, Cath Collins’s translation). 57 Agüero, “30 Años Después,” pp. 261-264. 58 See Wilde’s chapter in this volume. 59 In 2003, the year of the thirtieth anniversary of the coup, opinion polling institute CERC found that 62 percent of interviewees said they had tuned in to national television coverage of the commemorations (Huneeus, Chile un país dividido, p. 253). 60 UDI figures forged close links with a small group of victims’ relatives in the north of the country and began to generate proposals for additional financial reparations. 61 Beatriz Brinkmann, “Sin justicia no hay reparación”, paper presented at the international seminar, “Verdad, Justicia y Memoria a 21 años del Informe Rettig”, Santiago, Chile, 21 June 2012 and published in AFEP (eds.), Con Verdad, Justicia y Memoria Otro Mundo es Posible. (Santiago: Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos, AFEP; CINTRAS and Universidad de Chile, 2013), pp. 34-41. 62 The Commission reported initially in 2004, with an appendix adding around 1,000 additional victim numbers and names in 2005. A second round held in 2011 added almost 9,000 names to give the final total of 38,254. 63 As had notorious public confessions in earlier times, such as those of Osvaldo Romo in Chile or Adolfo Scilingo in Argentina. See Leigh Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

2 A Season of Memory: Human Rights in Chile’s Long Transition Alexander Wilde

A social, political, and moral fissure of the magnitude that we Chileans have lived is not closed again by a single act at a determined moment. It is not possible to root out the pain that lives in memory by a whole aggregate of measures, however numerous, well intentioned, and audacious they may be. —President Ricardo Lagos, “There is no Tomorrow without Yesterday,” August 2003

Memory has its seasons, whether in the lives of individuals or societies. We are aware of our past experiences more at some times than others, and so it is with nations. To the extent that they have collective identities or a common history, social consciousness of the past is not constant but varies over time. In some periods it may become a more defining dimension of the present and assume greater prominence in politics and public policy. This “historical memory” is part of the Zeitgeist of our contemporary global era, especially where regime transitions have drawn a line of before-and-after in national histories and aroused a felt need to reexamine a past still alive in memory. Modern study of historical memory grew out of the work of European scholars, particularly in France and Germany, on how problematic periods of their histories were cast in social memory. For them “memory” was the social meaning given to the past, as distinguished from “history”, understood as a reconstitution of the past based upon objective documentation and scholarly methods.1 While the Historikerstreit among German historians in the 1980s involved clashing interpretations of the Third Reich and its origins, it was also

31  

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

related to different ways that the Nazi period was remembered in society.2 In France historian Henry Rousso was drawn away from planned study of economic policies of the wartime Vichy regime when he was struck by the trials and cultural developments relating to this short, exceptional period as he began his research. Stimulated by this peculiar presence of the past, he embarked on a history of how Vichy had been remembered in French society and shed fresh light on how its real policies—such as its active complicity in persecution of the Jews— had been elided in a hitherto dominant narrative of la France résistante during the Nazi occupation.3 In Latin America historical memory was an observable dimension of democratic transitions. It captured the sense that much of life under authoritarian regimes remained hidden—that an important part of living social memory was closer to the truth of that past than the national version of “history” they provided. After transitions the political dimensions of this collective memory and the novel normative demands posed by human rights were particularly salient for politics and public policy.4 The struggle for official acknowledgement of what really happened in the past—for the claims of “memory” to be vindicated by the institutions of the state—was of central importance. The prize of this state recognition was sought and gained (or not) in political arenas, where historical truth and ethical imperatives might be proclaimed goals of public policy but were in practice subject to larger dynamics and other considerations. This chapter presents an interpretation of how and why historical memory became a significant public issue in Chile during its long transition to democracy. From 1990 to 2010, through four successive governments, the agendas of politics and public policy were shaped by struggles over the meaning of the turbulent years of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–1973) and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), particularly that latter regime’s massive violations of fundamental human rights. Social memory was part of the context of Chilean national life through these two decades but varied as a public force in politics.5 Initial steps to address the issues it raised were halting and episodic, but after 1998 Chile entered a period shot through with the dramas and divisions of a past that lived on in memory. This period proved to be a watershed in the country’s understanding of Pinochet’s historical legacy. Although his arrest in London aroused international attention and his long detention abroad unquestionably affected this struggle in Chile itself, it was actors and institutions there that determined how the state violence of the dictatorship would be framed in national memory.

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Transitional Politics and Memory: An Overview

During the distinct period from 1990 to 2010, social memory of the preceding decades was a changing force in politics and public policy. This transitional period was framed by the political dominance of the center-left Concertación, which left its mark on all public policy toward human rights and historical memory. The constituencies for these causes had special claims on the governing coalition, and its leaders, in turn, sought reforms of fundamental political institutions—notably, the courts and the armed forces—that shaped how Chile as a nation would address its living memory. Specific policy initiatives by different presidents of the Concertación, taken through their control of the executive, were critical though little noted contributions to this process. The first phase of this period, from 1990 to 1998, was characterized by erratic “irruptions of memory,” unbidden intrusions of past conflicts into public life that raised symbolic and moral issues that troubled its transition.6 Since the 1960s Chilean political life had been a battleground of competing ideologies: the Christian Democratic “Revolution in Liberty” through Allende’s “Popular Unity” government, overthrown in a violent military coup in 1973, through the subsequent seventeen-year military dictatorship, ended by a democratic opposition employing mechanisms of that regime’s own constitution. Through these decades Chile’s fate was an emblematic focus of international interest, and so it remained during its early transition: as a nation attempting to face the painful legacies of past political divisions and state violations of human rights. Its National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (the Rettig commission, 1990–1991) was widely admired, as were the reparations and pardons of the Aylwin government (1990–1994), meant to bind up the nation’s wounds. Chile’s successful prosecution of the former chief of the notorious DINA secret police,7 Manuel Contreras (jailed in 1995), stood out as an act of justice seldom achieved anywhere toward past operations of a country’s secret police. Nevertheless, the continuing power of political forces that had supported the dictatorship and the constraints of a semi-authoritarian “protected” democracy under its 1980 constitution repeatedly frustrated clear progress toward fuller democratization.8 After the initial change of regime, Chile’s political transition appeared stalled and its public life dominated by unspoken taboos and an aversion to the open expression of differences normal in a stable democracy. This muffled stasis was punctuated frequently, however, by social expression of a conflicted past that lived on in the transitional present, reminding the political class and

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

the public alike of issues that had not been successfully confronted and would have to be addressed. The second phase of this period began in the fateful year of 1998. In March Pinochet resigned his command of the army and was formally inducted into the political class as a senator for life, acts that mobilized and divided political leaders as well as Chilean society. The defeat of the constitutional accusation against him in Congress9 appeared to confirm the continuity of a constrained democracy. It seemed that Pinochet would spend his sunset years as a senior statesman, protected by his congressional immunity. It was not to be, of course. His arrest in London in October produced the greatest irruption of memory of the whole transition. The government of Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994– 2000), which had taken office with a future-oriented agenda, found itself overwhelmed by the unresolved issues of the past. As the Pinochet case followed its winding course abroad, it encouraged incipient efforts under way in Chilean courts to investigate and prosecute the dictator and his associates for human rights crimes. The glare of international attention—a factor during the last phase of the dictatorship and initial return to elected rule—was again focused on Chile’s transition. Pressures from abroad reinforced those at home as the government attempted to negotiate Pinochet’s return to Chile, contending (after other arguments proved fruitless) that he should be tried in national courts. Through the minister of defense, it took the initiative by creating an ad hoc body, the Human Rights Roundtable (Mesa de Diálogo, 1999– 2000). The Mesa reopened the principal human rights problem facing the country—the fate of those “disappeared” during the dictatorship. A few years later the government of Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) created a second truth commission, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (the Valech commission, 2003– 2004, see below), to consider other abuses of fundamental human rights. Public opinion, shaped by the revelations from judicial investigations and prosecutions of Pinochet-era officials, rapidly became more supportive of establishing the truth about the practices of the dictatorship, even such topics as torture that had been taboo earlier during the transition. Human rights and historical memory were an ongoing theme throughout the presidency of Michelle Bachelet (2006– 2010), Lagos’s successor. Under Bachelet the executive gave support to judicial prosecutions and expanded programs for memorials to victims of the dictatorship, culminating with inauguration of a new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in downtown Santiago in 2010. This second phase, from 1998 to 2010, constitutes a veritable “season of memory,” when prominent events, figures, and issues of the

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recent past were in sustained public view and became exigencies for politics and public policy. It was a watershed for historical memory, when Chileans finally achieved some convergence on central issues of the past—on state violations of human rights and what they meant to the country’s transitional democracy, and on Pinochet and Allende as national leaders and how they should be remembered in national history.10 By 2010, when Chileans elected the first president of the right since transition in 1990, their country had achieved a very different understanding of the past. Much of what had previously been considered mere “memory” (and therefore partial and in conflict with different memories of other Chileans) was established to be true and acknowledged as part of the country’s history.11 “Memory” during the Dictatorship and the Early Transition

Social memory appears as a manifest concern in Chile in the late 1970s, when the dictatorship gave unmistakable signs of its intent to be more than a historical interregnum. Pinochet’s torch-lit ceremony at Chacarillas in 1977 (orchestrated by his regime’s leading civilian intellectual, Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz) projected a refounding of the state. A new regime was to be protected by the tutelage of the armed forces within the values, rules, and institutions of a new constitution.12 The Amnesty Law of 1978 reflected this same radical intent. It aimed to expunge the political crimes from 1973 to 1978 (whether committed by the agents of the state or, it should be noted, its opponents) from historical memory, while shielding those responsible from prosecution. These policies were complemented by symbolic changes at the same time: the reinternment of the remains of founding father Bernardo O’Higgins in a new crypt and an eternal “Flame of Freedom” amidst the military ministries off Santiago’s Alameda,13 facing the Moneda presidential palace, to which Pinochet then moved as head of state.14 In just this context, in 1978, physical remains of the “disappeared” were found in various sites in the countryside.15 These discoveries provided stubborn evidence against the denials and misinformation of the regime and validated the claims of “memory” of what had really happened during the early years of the dictatorship. The fate of the disappeared at this point introduced a new human reality into a deeply divided social memory defined primarily by political differences lived out during the Popular Unity period and early dictatorship. There was still substantial political support for the regime and its narrative— disseminated from the commanding heights of the state—of a country saved from the irresponsibility and corruption of its politicians by the

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

armed forces, which had assumed their historical obligations to the nation and, despite occasional excesses, acted honorably to purify the patria of its former politics. Against this framing of events stood memories without access to official arenas that found expression in social spaces—in the streets, in cemeteries, and in religious and cultural institutions of civil society. They stretched back before the polarization and breakdown that led to the coup d’état of 1973—political memories of a republican state with governments that changed through elections, ruled through longestablished institutions and law, and gradually broadened social protections for society. These political memories were forged over the next dozen years into the shared memory of democrats (who differed on much else) that opposed the dictatorship. The claims of this dissident memory were essentially three: that what had happened during the period of polarization and Allende’s Popular Unity was far different from the new historia oficial; that the brutality of the dictatorship was not incidental but its most salient defining characteristic; and that Chilean national identity was expressed more authentically through its historical institutions of republican democracy than Pinochet’s regime and its protected semi-authoritarian successor. At the center of dissident memory was a new idea, a notion that does not appear in Chile’s earlier history, at least not in a form with significant political consequences: human rights. Since independence in 1810 Chile had experienced many episodes of state repression and of violent opposition.16 During the Pinochet dictatorship the idea of universal human rights offered the basis for a new form of dissidence that crossed old class and partisan boundaries—one that sought to recover a democratic tradition, with its flaws but also the social advances that it had made possible.17 “Memory” thus became a rallying cry of the democratic opposition during the 1980s, of the country’s need to know what had really happened during the dictatorship and the years leading up to it. The Concertación coalition carried this legacy to the transition to democracy that began with defeating Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite. And it is fitting that the fate of the “disappeared,” which first catalyzed the opposition’s embrace of “memory” against the dictatorship, would play a leading role in the struggle to recover Chile’s historical memory after the return to elected government. The Concertación scored a convincing victory in the 1989 elections but came to office in 1990 in a cautious mood. It was determined, above all, to demonstrate that democracy could govern successfully. In practice this meant an emphasis on economic policy that sustained growth and

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37

gradually mitigated poverty and other social costs imposed by the dictatorship. It also meant maintaining political stability by avoiding an anticipated explosion of social demands and seeking policies that could win support from the political right (the so-called politics of consensus).18 Particular priority was given to placating Pinochet himself, who continued to command the army and rejected pleas that he step down (slyly insinuating his indispensability to the government’s political operatives). The armed forces expressed publicly and often its determination to resist any “parade” of officers before the courts to answer for offenses committed during the dictatorship. The Aylwin government understood the need to distinguish itself symbolically from its authoritarian predecessor, particularly given the continuities in economic policy. In its early years it mounted a range of expressive policies to address Chile’s historical memory: inaugural ceremonies in the National Stadium, an emblematic site of repression in 1973; reburial of Allende in a prominent site in Santiago’s General Cemetery and construction there of a Memorial Wall for those executed or “disappeared” in captivity; and the Rettig truth commission and its official accounting of those murdered or disappeared at the hands of state agents. As president, Aylwin accepted state responsibility on behalf of the nation in a televised apology to the victims, but opted against a robust justice policy for human rights crimes in favor of selected emblematic prosecutions (notably Contreras).19 Aylwin’s government also failed to fulfill a Concertación commitment to overturn the 1978 amnesty decree. In all this maneuvering, initial government action in the uneasy early years of transition gave priority to securing democratic rule. It chose to contribute to historical truth about the dictatorship but to pursue justice only to the degree that seemed feasible.20 This pragmatic mindset did establish political stability and proved quite successful in economic and social policy. It also yielded an important bipartisan reform of the judiciary, finally achieved during the government of President Frei Ruiz-Tagle,21 which would contribute to a greater measure of justice in the courts after 1998. Both the Aylwin and Frei governments actively vetted promotions of officers within the armed forces and of judges to the Supreme Court, identifying individuals associated with violations of human rights during the dictatorship.22 Although these other institutions enjoyed formal autonomy, this executive role contributed to renovating their personnel over time, with effects that would have consequences later. What elite consensus-building and political engineering could not resolve during these years was what politicians conceived as the “human rights problem.”23 Many attempts were made to forge a grand political

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

bargain to circumscribe military vulnerability before the law and to limit justice for the victims in the name of greater truth and social reconciliation for the nation.24 All these efforts foundered over politics (divisions between the Concertación and an intransigent right, or divisions within the Concertación itself) and the opposition of the remnants of the human rights movement in civil society. Behind these repeated failures, of course, lay Pinochet’s political power as commander of the army (until 1998) and his de facto status as chairman of the right, whose civilian leaders had served his regime and remained fierce defenders of its legacy. Beyond the reach of political pragmatism, however, Chile’s stilldivided historical memory continued to pose expressive and moral claims. The fate of the Rettig truth commission is illustrative. Its report, based on impeccable investigation of violations of human rights, attempted to draw a clear distinction between acts that could never be justified and the historical climate that contributed to the coup. Many different actors contributed to the breakdown of democracy in 1973, it said, but the dictatorship’s violation of fundamental human rights could not be denied or defended. Despite this framing, the armed forces, the Supreme Court and the political right rejected the report in its totality, reserving particular venom for its interpretation of the history. A public education campaign to convey its findings to the population was aborted by political assassinations of various figures from the dictatorship carried out by avenging remnants of the armed left.25 An apparent terrorist threat to a fragile democracy momentarily trumped concern about what human rights should mean in Chile’s historical memory. A few years later that memory was reawakened by the drama of bringing DINA chief Contreras to justice. His trial provided evidence of the savage character of the secret police and the regime of which it was part, but this episode also conveyed a less heartening reality to all Chile—the precariousness of the rule of law. After being convicted, Contreras took flight and remained at large for nearly five months before going to prison. The constrained politics of these years proved incapable of confronting the novel normative demands of human rights, and Chile’s “memory” remained beyond the control of its political leaders. It continued to irrupt in public life as it had since 1990, sporadically but frequently reminding the political class and citizens alike of the unforgotten past—until the watershed year of 1998 sparked a sustained season that engaged what it should mean.

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A Season of Memory, 1998–2010

Through this season the issues of social memory were thrust upon policy makers through demands from civil society, above all from the remnants of the human rights movement and its supporters. But its course and accomplishments cannot be understood apart from the response and ultimately the leadership of politicians and state actors—or from the institutional reforms achieved by Chile’s political class for reasons only indirectly related to civic activism and public opinion on “memory” more generally. The impact of memory in politics and public policy in these years was exceptional. This season was driven to a striking degree by deep, even visceral feelings— above all, toward Pinochet. Between 1998 and 2006 Chileans were reminded over and over of the figure whose seventeen-year dictatorship had rewritten their history and who then lived on for the first sixteen years of the transition. They witnessed in many forms the inexorably unfolding revelations of how thousands of their fellow citizens had been “disappeared” into the ocean or hidden graves and how tens of thousands had undergone unspeakable tortures in concentration camps, military bases, police stations, and schools in every region of the country. Somehow, beyond whatever we may recognize as advances in public policy in this period, it was this embodiment of the meaning of the dictatorship—in Pinochet, his supporters, and their victims—that over the years of this season forced Chileans to face the dark truths of their past and determine that the future must be different.26 Historical truth was uncovered above all through the pursuit of justice. It was a large process by which Chileans, in effect, judged the past through the cases and individuals brought before the courts. Judicial truths, defined by court procedures and legal arguments, gradually contributed to historical truth about past structures of power and the responsibility of those who employed them. Seemingly inexorably, accumulating from the myriad processes of investigation, prosecution, and trial and transmitted through the media into national consciousness, this process changed the face of the recent past. Many actors carried forward the action of this extended drama: investigating magistrates in a renovated judiciary, aided and urged on by plaintiffs, their lawyers, and supportive executive agencies. The sustained pursuit of justice, with hundreds of individual cases and the multiple stages of legal proceedings, rewrote Chile’s history and its historical memory.27 Quite unanticipated at the beginning of this season,28 these developments were framed throughout by politics. The demands from

40

The Politics of Memory in Chile

groups in civil society on politicians and the state were essential to this story, but so too was the play of politics within the political class itself. The Chilean populace expected, and respected, leadership from its politicians. These politicians staked out positions and took policy initiatives for their own reasons—related to their personal histories and values,29 their conception of their responsibility for national institutions, and their electoral advantage in a partially democratized polity. The courts became a major venue and judges leading players in a new politics, but even the judiciary’s role in this period was conditioned by new policies of the country’s elected leaders. The Concertación’s political pragmatism, on display in public arenas such as the Congress, proved more effective in a changed political context. It led to significant new public policies; notably, in 2005 a thorough reform of the 1980 constitution. This kind of politics was widely covered by the media and visible in public opinion. Some of the most important changes of this period, however, took place through executive branch policies under Lagos and Bachelet. Although these policies responded to particular constituencies of the Concertación, they were largely unperceived by the general public. In the rapidly evolving political environment after 1998, the political right accorded these discreet executive initiatives a certain tacit tolerance and did not escalate them into major public confrontations. The leaders of the right increasingly faced decisions about their association with Pinochet—a historical figure who lived on among them—as they calculated their own political futures. For the first time they attempted to challenge the Concertación’s exclusive claim to the moral high ground of “human rights” while continuing to defend Pinochet’s accomplishments during his rule (dubbed “su obra”). With the Riggs Bank scandal of 2004 and continuing revelations of Pinochet’s venality, even this indirect identification with his dictatorship proved politically toxic. Expressive politics and leadership also reemerged in this period in response to the divided symbols and emotions of the living past that gripped Chilean society. With the electoral victories of the Concertación in 2000 and 2006, the politics of memory, with human rights at its center, again became a public part of presidential agendas and ambitions. Late in the dictatorship Lagos emerged as a leader of the political left, which suffered disproportionately from military repression. As a politician, he was always aware of the expressive, symbolic aspects of rule30 and found opportunities to employ them as president. He had the Moneda presidential palace renovated and opened to the public, and he restored the palace side door through which Allende’s dead body had been carried in September 1973. The door, known by its street address

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of Morandé 80, had become a site of memory during the dictatorship even though it had vanished from sight on the building’s smoothly replastered eastern facade. Bachelet, who embodied both the moral authority of democracy and personal persecution by the dictatorship, identified her whole presidency actively with the causes of human rights and historical memory. Although neither Lagos nor Bachelet had made memory and human rights a major theme of their campaigns,31 in office both understood that they were called to take new initiatives to fulfill the promises of the Concertación and to provide public leadership that might make human rights a moral legacy for the nation. Three major areas of public policy convey the basic character and dynamics of the season of memory. In each we can see how the expressive, normative claims presented by historical memory and human rights—for truth, justice, and reparation—challenged existing politics. Although earlier these values often seemed in conflict,32 in this period they reinforced each other and fed its forward flow. The quest for historical truth—establishing broader agreement about what happened in the past and why—was exemplified by the official Mesa de Diálogo and the Valech truth commission. However, the pursuit of justice in the courts also served the value of historical truth, generating an evergrowing body of evidence about particular crimes and the criminal policies of the dictatorship. Similarly, the pursuit of reparation—state expiation of the crimes of the dictatorship against individuals and the nation—represented a form of justice to victims and public recognition of denied historical truths. Human rights and historical memory were subject, like all public issues, to politics, with its partisanship, lobbying, and calculations of advantage. But ultimately they proved, to a degree no one anticipated, transformative of the constrained politics of Pinochet’s protected democracy. The Mesa de Diálogo and the Role of the Courts

After Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998, the Frei government exhausted a range of arguments over the next sixteen months to have him returned to Chile, asserting at last that he should, and could, be tried in Chilean courts for human rights crimes. There were good reasons at the time to be skeptical (Pinochet did in fact formally evade trial before his death in 2006). But having been thrust back into the international spotlight, Chile’s leaders and its democratic transition faced a major test of credibility, and so the government took an important initiative, the Mesa de Diálogo, to reopen the knotty issue of the disappeared. The short-term outcome of this effort fell far short of

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

resolving the issue, but its consequences in the medium term proved significant. It broke an impasse that had dominated the period before 1998, and because it was official in origin, its relative failure in effect raised the stakes politically. The Mesa and its aftermath led to growing demands for truth about what had happened to these victims and also to greater possibilities for justice in the courts. Frei’s minister of defense, Edmundo Pérez Yoma, convened the Mesa in August 1999. A roundtable of representatives of civil society, the armed forces, and the government, it was highly controversial from its inception. Early in his presidency, Frei had attempted unsuccessfully to resolve the longstanding “human rights problem” through political negotiations, but he never enjoyed good relations with the various relatives’ groups (agrupaciones) that demanded government action to discover the fate of the disappeared. For years these groups, identified politically with the left, had demonstrated before the Moneda palace in vain.33 Without their support or a record of sustained concern with human rights, Frei’s government hesitantly proposed the new ad hoc body that became the Mesa. The initiative deeply divided Chile’s human rights community. The agrupaciones and their lawyer allies rejected it as a ploy directed at international opinion, in order to facilitate Pinochet’s return to Chile. They had no faith in such political initiatives and insisted on justice and truth in the courts. Others, including figures with impeccable human rights credentials,34 saw it as an opportunity to bring representatives of the military to the table for the first time in order to confront the worst violations of the dictatorship. This second group, which was hardly naïve about the mixed motives inherent in politics, believed that the Mesa offered a public, officially sanctioned arena that might permit real exchange and reframe a stalemated debate. Both positions took account of politics, but their readings of the political moment were quite different. The Mesa’s deliberations were interrupted by the turns and reversals in the Pinochet case in Britain. Its brief final declaration came after the general’s dramatic return to Chile in March 2000. It included official state acknowledgement (including representatives of the armed forces for the first time) of “grave violations of human rights committed by agents of state organizations during the military government”35 and the shocking public admission that victims’ bodies had been buried clandestinely or transported by helicopter to be thrown into the ocean. In 2001, discrepancies appeared concerning the 200 individuals about whom information had been provided by the military. Information produced after the Mesa did not fit with what was known about them from human rights and ongoing judicial investigations. Public anger

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grew about military stonewalling, which shifted sentiment to favor stronger measures. The Lagos government reiterated the consistent position of the Concertación that questions of justice must be resolved in the courts but at the same time moved adeptly to reinforce government support for prosecutions. The special human rights unit of the national civilian detective police, Policía de Investigaciones, PDI, provided vital assistance in amassing evidence.36 Lagos also strengthened the Human Rights Program37 in the Interior Ministry. This program had existed since 1996 as an ad hoc entity following up the Rettig commission to offer assistance to magistrates investigating human rights cases.38 It was a small, low-profile office staffed by former members of Chile’s human rights community and operated almost entirely out of the public eye (and, not coincidentally, of party politics). Under Lagos the program in practice moved beyond its original, limited mandate and gradually gave official support to prosecutions.39 The changing dynamics of politics after 1998 made possible a more expansive role and, although little noted, enlarged the state’s commitment and the scope of justice in human rights beyond anything achieved earlier. This new role in the courts (and its subsequent support for human rights memorials, considered in the section below on reparation) built bridges between the government and the human rights groups that had formerly been kept at arm’s length. The fruits of this new relationship were evident throughout the season of memory. The role of the courts in this period was unprecedented. More than at any earlier time in Chile’s history, they came to offer an opening for initiative from groups in civil society to pursue justice. They became an institutional arena in which human rights issues might be addressed and resolved as an alternative to the political stalemate between the organs of the executive and legislative branches. Thus political issues associated with human rights became “judicialized”.40 This process was aided by reforms in the judiciary41 earlier in the transition and spurred by the courage of individual judges determined to redeem their institution from its ignominious failure to protect human rights during the military regime. While Pinochet still commanded the army, until March 1998, he remained a significant symbol of resistance to any “parade” of officers before the courts. But his long detention abroad, aided by Lagos’s firm reassertion of executive primacy in reforming the armed forces,42 removed judicial fears of reprisals from that quarter. Under Lagos the Supreme Court finally named a host of special investigating magistrates for human rights cases. In contrast to the constraints envisioned in earlier failed attempts to solve the “human

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

rights problem”, their large number and unrestricted terms indicated, at last, a serious effort. With the effective new support of the executive and the extraordinary historical records of the human rights movement, these special magistrates were able to take on hundreds of individual prosecutions. The work of Chile’s courts on human rights cases was ongoing through the entire season of memory and has continued since 2010. Justice was achieved to a far greater extent than seemed possible before it began, although it remains an imperfect and debated process (for reasons that are analyzed in Cath Collins’s chapter in this volume). As a manifestation of the impact of historical memory in public policy, it put an indelible stamp on this period. The acceptance by the right and the armed forces of the courts as the institutional venue to resolve human rights cases—as an alternative to political negotiations that produced policies from the executive and legislature—gave the courts unprecedented political legitimacy. Their handling of those cases restored their tattered moral authority and, in aggregate, presented Chileans with a whole new official accounting of the practices of the dictatorship. The pursuit of justice served the cause of historical truth and essentially validated the claims of dissident democratic memory.

The Valech Commission and Torture

Both in what it accomplished, and what it failed to achieve, the Mesa de Diálogo helped prepare the ground for Chile’s second official national truth commission, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (2003–2004). The Valech commission, named after its chair Monsignor Sergio Valech, was the centerpiece of a major new policy document entitled No hay mañana sin ayer (There is No Tomorrow without Yesterday). As analyzed in detail in the chapter by Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, this initiative represented a remarkable resurrection of a human rights issue, torture, that had energized the democratic opposition in the 1980s but became a political taboo in the decade after the return to democracy.43 The commission’s findings, published in a 2004 report with a followup appendix in 2005, banished all reasonable doubt that the dictatorship had employed torture systematically at more than 1,100 sites throughout the national territory to sustain its repressive seventeen-year rule. Its report also made possible legislation to recognize new classes of victims, extending already significant earlier reparations legislation to survivors of political imprisonment and torture. The broad social acceptance of the Valech

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report44—in marked contrast to the rejection of the 1991 Rettig report by national institutions still identified with the dictatorship—makes it a milestone for the moral legacy of human rights as part of Chilean history.45 The politics of memory that led up to the Valech commission had both national and international dimensions. Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 had the effect of reviving his association with torture, which had been a symbol of his rule in international opinion from the beginnings of the dictatorship. Torture in Chile was a focus of one of the first sustained international campaigns undertaken by Amnesty International, and torture was a recurrent subject in all reports of international human rights organizations through the life of the dictatorship. Diffuse awareness of torture in Chile itself became a public issue in the early 1980s, when a sector of the Catholic Church and other religious activists were spurred to nonviolent protests by the self-inflicted martyrdom of Sebastián Acevedo.46 It remained an issue that mobilized democratic opposition through the final decade of the dictatorship. After initial transition it stayed alive in social memory, as evidenced by human rights protests in the 1990s, but tended to diminish before the primordial demand to know the fate of the disappeared. Torture was also a difficult issue for public policy. Conceived as a legal issue to be dealt with by the courts, it presented formidable problems of evidence, given the secrecy of the act, the passage of so much time, and the reluctance of victims to come forward. The Pinochet case47 revived torture as a policy issue. Torture reemerged as a charge against Pinochet late in his detention abroad, spurred by the fact that Chile had ratified the international Convention Against Torture in September 1988, in the twilight of the dictatorship. In Chile itself civil society groups took up the issue (such as the Ethical Commission against Torture, Comisión Ética contra la Tortura, formed in 2001), demanding government action. At the same time, the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), the party most identified with the dictatorship, took the initiative to reach out to human rights victims and, with an eye on national elections at the end of 1999, symbolically diminish the exclusive claims of the Concertación to this moral dimension of historical memory. Although UDI’s presidential candidate, Joaquín Lavín, narrowly lost to Lagos, younger figures within the UDI continued to look for ways to neutralize what was in effect a wedge issue that worked against their electoral prospects. This disposition only deepened after Pinochet’s return to Chile in March 2000. His public presence was a growing complication in the rapidly changing dynamics of national politics, which were increasingly dominated by court cases

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against him and other figures of the dictatorship, covered daily in all national media. At this juncture, in 2002, the president of the UDI, Pablo Longueira, took up the cause of a group of families in Pisagua, in the Chilean North. With the claim that these victims were badly served by the agrupaciones and existing government policies, the UDI promised a new approach—with an emphasis on reparation—that would assure more adequate treatment. This sparked a new public debate that joined existing concern about possible new policy for torture victims. The Lagos government, which was doubtful whether torture could be prosecuted or even documented successfully, cleverly opened up a kind of public policy competition, inviting UDI and all other parties, social institutions, and civil society groups to present proposals.48 This approach had the effect of building a social and political consensus for change on this issue, while leaving the final definition of the new policy to the government. The result was No hay mañana sin ayer, a reparation policy built on a new truth commission, framed by historical memory. Reparations—official compensation to victims for what they had suffered—proved in Chile to be a human rights value that could be embraced by political rivals.49 Truth and justice remained more divisive values (even when political realities compelled accepting their consequences), because they involved assigning historical or criminal responsibility. Reparations did require an important shift in the figure of “victim”. Before Valech, the Concertación and the right had opposed conceptions of the “victims” of Chile’s recent history, depending largely on whether they had been opponents or defenders of the dictatorship. The Concertación’s language of “human rights” tended to mask its internal political differences—above all, over “victims” associated with the Communist Party, which was not part of the coalition. For its part, the right had long regarded “human rights” as a political tool wielded by dissidents against Pinochet’s rule and maintained after transition for political reasons. The season of memory produced a political convergence most clearly around the responsibility of the state to compensate for earlier crimes committed by the state. Conceiving “victim” in this way was clearly closer to the tenets of international human rights, and reparations—though often scanted by scholars focused on trials and truth commissions—shifted public consciousness toward the suffering of individual human beings.50 It did not foreclose a ready cynicism among some Chileans, who saw it benefiting a political constituency of the Concertación. But if one takes a longer historical perspective, reparations stand out as a recognition by the state of the need to do something for victims through official policy, beyond

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prosecution: an acknowledgment of its moral and material responsibility toward citizens that had suffered at the hands of state agents. In that sense it seems a significant step toward making “human rights” part of Chile’s shared historical memory.51 Memorials and Symbolic Reparation

The claims of memory were embodied with particular concreteness in memorials to victims. Such memorials already appeared during the dictatorship, notably in cemeteries —sacred space that even Pinochet’s regime hesitated to violate. In 1991 the Rettig commission noted the creation of such memorials by civil society and urged state support for more as a form of symbolic reparation to the victims.52 The Aylwin government undertook a Memorial Wall in Santiago’s General Cemetery53 to those disappeared and murdered while under arrest, but its approach (like that toward judicial prosecutions) was to choose a few emblematic cases: ad hoc initiatives rather than an active broader policy. During the period of “irruptions” before 1998, memorials continued to appear, usually as the result of civil initiatives by particular communities, trade unions or professional associations (gremios) to remember victims of the dictatorship.54 The oldest plaques and memorials within the most famous of these—the Peace Park created in the mid-90s within the razed ruins of the Villa Grimaldi, a notorious center of detention, torture, and disappearance on the outskirts of Santiago—are of this type and date from this time. The government faced few organized demands for a more general memorial policy. The focus of the remnants of the human rights movement, the relatives’ groups, was elsewhere—on truth and justice rather than memory and memorials.55 After 1998, however, Chilean society was swept by wave after wave of historical memory, linked to public events sketched in this chapter.56 The largest swell occurred in 2003, the 30th anniversary of the 1973 military coup, when the mainstream media devoted unprecedented coverage to reflection on Allende’s and Pinochet’s rule. With the past again revived, alive in public awareness from day to day, the Lagos and Bachelet governments thought afresh about how it should be acknowledged and remembered. After the earlier decade of ad hoc improvisation, they forged increasingly coherent policy and Chile experienced a remarkable flowering of official memorialization. Emblematic “sites of memory” related to the dictatorship’s massive violation of human rights—including the National Stadium, the Patio 29 section of Santiago’s General Cemetery, and the former detention and

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torture centers at Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38 and Nido 20—were recognized as National Historical Monuments.57 While community initiatives were responsible for many, perhaps most, monuments and memorial sites, the government gave increased support and official recognition to them, in effect making them a public part of Chile’s history. In 2010 they numbered more than 160, throughout the whole national territory.58 In 2003, under Lagos, Chile’s National Archives (like all such bodies in other countries, a repository of state documentation) responded to efforts from human rights organizations and began to incorporate their records into the nation’s history, as part of the UNESCO “Memory of the World” initiative. For years, some Chileans had commemorated August 30th as the “day of the disappeared”;59 in 2006, Bachelet gave the date official recognition. In 2007 the Ministry of National Property (Bienes Nacionales) published an online listing of 515 state properties used for detention and torture during the dictatorship, expressly presenting this documentation of “memory” as state policy to consolidate democracy and reinforce a culture of human rights. In 2009 legislation approved an official National Institute of Human Rights. First envisioned by the 1991 Rettig report, the powers of the Institute were subject to long political debate before taking concrete form under Bachelet.60 In 2010 she also inaugurated a new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in an old central neighborhood of Santiago, as a place for Chileans to reflect on the meaning for their national history of the violation—and defense —of human rights under the dictatorship. A key to expansion of policy in this area was the Human Rights Program of the Interior Ministry, the same small executive agency that gave official support to human rights prosecutions in the courts. In 2003, under Lagos, this program created a specific ‘Area of Studies and Projects’, to implement a new government agreement with representatives of the relatives of victims and to give official recognition and some support for memorials recognizing victims of state violence throughout the country.61 The rapid growth of such memorials encouraged Bachelet to implement a more ambitious, coherent, and decentralized policy, which enlisted a range of executive agencies such as the Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales. Initiative under this policy lay with civil society groups, but in contrast to the first decade of the transition, they found state officials sympathetic to their purposes.62 While neither Bachelet’s government nor that of Lagos wholly avoided tensions with these groups, it gave great influence over policy in this area to those most committed to official memorialization. In this way it demonstrated that, beyond the political parties, the Chilean state under

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democracy was no longer deaf to the claims of those who had suffered disproportionately under the dictatorship. This policy helped to win greater allegiance from sectors hitherto suspicious of official motives and initiatives, and in its decentralized design it also built on local energies and concerns throughout Chile, which made memory policy more truly national in scope. In policy terms, Lagos and Bachelet sought gains in this area, as in others, largely through executive action, sidestepping partisan divisions. The Interior Ministry’s Human Rights Program kept a low political profile and gave considerable influence to relatives’ groups, who negotiated with executive agency counterparts away from more public arenas. At the same time, however, both presidents used their office to communicate the significance of this memory and these memorials to the nation as a whole. This was particularly true of Bachelet, who during her four years in office personally attended literally scores of inaugural ceremonies for new monuments and memorials throughout the entire country, at once identifying herself with the families of the victims and expressing the consistent message that frankly facing Chile’s past was ultimately an affirmation of belief in its future. Symbolic reparation through memorials would not have become official policy without the reiterated pressure of the relatives’ groups, but they were not just another lobby with interests that could be satisfied by conventional politics. The bargaining and tradeoffs of the “politics of consensus” made it possible by the late 1990s to solve even thorny but more purely political issues of historical memory, such as how to commemorate Allende’s presidency.63 But the issues presented by the agrupaciones went beyond satisfying the demands of particular families for “their” victims, because they were victims of the state and its agents—a state that was now part of a democratic regime. Here again the framework of human rights expanded earlier, partisan-inflected views of victimhood, described above, to a broader conception relating to Chile as a nation. Many memorials today list the names of individual victims—a reminder of how particular lives were cut short by the large processes of history. Political rhetoric is scarce and the recurrent language is that of human rights. This season left Chile with signs throughout its national territory of what it had experienced as a society during the Pinochet years. It was an outcome produced by both tireless advocacy from civil society and enlightened political leadership that understood the moral demands of historical memory.

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Conclusion

Historical memory was a leitmotif of Chile’s long transition to democracy, its demands marking the course of democratization as it developed through this period. Confronting the unresolved issues presented by the Pinochet dictatorship and its violation of basic human rights brought normative and symbolic issues into political arenas and led to the forging of novel public policies. Although Chile had previously utilized commissions to inquire into past conflicts,64 the executive policy initiatives on “memory” in this period were unprecedented. They were taken despite proclivities in the political class (which repeatedly exhorted the populace to “turn the page”) to proclaim the transition concluded and avoid the claims of memory. Ultimately they were unable to do that, and in the years after 1998 political leaders responded to the demands of the past alive in memory in Chile and abroad. As they did, they produced a democracy more worthy of the name. The presidents of the four consecutive governments of the Concertación between 1990 and 2010 were all practical politicians. On the issues of human rights and historical memory, they tended to act only after pressures had built and circumstances had complicated their ability to govern effectively on the many other issues of politics. Their leadership on the normative questions of memory drew from their personal convictions, but also the experience of the political generations that held their coalition together and returned it to office election after election. That leadership was evident in the range of public policies during the “season” after 1998 that have been described here: policies that gave the official sanction of the Chilean state to initiatives that came from human rights organizations and civil society. It would be a mistake to understand the policies of Lagos or Bachelet (or the Concertación as a whole) as coherent visions implemented through carefully considered plans. Their policies on these issues emerged, rather, through the messy, uneven processes of partisan and bureaucratic politics. Public policies almost always do. They cohere primarily when viewed from outside and, historians believe, some distance in time. Many different forces—some directly stemming from social memory, others only tangentially related to it—converged during the season of memory. Institutionally, the willingness of the judiciary to take up the charged, fraught human rights cases and the social acceptance of its legitimacy to do so represented major historical changes. Pinochet himself, who lived on as a figure in public life long after the initial transition, was a catalyst for the larger process: a

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polarizing figure, a disturbing presence, and a recurrent reminder of the living past—indeed, its embodiment. The constrained tutelary democracy he bequeathed Chile—atada y bien atada65—preserved privilege and power for the armed forces and the political right, at least while Pinochet remained in command of the army. But it also had the effect of perpetuating the unresolved divisions in political and historical memory, as reflected in an electorate bifurcated along the same lines as in the 1988 plebiscite. As a result, political leaders were presented with fundamental moral issues touching on national values that resisted resolution through legislative bargaining and negotiation (which were also complicated, it should be noted, by longstanding patterns of distrust and their own divergent memories of the past). Pinochet’s loss of command, and even more his arrest abroad for sixteen months, produced a new court and media-driven political dynamic that made the issues of memory salient as never before. The unprecedented character of Pinochet’s regime in Chilean history ultimately called forth remedies that were similarly unprecedented. The dictatorship’s practice of disappearing alleged enemies, which was meant to extirpate the evidence of its acts, shocked the public conscience when admitted (even very partially) in the Mesa de Diálogo. So, too, did the findings of the Valech commission about the dictatorship’s systematic use of torture on those arrested for their political views (documented in more than 38,000 cases,66 with likely numbers much higher). During the season of memory this extreme and sustained brutality—this violation of the fundamental human rights of life and physical integrity—gained a kind of corporeal force beyond what are usually conceived as “issues” in public policy. The right to bury one’s dead has been a troubling demand to rulers for millennia, at least from the times of Sophocles’s Antigone. But its political consequences in Chile derived from the country’s own memory of the dictatorship. Policies to acknowledge, punish, and make amends for practices carried out in the name of the state in effect vindicated the claims of the “memory” of those who opposed Pinochet, and allowed Chile to face the future with stronger moral foundations. This is a hopeful reading of Chile’s season of memory, but we are still very close to the events. On one hand, Chilean national life after 1998 was suffused year after year by media coverage of the dictatorship’s violations of fundamental human rights. In 2001 the public reacted to the minimal truths of the Mesa de Diálogo with skepticism and growing anger. The Valech commission report in 2004 was broadly accepted by public opinion and Chile’s fundamental public institutions—in sharp contrast to the rejection by those institutions of the

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earlier Rettig report in 1991. This history and other evidence (see the chapter by Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra in this volume) all suggest that the policy achievements of these years had significant social impact and left their mark on Chilean history. On the other hand, what was accomplished by executive initiative, largely unperceived by the public, can be undone by the initiative of other executives.67 The Chilean jurisprudence that permitted advances in human rights cases during these years is hardly a settled matter (see the chapter by Cath Collins in this volume). The memorials, museums, and institutes risk becoming merely part of the landscape for younger generations who lack the connection of living memory to the conflicted past. In the final analysis, judgments about what this season has meant to Chile and Chileans must be tentative. Even the best of public measures cannot, as Ricardo Lagos recognized in 2003, cure deep pain that lives on in memory. We can attempt to assess the achievements of the period, read portents into changes in law and public institutions, project from the still-photo truths of public opinion data—but tomorrow will pose different tests. However, in the light of our world today, when “historical memory” has made claims on public policy so many different places, the experience of this small country stands as a remarkable example of a nation confronting questions profoundly related to its identity, with considerable success.

                                                                                                                1

For the study of historical memory by European scholars and the migration of the concept to Latin America, see Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “Verdad y memoria: Escribir la historia de nuestro tiempo (Capítulo Liminar)” in her edited e-book, Historizar el pasado vivo en América Latina, www.historizarelpasadovivo.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). On French historians such as Pierre Nora, see Marie-Claire Lavabre, “Mauricio Halbwachs y la sociología de la memoria,” ibid. 2 See, e.g., the post-Historikerstreit study by Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3 Henry Rousso, “La trayectoria de un historiador del tiempo presente,” in Pérotin-Dumon, ed., Historizar el pasado vivo en América Latina and The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991; French edn., 1987). 4 The fecund academic field of historical memory in Latin America sprawls across various disciplines. The social character and origins of collective memory predominate over enquiries into the interaction between social and political actors, and how historical memory has been shaped by the play of politics and the objectives of political actors in public policy. The latter perspective is more prominent among European historians. See, e.g., The Politics of Retribution in Europe, ed. by István Deák, Jan. T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and the extensive

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references therein; Judt, Postwar (New York: Penguin, 2005); A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and David Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 5 “Other” memories of the dictatorship in Chile, in which the political developments emphasized here appear only in the background, are given eloquent expression in David Benavente, A medio morir cantando: rastrojos de la memoria chilena, 1978–1998, 41 relatos testimoniales (Santiago: Catalonia, 2007), and Steve Reifenberg, Santiago’s Children (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), as well as many memoirs cited in Alexander Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 31 (1999), pp. 473-500, and (in Spanish) “Irrupciones de la memoria” in Pérotin-Dumon, ed., Historizar el pasado vivo. 6 Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory.” 7 The National Intelligence Directorate, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA, was a shadowy and widely feared semi-official intelligence agency officially founded in 1974, but in de facto operation since 1973. In existence through 1977, its primary mission was the systematic physical elimination of regime opponents and the sowing of fear amongst the population. Deliberately set up outside traditional armed forces structures and beyond the reach of rival, established, intelligence agencies, it used a mix of civilian and armed forces agents, carried out audacious cross border operations including targeted assassinations, and ran a network of secret detention and torture centers. Its director, Manuel Contreras, reported directly to Pinochet himself. His second in command, Pedro Espinoza, was tried and convicted alongside him for the Letelier assassination and subsequently for multiple other crimes. 8 The dictatorship bequeathed Chile’s transition political institutions that maintained the armed forces in a tutelary role and an electoral system that overrepresented the right in order to check majority rule. 9 Although the motion (comparable to impeachment by the US Congress) was initiated by left and centrist elements in the Concertación, the Frei government favored its defeat in the name of maintaining political stability. 10 Steve J. Stern sees the whole period from 1973 to 2006 as such a “season,” taking Pinochet as the dominant figure shaping social memory through all these years. See Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). His interpretation of the transition years is paralleled by another thorough, wellinformed study with a similar perspective: Stephan Ruderer, Das Erbe Pinochets: Vergangenheits-politik und Demokratisierung in Chile 1990–2006 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010). The studies of Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman are indispensable for this period. See particularly Las ardientes cenizas del olvido: Vía chilena de reconciliación política (Santiago: LOM, 2000) and El espejismo de la reconciliación política, Chile 1990–2002 (Santiago: LOM, 2002). 11 Peter Winn, “El pasado está presente: Historia y memoria en el Chile contemporáneo” in Pérotin-Dumon, Historizar el pasado vivo. 12 This constitution, ratified in a tainted plebiscite in 1980 and substantially amended through the efforts of the Concertación, is still the national charter. Helpful background on constitutional history is available on the Chilean Library

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of Congress website www.bcn.cl/lc/cpolitica/index_html (accessed 20 January 2013). 13 O’Higgins was only officially promoted to his status as founding father several decades after his death in self-imposed exile in1842. Brought back from Peru in 1866, he was subsequently interred in an ornate tomb in Santiago’s General Cemetery, where his bones remained for more than a century until drafted to serve the dictatorship’s ambitions. See Alexander Wilde, “Avenues of Memory: Santiago’s General Cemetery and Chile’s Recent Political History,” in A Contracorriente, vol. 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008), pp. 134-169; www.ncsu.edu/ project/acontracorriente/spring_08/Wilde.pdf (accessed 20 January 2013). 14 Steve J. Stern quite properly depicts the rise of social “memory” as a response to Pinochet’s efforts to legitimate an authoritarian future. This proved a battle, as he puts it, that the dictatorship “waged and won, and then waged and lost.” See Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 1. He historicizes the human rights movement, asking why its exposés “seemed to fall on apathetic ears” for so long (pp. 138, 196, 218), and shows why its moral appeals only gained traction in Chile later. His analysis of the considerable social support for Pinochet offers insight into his role and the politics of memory after transition, when state initiatives were manifestly inadequate until the season of memory that began in 1998. On the latter, see Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet, and Ruderer, Das Erbe Pinochets. 15 Lonquén, Cuesta Barriga and Yumbel became “sites of memory,” among the earliest of many specific places with names that defined much social memory of this period. See, e.g., Máximo Pacheco Gómez, Lonquén (Santiago: Editorial Aconcagua, 1983). 16 Loveman and Lira present a thoroughly revisionist reading of past episodes of political violence in Las ardientes cenizas del olvido and Las suaves cenizas del olvido: Vía chilena de reconciliación política 1814-1932 (Santiago: LOM, 1999). Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier explores the conservative strain of Chilean historiography in El peso de la noche: Nuestra frágil forteleza histórica (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997). 17 See Manuel Antonio Garretón’s brilliant essay, “Memoria y proyecto de país,” in Chile 2003–2004: Los nuevos escenarios (inter) nacionales (Santiago: FLACSO-Chile, 2004), pp. 95-115. He eloquently defends Chile’s historical democracy and social memory as a foundation for reconstruction of an “ethicalhistorical community.” Writing at the high noon of the season of memory, he noted perceptively that the year 2003 should not be seen as “a catharsis of closure” (p. 113). 18 Ascanio Cavallo, La historia oculta de la transición (Santiago: Editorial Grijalbo, 1998), and Rafael Otano, Crónica de la transición (Santiago: Plantea, 1995). 19 Prosecuted for the assassination of Orlando Letelier in September 1976 in Washington, DC, USA. The case was an explicit exception in Chile’s 1978 Amnesty Law, due to US pressure. 20 Aylwin promised “justicia en la medida de lo posible.” As a political judgment early in the transition, this was realistic about the limitations of unreformed courts and the Pinochet’s continuing political power. The relatives’ groups and others in Chile’s human rights community, however, found it a notorious betrayal of principle. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that

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Aylwin espoused early and often his belief that, even if the 1978 amnesty blocked prosecution, it did not foreclose investigation of human rights crimes. It was precisely this investigation by special judges after 1998 that shaped so significantly the whole character of the season of memory. Aylwin’s insistence on this point was often insufficiently appreciated but politically critical. 21 These reforms have their origins in studies of the so-called Grupo de 24 in the context of Pinochet’s constitutional project of the late 1970s. See Jorge Correa Sutil, “Cenicienta se queda en la fiesta: El poder judicial chileno en la década de los 90,” in Paul Drake and Iván Jaksic, eds., El modelo chileno: Democracia y desarrollo en los noventa (Santiago: LOM, 1999), pp. 281-315; and Jeffrey Puryear, Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973-1988 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). This group was an arena for early discussion about Chile’s national political institutions between bitterly divided democrats and, as such, a proto-political instancia in a regime without open elections or Congress. Its focus on state reforms, years before formation of the Concertación, is striking evidence of the institutional orientation of the country’s political class (as compared, say, to Argentina and other Latin American countries). In the first decade and a half of transition, this orientation was evident in justice reform (the most significant in a century), repeated efforts to change laws governing elections (which favored the political right), and reform of the 1980 constitution (the most significant of which was only achieved under Lagos in 2005). 22 Cavallo, La historia oculta de la transición. 23 Edgardo Boeninger, Democracia en Chile: Lecciones para la Gobernabilidad (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1997). 24 See Loveman and Lira, Las ardientes cenizas and El espejismo. 25 Alfredo Riquelme, author interview, Paris, 2009. Riquelme, later a key advisor in the Lagos government, was among those who organized the aborted National Education Campaign for Truth and Human Rights that was to follow publication of the Rettig report. “Para creer en Chile”: Síntesis del informe de la Comisión Verdad y Reconciliación (Santiago: Comisión Chilena de Derechos Humanos and Centro Ideas, 1991) was to provide a summary of key findings, with historical photos. 26 We frequently simplify historical periods and public events by associating them with particular individuals (“Pinochet’s Chile”) or collective groups (“human rights victims”). In this sense—which was palpable in Chile but also relevant elsewhere—they may “embody” the past. See Alexander Wilde, “The Past Embodied,” in A Contracorriente, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 2008) www. ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente/fall_08/wilde_rev.pdf (accessed 20 January 2013). 27 This complex historical process has been illuminated in detail by Cath Collins in Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); “Grounding Global Justice: International Networks and Domestic Human Rights Accountability in Chile and El Salvador,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (2006), pp. 711-738; “State Terror and the Law: The (Re)Judicialization of Human Rights Accountability in Chile and El Salvador,” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 35, no. 5 (2008), pp. 20-37; “Prosecuting Pinochet: Late Accountability in Chile and the Role of the ‘Pinochet Case’,” Working Paper no.5, George Mason University Working Paper Series on

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Human Rights, Global Justice, and Democracy (2009): http://cgs.gmu.edu/ publications/hjd/hjd_wp_5.pdf; “Human Rights Trials in Chile during and after the ‘Pinochet years’,” International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), pp. 67-86. Collins is also a prime mover in the innovative project to monitor accountability in the Chilean courts by the Human Rights Observatory of the Universidad Diego Portales, www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos (accessed 20 January 2013). 28 See, e.g., Mark Ensalaco’s good study of this period before the season of memory, Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 29 Many of these politicians knew the harsh practices of the dictatorship firsthand, having suffered them directly or through family members. Among many examples, see Sergio Bitar (Minister of Mines during the Popular Unity government and later a leading left politician in the Concertación), Isla 10 (Santiago: Pehuén Editores, 1987); Andrés Aylwin (a notable human rights defender and brother of President Aylwin), Simplemente lo que vi (1973–1990) (Santiago: LOM, 2003); and Heraldo Muñoz (an important international representative of various Concertación governments), The Dictator’s Shadow (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 30 Patricia Politzer, El libro de Lagos (Santiago: Ediciones B Chile, 2006). 31 Politzer, El libro de Lagos, and Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega, Bachelet: La historia no oficial (Santiago: Random House Mondadori, 2005). 32 See, e.g., A. Samuel Valenzuela, “Los derechos humanos y la redemocratización en Chile,” in Manuel Alcántara Sáez and Leticia Ruiz Rodríguez, eds., Chile: Política y modernización democrática (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2006), pp. 276-285. The article is a sophisticated examination of the public policies toward human rights in Chile’s long transition, without reference to the impact of social memory. In my view, it scants the agency of the human rights movement and underestimates the historical novelty of human rights as a force in national politics. 33 I am grateful for the research of Jennifer Herbst in the files of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad and the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos that supports this characterization of the period. 34 Notably, Jaime Castillo Velasco, Roberto Garretón, Elizabeth Lira, Pamela Pereira, Héctor Salazar, and José Zalaquett. 35 Declaración de la Mesa de Diálogo sobre derechos humanos. http://www.ddhh.gov.cl/filesapp/Declaracion_Acuerdo_Final.pdf (accessed 20 January 2013). Author’s translation. 36 Chile has two main national police forces, both of which operate as single territorial units with no federal or municipal variants. The first, the Carabineros, is a militarized institution considered part of the Armed Forces (although budgetary and other operational responsibilities were transferred to the Interior Ministry, from Defense, in early 2011). The separate PDI, Policía de Investigaciones, is a civilian detective force whose internal affairs department has, in various incarnations, been involved in investigation of human rights cases at the behest of investigative magistrates and public prosecutors. Andrés Domínguez describes training efforts in human rights in the PDI during the first decade after transition: “De cómo la alianza entre los derechos humanos y la policía producen justicia y seguridad.”, in Carlos Basombrío, ed., Activistas e

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intelectuales de la sociedad civil en la función pública en América Latina (Santiago: FLACSO-Chile, 2005), pp. 199-217. 37 The website of the Human Rights Program remains (January 2013) the most comprehensive repository of official policy documents relating to human rights in Chile: www.ddhh.gov.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). 38 The body that followed up the Rettig commission report was the National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation (Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación), which made its final report in 1996. 39 The program was initially limited to locating remains, and even today acts directly in only a minority of currently open human rights cases (Cath Collins, personal communication, 8 June 2012). 40 An excellent edited volume on this larger phenomenon in Latin America is Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell, eds., The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Javier A. Couso presents a skeptical view of its effects in firmly establishing human rights in “The Judicialization of Chilean Politics: The Rights Revolution That Never Was”, ibid., pp. 104-129. 41 Although the judicial reforms of the 1990s were the most sweeping in a century, the older system of investigating magistrates was still employed for human rights cases after 1998. On the reforms, see Collins, Post-Transitional Justice, and Jorge Correa Sutil, “The Judiciary and the Political System in Chile: The Dilemmas of Judicial Independence During the Transition to Democracy,” in Irwin P. Stotzky, ed., Transition to Democracy in Latin America: The Role of the Judiciary (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), pp. 89-106; “’No Victorious Army Has Ever Been Prosecuted . . . ’: The Unsettled Story of Transitional Justice in Chile,” in A. James McAdams, ed., Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 123-154; “Cenicienta se queda en la fiesta,” in Drake and Jaksic, eds., El modelo chileno, pp. 281-315; Lisa Hilbink, Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and William C. Prillaman, The Judiciary and Democratic Decay in Latin America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). These reforms were given political impetus by the rather louche mores of the unreformed Supreme Court on display during the early transition. See the muckraking account, El libro negro de la justicia chilena (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta Argentina, 1999) by journalist Alejandra Matus. 42 Author interview, Ernesto Ottone, a key presidential adviser during the Lagos government (Santiago, 15 April 2009). Lagos was greatly aided by his minister of defense, Michelle Bachelet, who worked effectively with reformist army commander Juan Emilio Cheyre. Bachelet’s father, a constitutionalist Air Force officer, died under military arrest in 1974. On this period, see Felipe Agüero, “Democracia, gobierno y militares desde el cambio de siglo: Avances hacia la normalidad democrática,” in Robert L. Funk, ed., El gobierno de Ricardo Lagos (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2006), pp. 4967; Augusto Varas, Claudio Fuentes, and Felipe Agüero, Instituciones cautivas: Opinión pública y nueva legitimidad social de las Fuerzas Armadas (Santiago: FLACSO-Chile/Catalonia, 2008); and Patricia Politzer, Chile: ¿de qué estamos hablando? Retrato de una transformación asombrosa (Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana, 2006), pp. 15-72.

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43 “One does not speak of torture” (De la tortura no se habla) was the title of a book examining a notorious case that gripped public opinion in 2001. Patricia Verdugo, ed., (Santiago: Catalonia, 2004). 44 An opinion survey in December 2004 by the Fundación Futuro found that 74 percent of respondents approved the Valech commission report (54 percent of whom said that they had believed the Rettig report in 1991) and nearly nine of ten respondents accepted as true the report’s findings on torture during the dictatorship. The report’s characterization of the past remained contested along political lines, with 49 percent judging it objective about the period and 44 percent rejecting it. “Informe de Opinión Pública: Informe de la Comisión sobre la Prisión Política y la Tortura”, available through a search function at www.fundacionfuturo.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). 45 See Anne Pérotin-Dumon, “El pasado vivo de Chile en el año del Informe sobre la Tortura,” in Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos, 2005, www.nuevomundo.revues.org/954 (accessed 20 January 2013). This second full truth commission, its origins, and its impact are striking developments within the broader field of transitional justice worldwide and deserve more study than they have received. 46 Hernán Vidal, El movimiento contra la tortura Sebastián Acevedo (Santiago: Mosquito Editores, 2nd edn., 2002). 47 See Carlos Huneeus, “The Consequences of the Pinochet Case for Chilean Politics,” and Alan Angell, “The Pinochet Factor in Chilean Politics,” in Madeleine Davis, ed., The Pinochet Case: Origins, Progress and Implications (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003), pp. 169-188 and pp. 63-84, respectively. See also the broader study by Naomi Roht-Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transitional Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 48 Lagos established an internal commission in May 2003 to clarify what was still called the “human rights issue.” See Informe de derechos humanos del primer semester de 2003 (Arzobispado de Santiago, Fundación Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad), pp. 72-92. 49 Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman provide a comprehensive and often critical analysis of the diverse and extensive reparation policies during the transition in Políticas de reparación: Chile 1990–2004 (Santiago: LOM, 2005). Lira herself was a member of both the Mesa de Diálogo and the Valech commission. 50 See, e.g., the story “Tortura, los rostros del informe,” in the glossy women’s magazine, Paula, December 2004, pp. 56-65. 51 Cath Collins correctly points out that reparations shift the dynamic away from perpetrator-and-victim to state-and-victim (personal communication, 16 January 2012). Reparations are not the same as justice, which aims to assign responsibility to perpetrators and, perhaps for that reason, reparations seem to be an issue on which political opponents can more easily agree. 52 “[M]oral and material reparation seem to be utterly essential to the transition toward a fuller democracy. . . [T]here are already a number of spontaneous initiatives and gestures of reparation throughout the country. Each of them is valuable in itself for what it expresses. Such initiatives need not spring from a law. Indeed it would be beneficial if initiatives for reparation were to multiply throughout the country and in every segment of society. Our hope would be that the creativity of such gestures might add to the artistic and

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moral endowment of our nation. Thus some day we may have symbols of reparation that are national and others that are regional or local in nature. However, it would seem that these things are not enough . . . Hence the state can take the lead in making gestures and creating symbols that can give a national impetus to the reparation process . . . It is to be hoped that as soon as it is prudently possible, the government will see fit to provide the means and resources necessary to set in motion cultural and symbolic projects aimed at reclaiming the memory of the victims both individually and collectively. Such projects would lay down new foundations for our common life and for a culture that may show more respect and care for human rights.” Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, tr. Phillip E. Berryman (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993; Spanish original, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 837-838 53 Santiago’s General Cemetery occupied a special place in national memory. See Wilde, “Avenues of Memory.” 54 See, e.g., Louis Bickford, “Memoryscapes” in Ksenija Bilbija, Jo Ellen Fair, Cynthia Milton, and Leigh Payne, eds., The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2005), pp. 96-102 55 In 2007 María Soledad Silva, Executive Secretary of the Council of National Monuments, noted that before the season of memory there were few applications to the Council for recognition of emblematic sites associated with human rights violations, despite rather open procedures (author interview, Santiago, 12 July 2007). 56 The Pinochet case was one of the largest of these public events. It dominated television coverage for several years. See Giselle Munizaga, “Augusto Pinochet en Londres. El caso Pinochet en los noticiarios de television,” in Nuevo Gobierno: Desafios de la reconciliación, Chile 1999-2000 (Santiago: FLACSO-Chile, 2000), pp. 221-230. 57 Two other emblematic sites associated with human rights violations were named earlier: the Hornos de Lonquén burial site (2000) and the detention and torture center named José Domingo Cañas (2002). 58 Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, www.museodel amemoria.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). 59 The date was an informal international holiday that commemorated the practice of forced disappearance as an emblematic phenomenon of our times. 60 Legislation for the Institute was first sent to Congress by Lagos in 2005. For an account of political debate over its mandate, see the chapter by Cath Collins in this volume. The Institute’s website, www.indh.cl (accessed 20 January 2013), does not recount this history but presents a good overview of its significant functions. 61 Author interview with María Raquel Mejías Silva, Executive Secretary of the Human Rights Program of the Interior Ministry, Santiago, 23 July 2007. See also www.ddhh.gov.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). 62 This interministerial working group was directed by Bachelet’s direct delegate, María Luisa Sepúlveda, formerly associated with major dictatorshipera human rights defense organization the Vicariate of Solidarity for many years. Sepúlveda accordingly enjoyed strong historic ties with the relatives’ associations most dedicated to human rights memory, and now chairs the board of the Memory Museum that was a major focus of the working group’s efforts.

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63 The negotiations over a memorial statue to Allende near the Moneda Palace are analyzed in Katherine Hite, “La superación de los silencios oficiales en el Chile posautoritario,” in Pérotin-Dumon, ed., Historizar el pasado vivo, and Katherine Hite and Cath Collins, “Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Reawakenings in 21st-Century Chile”, Millennium Journal of International Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (2009), pp. 379-400. 64 See the pathbreaking research on this point by Loveman and Lira, Las suaves cenizas del olvido. 65 It was Pinochet’s boast, echoing Spain’s Francisco Franco before him, that Chile’s transition had been “well and truly tied up” (by a National Security Council with military veto, overrepresentation of the right in Congress, packing of an unreformed Supreme Court, etc.). 66 The total figure of 38,254 documented victims reached by the successive 2004, 2005 and 2011 iterations of the original Valech commission was reported in August 2011. See www.indh.cl/informacion-comision-valech (accessed 20 January 2013). 67 Since the change of government in March 2010, conflicts over the continuing role of the Interior Ministry’s Human Rights Program illustrate this vulnerability, as do alterations in the websites of other parts of the executive branch such as the Ministry of National Property and the Council for National Monuments, Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales, which had previously highlighted the human rights dimension of Chile’s historical memory. On conflicts over the Human Rights Program, see the bulletins of the Human Rights Observatory of the Universidad Diego Portales, www.icso.cl/observatorioderechos-humanos (accessed 20 January 2013).

3 The Politics of Prosecutions Cath Collins

Outsiders tend to believe that efforts at justice for dictatorship-era human rights violations in Chile began with the 1998 UK arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for human rights crimes, and ended at his death in 2006. Nothing could be further from the truth. Vigorous, though generally unsuccessful, attempts to use the courts to curb or end atrocities began in September 1973, just days after the 11 September coup, at the instigation of individual lawyers. They continued through the activities of hastily formed human rights organizations under the protection of the Catholic Church.1 These efforts were redoubled, and finally rewarded, in the late 1990s and continue through to the present day. Indeed, in spite of successive center-left Concertación coalition governments between 1990 and 2010 proving to be particularly wary of decisive action on issues of justice, by 2012 Chile had compiled one of the most active and complete records of judicial accountability anywhere on the continent, and perhaps in the world. Despite the continued existence of a 1978 amnesty law effectively designed to grant impunity to former regime agents, and notwithstanding 2010’s political shift to the right, in mid-2012 there were 64 former members of the security forces completing prison sentences for their role in dictatorship-era crimes. These formed part of a total of 800 agents actively investigated or charged over such crimes since 2000. What explains the emergence of such an apparent zeal for justice in the region’s most controlled transition? Do trials reflect, or have they helped to bring about, a sea change in society’s feelings about what the Pinochet regime stood for and how it should be remembered?

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

What balance of state and nonstate agency lies behind this gradual (and still only partial) dismantling of impunity? This book’s principal interpretive frame, the politics of memory, suggests that changing views and actions about the criminality of past human rights violations should be understood against the broader sociopolitical backdrop rather than in a narrowly judicial context. In Chile as in neighboring Uruguay and Argentina, proximate causes of accountability change have included factors undoubtedly specific to the justice system. These include generational turnover within the judiciary; rule-of-law reforms; external, including international, pressure; the discovery or declassification of archival evidence; and continuing legally framed pressure from relatives’ associations and other civil society groups.2 Ultimately, however, Chile’s transitional justice trajectory is, like that of the other cases mentioned, inextricably intertwined with the general political shape of its post-authoritarian democratic (re)construction. It is no accident, for example, that 1998 turned out to be the “decisive year,” a turning point at once exposing and promising to reverse the habitual truncation of the justice dimension of Chile’s truth, justice, and reparations triad. Pinochet’s arrest in the UK was certainly not the only nor even the earliest significant event of the year, as is eloquently demonstrated by Alex Wilde and by Carlos Huneeus and Sebastian Ibarra in other chapters of this volume. Even this potent but unexpected detonator of later justice change could only have the effects it did due to a range of predisposing factors. According to Huneeus, these include a longstanding reliance on legalism and the principle of legality as the preferred mode and guarantor of transition.3 As to immediate effects of 1998’s legal and diplomatic bombshell, Huneeus suggests that its political costs may have been largely borne by the governing Concertación, whose efforts to extricate the besieged general and bring him home enraged at least some of their natural supporters while failing to fully appease his. The mainstream right, like the military establishment, accelerated an already detectable tendency to distance itself from the figure of Pinochet, something that probably in the long run served to increase the right’s electability. Judges, for their part, began to assert greater degrees of autonomy from political preferences of all stripes.4 According to experts gathered in 2008 at an academic conference convened precisely to assess the impact of 1998’s momentous events, the former dictator’s arrest helped “change . . . the country’s psychology, mood, and way of feeling” (Patricia Politzer) and explode the myth of Chile as a completed, and model, transition (Roberto Garretón).5 Direct effects included new forms of official as

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well as informal truthtelling and the apparent invigoration of the timid renaissance of national judicial investigations that had begun earlier the same year. Most of the academics, jurists, lawyers, activists and practitioners gathered at the abovementioned 2008 conference felt that the arrest had acted as the culmination of a series of highly symbolically charged events. Many had assumed the issue of justice for past crimes to be already over and done with, “resolved” or at least permanently placed on hold through the country’s previous recipe of limited truthtelling, reparations, and amnesty. It became quickly apparent, however, that 1998 would be the year when the justice question would return definitively to the fore. The previous truth-justice stasis did not survive this test—further evidence for the contention that broader political change was slowly rendering this, like other aspects of the 1989-1990 transitional settlement, obsolete. What part did formal trials play in the post-1998 renegotiation of Chile’s human rights legacy? In what ways did trial dynamics both affect and reflect wider political shifts? This chapter complements others in this volume by focusing specifically on the justice and accountability aspect of post-1990 Chile’s complex and often contradictory relationship with its dictatorial past. After briefly describing how immediate transitional realities deactivated formal justice claims, the chapter goes on to discuss various influential manifestations of the “legalism” alluded to by Huneeus as a founding characteristic of the post-1990 polity.6 The overall intention is to show how this framing has alternately limited and permitted post-1990, and particularly post-1998, innovations in criminal and civil liability for dictatorship-era crimes. The analysis draws on the work of the Human Rights Observatory, a project set up at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, in 2009 to map and analyze social and political change around the post-1998 reinvigoration of human rights trials.7 Transition as Disappointment and as Opportunity

Chile’s right-wing military dictatorship was both authoritarian and murderous. At least 3,200 people were killed or disappeared for political reasons between 1973 and 1990, with almost 40,000 more tortured or imprisoned.8 Exile, both internal and international, was even more widespread as were mass suspensions of civil and political rights including suffrage and free association and assembly.9 This depressing legacy had figured prominently in both international condemnation and internal opposition to the regime. When the first Concertación government took over in 1990, expectations were accordingly high

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among the human rights community that action over truth, justice, and memory would be near the top of the official agenda. This was, after all, an elected government made up of opposition figures, among them former exiles, survivors, and relatives of high-profile victims of repression. Human rights had been an important unifying factor in the final rejection of the military regime, and many relatives’ groups and human rights organizations believed that their time had finally come. They were quickly and comprehensively disappointed. Structural impediments including the 1978 amnesty law, the still-valid 1980 Constitution, and the restricted composition of Congress10 deliberately reduced the opportunities for radical change of any sort by the incoming administration. Specific threats, civilian-military standoffs, and the negative example of neighboring Argentina11 finally convinced new president Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) that limited truth, together with some reparations measures, was the most that could be achieved or should be attempted. Radical demands, whether from the human rights movement or from other social groups, were actively discouraged as the former opposition adjusted to “being government,” shedding the untidier or less governable aspects of its broad-based, “everyone-againstPinochet,” identity of the late 1980s. An active and generally well-regarded human rights movement was not only sidelined but also decimated. The iconic Vicaría de la Solidaridad closed its doors altogether in 1992, and direct action groups such as the Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo went into voluntary suspension as an act of faith in the promises of the new government. Although some figures associated with human rights work were absorbed into the new administration, they did not go into human rights-related posts. This marked an early divergence from Argentina, where a similar influx was pivotal in building a substantial human rights institutionality within the first transitional administration. Chile’s reduced and somewhat chastened movement, faced with the same truth, justice, and memory agenda that had emerged over the 1980s, found the new dispensation less accommodating than had been hoped or expected. Official truth, in the form of the early truth commission chaired by former senator Raul Rettig, was certainly welcome but had proved limited both in scope (focusing deliberately on deaths and disappearances) and in impact. As Alex Wilde’s preceding chapter shows, both unforeseeable and entirely predictable political events and institutional reactions were allowed to dilute the potential value of the Rettig report as a new starting point. The commission’s careful report was thorough and meticulous in examining causes and forms of violence, and relatively daring in pointing out the failings of

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“gatekeeping” institutions including the courts. However, it did not quite match—after all, how could it—the dramatic effect of less complete but somehow more affecting recent revelatory episodes. These had included discovery of a mass gravesite in the northern desert,12 the publication of investigative journalist Patricia Verdugo’s bestselling account of the chillingly named “Caravan of Death” massacres, and an appallingly insouciant televised encounter with Pinochet at which he remarked that the burial of two or three anonymous corpses per clandestine grave had been a simple “economy.” Aylwin did his best, receiving the Rettig report in a solemn ceremony and having copies presented to relatives of all victims named in it and to public institutions including schools and libraries. The wholesale lack of change or repentance in perpetrator or collusive institutions, however, played its inexorable part: the armed forces and the courts both dismissed the report in extremely robust language, and their rebuttals were allowed to stand uncorrected.13 This exercise in truth recovery—consisting as it did mainly of official validation of a portion of the many testimonies and allegations already made public over the years by human rights organizations—probably did have a deep impact on those who insisted or genuinely felt that they had not known the extent of what was going on. The report was, for instance, sold in a popular edition at newspaper kiosks up and down the country, with anecdotal reports of long queues to obtain a copy or even just to take a look. The same grapevine nonetheless also suggested that the ranks of those keen to lay hands on the report included many former agents. Their main concern was to check that their names had been kept out— as, of course, they had.14 In general, it seems that few converts and even fewer penitents came into being solely or even principally as a result of Rettig. A poll carried out years later by right-wing think tank Fundación Futuro supports this view: asked in 2004 to recall how they had felt over a decade earlier about the commission’s report, most respondents reported having had significantly less faith in it than in subsequent initiatives. Accustomed as they were at the time to being told that graphic tales of assassination and torture were antiregime propaganda promulgated by dangerous left-wing terrorists, those who had no direct personal reason for assimilating the opposite view were perhaps understandably reluctant or merely slow to do so. At most, the vague notion that there had been “excesses,” particularly in the (long-ago) early period after the coup—when, after all, the country had been at war15—entered the national psyche, and was used consciously or subconsciously to quiet any prickings of conscience.

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The cumulative effect of subsequent drip-feed revelations later helped to reverse this pervasive state of cognitive dissonance, but so too did the later dropping of transition-era pretence by some of the institutions and individuals involved. Belated acknowledgement was more often brought about by hard judicial facts and case verdicts than by Rettig, supporting the view that judicial activity has a particular nature and power for which there can be no substitute. The Rettig report, after all, drew less on direct, forensic factfinding by supposedly “neutral” justice system operators than on preexisting files and testimony from organizations such as the Vicaría. The Vicaría’s archive, substantial and even damning as it was, could be dismissed by those who so wished as a known repository of antiregime propaganda. The Rettig commission could accordingly be criticized or discounted for having relied so heavily on it. The commission had been carefully composed to include known regime supporters, in part to avoid or minimize this very risk. Hardliners could nevertheless tell themselves that the commission’s right-wing members—some of whom privately declared themselves changed and chastened by what they had seen and heard16 —had simply been taken in by the weight of false or exaggerated evidence. The maintenance of this happy state of willful ignorance was doubtless made easier by the nature of Rettig as a standalone, relatively short-lived instance not backed up by concerted justice activity.17 In the absence of corroboration from the justice system, the one branch of state that the right could still with propriety call its own, Rettig commission versions were just that—versions, to be disputed or ignored as proved convenient. Reparations, much more in evidence than justice and much more conscientiously followed up than truth, were in practice equally limited in their power to create at least moral condemnation. Their representational or performative aspect as an acknowledgment of culpability on the part of the state was played down, in favor of justifications that spoke more to the charitable relief of hardship among relatives, the economic advantage to the country of encouraging exiles to return, or the public health justifications for addressing survivor trauma.18 It quickly became clear that Chile’s transitional “memory field” would continue to include official toleration of triumphalism from former powerholders, openly declaring that they had nothing to be ashamed of and implicitly daring the new authorities to contradict them. The Concertación became adept at the sleight of hand required to keep gestures toward the human rights community suitably low-key, ensuring that they neither challenged legal amnesty nor constituted outspoken condemnation of the previous regime.

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Why Trust the Courts at All? The Return of Legalism

How did trials ever come to be a prominent feature of this rather daunting transitional landscape? It is relatively easy both to imagine and to observe how trials come about where former powerholders fall from grace and are militarily defeated and roundly repudiated: post-WWII Europe and post-Malvinas Argentina are but two cases in point. In Chile, however, trials must have seemed the most remote of all prospects in a generally unfavorable, highly controlled transitional setting. Faced with clear evidence of the inability of official truth or reparations measures even to install an unambiguous national narrative about the unacceptability of the authoritarian past, the idea of pushing for criminal prosecution of key figures from that past must have seemed idealistic at best. And yet one significant portion of what was left of the historic human rights community did continue to target its actions at the courts. This apparently paradoxical or even quixotic behavior does in fact have several logical explanations. First, in a culture heavily invested in legalism it was in some sense natural to continue to look to the courts, even to Pinochet’s courts, to produce legal truths that could underwrite the production of new social compacts where political bargaining had failed to do so. The judicial system or the legal system more generally had not, of course, shown any great vocation for speaking truth to power over the preceding seventeen years. But nor had the courts been completely ineffective in molding or restraining government preferences, and Chile’s generally firm belief in its own essential vocation as a rule-bound republican polity guided the desire of many, not only on the left, to be able once again to cast the judicial branch in this role. A functioning court system, autonomous at least in name and never closed nor suspended, had been one of the principal artifacts the dictatorship had liked to show off to outside critics. The same system was for some a particularly fitting instrument to be used for the rehabilitation of bureaucratic rationality, rather than personal edict, as guiding principles for national life. After all, many had always believed and others had gradually come to share Pinochet’s oftrepeated view that mere politicians, los señores politicos, were in general a poor and venal lot who could not be expected to put the interests of the patria above personal or party gain. Put simply, even and perhaps particularly in socially conservative sectors, what the Supreme Court was or was not prepared to countenance now carried more potential weight than the views or actions of the incoming presidency or legislature, each seen as captured by particular interests or hampered by the weight of political

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negotiations and compromise. The courts accordingly became coveted terrain for both conservative and progressive tendencies. For the former, if the military were really about to vacate the role of disinterested guardian of higher values, perhaps the judges could be prevailed upon to step in. For the latter, if the Supreme Court, of all people, could be persuaded to call a crime a crime, it would be particularly difficult for even the most recondite sectors of Pinochetismo to refute them. In this way, and not by any means only in relation to human rights, a regime-era transitional blueprint designed to put many issues beyond the realm of politics sowed the seeds of the gradual politicization, in the broadest sense, of other arenas of national life. Ambassadorial and ministerial appointments made by the dictatorship were, of course, largely reversed by new civilian authorities, but this change only rendered mid-level civil service personnel even more central to the preservation of regime-era transformations. Their tenure, like that of regime-appointed justices, was one of the exit guarantees sought and safely obtained by the outgoing Pinochet regime. Changes that had been wrought by minor legislation might be susceptible to modification or reversal by the new legislature, but this too had been carefully anticipated. Designated senators in practice assured the elected right of a nonelected boost to its voting power, while major policy orientations and preferences were tucked safely away in constitutional provisions protected by supermajorities. Other aspects of the “new Chile” considered too important to be subjected to the rough and tumble of democratic politics were placed under the tutelage of the National Security Council, constitutional tribunal, and other purportedly neutral bodies.19 In this sense, the courts became just one more arena in which the new politics of transformation or continuity would be played out. The likelihood of their exercising a largely conservative or “stabilizing” influence was attractive: not only to regime diehards but also to the much broader constituency of Chileans both tired and fearful of radical innovation whatever its source.20 In this sense, too, that portion of opposition to the previous regime that had consciously cultivated a principled or centrist rather than leftist party-political critique21 was naturally drawn to the use of preexisting institutions such as the courts to reshape the country’s future. At least some of these organizations, and their leaders, had based their objection to the previous regime’s actions less on its rightist character than on its many departures from hallowed tradition. The exceptionalist belief in Chile as an island of solid institutionalism and republican orthodoxy—a strong rule-of-law state—was no less persuasive to its adherents for having contained, as Lira and Loveman have subsequently

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demonstrated, a necessary quota of willful self-deception.22 For these sectors, a return to normality in bureaucratic and institutional practice would be a welcome backdrop to the deepening of dictatorship-era economic transformations to which at least some had no serious objection in principle. The resetting of the country’s sociopolitical direction that had taken place between 1973 and 1990 might be variously judged as unfortunate in its dramatism or even misguided in some of its manifestations, but the best future course to set was clearly to retune and reshape rather than dismantle. Judges, courts, and all of the other comforting trappings of a system consecrated to the ideal of rational order were in this sense a highly preferable alternative to any return to the radical uncertainties of the 1970–1973 Popular Unity interlude.“Bourgeois democracy” had much to recommend it to those who had not enjoyed either recent demonstration of the main polar alternatives. In this way, much as the courts had come to be reviled by directly victimized sectors for their persistent refusal to take decisive action against regime crimes, their stock among the general population remained rather more buoyant, perhaps even in some cases for precisely the same reason.23 After all, in early 1989 only 17 percent of Chileans polled considered themselves to be direct or indirect victims of human rights violations committed by the regime. Four months earlier, in December 1988, the same polls had given judges a relatively high rating as a group that could be trusted to solve the nation’s problems.24 The (civilian) political class was, meanwhile, poorly evaluated repeatedly in opinion polls between 1991 and 2002.25 Accordingly, accounts of the Chilean transition that explain initial Concertación caution exclusively as a product of deference to direct elite and military pressure perhaps underestimate a very real popular desire for an end to the enervating uncertainty and polarization of the previous two decades. The Concertación’s political leadership showed greater awareness of this reality—faithful, after all, to Chile’s pre-1970 traditions of a “threethirds” left, right, and center voting pattern—in their strategy for the 1988 plebiscite campaign that finally opened the way to competitive elections. The Concertación’s “No” campaign included TV spots in which everyday figures, including well-known sportsmen and entertainers, recounted their own direct experiences of victimization.26 These were, however, interspersed with more conciliatory episodes in which national symbols such as the Chilean flag featured prominently, countering regime portrayals of the left as an essentially alien, unpatriotic force. The generally calm and positive tone of the spots emphasized that a vote for the Concertación would not be a vote for

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socialist revolution, and played well with centrist voters who had been genuinely perturbed by Allende’s radical reforms and his increasingly combative relationship with both the senate and the courts. The same sectors were further reassured by the eventual selection not of Lagos but of the firmly centrist, and historically anti-Allende, Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin as the coalition’s first presidential candidate.27 Finally, the opposition’s central and lasting decision to respect regime-era legality—as distinct from legitimacy—both in campaigning and once in office represented a definitive commitment to work within existing legal and judicial parameters. The small and increasingly isolated sectors of Chilean society that considered justice for past crimes to be a necessary and nonnegotiable component of real transition had, of course, a rather closer and less rosy view of what the regime-era justice system had to offer. Nonetheless, their own past habits, as well as the increasingly apparent reservations of the incoming political class about maximalist demands for punishment, led them also to turn or return to the courts as a venue for action. Legally framed claim-making had always been a mainstay of the human rights community.28 During the dictatorship, organizations had done their best to combine semi-clandestine protection and relief work with the presentation of thousands of habeas corpus writs and other legal actions on behalf of victims of disappearance and, to a lesser extent, of political execution, political imprisonment, or torture. The distinctive formal-legal character of the Chilean human rights defense movement from its early days was almost unique in the region, making it an unparalleled repository of documentation, paperwork, and even official evidence relating to individual cases. These actions were never abandoned by the movement, and many of the judicial investigations that resulted remained technically open, although in de facto abeyance, right through to 1990. The challenge of opening up formal justice possibilities and avenues once transition had begun was accordingly daunting but not completely unthinkable. It would not require the building from scratch of a case universe but the reinvigoration of an existing one and, crucially, the generation of a new response from the justice system. The specific and limited nature of this task, requiring technical expertise from a small group of legally literate actors, also suited the reduced human and financial resources of the increasingly isolated but always vocal human rights movement. The focus on justice, and formal justice at that, was both a positive choice and a pragmatic acceptance of new realities for a movement that did not prosper or even find it easy to survive in the new period.

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Between 1990 and 1998 this continued option for legalism operated in essence as a holding tactic, at best preventing the justice situation from deteriorating even further. An early challenge to the constitutionality of amnesty produced an unfavorable ruling hardening its application. Aylwin’s efforts to convince the courts that they should at least investigate Rettig report cases seemed to fall on equally stony ground. Accordingly, lawyers and organizations harbored little more than the modest ambition of preventing existing case files from being closed for lack of new activity. They accordingly submitted routine requests for new witness statements or other investigative work, or embarked on challenges to military jurisdiction with little genuine hope of direct success. Occasional advances such as verdicts in the degollados, Tucapel Jiménez, or Letelier cases could not lead directly to breakthroughs in the main case universe, since they were won by pursuing a limited number of clear exceptions to the apparently immutable 1978 amnesty law,29 although the symbolic effect of a guilty verdict against the formerly all-powerful secret police chief, in the Letelier case, should clearly not be underestimated. In general, however, the Concertación’s decision while still in opposition to broadly accept the preservation of authoritarian-era laws as the price of political opening severely circumscribed the real inroads that human rights lawyers could make. So too did the specific decision by the Aylwin camp to abandon a campaign promise to seek repeal of the 1978 amnesty law. The only official measures initiated in legal terrain were tightly and explicitly restricted to the search for remains.30 Relatives behind the existing criminal complaint cases could be forgiven for becoming increasingly worn down by an interminable process that brought no visible results, while other potential claim-bringers were given no real incentive to follow suit. Survivors, particularly, had not even been individually named or acknowledged in the Rettig report. They continued to be essentially incidental to a truth and justice debate strongly centered on the dead and disappeared. This unproductive state of affairs continued largely unchanged until 1998, but what changed it was not, in the first instance, the far-away action of a Spanish judge. In January 1998, motivated by a mixture of long-running grievances over the lack of formal justice coupled with Pinochet’s imminent retirement from the army and entry into the senate, Communist Party president Gladys Marin presented what was to become the first successful effort to spark a criminal investigation of Augusto Pinochet in person. Couched as an accusation of possible responsibility in the deaths or disappearance of her own husband and other Communist Party officials, the presentation followed the standard format of the hundreds

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of similar cases attempted previously and brought since. Its only particularly novel aspect was in daring to name Pinochet himself as directly involved in the alleged crimes. Two days later, a similar claim was submitted by relatives of victims of the “Caravan of Death,” a traveling squadron that had ordered and carried out summary executions up and down the country shortly after the coup on Pinochet’s personal orders. Both claims were unexpectedly ruled admissible by Juan Guzmán, the investigative magistrate to whom they were assigned by rote. The case of the Caravan, particularly, began to develop into a viable investigation as Guzmán read up on truth commission and journalistic accounts of the episode, called witnesses, and began slowly to educate himself in realities he had always denied. These early glimmerings of domestic accountability were not afforded major significance early on since most people expected them to prove fruitless, as had a parallel attempt by some socialist politicians to have Pinochet impeached. Despite the initiation of early investigations, the former dictator still seemed well protected by the amnesty law and by his usual air of political invincibility. Handing over command as planned in February, he took up his senate seat as scheduled in March, in stony defiance of protests both inside and outside the chamber. The move gave him an extra layer of immunity from prosecution, as a sitting parliamentarian, and it seemed on balance probable that domestic justice action would fizzle out if left to its own devices. Pinochet’s were not the only cases in train, however. In September 1998 an apparently equally minor innovation in an unrelated31 case proved to be yet another milestone in the gradual dismantling of de facto impunity. A military judge was ordered to reopen a disappearance case, previously closed through amnesty on the grounds that the statute had been prematurely or inappropriately applied. The new reasoning was that no individual suspects had yet been named, nor was there anything to indicate with certainty that the crime involved, kidnapping, had been fully consummated within the four-and-a-half-year window that amnesty covered. This second argument, the “ongoing crime” thesis, would later become the main tool by which a large tranche of preexisting disappearance cases were reopened. Beginning with crimes clearly committed outside the time period of amnesty and continuing with these “ongoing crime” cases, lawyers and organizations generated dozens and finally hundreds of new and reopened complaints. Since Guzmán’s investigation was clearly, albeit slowly, gathering steam, it became apparent that demonstrating a link to that new set of cases offered the best prospect of getting an old investigation out of the doldrums of the

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military court system. The most effective way to do that was to find a new angle allowing a specific mention of Pinochet on the list of those presumed responsible, a move that allowed Guzmán, if he so wished, to add the crime to his growing caseload. In the meantime, Pinochet had of course been handed an international arrest warrant during a London clinic stay, raising hopes that his previous armor plating might finally be giving way and adding yet another incentive for domestic claim-bringers to finally act against him. The five-hundred-day wrangling over Pinochet’s eventual return to Chile ran through a host of legal arguments about sovereign immunity and territoriality of law before coming to rest on the twin, and somewhat contradictory, contentions that Pinochet was in no fit state to be prosecuted, but could in any case be quite satisfactorily prosecuted in Chile. The existence of the domestic cases mentioned above was used by the Chilean government as evidence that Pinochet did not need to be extradited to Spain, as he could be impartially dealt with on home territory. This veiled promise in turn encouraged the bringing of more claims, which quickly (by early 2000) numbered over three hundred. By the time Pinochet finally returned to Chile in March of that year, President Frei Ruiz-Tagle had been replaced by Ricardo Lagos. The narrowness of the Concertación’s third consecutive presidential victory, which unlike the previous two had gone to a second round of voting, almost certainly owed something to the Pinochet case saga. The new dispensation could perhaps be forgiven for seeming heartily sick and tired of the whole issue. Managing the domestic “Pinochet effect” promised little political gain and large political risk, and the administration seemed keen to damp down the embers as quickly as possible. Deals had been struck while Pinochet was abroad. To make the story of his failing health more believable, he would retire from his recently inherited senatorial seat and, it was hoped, bow out of public life. It seems likely that a quiet end was also prescribed for the domestic investigations, which had served their purpose in bringing him home. The judiciary, however, had other ideas. Despite a visible corporate distaste for the matter and the publicity it had brought, the courts were not prepared simply to drop cases. Still in the international spotlight, and already unfavorably compared in some quarters to the Spanish courts and even to the essentially conservative UK House of Lords, some in the judicial branch perhaps perceived that having been given a second chance to redeem themselves over human rights cases, this time they would not be forgiven for simply repeating the cursory negative answers of the past. Guzmán, although not popular with most of his peers, fulfilled a useful role in offering tangible evidence that “something” was

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being done. A certain quota of orneriness may also have played a part: judicial reforms and occasional financial scandals had strained the relationship between the political class and the judiciary over the latter half of the 1990s,32 and the institution seemed to relish the idea of refusing to slavishly follow elite preferences. After the Mesa de Diálogo truth initiative of 1999-2000, described by Wilde in the previous chapter, the courts were asked to name special judges to follow up on the (eventually paltry) information received. Far exceeding this brief, they carried out a national survey of all old and new human-rights-related cases and over the next four years assigned various tranches of specially designated judges to deal with them. At the instigation, in some instances, of individual judges associated with a sympathetic human rights position,33 the principle that judges rather than politicians would decide the eventual fate both of Pinochet and of human rights cases in general was quietly but firmly installed. Cases, then, were back and were here to stay. This principle should not be confused, however, with particular judicial zeal to resolve them or to resolve them in a manner favorable to the demands of claimants and relatives. Most cases dragged on through the subsequent decade and many34 have still not been resolved. Even other justice system actors became impatient with what they saw as judicial foot-dragging. A specialized human rights branch of the detective police, founded back in 1994,35 came into its own in this period. By 2004 the unit was heading to peak strength of around fifty detectives, assigned in teams to work under the orders of the specialized human rights judges. Seeing their judicial bosses up close and under pressure, the detectives formed the clear impression that some—particularly those further down the career ladder—were reluctant to go the extra mile and actually indict or convict once the case file had been amassed. Others tended to bow to informal pressure to extend kid-glove treatment to former military personnel, even down to the timing and location of eventual sentence serving.36 In short, judges’ new corporate commitment was to investigate, not necessarily to convict or to punish. In the early years of the new case universe, amnesty was often still invoked by judges at all levels. The erratic patchwork of convictions and effective absolutions that resulted made a mockery of the principle of judicial certainty and clearly followed individual judicial preferences. Knowing the name of the judge, or the composition of the appeals bench, allowed accurate prediction of the outcome, almost independently of the strength of evidence. It was not until around 2004 that the rather routine principle that international law prevents application of amnesty to war crimes or crimes against humanity was established as relatively stable doctrine.

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This final step, allowing the prosecution of theoretically amnestiable 1970s crimes of repression, went qualitatively beyond the exceptions and exemptions that had previously been admitted but still did not go so far as to strike down the amnesty law itself (something that, after all, the Argentine courts had begun to do in 2001 and the legislature had completed in 2003). The relative circumspection of Chilean judges in these matters extended to their description and treatment of the crimes themselves: strictly speaking, no one was ever accused or convicted of human rights violations per se. Only domestic code crimes as specified in the prevailing law of the time—law often made, of course, by the regime itself —were accepted as valid charges. Therefore, for the purposes of trials, no instance of torture or disappearance has ever been proven or punished in Chile. The only offences for which sentences have been issued since 2000 have been the five ordinary crimes of homicide, kidnap, criminal conspiracy, illegal burial or apremios ilegitimos. The latter is best translated as illicit or extrajudicial “pressure,” a euphemistic and lesser treatment of the crime of torture.37 This rather unadventurous and decidedly minimalist approach to the classification of offences was also, in 2007, complemented by a vertiginous drop in the length of final sentences. A sentencing formula allowing sentence discounts where a long time has elapsed between crime and conviction was seized on by the Supreme Court and quickly became of routine application in human rights cases. Its effect was typically to reduce a fifteen-year initial sentence for homicide to a five-year suspended sentence on appeal. The principle, known as “gradual prescription,” was applied to almost every final human rights case verdict between mid-2007 and mid-2012, and is the main reason that only around a third of finally convicted perpetrators are actually serving their sentences in jail. Almost all of those who landed in jail are located in specially designed and relatively luxurious military facilities rather than common prisons. This outcome became another bone of contention for relatives and human rights organizations, who found the judiciary’s belated conversion to the cause of accountability, though in principle welcome, to lack conviction in practice. The long-awaited unblocking of the judicial route, in other words, has proved, as perhaps it must, disappointing for those who most sought it and inconvenient, rather than catastrophic, for the institutions and individuals who did not. The present pattern of judicial action on cases thus feels like a very Chilean compromise of “not too much” justice, delivered in a muted and deliberately low-profile manner. Although gradual prescription was apparently discontinued in mid-2012,

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after a criminal bench reshuffle, sentences have never matched the thirty-five-year-plus average imposed for similar crimes in neighboring Argentina. Has this judicial prudence been necessary to preserve social peace? Did the first post-2000 convictions cause such social and political turbulence that a certain amount of subsequent restraint could be expected or even recommended? In fact, although initial shock waves were generated by the sight of apparently untouchable figures such as Pinochet himself having to answer to the courts, while other notorious regime agents went38 or went back39 to prison, national life adapted rapidly to the steady advance of investigations. Once the current armed forces, mainstream political right, and government authorities realized that cases could not be truncated by force of will alone, they seemed to resign themselves to a certain inexorable rhythm. The absence of permanent evident tensions over the matter is almost certainly deceptive and equally certainly owes much to the relatively lenient approach to punishment finally adopted by the Supreme Court. Despite the periodic appearance of proposals to pardon the convicted, foreshorten ongoing cases, or otherwise rein in or reduce the reach of prosecutions, major “irruptions”—to use Alex Wilde’s phrase—have become rarer in this field since the death of Pinochet in 2006. The physical removal of the regime’s most identifiable love-hate figure from the scene was undoubtedly a major turning point. Most of the other names on trial belong to secret police operatives whose actions few today want seriously to defend. Unlike Pinochet, they are not directly associated with the more precious political and economic legacies that regime supporters defend. Antiprosecution reaction from the more extreme fringes of the right served, if anything, to force the mainstream right to moderate its own position (see the chapter by Collins and Hite in this volume). Since 2000 it had undoubtedly become much less common than previously to hear this side of the regime’s behavior either denied or defended. Trials have almost certainly played a part in this shift in discourse, although it is perhaps impossible to quantify precisely or to distinguish their specific contribution from other relevant shifts such as progressive truth recovery or revelation, broader cultural change, and symbolic activity including reparations and memorials. Trials in Chile—late, often slow, and occasionally unsatisfactory as they have been—have, at least, served a range of purposes including the practical demonstration that national-level justice is a viable and potentially more complete alternative to hybrid or international tribunals. Carried out with exemplary and at times almost exaggerated respect for the due process rights of the accused, it is hard to seriously

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impugn the convictions that have to date resulted. In this way, trials have served the purpose Ignatieff calls “narrowing the space of acceptable lies”. Public opinion work by the Universidad Diego Portales suggests, for example, that by 2010 a large majority of the general population believed that trials should continue and that the existing number of trials and convictions was in fact very low compared to the real magnitude of the crimes committed.40 The experience of finally investigating and seeing through these trials has, meanwhile, educated at least a portion of judicial personnel in international standards and international law. Although there is little evidence that the judiciary has thereby been converted to an activist or pro-rights stance on other issues,41 specific actions such as the 2007 Supreme Court decision to allow the extradition of former Peruvian head of state Alberto Fujimori from Chile are difficult, if not impossible, to imagine had those prior changes in internal accountability not taken place. Chile, accordingly, has been or has become part of a broader regional trend away from impunity or blanket amnesty. The growth of international cooperation and extradition requests as other Southern Cone countries have activated case universes of their own has perhaps also helped Chile to become more aware of itself as one setting among a number grappling with similar issues. The Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court on Human Rights have become more active as higher venues for the legal issues these cases raise. Although Chile, in particular, has shown itself to date impervious at a political level to the Court’s findings,42 juridically these are increasingly cited in deliberations over final verdicts in human rights cases, generally to support a pro-accountability position.43 Beyond the specifically legal frame, trials have certainly not brought about open social conflict, though they have at times served to expose the persistence of continuing ideological fractures. They have also added a particular edge to periodic conflicts between the judicial and other branches of state, in particular the executive, given Chile’s highly presidentialist system. A 2010 shift to a right-wing executive, overlapping for a time with a Supreme Court president associated with human rights case progress,44 largely left the judiciary seeming the more progressive branch of government. But this discrepancy was visible even under the Concertación and should not, in either case, be allowed to obscure the very real timidity and limited nature of the judiciary’s pro-accountability stance. In a broader perspective, the fact that the question of what is just and moral in regard to past atrocities was allowed to become a suddenly and almost exclusively judicialized question after 1998 speaks volumes. It suggests a continuing social and

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political reluctance to be forced to define a more explicit or more robust stance on the question of responsibilities. Criminal cases began in 2008 to open up the question of civilians’ criminal responsibilities, but in a limited way, restricted to direct participants in individual criminal episodes45 rather than senior current politicians who had held cabinet posts in the previous regime. A number of civil cases, or of civil damages claims appended to criminal complaints, have, if anything, further narrowed the scope of official acknowledgement. The present-day state has vigorously defended itself against such claims, in effect disowning the responsibilities admitted in the Rettig report.46 As far as criminal cases are concerned, these have concentrated, even more than did truthtelling, on the most dramatic crimes of disappearance or assassination. Only recently has a tiny proportion—around 29 cases of a mid-2012 total of 1,445—been brought for survived torture, a crime that has to date produced only a single effective custodial sentence, of one hundred days. Criminal prosecutions have not only targeted low-ranking perpetrators. Initially, however, they largely featured members of the parallel shadowy intelligence services who were particularly active in the regime’s early years and, moreover, operated outside of normal armed forces’ command structures. Once trials began potentially to reach serving, rather than only retired, officers, a perverse logic began to operate by which judicialization threatens to reverse previous advances on military reform or the “purging” of institutions responsible for infractions. Prior to the significant expansion of the case universe in 2000, a tacit agreement had apparently been reached that officials linked to past repression would not be approved for promotion or earmarked for conspicuous high-ranking roles. Voices on the right and in military circles, however, began to suggest that, now the possibility of trial and conviction was clearly open, anyone who had not been indicted must be considered wholly legally and morally innocent and could not therefore be passed over in this way. This argument, which has some force, illustrates what for accountability enthusiasts must be considered the flip side of judicialization in an extremely legalistic culture, and it is to this matter that we now turn. Dimensions of Legalism in Chilean Accountability Practice

The tendency to respect or at least to preserve the existing legal edifice inherited from the dictatorship period was heavily in evidence in Chile at two key moments for accountability: 1990 and 1998. In 1990 the principle of legality-as-continuity underpinned the transitional

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framework itself, minor constitutional changes notwithstanding. In 1998 it formed the basis of the discursive and policy framework applied to the Pinochet arrest. In denying the extraterritoriality of international law the Chilean government was defending, it claimed, a principle—sovereignty and sovereign immunity—rather than an individual. The main effects of this legal framing on subsequent justice trends were fourfold. First, dealing with past crimes wrought specific, demonstrable changes on the judiciary itself. Second, the particular institutional arrangements adopted restricted rather than stimulated broader innovation in rights practice. Third, legal actions broadened out and finally completed previous truth recovery. Fourth, accountability issues introduced new tensions to the judiciary’s internal and external relationships (between judges; with other justice system actors; with other branches of state and military/political elites, and with elements of organized civil society). As regards the first of these, changes to the judiciary, the judicialization of politics over time produced its intuitive correlate, the politicization of the judiciary. After 1998 judges were handed almost sole responsibility for the issue that no previous authorities, including of course the judiciary itself, had wanted to address. Previously unrewarding but also essentially unremarkable, the accountability issue became a political and diplomatic hot potato as soon as Pinochet himself, rather than some more lowly triggerman, was in the frame. For several years after Pinochet’s return from the UK, Chilean judges made regular headline news at home and abroad solely over their performance in cases involving him. Individually, some judges clearly resented the attention while a small number seemed to relish it. But corporately—and the Chilean judiciary is nothing if not a corporate entity—the general impression was one of rather fusty irritation that judicial decisions were being scrutinized by the uninitiated, whether approvingly or otherwise. The more pompous elements of the judiciary seemed to regard themselves as an almost priestly caste, called to rise above popular opinion and certainly not to succumb to moral suasion over the supposed rightness or fairness of an existing statute such as the 1978 amnesty law. Laws, carved in stone, were simply to be applied in the most literal and mechanical of ways, with interpretation regarded as a suspect business. The suggestion that prevailing judicial practice already betrayed a good deal of discretional interpretation was treated as almost heretical. Changes produced by the augmentation of the human rights caseload, corporately perceived as a threat, were magnified by the effect of unrelated modernization reforms from the mid-1990s. One cohort of senior judges had been retired, and the ranks of the remaining ones

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swollen by an influx of noncareer judges, introduced precisely to bring fresh air into the system. The immediate impression seemed to be one of instability and the immediate reaction, perhaps predictably, was conservatism with a small “c”. Pinochet case(s) judge Juan Guzman was criticized from within for the transgressive tone or tenor of his actions as much as for their content. Criticized, with good reason, for some of his patchier judicial reasoning or investigative technique, Guzmán’s weightier sin for some of his senior colleagues seemed rather to be his alleged fondness for the limelight, with his willingness to talk to the press generally regarded as beyond the pale. The fact that a previously reliably conservative judge had clearly experienced some sort of personal epiphany through close contact with these cases and with the witnesses and evidence surrounding them also represented to some a window of opportunity and for others a cautionary tale. If Guzmán, then why not others? In this light the assignation fairly early in the “justice revival” of specialized case judges for human rights cases takes on a double meaning. Systemic learning was thereby limited, with specialized judges learning a lot very fast but not necessarily diffusing their knowledge to colleagues or throughout the system as a whole. Cases continued long enough to usher some judges, including Guzmán, into retirement; and others into the next life.47 On the other hand, judicial specialization undoubtedly allowed for a relatively—but only relatively—more expeditious advance of the human rights case universe. Variations in individual levels of knowledge and professional proficiency among the judges actually assigned could be ironed out by patient nursing from the experienced human rights lawyers and specialized detectives who increasingly orchestrated real advances. Data and testimony were shared across cases and related cases were grouped into single episodes, both practices almost unknown under the previous patchwork of military and regional court cases. These developments finally allowed justice system operators to acquire the kind of encyclopedic understanding of repressive structures and systems that only human rights organizations had previously enjoyed.48 The state as such finally became cognizant of patterns that others—both perpetrators and victims—had known for years, giving the lie in passing to any continued suggestion that violations had been “individual excesses” rather than systematic policy. Judicial investigations from 1998 uncovered previously unknown facts and incidents even in this, the region’s perhaps most completely documented and studied repression. Witness and perpetrator accounts in apparently unrelated cases began to throw up similar references to a detention site or center whose clandestine title was not instantly

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recognizable. The confession of a low-level civilian agent eventually made it clear that this was a wholly new site where, it seemed, agents had energetically and singlemindedly dedicated themselves to the physical extermination of Communist Party leaders and members. The Simón Bolivar headquarters, situated in an uptown Santiago street of the same name, had finally been uncovered and the fate of various stilldisappeared individuals could finally be traced. The process had taken so long largely because most previous centers had been identified and denounced by survivors: Simón Bolivar had none. To this day, no one other than torturers or their accomplices is known to have emerged from Simón Bolivar alive. The crimes finally cleared up through this belated discovery included that of the death of Communist Party leader Victor Díaz, father of faithful and iconic Relatives’ Association member Viviana Díaz. The testimony that she sat through, from agents who had witnessed her father’s prolonged detention and agonizing death, finally explained an anomaly that the family had never been able to reconcile—the relatively early date of his disappearance versus later rumors and phone calls suggesting he was still alive—but otherwise left the activist wondering for the first time ever “whether there are some things it’s better not to know” (author interviews with Viviana Díaz, Santiago, 2012 and 2013). This is one of the senses in which judicial investigation, though in Chile carried out literally behind closed doors, has completed and extended previous truth recovery. This has, perhaps predictably, proved a doubleedged sword. The peculiarly sheltered nature of a written investigative system that has no fully public hearings nor any adversarial component has limited the broader public transmission of these additional truths to what media sources choose to report and the public choose to watch and read. “New truths” have nonetheless been taken up by the national Museum of Memory and Human Rights, memorial site educational programs, and a range of other interested parties. There is certainly much in the wealth of written case material now being produced that is going unnoticed and unstudied, but whereas documentation from the 2004–2005 and 2011 Valech truth commission has been declared secret and locked away, judicial records at least in theory become part of the public record.49 Finally, the introduction or reintroduction to the ordinary judicial system of such an essentially thankless and yet symbolically loaded question as accountability for past crimes has generated its share of both generic and specific tensions. Distancing between the executive and the judicial branch over these issues, discussed above, was, if anything, exacerbated after 2010 by the right-wing government’s law-and-order

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discourse. This involved shifting the blame for repeat crime onto the supposedly excessively lenient, garantista tendencies of state prosecutors and judges alike. In final interviews before handing on his leadership role, outgoing Supreme Court president Juica was moved to declare 2010 and 2011 the worst period since the return to democracy for executive pressure and interference in judicial activity. Occasional tensions also arose with the legislature, whose resolute failure to deal with the 2006 Inter-American Court Almonacid case ruling over amnesty led to reminders that all branches of state, not only the judicial, share responsibility for implementing Court verdicts. Another, and for the courts a more novel, source of tension introduced by these cases was the direct and sometimes intense relationship with witnesses, relatives, survivors, and perpetrators demanded by lengthy and intricate investigations of long-ago events. Judges were largely unprepared, both professionally and psychologically, for the specific demands of investigating traumatic mass crimes.50 Horror stories of unaccompanied witnesses physically confronted by a phalanx of hostile defense lawyers, or cited repeatedly to give the same testimony for administrative convenience or on judicial whim, are certainly more common than they ought to be. In general, the encounter between judges and victims has been particularly loaded given the previous history of inaction on the issue, and judges who expected to find themselves hailed as heroes of justice in this new era have sometimes received a rude awakening.51 Conclusions

What Chilean judges do about human rights cases has changed significantly, perhaps dramatically, since 1998 and certainly since 2000. The internal contradictions and limited parameters of this change nonetheless suggest that shifts are due less to some inexorable external compulsion than to changes in what judges jointly and severally choose to do and want to do about such cases. These predispositions or orientations have in turn been influenced by changing perceptions of what political authorities, and national and international society, want to see or believe is just. The specific mechanisms through which these changes have been assimilated are various and include, beginning in 1997, important judicial reforms that expanded and changed senior court membership and thinking. While Chilean judges generally criticized the Pinochet arrest of 1998, they also acknowledge, at least in private, its demonstration effect on national judicial practices and particularly on human rights case criteria.52 Jorge Correa Sutil, jurist and former member of the Chilean Constitutional Court, claims a “Garzón effect”

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since, he says, “to have a foreign judiciary acting in a way that could only be described as a substitution for what the Chilean judiciary had failed to do, implied a powerful critique of their personal and collective efforts.”53 The combination of judicial reforms preceding Pinochet’s arrest, coupled with judicial-political sensitivity to international opinion and international legal norms, operated together in a changed national context to produce a new openness to creative reinterpretation of the 1978 amnesty law and the subsequent reopening of the question of criminal liability for human-rights-related crimes. The essentially political nature of this initial shift has made subsequent progress contingent, occasionally unpredictable, and potentially reversible. First, domestic law was reinterpreted, then, somewhat begrudgingly, international legal principles were recognized in order to remove some portions of the human rights case universe from the reach of amnesty. The upshot has in general terms been significant change in de facto outcomes, without concomitant, potentially more lasting, change in law or procedure. Between 2007 and 2012, an essentially unstable equilibrium within the Supreme Court’s criminal bench has produced what seem to be disproportionately low sentences for such serious crimes. The partial reversal of this tendency after May 2012 was no more reliable than previous alterations, since it too was the product of fine shifts in minority voting patterns caused by rotation of senior judicial personnel. One significant comparative question for other settings is the extent to which the symbolic and moral force of domestic prosecution is blunted altogether by these kinds of accommodation and contextualization in prosecution of mass atrocity.

                                                                                                                1

The first documented attempt was a habeas corpus writ submitted by lawyer and Christian Democrat politician Bernardo Leighton on 14 September 1973 for seven detained union activists or political leaders. The ecumenical “ProPaz” relief committee was founded in 1973 and transformed into the Catholic Church-run Vicaría de la Solidaridad shortly thereafter. 2 See Cath Collins,“Human Rights Trials in Chile during and after the ‘Pinochet Years’,“ International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), pp. 67-86, for details of the operation of these factors in Chile’s domestic justice trajectory; and Collins “The End of Impunity? ‘Late Justice’ and Post-Transitional Prosecutions in Latin America” in Phil Clark, Danielle Granville and Nicola Palmer (eds.), Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2012) pp. 399-442, for a comparative account of their significance across the region in recent years. 3 Huneeus also points to the groundwork previously laid by the human rights community, investigative journalists, and a handful of diligent judges. Carlos Huneeus, “The Consequences of the Pinochet Case for Chilean Politics,”

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in Madeleine Davis, ed., The Pinochet Case: Origins, Progress and Implications (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003), pp. 169-188. 4 The Santiago Appeals Court, for example, resolved in 2000 to allow domestic investigations against Pinochet to proceed when prevailing political logic clearly called for cases to be quietly shelved. Ibid. 5 Both Politzer and Garretón were speakers at the October 2008 “Pinochet Effect” conference held at Santiago’s Universidad Diego Portales. Quotes are taken from the conference report of the same name, authored by Brett (2009) and available in both English and Spanish at www.icso.cl/observatorioderechos-humanos, publications section (accessed 20 January 2013). 6 In fact, as mentioned above, Huneeus focuses on adoption of the “principle of legality,” interpreted as continuing respect for 1990’s actually existing legal and constitutional framework and realities as the terrain onto which the transitional route map was to be traced. 7 The project was a direct response to the specific research agenda identified by attendees at the 2008 conference already mentioned. More details, and detailed reference material in English or Spanish, can be found at the project’s website www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos (accessed 20 January 2013). Grateful thanks are due to current and past team members of the Observatorio, as to various groups of student interns, for their tireless and often voluntary contribution over the years to the activities, data, analyses and opinions on which this chapter draws. For an appraisal of tendencies in a broader range of human rights issues over time, see the annual reports produced by the Observatory’s partner Human Rights Centre, also run by the Universidad Diego Portales, www.derechoshumanos.udp.cl (accessed 20 January 2013; Spanish only). 8 Victim numbers are always a contested issue. Officially recognized victim and survivor totals stood in 2011 at 3,216 dead and disappeared and 38,254 survivors of torture and political imprisonment. The first total includes both state and nonstate attributed incidents—the latter at around 10 percent of the total—but the second, survivor, figure only includes incidents for which state agents were demonstrably responsible. See www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechoshumanos (accessed 20 January 2013). 9 The regime’s first acts included the closure of Congress, banning of all political parties, and introduction of a series of constantly extended states of emergency or exception, which imposed curfews and suspended constitutional guarantees. 10 This included designated senators, who in effect swelled the already substantial right-wing vote. See other chapters in this volume for details. 11 Where 1984 trials of former junta members had provoked violent military reaction, amnesty, and eventually pardons. 12 This was located in the town of Pisagua. See Hite and Collins’s chapter for more detail. 13 Aylwin did, however, attempt to challenge Pinochet over the particularly intemperate language used in his denunciation. 14 A political cartoon of the time shows a winding queue of eager would-be purchasers asking “Rettig report, please,” but their dark suits and Aviator sunglasses give them away: all are former secret police agents. Reprinted in the collection Rufino, Civiles No Identificados, Editorial Midia, Santiago, 2009.

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15 This was a contention made by the first junta when it declared a state of emergency “equivalent” to an internal state of war. This largely fictitious war, however, had only one set of combatants. The legal fiction finally rebounded on regime agents after 2000. The Supreme Court decided that the armed forces’ insistence on or belief in a prevailing state of war in fact made them more, rather than less, liable to prosecution since it activated the Geneva Convention’s protections for prisoners. 16 Including Gonzalo Vial, a prominent right-wing historian and biographer of Pinochet who finally admitted, years after taking part in Rettig, that he had played a part in drafting “El Libro Blanco del Regimen Militar.” This propaganda piece, released by the regime shortly after the coup, purported to show that the Allende regime had been heavily armed and planning acts of mass violence. 17 The report’s findings were handed to the courts, with some subsequent action over the search for remains of the disappeared. A continued maximalist interpretation of amnesty was nonetheless applied and even strengthened to preempt the possibility of criminal prosecutions. The relatively few death or disappearance cases not covered by amnesty owing to their date of commission usually remained in the hands of the recalcitrant military justice system. 18 The only substantial moral, rather than economic, reparations measure in this early package was a public monument to victims. It was precisely this element that was long delayed, sited out of constant public view (in the capital’s General Cemetery rather than in its main everyday spaces), and inaugurated in a decidedly low-key ceremony with no cabinet-rank government figures in attendance. See Alexander Wilde, chapter one in this volume and “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy”, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 31 no. 2 (1999), pp. 473-500. 19 See Manuel Antonio Garretón’s oft-cited concept of “authoritarian enclaves,” discussed by Peter Siavelis as the construction of “autonomous powers” that “usurp the authority and legislative capacity of . . . the Congress and the President.” Peter Siavelis, The President and Congress in Postauthoritarian Chile: Institutional Constraints to Democratic Consolidation (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), pp. 185-190. See also Peter Siavelis and Kirsten Sehnbruch (eds.), Concertación Governments in Chile 1990-2010: Politics, Economics and Social Policy under the Rainbow (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2013). Logically, the exercise of this capacity over time affords these same bodies significant political agency, transforming them in effect into mainstream political actors. 20 See the preceding chapter in this volume. Elizabeth Lira, in remarks to the 2008 Pinochet Effect conference already mentioned, also emphasized the exaggerated fear of dissent or political conflict that has characterized post-1990 national life (roundtable session, transcript on file with author). 21 Notably, though not exclusively, Catholic Church or Christian Democratrelated organizations such as the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Comisión Chilena de Derechos Humanos, and FASIC, the Fundacion de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas. 22 Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman’s increasingly historically focused work has relentlessly exposed how authoritarian tendencies and violent practices long predate the 1973 rupture. Their chapter in this volume depicts the

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possible or actual deployment of exemplary violence against political opponents as a routine part of official political praxis from the foundation of the Republic, making the Pinochet regime unique only in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. 23 The high residual electoral strength of the regime among the electorate in 1990, and popular sympathy for some or all aspects of its achievements, are too often overlooked or underestimated. As one powerful indication, public opinion data produced by the Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea, CERC, show that between 1989 and 1995 over 50 percent of those polled consistently characterized the regime as “a mixture of good and bad.” The proportion evaluating it in entirely positive terms never fell below double figures, while outright rejection never rose above a 1991 peak of 29 percent and in fact declined consistently after 1996. See Huneeus, “The Consequences of the Pinochet Case for Chilean Politics,” p. 54. 24 This fact suggested ineluctably that the human rights legacy was not considered to be one of these problems, as judges at the time were clearly uninterested in addressing this issue. Judges scored 48 percent in the poll, tying with the regular police force (Carabineros) and bettered only by senior clerics (at 58 percent) and businessmen (49 percent). CERC national public opinion data are reproduced and analyzed in ibid., pp. 172-173 and 213-216). 25 Ibid. The questions about civilian politicians were not posed in the 1988 version of the poll, for obvious reasons. 26 See Pablo Larraín’s 2012 film No, a fictionalized recounting of the now famous campaign. 27 Certain leading Christian Democrats supported the 1973 coup, believing it would be a temporary interlude leading to their own return to power. A 2013 criminal complaint brought by both leading relatives’ associations and a human rights lawyer prominent in the Communist Party sought to underline precisely these associations. The querella denounced prominent civilian figures including former president Aylwin, and represented the first legal action of recent times aimed not at later regime crimes but at the violent, civilian-instigated seizure of power that preceded them. 28 For a more detailed account of the continuities that link past and present legal action over past human rights abuses in Chile, see Collins, “Human Rights Trials in Chile during and after the ‘Pinochet years’,” pp. 67-86, and PostTransitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010). 29 The degollados and Jiménez killings took place in the 1980s, whereas the amnesty law could only legally apply to crimes committed before its promulgation in March 1978. The period from 1973 to 1978, however, included the majority of fatal violence and disappearances. The Letelier case was unique among these 1970s murders in being explicitly excluded from the amnesty law, at US insistence and due to its having taken place on US soil. 30 The Rettig commission’s follow-up body, which worked from 1996 before being transformed into what is today the state Human Rights Program, was explicitly restricted by mandate to searching for the disappeared or the remains of the politically executed whose whereabouts were still unknown. This latter category represented victims whose families had been officially told of their deaths but refused permission to take possession of the remains for burial. The Program was not allowed to take legal action tending towards the

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assignment of criminal responsibility in such cases, nor to take any action whatever over survivors, nor over victims whose remains had been handed to their families and buried in the regular way. The Program was also deliberately located within the Interior Ministry, rather than the Justice Ministry, to dispel any misgivings from the military or the right about a possible prosecution agenda. 31 This case did not, moreover, directly involve Pinochet 32 Events contributing to strained relations included the first ever sacking of a sitting Supreme Court judge by his peers. The judge, dismissed in April 2001 for misconduct, had been considered close to the government and was regularly described in the press as the “Concertación’s man in the court.” 33 These included Carlos Cerda, who had been censured during the 1980s for his valiant efforts in human- rights-related investigations but who had by sheer staying power reached the presidency of the Santiago Appeals Court in a crucial year. Cerda’s second foray into human rights advocacy again brought personal costs: in 2006 he was vetoed in the Senate for a Supreme Court seat by the right. Explicit reference was made to his role in human rights cases and the investigation of financial corruption involving the Pinochet family. In early 2013, supposedly technical adjustments made to rules for the calculation of seniority ensured that Cerda would hitherto be preceded in automatic nominations for future Supreme Court vacancies by a notoriously conservative figure, previously vetoed for his denialist position on both Chilean atrocities and the Jewish holocaust. 34 According to the courts’ own figures, no more than 2 percent have been resolved. By October 2012 1,342 human rights investigations were open while Supreme Court figures claimed that final verdicts had been handed down in around one hundred sixty cases since 2002. 35 The Brigade is a spinoff of the internal affairs department of Chile’s Policía de Investigaciones, PDI, a civilian detective force. The Human Rights Brigade carries out on-the-ground investigation of human rights cases, both past and present, at the behest of investigative magistrates or public prosecutors. The PDI, like its counterpart the (militarized) regular police force, Carabineros, operates as a single territorial unit with no federal or municipal variants. The PDI’s Human Rights Brigade operates out of a single headquarters in the capital, Santiago, although with national reach and jurisdiction. 36 “First time round [in 1970s and 1980s pseudo- investigations] military officers were just never cited. This time round, it was always junior not senior officers at first. They would get to say where they were questioned, instead of being brought in to the station like anyone else.”. “After the Contreras debacle [noisy protests and confrontations outside the courtroom where the former secret police chief was brought to be officially notified of a new conviction] we got the order to ‘avoid incidents’. In practice that means [convicted repressors] get notified at home or through their lawyers. Then they get to turn up under their own cognizance to serve their sentences. There’s no prison van, no handcuffs . . . . {I]t’s definitely special treatment.” Author interviews, 2010– 2013, with former senior detectives in the Human Rights Brigade and with judicial branch staff, identities reserved. 37 Torture was finally, albeit unsatisfactorily, codified and penalized in Chilean law but not until July 2008, far too late to be applied retrospectively to these cases.

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38 These included Miguel Krassnoff and Hugo Salas Wenzel, senior political police officials at different points in the dictatorship. 39 Among those were Manuel Contreras and his former second-incommand, Pedro Espinoza, who had both been briefly jailed in 1995 for their role in the Letelier assassination and were convicted once again, of additional crimes, after 2004. 40 UDP Opinion Poll 2010, human rights segment. See www.icso.cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos, publications section (accessed 20 January 2013). 41 See Javier Couso “The Judicialization of Chilean Politics: The Rights Revolution That Never Was” in Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell, eds., The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) on this point. 42 For example, Chile has resolutely failed since 2006 to comply with legislative modification of the amnesty law required by the adverse Almonacid case verdict of that year. 43 Unpublished original comparative data amassed by the Universidad Diego Portales Human Rights Observatory, available on request. 44 The Supreme Court president was then Milton Juica, who was replaced in early 2012, on expiry of his term, by the much more conservative, and proamnesty, Ruben Ballesteros. The consequent return of Juica to the criminal bench that actually resolves most human rights cases nonetheless produced, if anything, a net improvement in the prospects for accountability, as evidenced by an initial abandonment of gradual prescription in cases on which Juica sat. 45 Such as civilian landowners implicated in the Paine massacre (see the chapter by Collins and Hite). 46 A full sitting of the Supreme Court resolved in early 2013 that statutes of limitation, long ruled inadmissible for the purposes of criminal prosecution of crimes against humanity, should nonetheless be applied to the question of (state) liability. 47 At the 2008 UDP conference Cristian Riego, of regional justice NGO CEJIL, made this point forcefully. He argued that the Chilean propensity to “resolve” tensions in a short- term and resolutely noninstitutionalizing way was perhaps the worst enemy of future democratic quality and rights-guaranteeing progress, since it was designed precisely to avoid rather than engineer lasting change. Roundtable comments, on file with author. Leading human rights case lawyers and judicial sources interviewed in 2012 and 2013 claimed, moreover, that lower court judges were reluctant to be “drafted” onto human rights cases, seeing them as a probable career dead end. 48 In mid-2012 the Interior Ministry Human Rights Program and the PDI’s Human Rights Brigade began to meet regularly with the AFEP, one of the main relatives’ associations, instigating a fortnightly ‘legal clinic’ to pool information and ideas about stalled cases. The innovation grew from AFEP initiatives in seeking out training workshops with forensic scientists and detectives in order to better understand technical requirements in their submission of new complaints. 49 In recognition of the potential importance of this source, outgoing Supreme Court president Milton Juica presented scanned copies of entire human rights cases files to the national Museum of Memory and Human Rights in January 2012, promising that more would be made available.

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50 Few judges showed themselves willing to initiate collegiate or interdisciplinary ways of working. Amongst the honorable exceptions is Alejandro Solís, who introduced a full time social worker to his team and collaborated closely with forensic service colleagues during his investigation of particularly sensitive misidentifications of bodies exhumed from in the Patio 29 section of Santiago’s General Cemetery. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, on his retirement in December 2012 Solís had signally failed to reach the Supreme Court, but had the distinction of being the specially designated human rights case judge who had resolved most cases. 51 One specially designated judge emerged beaming from an interim hearing, at which he had preferred charges, apparently expecting to be feted by relatives. Seeking out the victim’s brother, he graciously declared his intention to shake hands in recognition of the man’s long dedication to the case. The brother politely but firmly declined the proffered hand, saying “I’ll shake hands with you when you finally do your job and send that man to prison.” 52 See, e.g., Alexandra Huneeus, “Judging from a Guilty Conscience: The Chilean Judiciary’s Human Rights Turn”, Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1 (Winter 2010), and Lisa Hilbink, Judges Beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) , and remarks quoted in Brett, report on the Pinochet Effect conference (2009), pp. 22-23. 53 Correa Sutil quoted in Brett, ibid.

4 Torture as Public Policy, 1810–2010 Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman

After the Chilean military coup of 1973, human rights violations and torture of detainees in police stations, sport stadiums, clandestine torture centers, and many other locales became common. Family members of victims retained lawyers to locate and defend the detained and missing. A small band of human rights lawyers presented writs of habeas corpus (recursos de amparo) seeking the release or, at least, the location of those detained. In almost all cases these writs, as well as legal action (denuncias) against “those who are found responsible” (contra quienes resulten responsables), were rejected by the courts.1 Nevertheless, these legal actions created an official record of massive violation of human rights, torture, and “disappearances” throughout the country. In the next thirty years, with few exceptions, little progress would be made in judicial investigations of these cases nor would perpetrators be identified or brought to trial. Notwithstanding the lack of progress in investigating these human rights violations by the Chilean judiciary, family members of victims, the human rights lawyers, and some of their political allies persisted in the quest for truth (investigation of the crimes), justice (prosecution), and punishment of those responsible for human rights violations and torture. Not until creation of the so-called Valech commission (The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, chaired by Bishop Emeritus Monsignor Sergio Valech), and its reports of November 2004 and June 2005, did thousands of survivors of torture receive some official recognition of their suffering and limited

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reparation. The Valech commission report opens with the conclusion that during the military dictatorship, “consciously or unconsciously, a conspiracy of silence about the torture spread slowly through the country.”2 It reported that political prison and torture constituted a state policy during the military regime, defined and promoted by the political authorities of the period that mobilized personnel and resources of various public organizations and issued decrees and laws that protected such repressive behavior. All of this counted on the support, sometimes explicit but usually tacit, of the judiciary.3 The military dictatorship installed in 1973 used torture systematically and massively as public policy, on a scale unprecedented in Chile. This extensive use of torture against opponents and “enemies” of the Fatherland (Patria) between 1973 and 1990 was denounced in Chile, in international fora such as the United Nations and Organization of American States, and by a variety of nongovernmental organizations around the world.4 Yet few critics of the military regime noted that it perpetuated and expanded a practice embedded in Chilean police and judicial practice since colonial times and used throughout Chile’s existence as an independent republic. Torture as public policy was a customary, if not legal, ingredient in Chilean politics, law enforcement, and the prison system. When to use torture and “appropriate” methods had sometimes been controversial, but the torture of common criminals and political adversaries had been common in Chile, as had been impunity for torturers. Reparation for victims of torture had rarely been discussed in Congress or made part of the political agenda by the country’s major political parties.5 In this chapter we review the practice of torture in Chile as an instrument against political adversaries and “enemies” of incumbent governments from colonial times to the present. We do not address, except in passing, the systematic torture and mistreatment of common criminals.6 We also consider denunciation of, and resistance to, the practice of torture from the nineteenth century to the present. This historical retrospective, necessarily synoptic, reconstructs the cultural and political foundations of the practice of torturing “enemies of the state” since colonial times. The chapter is not intended as a systematic investigation or history of torture in Chile. Rather, we have chosen key moments in Chilean history as “snapshots” of the use and resistance to torture as public policy: (1) the independence movement and the Spanish “reconquest” (1814–1817); (2) the formation of the “Portalian State” (1833–1861); (3) the 1891 civil war; (4) the dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez, 1927–1931; (5) the increasing polarization of politics from 1932 to 1973; and (6) the military dictatorship, 1973–1990. We conclude with

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a brief consideration of the post-1990 period and a summary of the work of the Valech commission, its achievements, and its limitations. The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition

The application of torture (tormento), as well as threats of torture to extract confessions (torture in caput proprium) or information about other potential heretics, witches, or other “enemies” of the faith (torture in caput alienum), was a routine instrument of the Spanish Inquisition throughout colonial Spanish America. Torture was an instrument of both religious and political control. In Chile, as elsewhere in the Spanish colonies, the process typically began when an informant (delator) accused someone of witchcraft, blasphemy, practicing or spreading Judaism (judaizante), or some other crime against the Catholic faith or the Spanish monarchy. Chilean historian José Toribio Medina investigated the Inquisition in Chile and its connection to the Tribunal at Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty. Medina’s archival research yielded excruciating details on the use of torture against enemies of the faith and potential enemies of the Crown (supposedly, Jews conspired with Portuguese, Dutch, and British interests to wrest the colonies from Spain). Medina explains that the Inquisition’s investigations took place in secret, and the identity of the informants was not revealed. In the first interrogation the inquisitors asked the accused if they knew the cause of their imprisonment. Denial was the typical response, to which the inquisitor would reply that the Holy Office did not arrest people without just cause, pressuring the detainee to confess, and then applying torture of various sorts to obtain a confession or other information sought by the inquisitors. In principle, the senior inquisitor (ordinario) would take part in the initial torture sessions.7 Medina adds that in the preliminary stages torture was limited to warning the “patient,” while he or she was undressed, that he or she should tell the truth. But when no confession was forthcoming, among the common methods of torture used by the Tribunal of the Holy Office were the rack (potro), pulleys (garrucha), and water torture (la toca).8 Medina relates that he does not include as part of the torture gagging (mordaza) or being placed in shackles (grillos), since these were routinely applied to prisoners in transporting them to the jails and the shackles remained in place even when the prisoners slept.9 Torture continued after interrogations; punishments included forced labor in extremely harsh conditions and flogging (azotes).10

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Before Medina’s history of the Inquisition, other Chilean scholars and policymakers had also noted the influence of inquisitorial practices in Chilean life. In 1862 Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna delivered an address to the Humanities Faculty at the University of Chile titled “What the Inquisition Was in Chile” (Lo que fue la Inquisición en Chile).11 Vicuña Mackenna included in a published version of his study of the Inquisition extracts of the Inquisitors’ Manual (Manual de Inquisidores), highlighting what he called “justifications” (piezas justificativas). These passages illustrated the ideological, political, and religious foundations of the Inquisition and detailed the procedures and methods used in the “trials” of the accused. Torture was justified as a useful instrument to uncover “enemies” and to reconcile them (that is, obtain their “redemption” and renewed “commitment”) to the existing regime. The practice of a religion other than Catholicism constituted not only religious treason but also treason against the Spanish monarchy. Anyone could be a suspect. This situation made necessary a sustained and systematic vigilance in identifying, persecuting, and separating transgressors from the rest of society. Preventing “contamination” of family and society by subversive ideas and practices was given high priority. The Inquisition focused on preventing ideological and religious contagion—a concern that would also be present in political discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when national states replaced the heretical enemies of the Inquisition with other enemies for whom biological metaphors became common: germs, virus, or cancer, which might threaten the body politic. The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition was abolished in the Spanish colonies by the Spanish Cortes (parliament) in 1813, but reestablished in July 1814 by King Ferdinand VII. The last representative of the Tribunal in Chile, José Antonio de Errázuriz y Madariaga, did not protest the Chilean Congress’s decision (25 September 1811) to retain the annual contribution to the Lima Inquisition Tribunal in Chile, a first step toward adhesion to the local independence movement and the end of the Inquisition in Chile.12 In 1821, with the independence of Peru, the Spanish Inquisition disappeared in South America. Medina finished his book on the Inquisition by noting that it had processed some 200 persons in Chile, adding that a French author claimed that the Inquisition in Lima had committed worse atrocities than the Inquisition in Spain.13

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The Legacies of the Inquisition

Some of the methods of torture used by the Inquisition were also routinely practised by police both before and after independence. During the reconquest of Chile by royalist forces from 1814 to 1817, the Spanish political police (Talaveras) were greatly feared for their use of torture. Literary works on this period refer to methods of torture, just as it had been practised by the Inquisition. Thus Francisco Ulloa relates that the Talaveras applied water torture to their adversaries “without compassion.”14 Similarly, Chilean novelist Alberto Blest Gana describes the actions of the political police in their searches of the houses of “patriots” (those fighting for independence), detention of suspected rebels, torture of prisoners, and the climate of fear created by the Talaveras violence. Giving orders to a corporal, the commander of the Talaveras, San Bruno, commands that “all the people in this house are prisoners and incommunicado. If anyone attempts to leave from here you are to apply 50 lashes, without further orders.”15 From 1818 to 1831 Chile experienced a period of political chaos, typical of South America after independence. However, with the victory of conservative factions over liberals in the Battle of Lircay (1830), Chile would become the most politically stable new Spanish American nation. Despite brief civil wars in 1851 and 1859, what came to be called the “Portalian State”—in honor of businessman-politician Diego Portales, who helped impose a constitution in 1833 that would endure until 1874 without reform—Chile became known for political stability and order. In the creation of this Portalian State, coercion, state terrorism, courts martial for civilians (consejos de guerra), press censorship, and repression of political opponents prevailed. Historian Vicuña Mackenna reports that in 1837 the government “was a dictatorship and it ruled through terror.”16 During thirty years Chile had three presidents, each serving two five-year terms. Although Vicuña Mackenna’s version of Chilean history reflects his liberal sympathies, even Chilean historians more sympathetic to the conservative governments of the 1831–1861 period recognize that torture, including frequent use of flogging (azotes), was routine in interrogations of prisoners and also as a form of punishment ordered by judges at the time of sentencing. By the time Chile finally adopted a penal code in 1874, leading criminal lawyers, jurists and politicians attempted to address violations of constitutional rights, including torture and abuse of prisoners. In

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particular, the code outlawed corporal punishment of prisoners by police, jail personnel, and other public officials except when carrying out the sentences of a judge.17 Robustiano Vera, a nineteenth-century authority on the penal code, described the types and methods of application of torture and the responsibility of judges in implementing these practices.18 His comments reveal torture methods that in many ways differed little from those used by the Inquisition—and those that would be used throughout the twentieth century. He also noted that the judges themselves could violate the prisoner’s constitutional rights and that they enjoyed impunity when they did so, whether in the case of torture or “excessive force” (rigor innecesario). According to Vera, the most frequent punishments meted out were: flogging (azotes); suspending the victim from the ceiling by the wrists, which are tied behind the back (garrucha or strappado);19 head and face slapping (bofetadas); starvation or a diet of bread and water; gagging; incarceration in humid, filthy cells; and isolation, without even a bed in the cell. Moreover, the accused were left in police custody, rather than taken to jail cells. If, despite threats, insults, and mistreatment, no confession was forthcoming on interrogation by the judge, the police agents were instructed to obtain a confession. Only after torture and obtaining a confession would the prisoner be taken back before a judge. If the prisoner recanted, he would be returned to police custody where the torture would be repeated until the prisoner admitted his guilt. If, when transferred to jail, the prisoner denounced his torture or retracted the confession, those accused of torture would be called as witnesses, if the prisoner could identify them. Since no other witnesses existed, the accused would deny that they had tortured the prisoner, and the conviction would be upheld. Vera ends this section of his commentary with a rhetorical question: “How many times have we seen these arbitrary actions and inspected the locale where these poor men were hung from their arms, without being able to prevent it? And what is worse, they had a band playing and the drums beating so the screaming could not be heard over the music.”20 In principle, torture was against the law in Chile. However, the legal and practical definition of torture or excessive force was imprecise. Controversy existed over the routine use of flogging in interrogations to obtain confessions, and as part of the punishment ordered by judges (for example, fifty lashes and two years in prison). Flogging (azotes) had been outlawed in 1814, considered a form of torture; it was reinstituted in 1817 and abolished again in 1823, then again reestablished. In 1850 flogging was replaced with six months of prison for each fifty lashes. Opponents of flogging argued that it violated the 1833 constitution,

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which prohibited torture, and that, like caning (palos), provided for in the Military Code of Justice, it was “inhumane.” Nevertheless, punishment (but not interrogation) with azotes was reintroduced in legislation in 1852.21 Debates over the use of flogging and other forms of “pressure” during interrogations continued, as did controversy over the use of flogging as legal punishment. In 1876 a new law (approved by a senate vote of 13-9) specified that those convicted of theft (hurto) or robbery would be sentenced to twenty-five lashes for each six months of jail time, but that no more than one hundred lashes should be administered for a single conviction.22 This law had been the subject of intense discussion in the senate, where liberals such as José Eugenio Vergara and Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, joined by former president Manuel Montt, opposed the use of flogging in interrogations but differed on its use as punishment. Others, such as Senator Ramón Guerrero, noted that judges were forbidden from using flogging and other coercive measures as part of interrogations, but nevertheless they sometimes did so—and, according to Guerrero, they obtained good results. In the “liberal spirit” of the times, a reform in 1883 limited the use of flogging to cases of recidivism of theft, robbery, robbery with violence, and “intimidation of persons” by males from 18-50 years of age. Although debates persisted over flogging detainees and prisoners, few Chileans objected to the use of coercive interrogations by police and judges, these practices being considered normal in the arrests of “bandits” and “criminals.” Public debates over torture would only resurface when the country entered another political crisis with the civil war of 1891—and torture was applied against their adversaries by both opponents and supporters of the government of José Manuel Balmaceda. From the Civil War of 1891 to 1931

The Chilean civil war of 1891 pitted liberal political elites against their conservative adversaries in a battle to redefine the nature of the Chilean political system. At its simplest, a constitutional crisis provoked a civil war. Studies of the civil war identify many underlying causes, from the confrontation between presidentialism and congressional government to church-state issues and the surrogate battle for control of the Chilean nitrate sector by British, German, and United States’s interest, among many others.23 Victory by the enemies of President Balmaceda initiated what Chilean historians call the “parliamentary republic” (1891–1924). At the end of the civil war Balmaceda’s supporters suffered repression and vengeance. Exposés soon appeared of the abuses by the Balmaceda

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government before and during the war. In a sort of victors’ justice proceeding, the last cabinet members of Balmaceda’s government faced a “constitutional accusation” (acusación constitucional) by the senate. Most of the former ministers had fled into exile, but the proceedings went on in their absence.24 The newspaper El Mercurio editorialized in relation to the acusación: “What is important to the country and what justice requires is that impunity not prevail after the high personages of the dictatorial regime [the Balmaceda government] have been punished. Justice does not require punishment of the subalterns, but rather indulgence for the less guilty.”25 A senate investigating commission heard charges against the former ministers which included unlawful imprisonment, unlawful searches of residences, repression and censorship of the press, violation of correspondence, and mistreatment and torture of prisoners, among various others. In the fifth session the commission focused on the practice of torture. Numerous witnesses from different parts of the country testified that they had been subjected to torture or heard the screams of other prisoners under torture. In some cases, witnesses identified police or prison officials responsible for the torture.26 From the testimony of victims, former prisoners, and agents of the state, no doubt existed that prisoner abuse and torture had been common. Some of the agents called to testify denied their own participation in the torture; one mentioned the indignation of higher authorities, including former president Balmaceda, when they became aware of these practices. The witness blamed subordinates in Valparaíso, acting on their own, for the lashings administered to prisoners in that locale, and claimed that the president [Balmaceda] and the cabinet minister in question had forbidden that flogging or other forms of torture be applied against prisoners.27 In short, torture had occurred as a result of the “excesses” of subordinates—a story that would be repeated in Chile and elsewhere many times when efforts were made to call torturers to account. At the conclusion of its hearings, the senate commission delivered a report that received little attention in the press. The senate found the former cabinet ministers guilty of treason, violation of the constitution, failure to comply with existing legislation, malfeasance and misuse of public funds, and bribery (soborno). The report was sent to the Supreme Court, and then forwarded to the court of appeals in Santiago, which had jurisdiction for criminal prosecution of these cases. The appeals court ordered the accused to appear, knowing that they were out of the country. Between 1891 and 1894 several amnesty laws made the report and the citations irrelevant; impunity would reign for all the accused as

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the price for political reconciliation.28 The commission report and the allegations of torture and abuse of prisoners would be virtually forgotten. The end of the civil war and the drama of the constitutional accusation hearings did not put an end to torture in jails, prisons, and police posts in Chile. When high-ranking politicians or members of the elite denounced the practice of torture, it caused some scandal, but not when the victims were common folk. Flogging was habitual both in interrogation and in punishment in civilian prisons and in the army. Writing in 1902, poet Carlos Pezoa Véliz in “La pena de azotes” captured the scene as he witnessed the ferocious punishment of an army deserter in the barracks yard.29 From the 1891 civil war until 1924 the 1833 constitution remained in place and Congress reasserted its central role in national politics. Meanwhile, the rise of organized labor, leftist political parties, a more professional (Prussian-trained) officer corps, and demands for reform eventually led to another political crisis. A military coup in 1924 followed by a year of political confusion brought both a new constitution and the collapse of the old political regime. In 1927 a Prussian-trained army officer, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, made himself president and initiated a process of “modernization of the state.”30 The Ibáñez Government

Carlos Ibáñez governed Chile from 1927 to 1931, using the “extraordinary authority” (facultades extraordinarias) delegated to him by Congress and the provisions for state of siege in the 1925 constitution. Political opponents were subjected to surveillance, imprisonment, torture, internal exile (relegación), and exile in foreign countries. Ibáñez’s secret police infiltrated religious, social, labor, student, and political organizations—even sports clubs. Journalists, political and union leaders, dissident businessmen and those identified as “subversives, ruffians, and suspected communists” were detained and treated harshly in jails and prisons.31 Ibáñez and his team of technocrats reorganized the Chilean state, expanded the role of the national police force and secret police, and introduced a number of lasting institutional reforms. However, with the onset of the world depression, massive protests by students and professional organizations helped oust the Ibáñez government in 1931. Upon the fall of the Ibáñez government, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies legislated to reorganize the national police force and eliminated the specialized ‘sociopolitical department’ (Sección Político-

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social) of the secret police, the unit most responsible for systematic prisoner abuse, torture, and assassinations.32 In early August 1931 the Senate created a commission to investigate the dictatorship. The Comisión Investigadora de los Actos de la Dictadura (Commission to Investigate the Acts of the Dictatorship) received written denunciations of regime abuse, including torture, and collected mountains of information on corruption during the dictatorship. Typical torture methods used to extract “confessions” included the usual: holding prisoners incommunicado, slapping and beating, starvation, humid and filthy cells, flogging, the garrucha-type hanging with arms behind the back, submersion in icy water, and needles inserted in sensitive parts of the body, including genitals, among others.33 Parallel to the investigations of the commission, Congress initiated acusación constitucional proceedings (similar, but not identical to impeachment, potentially leading to criminal prosecution) against Ibáñez and several of his cabinet ministers. At first the commission had broad political support; as political alliances shifted and the need for “normalization” and “reconciliation” became apparent, however, the commission lost favor. Frustrated with the new political circumstances, the commission resigned and was dissolved on 24 December 1931. In its letter of resignation to the Chilean president, the commission noted that impunity had prevailed.34 In the brief period during which the commission operated, it became clear that torture was a habitual instrument of both the secret police and regular police. As in the past, the police denied use of these methods and called the victims and their lawyers or allies liars. The volumes of material collected by the Commission to Investigate the Acts of the Dictatorship went into the archives, where they remained forgotten by Chilean historians and political leaders until rediscovered late in the 1990s. Torture continued, in practice, as unofficial public policy. Chilean Democracy 1932–1973

Although torture, without precise definition, remained illegal, Chilean political culture and police practice conserved the legacies of the Inquisition. “Enemies of the state” were legitimate targets for repression. The Penal Code of 1874, borrowing from European and especially Spanish practice, specified penalties for those who threatened the “internal security of the state.” Over time this rubric came to include opposition journalists, politicians, intellectuals, and labor leaders, among others. To defend the newly established “democracy,” in 1932 a series of decrees specified the behaviors that would be considered threats to

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the internal security of the state and defined “enemies of the Republic”. Decree Law 50, as modified in 1937, 1948, and 1958, and still the basic foundation of Chilean legislation on internal security of the state in 2012, specified that “any person who propagates or encourages, by word of mouth or in writing, doctrines that tend to destroy by violence, the social order and the political organization of the state, by attacking its fundamental institutions or attempting to overthrow the government” would be considered an “enemy of the Republic”.35 Enemies of the Republic could not be tolerated; they had to be detained or destroyed. Under these circumstances abuse and torture of prisoners were habitual instruments, used to identify “enemies” and to guarantee “security” and “order” against those who threatened the very existence of the Republic: subversives, anarchists, socialists, communists, and other evil-doers. In cases where prisoners denounced torture, judicial proceedings offered little relief or none at all.36 During the government of Arturo Alessandri (1932–1938) denunciation of mistreatment and torture of prisoners was frequent, as the government sought to repress rightist and leftist opposition to its policies. Flogging remained on the books as a legal punishment, but the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies also heard complaints of other forms of torture, even the use of “an electric machine” and death threats by both regular police (Carabineros) and detective police.37 Leftist and Radical Party legislators repeatedly denounced torture and police abuse, but to no avail. In 1936, Deputy Carlos Alberto Martínez (of the Nueva Acción Pública party, NAP) indignantly denounced the abuses committed by personnel under the command of Waldo Palma, Director General of Investigaciones.38 Senator Guillermo Azócar (Radical Party) announced that an association of tortured prisoners (Asociación de Flagelados) “requested that something be done about these abuses. . . . such things could happen one thousand years ago, but not in this time of [advanced] culture.”39 The following year, Communist Senator Elías Lafferte denounced his own torture with electricity in the Investigaciones headquarters on General Mackenna Street in Santiago: “They took me to a sort of cell that was like a subterranean hallway. . . . [T]he ground was full of water and mud and there were installations suited to a creole Inquisition, but modernized, lacking not even a machine to apply electric current. Four agents began to interrogate me. They hit me in the stomach, the chest, the back. When they were convinced that was not enough, they decided to use the electric machine.”40 Lafferte continued: “I was converted into a human dishrag; my face was bloody, my legs trembling.” Taken before the head of Investigaciones, he was asked: “What happened to you,

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Lafferte?” “I answered: the police have beaten me.” Looking him straight in the eye, the chief said, “That’s what you say. No one is beaten here.”41 In 1938 Chileans elected a Popular Front government (1938–1941), dedicated to political reform and improving the living conditions of workers and the middle class. Nevertheless, the punishment of flogging remained in the Chilean penal code. More frequently, however, presidential pardons suspended this punishment or replaced it with jail time.42 Such pardon decrees multiplied during the 1940s until 1949, when the punishment of azotes was definitively abolished.43 With the initiation of the Cold War, the same government that abolished the punishment of flogging ruled the country under extraordinary powers (facultades extraordinarias), repressed the labor movement, and sought to eliminate Communist influence in the country. Communist Senator Guillermo Guevara Vargas denounced the persecution of labor leaders: “hunted by a pack of agents from Investigaciones, who first flagellated them, then sent them off to distant places where they have no means to live”.44 In 1948 the government of Gabriel González Videla adopted the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy (Law 8.987), a sweeping revision of Internal Security Law 6.026 of 1937. This new law outlawed the Communist Party; purged the public sector, including teachers, the labor movement, and electoral registries, and allowed González Videla to establish detention centers (labeled concentration camps by the political left) for Communists and other dissidents. Mistreatment and torture in the detention centers and prisons of the period were immortalized in the poetry of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, published in 1950. Neruda called on readers to remember the violence and torture suffered in different eras of Chilean history. In the poem “Los Tormentos” (The Torments) he described the invasion by army troops of the homes of coal miners in the town of Lota in 1947, and the mistreatment and brutality suffered by the victims: “los hundieron, los acorralaron, marcándolos” ([they] crushed them, corralled and branded them), then hundreds of miners were “deported to Patagonia and jailed in the Antarctic cold, or in the desert of Pisagua.”45 Notwithstanding derogation of the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy in 1958, a newly revised Internal Security Law (Law 12.927) continued the tradition established in 1932. This law specified “crimes against national sovereignty and external security,” “internal security of the state,” “public order,” “normal national activities” (for example, strikes by public employees), in addition to those crimes stipulated in the Penal Code and Military Code of Justice.46 As in the

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past, enforcement of this law depended on action by the minister of the interior or his agents. Primary jurisdiction in such cases corresponded to the appeals court in each jurisdiction, unless the crimes, even if committed by civilians, corresponded to military tribunals (for example, violence against a police agent). The procedural operations of the internal security laws provided few guarantees for detainees, unless the appeals court of jurisdiction operated effectively to restrain abuses.47 In short, torture and mistreatment of detainees continued for both those accused of common crimes and those detained for “political” crimes. Torture was not massive, but it was common. On occasion, prisoner abuse and torture were denounced in the press and Congress. Illustratively, in 1955 a constitutional accusation was presented against Minister of Interior Osvaldo Koch, Ibáñez’s son-inlaw, for violating the constitution by ordering the detention of some five thousand citizens in arbitrary fashion.48 During debate on the acusación, detailed descriptions were provided of mistreatment and abuse of the prisoners at the hands of Carabineros and the Investigations police. The Chamber of Deputies rejected the acusación by a vote of 53-44.49 Two years later, after an urban insurrection in Santiago in early April, over six hundred detainees faced abuse and violence after their detention. Some were banished (trasladados) to distant provinces by order of the minister of the interior. Denunciations in the press and Congress demonstrated once again that torture and mistreatment by the police were habitual.50 Police practices and prisoner abuse changed little into the 1960s. As Chile entered into the “Revolution in Liberty” of Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), Communist Senator Volodia Teitelboim told his legislative colleagues that it was important to put police mistreatment of detainees on the record. He referred to the suicide of primary school teacher Magali Honorato, after being accused of terrorism and tortured, in a case in which a bomb had exploded in the Santiago neighborhood of La Cisterna on 31 December 1964. Teitelboim claimed that the teacher had been the victim of physical and mental cruelty and sadism by the police.51 In the same session, Senator Salvador Allende indicated that Socialist Party representatives had met with the minister of interior, Bernardo Leighton, and delivered some ideas on how to prevent such basic violations of human rights.52 While all political sectors repudiated terrorism, the denunciations of torture did not gain adherence from most legislators, nor did police practices change. Toward the end of Frei’s term, in 1969, the Senate debated an amnesty law to favor a group of prison guards who worked at the special

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disciplinary prison in Victoria, in southern Chile. In an important departure from usual practice, the Appeals Court of Temuco had convicted the prison officers of “abuse of authority” and “use of excessive force” (uso de rigor innecesario), but not of torture, a more serious crime. Ten prisoners had been seriously beaten, according to prison authorities, to put down an uprising, but according to others, “for no reason at all”. The prison officials argued that they had had to “energetically repress” (reprimir con energía) acts of indiscipline. The Temuco Appeals Court sentenced the prison guards to three hundred days in jail. After thirty days, they nonetheless received a presidential pardon and returned to their work at the prison. An amnesty, unlike a pardon, would remove the crime from the prison guard’s criminal record (prontuario), as if it had never occurred. Those supporting the amnesty argued that force was sometimes required to maintain discipline in the prisons. The debate on the amnesty brought to light the “savage and barbaric” system of “a reception committee” that was common practice to “soften up” the prisoners who entered the prison. National Party deputy Victor Carmine described the reception with clubs that “left [new prisoners] bloody, barely conscious, and then [they were] put in solitary confinement for a month. This was the first step in their ‘reeducation’.”53 Notwithstanding this testimony, and the legislators’ recognition of the inhumane conditions in the Victoria prison and other facilities throughout the country, Congress approved the amnesty for the prison guards and their return to service. The legislators considered both the prisoners and the guards “victims” of the poor prison conditions throughout the country. In any case, the prisoner abuse had not involved “political” repression and no public figures were affected. In 1970 Chileans elected a Socialist president and the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular) coalition committed itself to taking Chile on a “peaceful road to socialism”. However, this peaceful road did little to change police and prison practices. In 1972, as part of the political oppositions’ battle against the Popular Unity program, a constitutional accusation was presented against Socialist Party Minister of the Interior José Tohá. The acusación centered on the minister’s failure to control violence and armed groups in the country. Among the charges against the minister were “arbitrary detentions and other illegal acts”. Radical Party Senator Raúl Morales Adriasola read into the congressional record a letter from the Consejo General del Colegio de Abogados de Chile with a sworn statement from attorney Juan Luis Ossa Bulnes. Senator Morales Adriasola alleged that the Policía de Investigaciones had detained, abused, and applied electrical current to Juan Luis Ossa Bulnes

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in January 1972. Ossa Bulnes claimed that during a forty-minute period he had received twenty jolts of current, and his torturers told him that when he “wanted to sing,” he could raise two fingers. He was further interrogated and told to confess that the National Party Youth (Juventud Nacional) was organizing armed groups to overthrow the government. On his release, Ossa denounced the torture to the Rancagua Appeals Court and recanted his “confession.” He could not identify the torturers, though he had heard that they were “specialized detectives” from Santiago.54 Congress, with a majority in opposition to the Allende government, approved the acusación against minister Tohá. A year later, a military coup ousted the Popular Unity government. Chile would live the next seventeen years under a military dictatorship. The military dictatorship inherited a tradition of police abuse and torture of detainees and prisoners. It would convert this tradition into a massive, systematic application of torture to political enemies—a system of state terrorism and clandestine torture centers harkening back to the Inquisition. Anticipating the Coup

On 5 August 1973 more than one hundred naval personnel were detained in Talcahuano and Valparaíso. Accused of insubordination (incumplimiento de deberes militares), they were interrogated and tortured at various naval installations. These navy personnel belonged to a clandestine network in touch with leaders of the Socialist Party, MAPU Party, and the Left Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR). They apparently intended to resist the anticipated military coup by taking control of naval vessels.55 The superintendent of Valparaíso province, Hernán Concha Salas, a retired army colonel, ordered the application of the Law of Internal Security, permitting that the accused be tried for sedition and rebellion. The Communist Party newspaper El Siglo and Puro Chile reported that the navy had “detained a group of sailors connected to the ultra-left” (meaning the MIR). The torture applied to the prisoners ranged from beatings, a modified rack (on a cross), submersion in water filled with feces and urine, simulated executions, threats against family members, and application of electrical current, among other methods.56 When the torture was denounced in the press—Allende was still president and the pro-government press still operating—a group of family members of the detained sailors presented a criminal complaint (querella) against the torturers.57 On 2 September 1973 Allende called for administrative

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investigations (sumarios) of the torturers—but he had also denounced the “political infiltration” of the armed forces and Carabineros.58 Meanwhile, lawyers seeking to defend the prisoners were denied access to their clients; they filed habeas corpus writs and writs of protection in the Valparaíso Court Martial (jurisdiction of first instance for the case) and with the Concepción Lawyers Association (Colegio de Abogados de Concepción). When they were finally given access to the prisoners, they confirmed the torture, which was denounced in the press. After the coup on 11 September, some of these lawyers themselves became prisoners and were tortured. By 20 August a “committee to defend the indicted sailors”, (Comité de Defensa de los Marinos Procesados), had formed in Valparaíso, presaging the human rights organizations that would spring up after the coup on 11 September 1973. The navy denied any torture had occurred. On 7 September, invoking the press laws (Ley 16. 643, Sobre Abusos de Publicidad), the press was prohibited from reporting on torture in this case.59 However, some of the prisoners had already sent a public letter to Allende, denouncing the torture and the coup that they believed was imminent.60 In his last mention of the case before the coup and his death, Allende declared: “If there are those guilty of torture, they will be punished; if, on the contrary, the accusations are false, those who have made them will be punished for making false accusations (imputaciones sin fundamento).61 Seeking to prevent a coup, Allende preferred not to raise the torture accusations beyond this level. Ironically, while the sailors who had conspired to resist a coup and defend the government were detained and tortured, the navy commanders who plotted the coup continued forward with their plans. During the month of August 1973 military and police repressed supposed guerrilla movements near the southern settlements of Nehuentúe, Lobería, Puerto Saavedra, and Rucalán (province of Cautín), and effected violent searches of factories, radio stations, and suspected locations of leftist arms caches in Santiago and other cities. Peasant and indigenous leaders were interrogated and tortured. Government sources and media sympathetic to the government denounced the abuses and torture committed by the armed forces while the opposition claimed that a guerrilla foco had been dismantled.62 Under cover of enforcing an arms control law, adopted during the Allende administration (Law 17.798, Sobre Control de Armas y Elementos Similares, 1972), the police and military forces abused and tortured detainees, creating a climate of terror among the “political prisoners.” Although the methods of interrogation and torture had been updated in some respects by French and U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine and training since the

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1950s, the “basics” went back to the Inquisition and more than one hundred and fifty years of Chilean practice.63 Dictatorship

The events of July and August 1973 anticipated the ferocity that followed the coup of September 11. Not all Chilean military officers supported a coup d’état, even if they opposed the policies of the Popular Unity government. To impose a military junta on the country and establish their effective control, the navy, air force, and Carabineros purged their ranks of potential dissidents. In some cases, dissident officers and military personnel were tortured and assassinated. The junta, with its Decree Law 5 (12 September 1973), declared that the country was in a “state of war,” with all the legal and practical implications of such a decree.64 Constitutional rights and liberties were suspended. Resistance and resistors would be prosecuted by military tribunals “in times of war”.65 This declaration left Popular Unity and other politicians, labor leaders, journalists, peasants—indeed, any adversaries of the military—without constitutional protections and subject to courts martial as if the country were at war. This also meant that the Chilean judiciary, which for the most part supported the coup, would fail to protect basic constitutional rights or even to take seriously writs of habeas corpus (recursos de amparo) or review the arbitrary actions of the military tribunals.66 In the days after the coup, mistreatment and torture were applied massively against Popular Unity officials, leftist politicians, journalists, and supporters. The junta justified its savagery as necessary to “save the fatherland” (as they defined it) from international Communism and its local adherents. As South American liberator José de San Martín had said long ago, “When the Patria is in danger, everything is licit, except allowing it to perish” (“Cuando peligra la Patria, todo es lícito, menos dejarla perecer”).67 A few days after the coup, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez and Lutheran pastor Helmut Frenz, along with representatives of other Protestant churches and the Orthodox Church, and Jewish religious leaders, created an organization to assist the persecuted. COPACHI, the Comité de Cooperación para la Paz en Chile, began to receive hundreds of denunciations of torture and disappearances, of violent and illegal searches of homes, and of massive dismissals from workplaces. Hounded by the military regime, COPACHI would be dismantled and replaced by the Vicaría de la Solidaridad in 1976. The Vicaría finally closed its doors in 1992, two years after the end of the dictatorship. From 1973 until the late 1980s a variety of human rights and religious

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organizations denounced ongoing torture in Chile.68 These groups included the World Council of Churches, the International Commission of Jurists, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and Amnesty International. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights frequently queried the Chilean government regarding reports of massive detentions, extrajudicial executions, torture, and disappearances (people detained and unaccounted for). The Chilean government denied the accusations, typically attributing them to a global conspiracy of international Communism to delegitimize the junta.69 At the Fifth General Assembly of the Organization of American States the member states had requested of the Chilean government a report on the human rights situation in the country. At the Sixth Assembly, in 1976, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission presented a report formulating charges of grave violations of human rights in Chile. The military government responded that the Chilean judiciary was independent, that the state of siege still in effect was legal and necessary, and that the rule of law applied to those detained and charged with crimes. The government also claimed that the right to life was respected in Chile and that the commission report was echoing those who conspired to overthrow the government in league with an international Communist conspiracy.70 The charges and countercharges continued. Every year until the end of the dictatorship the General Assembly of the United Nations condemned human rights violations in Chile.71 Torture of detainees and prisoners was habitual under the Chilean dictatorship.72 From the first years after the coup, defense lawyers denounced torture to the military tribunals and to the civilian appeals courts with no effect. Both the Penal Code and the Military Code of Justice outlawed prisoner abuse and torture. Until 2005, fifteen years after the return to elected civilian government, there would however be no convictions of police, military, or government officials for torture. At the end of 1980 a group of human rights lawyers (the Asociación de Abogados Pro Derechos Humanos) requested that the Supreme Court designate one of its members to investigate denunciations of torture of seven individuals by agents of the National Information Center (Central Nacional de Informaciones, CNI).73 Between January and August 1980 the lawyers had received reports of more than one hundred thirty such cases. The lawyers wrote to the Supreme Court that torture “seems to be a habitual practice of certain government security services. People, and some authorities, are becoming accustomed to the use of torture. This habituation [to torture] (acostumbramiento) must be avoided at all costs,

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not only for the sake of the victims, but for the good of society.” The Supreme Court rejected the lawyer’s requests for an investigation.74 In 1981 various Catholic dioceses decreed excommunication for those who participated in torture.75 The Chilean Human Rights Commission created a National Commission Against Torture (Comisión Nacional contra la Tortura). At the same time, a group of priests and members of religious orders carried out peaceful protests in front of torture centers, holding banners reading “Torture is Done Here” (“Aquí se tortura”). This group, founded by Jesuit priest José Aldunate S.J., eventually spawned the Sebastián Acevedo Movement, named after a father who self-immolated in front of the cathedral in the city of Concepción on 11 November 1983 in a desperate act to obtain the release of his son and daughter.76 Widespread news coverage of the burning Acevedo produced great impact among the opposition to the military regime. A month later the Catholic bishops confirmed their decision to deny communion to “torturers, their accomplices, and those who have the power to prevent torture, but fail to do so.”77 Between 1976 and 1992 the Vicaría de la Solidaridad presented more than 1,300 formal complaints (querellas) of torture to the courts against “those who are found responsible” without results. This number represented only a portion of the tortured that came to the Vicaría: not all dared to file a formal complaint with the courts. Finally, seeking to gain international legitimacy, the military government adhered to the Convention against Torture, with reservations, in 1987. While this was an important symbolic measure, which would have unanticipated practical consequences years later in criminal cases against torturers of the military regime, it did not end torture in Chile during the dictatorship.78 The massive use of torture against “enemies” inspired fear throughout the population. The regime justified its harsh repression against its “enemies,” in the context of the Cold War, as a battle of Western Civilization against Communism. Still, it denied that its enemies were tortured. When the use of torture was finally acknowledged in several cases, the regime explained the torture as a result of “individual excesses.” Subsequent judicial investigations and the work of the Valech commission (2003–2004, see below) have demonstrated that the use of torture was the result of policies adopted at the highest levels to combat “enemies” of the Patria.79

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Transition and Post-Dictatorship

In 1988 a plebiscite called for in the 1980 constitution surprised General Augusto Pinochet with a victory for the opposition. In accord with the constitution, general elections followed the “No to Pinochet” vote in 1989. In December 1989 Chileans elected Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin to the presidency with a coalition government called the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. The coalition program gave great attention to human rights, emphasizing the need to discover the truth regarding the disappeared and to provide justice and reparation for the victims. The government also gave priority to the return of political exiles and liberation of remaining political prisoners. Reparation for victims of torture was, however, not mentioned. In part, the large number of torture victims made the fragile transition government hesitant to move on that front immediately. In any case, the political opposition and Pinochet’s supporters still controlled the Senate with the votes of the “institutional” (appointed) senators, four of whom directly represented the armed forces and Carabineros. Likewise, military government appointees still dominated the Supreme Court and the appeals courts. In these circumstances, the Aylwin government gradually sought to implement the Concertación’s human rights program. Aylwin created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated cases of the disappeared and extra-judicial executions. Headed by longtime Radical Party legislator Raúl Rettig, the Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación delivered its report to President Aylwin in February 1991. The report documented massive violations of human rights, listed victims, recommended reparation measures, and urged reforms to prevent future violations. The commission report became the foundation for future progress in criminal investigations, but at the time of its release the armed forces, Carabineros, and the Supreme Court all vigorously rejected its findings. In any case, investigation of torture and torture victims was outside the mandate of the Rettig commission.80 Likewise, it had no power of subpoena, nor any direct connection to the criminal justice system. Between 1991 and 1998 the Concertación governments of Aylwin and Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000) adopted legislation providing pensions, medical services, educational benefits, and other forms of reparation for families of the disappeared and persons murdered by the military government. The Aylwin and Frei governments also moved to reform the penal code, introduced human rights education into the

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school curriculum, and adopted other measures related to the human rights agenda.81 The armed forces and police continued their resistance to modification of the Military Code of Justice and refused, for the most part, to cooperate in investigations regarding the disappeared. Political constraints and fear of military reaction impeded investigation or criminal prosecution related to the military regime’s torture of thousands of Chileans. Moreover, application of the 1978 amnesty decree imposed by the military regime seemed to make such prosecutions unviable for cases before 1978.82 Application of statute of limitations (prescripción) provisions in the Criminal Code also seemed to preclude successful prosecution in many cases. In a surprise development, Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in 1998 on a writ from a Spanish judge regarding a case opened in 1996, in which Judge Baltasar Garzón charged Pinochet with genocide, terrorism, and torture committed during the Chilean dictatorship. An extradition request had been made by the Spanish Council of Ministers to the UK authorities. To resolve the extradition request it was necessary to determine if Pinochet enjoyed immunity as a former head of state. The UK House of Lords rejected a finding of immunity, but limited the potentially extraditable offences over which proceedings could continue to the crime of torture, and further, to counts of torture alleged to have been committed after 29 September 1988. This date was considered by the Lords to represent the date at which torture became an extraditable crime in Great Britain. Judge Garzón later amended his extradition request accordingly, adding documentation for 53 cases of torture committed between October 1988 and March 1990, along with 1,198 cases of disappearance, which he considered cases of (ongoing) torture, due to the suffering of the victims’ families. Pinochet’s detention reactivated the human rights movement in Chile and angered the armed forces and political right. The Chilean government argued, officially, that Pinochet should be returned to Chile for trial rather than tried in Spain or elsewhere in Europe. His supporters and some members of the Concertación coalition framed the argument in terms of Chilean sovereignty and the independence of the Chilean judicial system. Important members of the Concertación coalition disagreed with this position, hoping for Pinochet’s conviction on torture charges in Europe and doubting the ability of Chilean courts to convict him. In practice, he would die without being tried in Chile, but not without facing numerous charges against him, participating in depositions regarding his alleged crimes, and being subjected to house arrest.83

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After a lengthy diplomatic and legal process (Pinochet was detained for 503 days) involving British law, European and international treaties, Chilean-British bilateral relations, and disputed medical reports on Pinochet’s health, Home Secretary Jack Straw decided (on 2 March 2000) against extradition: I have today, decided that I will not order the extradition of Senator Pinochet to Spain. I made this decision under section 12 of the Extradition Act 1989. I have referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions for consideration of a domestic prosecution, in accordance with Article 7 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. I have also decided not to issue Authorities to Proceed in respect of the extradition requests from Switzerland, Belgium and France. Full reasons for my decisions are contained in the letters to the parties concerned from one of my officials as set out.84

Pinochet was sent home to Chile, judged to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, but he was not exonerated on the torture charges. As several chapters in this volume confirm, the Pinochet case gave new international significance to the Convention against Torture and encouraged human rights organizations around the world.85 It also opened the door for a flood of criminal cases against Pinochet and others accused of violating human rights during the dictatorship in Chile. It seemed that international human rights law, including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention on Torture, might become a tool for prosecuting human rights violations in Chilean courts. And, for some crimes, it seemed that international law permitted no amnesty nor was there a statute of limitations. Not until Augusto Pinochet was detained and arrested in London in 1998 did former political prisoners and torture victims begin to organize themselves on a national scale. Among other initiatives, lawyers proposed that the querellas filed years before be reactivated and that torturers be brought to justice. In April 2001 the NGO CODEPU (Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo) presented the first querella for torture in the 9th Criminal Court of Santiago, on behalf of twenty-one survivors of torture committed at the Academia de Guerra Aérea (AGA). The charges included illegal detention or kidnapping, illegal privation of liberty, torture, and illicit association. In this case, the charge of “apremios ilegítimos” was added against nineteen ex-personnel of the air force.86

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By the end of 2004 CODEPU had filed fifteen querellas for torture. Among them were three actions for kidnapping and torture of minors between three and seventeen years old. CODEPU also presented a querella in the name of former detainees of the navy, against Augusto Pinochet “and those responsible” from the navy intelligence service, for apremios ilegítimos, kidnapping, and illicit association. The case involved the torture of nine former noncommissioned officers who refused to support the coup in 1973. Judge Gabriela Corti declared that she lacked jurisdiction and reassigned the case to the Naval Court, making the Military Code of Justice applicable. The Naval Court applied the statute of limitations to the case, leaving the defendants free in 2003. Lawyers from CODEPU also filed cases in the name of survivors of the Tejas Verdes prison camp, a querella in the name of twenty-three survivors of the Villa Grimaldi torture center, and against agents of the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) operating out of the headquarters on Borgoño Street near downtown Santiago. Another querella was presented for torture of workers at the Loewer sausage factory.87 By the end of 2001, 299 querellas had been filed against Pinochet. Querella number 285 charged Pinochet, Manuel Contreras (director of the DINA secret police in the first years of the dictatorship), Marcelo Moren Brito, Miguel Krassnoff, Basclay Zapata, and Osvaldo Romo with torture and apremios ilegítimos against nine women detained in the clandestine prison on José Domingo Cañas Street. In December former officers Efraín Jaña, Fernando Reveco, Carlos Vergara, and others presented querella number 287 against Pinochet, for the crimes of kidnapping (secuestro), illicit association, and the torture of officers who objected to the orders of General Sergio Arellano Stark in the infamous “Caravan of Death” episode of September and October 1973.88 This querella detailed the insults and tortures suffered by the complainants on being detained.89 The growing backlog of querellas made visible the widespread use of torture during the dictatorship and the range of people and groups in different parts of the country who had suffered torture since 1973.They also highlighted the fact that political prisoners and torture victims had not received justice, recognition of their suffering, or reparation in the first thirteen years of elected civilian government.90 The Agüero–Meneses Case

Until the end of March 2001 Emilio Meneses was a professor in the Faculty of History, Geography, and Political Science of Santiago’s Universidad Católica. He taught classes in the undergraduate and masters programs of the university’s Institute of Political Science. Felipe

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Agüero, a US-trained political scientist, denounced Meneses as the person who had tortured Agüero during the latter’s confinement at the National Stadium in 1973. Agüero, at the time, was a 21 year old student of sociology at the Catholic University and a member of the MAPU political party, one of the parties that formed the Popular Unity coalition. After more than a month of interrogation and torture, he was transferred to a regular Santiago jail. He was never charged with any crime, and was released in February 1974. Between 1978 and 1982 Agüero was a researcher at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Santiago. In 1982 he moved to North Carolina, USA, and completed his doctorate at Duke University. In subsequent years he was a professor and researcher at several universities in the United States. On 21 February 2001 Agüero sent a private letter to Alfredo Rehren, the director of the Catholic University’s Institute of Political Science, explaining that Professor Meneses had been his torturer.91 Days later, in March 2001, many students refused to attend Meneses’s classes and protested his presence at the university. On 31 March Meneses resigned from the Institute of Political Science. In May Meneses filed a criminal lawsuit against Agüero for the crime of injurias graves (criminal libel or slander).92 Agüero was certain that Meneses had been his torturer, when he was forced to undress and a blindfold was placed over his eyes in the National Stadium.93 Meneses denied all Agüero’s charges, claiming that his actions in the National Stadium had been limited to taking declarations from detainees outside the interrogation chambers. He also claimed that the navy interrogators were unarmed and their objective was to ensure that the detentions had followed correct procedures.94 The judge’s sentence absolved Felipe Agüero of the charges of injurias: he had not lied. Meneses appealed the sentence, but his appeal was rejected by the Appeals Court of Santiago in September 2004. Agüero was one of more than 36,000 former political prisoners who testified before the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Comisión Nacional de Prisión Política y Tortura. In November 2004, when the commission’s official report was released and thousands were officially recognized as victims of torture, Agüero declared that this initiative was the “great act of acknowledgement” (“el gran acto de reconocimiento”) that had been lacking since the Rettig commission report of 1991. He noted that the report should silence those who always insisted that the government and society should limit themselves to the “emblematic” cases: “Every one of the thousands of cases are ‘emblematic’. . . . All the torture, as a generalized practice, was emblematic.”95

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The creation of the commission had resulted from the efforts of various groups, that demanded that the Chilean state assume its responsibility and recognize the thousands of torture victims during the dictatorship. As criminal cases multiplied in the courts, leaders of the human rights organizations and associations of former political prisoners reminded President Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) and his government that Article 14 of the Convention Against Torture provided that: Each State Party shall ensure in its legal system that the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation, including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible. In the event of the death of the victim as a result of an act of torture, his dependents shall be entitled to compensation.96

The Comisión Ética contra la Tortura, a committee formed by representatives of human rights organizations and other nongovernmental organizations at the end of the 1990s, presented periodic reports to the government regarding the outstanding debt owed to former political prisoners and torture victims. Simultaneously, the associations of ex-prisoners took their demands to Congress through select members of the Concertación coalition. Lagos himself acknowledged in the press that the surviving torture victims had been neglected and that the government was not complying with its international obligations. With both domestic political circumstances and international treaty obligations in mind, President Lagos decided to reformulate the human rights agenda of the Concertación government. This initiative included support for renewed judicial investigation of the cases involving the disappeared persons and establishment of a commission to investigate torture during the dictatorship and to make recommendations for reparation to the victims. The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture97

In August 2003 President Ricardo Lagos made public his proposal for new initiatives dealing with past human rights violations. He delivered his proposal in a message to the nation titled “There is No Tomorrow without Yesterday” (No Hay Mañana sin Ayer).98 Lagos told the country that it was not possible to simply turn the page on past human rights violations, nor to deny the past. He reminded Chileans that agents of the state had persecuted, tortured, murdered, and disappeared persons

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throughout the country. He insisted that family members and all Chileans had a right to know the truth regarding these atrocities. In his message, Lagos announced the creation of the Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. The commission began its work on 11 November 2003. Lagos named Monseñor Sergio Valech, Bishop Emeritus of Santiago, as president of the commission, thus giving the commission its nickname, the Valech commission. The commission was charged with receiving testimony over a six month period and determining who had suffered imprisonment and torture for political reasons in the period from 11 September 1973 to 10 March 1990. Decree 1040, establishing the commission’s responsibilities, excluded from its remit individuals who had been detained in mass arrests during public protests and subsequently released, and individuals arrested for or charged with common crimes. The commission was to file a report on its findings, and propose reparations measures for victims whom the commission certified had been detained for political motives and/or tortured. The report was delivered to the president on 10 November 2004, after a six month extension period had been added to the initial time frame to allow fuller review of cases already received.99 The Valech commission interviewed 35,868 people who testified in their own name or in representation of deceased family members who had been political prisoners. Of those who testified, 8,614 were not recognized as political prisoners or torture victims by the commission for lack of sufficient evidence. More than 90 percent of those interviewed reported having been tortured. The commission sought to document each case as best it could, collecting evidence and testimonies from the witnesses, and reported on the most frequent forms of torture applied, including sexual violence against men and women. The commission heard testimony from 3,399 women. Almost all claimed that they had been victims of sexual violence, with 316 reporting that they had been raped. Of the latter, 229 were already pregnant when detained. Twenty of these subsequently suffered miscarriages because of torture. Thirteen more women declared that they became pregnant as result of rape by their captors; six of those pregnancies came to term. The 2004 version of the report documented a total of 978 adolescents (aged between 12 and 18 years) arrested, interrogated, and tortured because of their participation in community organizations and political parties, while 102 boys and girls aged 12 and under had been detained together with their parents.100 The commission reported that thousands of the torture victims had physical and emotional sequelae. Appearance before the commission was voluntary, and many survivors chose not to testify, not wanting to

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relive their experiences or to identify themselves as torture victims for a variety of reasons.101 As part of its report the Valech commission listed and described the centers of detention and torture throughout the country: military installations, police stations, naval vessels, sports stadiums, prison camps, clandestine prisons and other locales operated by the specialized ntelligence services (DINA and CNI). It also critically assessed the role of the Chilean judiciary, which had failed to protect the constitutional and human rights of the victims, despite repeated complaints and writs of habeas corpus filed by lawyers. In particular, the report noted that judges had failed to review the actions of the military tribunals, where the “trials” lacked even a semblance of due process. Perhaps most importantly, the commission report found that torture had been the policy of the military regime—not the result of “individual excesses” by rogue police, military, and civilian accomplices. Torture on a massive scale required the use of public resources: personnel, equipment, public buildings, and budgets. Members of the military junta and their subordinates at many levels of government participated directly and indirectly in torturing thousands of victims. In accord with its mission, the Valech commission proposed reparation policies ranging from pensions and symbolic recognition (monuments, museums) to programs of public education on human rights to avoid future human rights violations. The commission noted that thirty years after the fact the damage done was irreparable, but that individual recognition and some form of reparation would contribute to reestablishing the dignity of the victims within Chilean society. It concluded the report by expressing its hope that it had completed the charge given by President Lagos that its recommendations would contribute to reparation for the victims, to a national coming together (reencuentro), and to a commitment to human dignity and human rights in the future.102 President Lagos made the commission’s report public on 28 November 2004. In his speech he emphasized that the work of the commission was an effort to restore dignity for the victims and to heal the wounds in the national soul. He told the country that there could be no doubt that political imprisonment and torture had been an institutionalized instrument of the military government, absolutely unacceptable, and completely at odds with the historical traditions of the country.103 Here Lagos was wrong. Torture had been de facto public policy in Chile since independence, and even before, although never on the scale practised by the Pinochet regime.

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The Valech commission placed varying degrees of responsibility on the armed forces, secret police, Carabineros, and the judiciary for the crimes and human rights violations identified in its report. For the first time, these institutions acknowledged—albeit in varying degrees—their responsibility not only for the crimes of the past but for prevention of such crimes in the future. Illustratively, army commander General Juan Emilio Cheyre declared publicly that the army had taken the difficult but irreversible decision to assume responsibility as an institution for the criminal and morally unacceptable actions of the past. He added that the army shared the pain of the victim’s suffering from these violations of human rights, and recognized that they had been treated in a way inconsistent with the permanent and historical doctrine of the army.104 The commanders of the navy, air force, Policía de Investigaciones, and Carabineros offered their own versions of apology for the past.105 The Supreme Court issued a statement acknowledging the “gravity” of the conclusions of the Valech commission, but rejected the findings that the judges of the Supreme Court “colluded” with those who committed the human rights violations after 11 September 1973: “It is not possible to accept [the conclusion] that distinguished judges have colluded [se hayan podido concertar para con terceros] to permit illegal detentions, torture, kidnapping and murder. . . . But it is true that during much of this period the institutional order was suspended after 11 September 1973 and that judges and the higher tribunals were to a great extent impeded from carrying out their functions.”106 On 24 December 2004 the government promulgated Law 19.992, establishing reparation measures for victims identified in the Valech commission report. Reparation included a pension of US$220 a month.107 In all cases, reparations rights included medical assistance, educational benefits, and (as amended) transfer of these benefits to offspring. It also stipulated that the testimony to the commission would be unavailable to the public or to other official, including judicial, sources for fifty years—a provision bitterly criticized by many groups in Chile. One group of former political prisoners took the issue to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights.108 The Agrupación Metropolitana de ex Presas y Presos Políticos published a book in 2006, Cien Voces rompen el Silencio, a collection of personal testimonies written to reveal some of the details provided to the commission.109 Although the Valech commission had closed for the purposes of receiving new cases or testimony back in mid of 2004, its classificatory work was extended until 31 May 2005, when it delivered a supplementary report recognizing 1,204 additional cases. These included 87 cases of minors, four of whom had not yet been born at the time of their

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victimization (their mothers had been pregnant during the time that they were detained). This inclusion caused some concern among feminist groups since it made “persons” of the unborn—an ironic and controversial conflict to emerge from the commission’s work. Another 200 cases still remained pending, and others protested their exclusion for not having testified during the commission’s six-month window of reception of testimony. Recurrent demands to reopen the commission for more testimonies occurred after 2005. Advocates claimed that many thousands of torture victims had not yet qualified for the rights recognized in the reparations law. These representations were partially recognized in 2009, when a law whose main purpose was to create the new National Institute of Human Rights also gave rise to a new period of consideration of cases .Law 20.405, of December 2009, created the Institute, and the accompanying decree from the Ministry of the Interior (Decree 43 of 2010) established a commission to identify persons “disappeared, and illegally executed, imprisoned for political reasons or tortured by the military regime”.110 The new commission was named the Comisión Presidencial Asesora para la Calificación de Detenidos Desaparecidos, Ejecutados Políticos y Victimas de Prisión Política y Tortura. The commission was to be formed by the same people who had worked on the Valech commission; although two of those original commissioners resigned for personal reasons. Once replacements were named, the new commission—often referred to in the press and popular parlance as “Valech II”—began its work on 17 February 2010. The mandate laid down by the government charged the new commission with creating a list of to date unrecognized cases of two major categories of victim. The first category, corresponding to the original Rettig commission, comprised victims of forced disappearance or extrajudicial execution for political reasons, whether committed by state agents or by private individuals. The second category was the same as that dealt with by the recent Valech commission, namely, torture and political imprisonment by state agents of individuals who had survived. The new commission received 622 applications for recognition in cases of forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions for political reasons, and other cases of political violence, and 31,831 applications from persons claiming to have been victims of political imprisonment and torture between 11 September 1973 and 10 March 1990. The commission completed its work on 17 August 2011. It recognized 30 additional cases of disappeared persons and political executions and 9,795 additional victims of political imprisonment and torture, bringing the overall total of recognized cases to 38,254. The new list was published, together with a short explanatory text—not constituting an

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additional official report—solely in electronic form on the Internet website of the commission itself. The government of President Sebastián Piñera did not publicize the commission’s report more widely, and no printed copies were ever produced. The website was nonetheless decommissioned within a few months, and within a year of publication neither this text nor that of the 2004 Valech commission was available from any relevant official website. (The 2011 list and the report could however still be sourced from the website of the National Institute of Human Rights, an officially-funded body, but one considered independent of the state). 111 Torture No More?

Notwithstanding the progress made by human rights organizations in Chile regarding torture and the increased awareness of human rights law, denunciations of mistreatment of prisoners and torture still appeared in the press. In 2003 a London immigration court accepted a claim for political asylum by a former Carabinero who had denounced police corruption and torture of indigenous Mapuche activists. The former policeman faced a court martial in Chile and had received death threats.112 A querella by Waikilaf Cadin Calfunao, in 2007, accused prison guards (gendarmes) in the southern city of Temuco of physically abusing him (apremios ilegítimos) before his transfer to a high security jail in Santiago.113 In January 2010 a querella was presented in the town of Lautaro against personnel of the Policía de Investigaciones (PDI) and others (“todos los que resulten responsables”) for torture or apremios ilegítimos (according to Art. 150A of the Penal Code), committed against Ángel Reyes Cayupán and Elvis Millán Colicheu, detained in December 2009.114 In 2010 a querella for torture (tormentos) was presented on behalf of another Mapuche activist, Felipe Huenchullan Cayul.115 These denunciations took place in the context of an ongoing campaign by Mapuche activists to recover ancestral lands in the south of the country, in the course of which some groups have taken violent action. The Chilean government response has been to apply the Law of Internal Security and dictatorship-era anti-terrorism legislation, charging the indigenous activists with terrorism and subjecting them to simultaneous prosecution by civilian and military courts. Ongoing torture, violence, and degrading treatment by Carabineros, the PDI, and prison guards is not, either, deployed solely against Mapuche activists. A civil society report sent to the United Nations in April 2009 began: “Nineteen years after the end of the military regime, we observe with

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concern the persistence of multiple situations of abuse, unnecessary use of force and brutality by state police agents, resulting in torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons.” On its second page the report asserted: “We furthermore observe that some of these acts of violence imputable to Carabineros and Policía de Investigaciones fit the description of torture as defined by Article 1 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (hereinafter the Convention).”116 In March 2009 the Chilean government, fulfilling its obligations under the Convention against Torture, delivered its fifth periodic report to the UN Committee against Torture. The committee had submitted various questions to the Chilean government, including queries on the ten- year statute of limitations for the crime of torture. Among the many questions put to the Chilean government by the committee, several aimed to determine the effectiveness of measures designed to ensure that detainees and prisoners would not be mistreated or tortured. The government reported that between 2006 and 2008, it had registered 730 complaints of abusive treatment by Carabineros. According to the government, all these were investigated. Of the 730 complaints, 678 were resolved and 52 remained under investigation. In only 78 of the completed cases had some sort of disciplinary action been taken against police personnel. All the others were either dropped by the complainants or determined to be without merit. In only one case was a Carabinero removed from service as a result of these complaints. Four criminal cases had been brought against Carabineros in the same period.117 Similar data were presented for the PDI and Gendarmería (prison service), indicating that some effort to control abuses and mistreatment of prisoners existed, but that enforcement of sanctions against violations of constitutional and human rights by government personnel was relatively weak. Retrospective/Prospective

A retrospective look at torture in Chile reveals that it has been practised since colonial times, and that government authorities have either condoned it or looked the other way when they believed it served their purpose. Its routine use stemmed from the belief that it was an efficient method of obtaining “confessions” and information desired by the government, or of punishing “enemies.” Torture was used to force the tortured to submit to the existing authorities, compelling the “betrayal” of loyalties and renunciation of political, moral, or religious convictions. With the sole exception of the introduction of new tools and techniques,

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there was little difference between the objectives and methods of torture used by the Spanish Talaveras during the reconquista (1814–1817); those deployed by the secret police and military in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the tactics of the DINA, CNI, Carabineros and the armed forces during the Pinochet dictatorship. There was social, cultural, and political support for torture, whether against bandits in the name of public security, or against political adversaries in the name of protecting the Patria against “germs,” “viruses,” cancer, liberals, anarchists, subversives, Marxists, or Communists. The most recent “enemy” whose existence or image may be held to justify the use of torture is the “terrorist,” a category that is increasingly stretched to include indigenous activists who violently seek a change in the status quo and recovery of ancestral lands, thereby challenging the sovereignty of the Chilean nation-state. Organized opposition to torture has been strongest when it affected not only common criminals, ethnic minorities, and working class people but also political elites, as occurred in 1891, 1927–1932, and then after 1973. For the most part, however, torture persisted below the radar as a de facto, albeit illegal, instrument of public policy. During the Pinochet dictatorship torture was used massively from the day of the military coup. Its use was both denied and clandestinely acknowledged, not only to eviscerate the political left, but also to terrorize other sectors of the population and to deter effective opposition to the military regime. When forced to acknowledge instances of torture, the military government referred to “individual excesses” rather than admit that torture was public policy. But the numerous victims and the influx of exiles arriving in Europe, North America, other parts of Latin America, and elsewhere triggered denunciations by international organizations, nongovernmental and human rights organizations around the world, including the Organization of American States and the United Nations. General Pinochet and his government became emblematic of torture and other acts of state terrorism. Only recently have criminal investigations allowed final discovery of the eventual fate of many victims of the dictatorship, murdered after intense torture, then “disappeared” into the sea or their bodies mutilated and buried. Much of this suffering might have been avoided or lessened if the Chilean judiciary had carried out its constitutional mission of protecting individual liberty and human rights. However, the judiciary in 1973 for the most part supported the military coup, viewing the Allende government, rather than the military and its allies, as the greatest threat to the rule of law in Chile. According to the Valech commission, over 90 percent of political prisoners held between 1973 and 1990 were tortured.

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The survivors, through their testimonies to the commission, have allowed reconstruction of the details of the torture regime, piece by piece, military and police installation by installation, clandestine torture center by torture center, in detail. The testimonies make clear that torture was public policy, carried out by civilian and uniformed personnel who became more “professional” in their torture techniques over time—but whose training, both domestic and by foreign militaries and police academies, made them part of the international Cold War as well as of the “war” on “enemies” of the Chilean Republic. After 1989 Chile made itself a full party to the Convention against Torture. It gradually incorporated international human rights law into domestic legislation. In addition, the Convention against Torture has been used directly as grounds for prosecution and sentencing in cases of human rights violations, including the landmark decisions of Judge Alejandro Solís, removing General (Senator) Pinochet’s parliamentary immunity in cases involving the notorious Villa Grimaldi torture center and the prison camp at Tejas Verdes.118 Thus international norms, international law, and the efforts of transnational human rights organizations in collaboration with Chilean organizations have brought important institutional changes in regard to torture as public policy. They have also brought some moral, material, and financial reparation for thousands of victims and their families, however insufficient. But the work is not finished. The practice of torture in Chile was taken as a minor matter before the 1970s. Not even the gruesome details of torture methods provided in the report of the Valech commission have managed to create a significant contemporary social movement to improve police practices or prison conditions. The support that has surfaced in recent times to protect Mapuche activists from abuse has been relatively weak, partly because racism has not disappeared in Chile and partly because some groups of the Mapuche have defined themselves as “enemies” of the sovereignty of the traditional Chilean nation-state. In the end, treaties, laws, human rights organizations, and social movements are not enough to end torture as public policy unless accompanied by changes in political culture that make human rights for all peoples the first priority. That challenge, the transformation of political culture to make torture anathema to all of us even in times of crisis and fear, is no easy task to achieve—as United States citizens have discovered since 11 September 2001.

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Research for this chapter was carried out as part of the research project “Memory and Justice” supported by the Ford Foundation Andean Office in Santiago, Chile. 1 The phrase “those who are found responsible” (contra quienes resulten responsables) is legalese to denote that the criminal complaint is against still-tobe-identified perpetrators. For an account of the first efforts to defend those repressed by the military regime, see Andrés Aylwin Azócar. Simplemente lo que vi (1973-1990): y los imperativos que surgen del dolor (Santiago: LOM, 2003). 2 Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004 p. 9. Authors’ translation. htwww.bcn.cl/bibliodigital/dhisto/lfs/Informe.pdf (accessed 9 June 2012). 3 Ibid., 171-177. 4 See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 5 Chile had no monopoly on the routine use of torture in interrogations and for punishment. See Darius M. Rejali, Torture & Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994) and Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and George Ryley Scott, History of Torture throughout the Ages (London: Senate, 1994, originally published London: T. Werner Laurie, 1940). 6 On the continuation of police violence and abuse of detainees after transition from military to civilian rule in Chile and Argentina, see Claudio Fuentes, Contesting the Iron First: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile (New York & London: Routledge, 2005). 7 José Toribio Medina, La Inquisición en Chile. Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Chile. (Santiago: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico José Toribio Medina, 1952; 1st edn., 1899), p. 142. 8 For descriptions and illustrations of each of these methods of torture see “Quistion de tormento,” at: www.gabrielbernat.es/espana/inquisicion/ie/proc/tormento/tormento.html# mancuerda. (accessed 12 May 2012). La toca was similar to the waterboarding torture used later by US troops in Iraq, and earlier in the Philippines against insurgents in the early twentieth century. 9 Medina, La Inquisición en Chile, p. 144. 10 “. . . y estando en forma de penitente se le leyó su sentencia con méritos y fue condenado a doscientos azotes y a que sirva a S. M. a ración y sin sueldo perpetuamente en el presidio de Valdivia y que todos los viernes rece una parte del rosario a María Santísima”. Ibid., p. 625. 11 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Francisco Moyen o lo que fue la Inquisición en América. (Valparaíso: Imprenta del Mercurio 1868), pp. 7, 118. 12 Medina, La Inquisición en Chile, pp. 662, 663. 13 Ibid., p. 671. 14 Francisco Ulloa, San Bruno y los Penitentes. Postrimerías del Coloniaje (Valparaíso. Sociedad Imprenta y Litografía Universo, 1912), pp. 35-36. Authors’ translation.

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15 Alberto Blest Gana. Durante la Reconquista, II (Santiago: Zig Zag, 1955), p. 281. 16 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, D. Diego Portales (Santiago: Editorial del Pacífico, 1974). p. 356. Authors’ translation. 17 The code established sanctions for public officials who violated prisoner rights, including that prisoners be presented before a judge within twenty-four hours of detention. It also punished officials who “arrogated to themselves judicial faculties or imposed any punishment [on prisoners] involving corporal punishment.” The idea was that only judges could impose corporal punishment, including flogging (azotes). Authors’ translation. 18 See Robustiano Vera, El Código Penal de la República de Chile Comentado (Santiago: Imprenta de P. Cadot y Cª, 1883). Cited by Jean Pierre Matus in “Fernández, Fuenzalida y Vera: Comentaristas, autodidactas y olvidados. Análisis diacrónico y sincrónico de la doctrina penal chilena del siglo XIX,” Revista Ius et Praxis, vol. 12, no. 1 (2006), pp. 31-67. 19 With the garrucha or strappado torture, weights are sometimes added to the body to increase the pain. Dislocation of the arms is common. 20 Robustiano Vera, “El azote, el tormento y las incomunicaciones como medios de descubrir delitos,” Revista Forense Chilena, Vol. 16(7), no. 8 (1891). pp. 586-591. Colección Biblioteca Nacional, Archivo pdf (Reference code MC0018570). Authors’ translation. 21 Ernesto Zamorano Reyes, La pena de azotes (Santiago: Imprenta y Encuadernación Bellavista, 1909). “Memoria de prueba para optar al grado de licenciado en la Facultad de Leyes i Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad de Chile,” Biblioteca Nacional (Reference Code MC0018569). 22 Lei promulgada con fecha 5 de octubre de 1876, en el número 4.716 de El Araucano, cited in Ricardo Anguita, Leyes Promulgadas en Chile, II (Santiago: Imprenta, Litografía i Encuadernación Barcelona, 1912), p. 407. 23 For interpretations of the causes of the civil war of 1891, see Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, 1886-1896: Balmaceda and North (London: Athlone Press, 1974); Luis Ortega, ed., La guerra civil de 1891: Cien años hoy (Santiago: Universidad de Santiago de Chile, 1991); Marcos García de la Huerta, Chile 1891: Gran Crisis y su Historiografía.(Santiago: Edeh, 1981); Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Las suaves cenizas del olvido: Vía chilena de Reconciliación Política 1814-1932 (2nd edn., Santiago: LOM, DIBAM, 2000), pp. 224-237. 24 The “acusación constitucional” procedure combines “impeachment” with retroactive investigation and nonjudicial “trial” of government officials as specified in the Chilean constitution. For details, see Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Las acusaciones constitucionales en Chile: Una perspectiva histórica (Santiago: LOM, FLACSO, 2000). 25 Editorial, El Mercurio, Valparaíso, 4 December1891, reprinted in La Época, Año X, Santiago, 5 December 1891. Authors’ translation. 26 Acusación a los ex Ministros del Despacho señores don Claudio Vicuña, don Domingo Godoi, don Ismael Perez Montt, don José Miguel Valdés Carrera, don José Francisco Gana, don Guillermo Mackenna. Pruebas rendidas durante el juicio ante el Senado (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Nacional, calle de la Moneda 112, 1891), pp. 83-86. 27 Declaración de don Tristán C. Stephan, ibíd., pp. 89-90.

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28 On amnesties from 1891 to 1894, see Loveman and Lira, Las suaves cenizas del olvido pp. 242-256. 29 . . . sobre el patio del cuartel tendido siente el roce brutal de la varilla rojiza mancha. Escúchase aullidos cada brazo en el aire da un chasquido que las entrañas del soldado trilla . . . . For the full text of “La Pena de Azotes,” see www.escritores.cl/base.php?f1=articulos/texto/recordandoapezoa.htm (accessed 24 May 2012). 30 Ibáñez had himself “elected” in a national plebiscite and then orchestrated noncompetitive congressional elections. Thus the façade of democracy remained, despite purges of the judiciary and fierce repression against political adversaries, the press, and the labor movement. 31 For an account of this period by the director of the secret police, see Ventura Maturana B., Mi Ruta, El pasado, el porvenir (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1936). Ventura Maturana, a lawyer, is considered one of the founders of the modern-day detective force known as the Policía de Investigaciones de Chile. 32 Cámara de Diputados, Sesión 31ª, Ordinaria, 28 July 1931, p. 1097. 33 República de Chile, Senado, Comisión investigadora de los actos de la dictadura. Sesión 8ª, Plenaria, 18 August 1931. See Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Los actos de la dictadura. Comisión Investigadora 1931 (Santiago: LOM, Universidad Alberto Hurtado. DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, Serie Fuentes para la Historia de la República, 2006), vol. XXVII, pp. 51-56. 34 Cited ibid., pp. 80 and 82. 35 Decreto Ley 50: Establece sanciones para los delitos cometidos contra la Seguridad Interior del Estado (Published in the Diario Oficial Nº16.307, 24 June 1932). Authors’ translation. Reprinted in Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Arquitectura política y seguridad interior del Estado, Chile 1811-1990 (Santiago: LOM, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, Serie Fuentes para la Historia de la República, 2002), vol. XIX, pp. 97-100. 36 For an illustrative and graphic case, see Gaceta de los Tribunales, Sentencias de la Corte Suprema, Nº 43, “Celedonio Cáceres y otros. Aplicación de Tormentos,” 1 April 1932, pp. 162-168. 37 Present-day Chile has two main national police forces, both of which operate as single territorial units with no federal or municipal variants.The first, the Carabineros, is a militarized institution considered part of the armed forces for most purposes. The separate Policía de Investigaciones is a civilian detective force formally constituted during the Alessandri period (in 1934), but with antecedents dating back to the late nineteenth century. Known during the first half century of its existence as ‘Investigaciones de Chile’, it officially became the ‘Policía de Investigaciones’, or PDI, in 1984. 38 Senado, Sesión 20ª, Extraordinaria, 13 April 1936, pp. 510-511. 39 Senado, Sesión 14ª, Extraordinaria, 24 March 1936, p. 204 40 Elías Lafferte, La vida de un comunista: Páginas Autobiográficas (Santiago: Talleres gráficos Lautaro, 1957), pp. 278-279. Authors’ translation.

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41 Cited in Ricardo Boizard, Cuatro retratos en profundidad: Ibáñez, Lafferte, Leighton, Walker (Santiago: imprenta El Imparcial, 1950), pp. 147148. Authors’ translation. 42 For examples of such pardon decrees, see Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Leyes de reconciliación en Chile: Amnistías, indultos y reparaciones 1819-1999 (Santiago: LOM Universidad Alberto Hurtado; DIBAM; Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, Serie Fuentes para la Historia de la República, 2001), XVII, pp. 113-135. 43 The punishment of azotes was abolished by Law 9.347, which derogated article 4 of the law of 3 August 1876 and 3 September 1883. These laws had stipulated the punishment of azotes for specified crimes. 44 Under Chilean law, the president could (and can) send persons into internal exile (“traslado” in legal terms, but often referred to, incorrectly, as relegación) when governing under facultades extraordinarias, a state of siege, or other constitutional regime of exception. Such decrees of traslado, according to doctrine developed by the Supreme Court in the 1930s, were not reviewable by the courts; they fell within the constitutional jurisdiction of the president. 45 Pablo Neruda, Canto General, tr. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 197. 46 For the full text of this law, see Loveman and Lira, Arquitectura política y seguridad interior del Estado, pp. 161-175. 47 This would become of even greater concern during the military dictatorship (1973–1990). See, e.g., Arzobispado de Santiago, Vicaría de Solidaridad, Delitos contra la Seguridad del Estado, vol. 1 (Santiago: n. p., 1989). 48 Cámara de Diputados, Sesión 67ª, Ordinaria, 2 September 1955, p. 3134. Ibáñez, the former dictator, returned to the presidency in 1952, elected as an “antipolitical” populist whose symbol was a broom to sweep away the corruption of “politics.” 49 Cámara de Diputados, Sesión 73ª, Ordinaria, 9 September 1955, p. 3442. 50 On the events of April 1957, see Pedro Milos, Historia y Memoria: 2 de abril de 1957 (Santiago: LOM, 2007). 51 Senado, Sesión 27ª, Ordinaria, 27 July 1965, p. 1735. 52 Ibid., p. 1742. 53 Cámara de Diputados, Sesión 32a Ordinaria. 13 August 1969, p. 3111. 54 Senado, Sesión 56ª, Extraordinaria, 22 January 1972, pp. 2894-2897. 55 On leftist penetration of the armed forces, and especially the navy, see Jorge Magasich A., Los que dijeron ‘No’: Historia del movimiento de los marinos antigolpistas de 1973 (Santiago: LOM, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 399-431, and vol. 2, pp. 42-115. 56 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 134-155. 57 El Siglo, 30 August 1973, cited ibid., p. 217. 58 Ibid., p. 141; Chile Hoy, No. 7, August 1973; Lucía Sepúlveda Ruiz, “Hay que dar la palabra a los militares que respetaron la Constitución para avanzar hacia unas FFAA democráticas,” interview with historian Jorge Magasich, author of “Los que dijeron no,” regarding the sailors who opposed the coup in 1973, in Rebelión, 2 May 2008. www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=66727 (accessed 31 May 2012). 59 Causa 3926, foja 256; Tribuna, 7 September 1973; cited in Magasich vol. 2, pp. 183-184.

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60 61

“Carta al pueblo y al Presidente,” reprinted in Magasich, vol. 2, pp. 200-

Las Noticias de Última Hora, 9 September 1973. Paul Drake and Iván Jaksic, eds., El modelo chileno: democracia y desarrollo en los noventa (Santiago: LOM, 1999), pp. 446-447. See also Florencia E. Mallon, La sangre del copihue: la comunidad Mapuche de Nicolás Ailío y el Estado chileno, 1906–2001. (Santiago: LOM. 2004), pp. 133-143. 63 On the role of the US “School of the Americas” in training Latin American military personnel, and on US “torture manuals,” see Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 64 Decree Law 5 was published in the Diario Oficial on 22 September. Its wording regarding a “state of war” and the application of the provisions of the Military Code of Justice for “times of war” were still the basis of judicial dispute in 2010. Had the country really been “at war”? If so, should prisoners have been protected by the Geneva Conventions? If so, had the junta violated the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes? 65 Reprinted in Loveman and Lira, Arquitectura política y seguridad interior del Estado, pp. 337-341. 66 Although Chile had ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1951, and the military junta declared the country in a “state of war,” police and armed forces personnel did not respect the rights of their “enemies,” including the right not to be tortured, “disappeared,” or murdered. 67 Cited in Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999), p. xv. 68 For a history of human rights organizations after 1973, see Patricio Orellana and Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, El movimiento de derechos humanos en Chile 1973-1990 (Santiago: Centro de Estudios Políticos Latinoamericanos Simón Bolívar, 1991). 69 See Juan Enrique Vargas Viancos, “El caso chileno ante el Sistema Interamericano de Protección de los Derechos Humanos,” Revista Chilena de Derechos Humanos, no. 12 (April 1990), p. 15. 70 Vicaría de la Solidaridad, “Documentos sobre la situación de los Derechos Humanos en Chile analizados en el sexto período ordinario de sesiones de la O.E.A.,” June 1976. Fundación Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad. 71 See the special reports of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at: www.cidh.org/countryrep/Chile74sp/Indice.htm and www.cidh.org/ countryrep/Chile76sp/Indice.htm. For further detail on the UN and OAS condemnations of human rights violations in Chile, see www.cidh.org/ countryrep/Chile77sp/indice.htm and www.cidh.org/countryrep/Chile85sp/ Indice.htm (29 May 2012). See also Vargas “El caso chileno ante el Sistema Interamericano”, pp. 11-29. 72 Over time numerous testimonials were published regarding torture in the prisons and clandestine detention centers. See, e.g., Hernán Valdés, Tejas Verdes (Barcelona, Editorial Ariel, 1974); Alberto Gamboa, Un viaje al Infierno (Santiago: La Partida, 1984); Ernesto Carmona, ed., Morir es la noticia (Santiago, Impresión: J&C Productores Gráficos Ltda., 3rd edn., 1998). 73 The CNI, supposedly an intelligence service, operated in practice as Chile’s main repressive agency or secret police service between 1977 and 1990. 62

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It replaced earlier functional equivalent the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA, which operated between 1973 and 1977 and was responsible for most dictatorship-era disappearances and killings. 74 Maxine Lowy, “Abogados de derechos humanos denunciaron tortura desde el primer momento,” July 2005. www.unexpp.cl/home/?p=1169 (accessed 29 May 2012). 75 “Excomunión a torturadores,” Mensaje, no. 296, 1981, p. 68. 76 See Hernán Vidal, El Movimiento contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo: Derechos humanos y la producción de símbolos nacionales bajo el fascismo chileno (Santiago: Biblioteca 7&3, Mosquito Editores, 2nd edn., 2002). 77 “Un camino cristiano”, Declaración de la Asamblea Plenaria de la Conferencia Episcopal de Chile. Ref. N. 761/83 en Documentos del Episcopado. Chile 1981-1983 (Santiago: Ediciones Mundo, 1984): 147. 78 The Chilean government signed the Convention, with reservations, on 23 September 1987. It was not published in the Diario Oficial until 26 November 1988. 79 In 1999 the administration of President William Clinton declassified a large number of documents regarding the U.S. role in the preparation for the coup of 1973 and support by the United States of the military regime. See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. (New York: The New Press, 2003). 80 Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, 3 vols. Santiago, February 1991. The authors of this chapter interviewed all the members of this commission regarding its work, limitations, and achievements. 81 See Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman, Políticas de Reparación. Chile 1990-2004 (Santiago: LOM, DIBAM, 2005). 82 On the 1978 amnesty decree, see Loveman and Lira, Las ardientes cenizas del olvido. Pp. 451-464. 83 In January 2001 Judge Juan Guzmán placed Pinochet under house arrest for the second time on charges of homicide and kidnapping. He was accused of masterminding 57 homicides and 18 kidnappings carried out during the “Caravan of Death” in 1973. Further charges and new cases saw Judge Guzmán formally chargePinochet in December 2004 with nine kidnappings and one murder, in the case of ten Chilean leftists who disappeared or were killed outside of Chile in the 1970s. Cases continued to mount against Pinochet until his death in 2006. Just before his ninetieth birthday, Pinochet was placed under house arrest and charged with tax fraud, forging passports and documents, and incomplete reporting of his assets in a case involving an estimated US$ 27 million hidden in foreign bank accounts. Next, Judge Victor Montiglio put him back under house arrest (in November 2005) and charged him with seven counts of kidnap (disappearance) in a 1974 human rights case known as Operation Colombo. 84 For detailed documentation on Straw’s decision not to extradite Pinochet to Spain, see Jack Straw, British Secretary of State, “On Pinochet’s Liberation” at: www.analitica.com/bitblioteca/pinochet/liberation.asp (accessed 24 May 2012). 85 For a short-term assessment of the implications of the Pinochet case, see Stacie Jonas, “The Ripple Effect of the Pinochet Case,” Human Rights Brief, vol. 11, no. 3 (24 May 2004), pp. 36-38. For thorough analysis of the case, see

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also Naomi Roht-Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 86 Most Spanish-English dictionaries translate “apremios ilegítimos” as torture. But various versions of the Chilean Penal Code over the relevant period list tormento/tortura, apremios ilegítimos, and rigor innecesario. This suggests that there is some precise difference among these, but common usage does not so distinguish. Illustratively, in a 2010 case, in which prison guards were sentenced to 60-100 days for beating a female prisoner, newspaper reporting also did not distinguish between the two: “Nueve gendarmes fueron condenadas a presidio remitido por el delito de apremios ilegítimos o torturas en contra de una detenida del Centro Penitenciario Femenino de Santiago,” La Tercera, 17 February 2010. 87 Ximena Marré, “Apremios: hay 14 querellas sin procesados. Estas acciones han sido presentadas por sobrevivientes de centros de detención de los cuerpos armados,” El Mercurio 11 November 2004. For an account by workers of the repression and torture in the Loewer case, see “Cecinas Loewer,” PiensaChile.cl, 9 September 2004. www.memoriaviva.com/empresas/cecinas_loewer.htm (accessed 26 May 2012). 88 FASIC: www.fasic.org/juri/quere2001.htm accessed 10 May 2012). See Patricia Verdugo, Los Zarpazos del Puma (Santiago: CESOC, Ediciones ChileAmérica, 1989). 89 Mercedes Castro, “Militares (r) rompen el silencio en querella por torturas contra Pinochet,” www.primeralinea.cl, 2 October 2001. 90 See Brigada de Ex-Presos Políticos Socialistas, “Fichas, demandas y querellas,” Boletín no. 1, 10 August 2002. www.purochile.rrojasdatabank.info/ beps010.htm (accessed 31 May 2012). 91 “He caído en cuenta que mi silencio termina, en verdad, por hacerse cómplice del engaño a que este individuo somete a diario a todos quienes le rodean . . . participó en el equipo que me torturó a mí personalmente repetidas veces en el Estadio Nacional en 1973, y frente a quien deben haber pasado centenares de detenidos. Sobre su participación no tengo duda alguna.” See Patricia Verdugo, De la tortura NO se habla, Agüero versus Meneses (Santiago: Editorial Catalonia, 2004); www.memoriaviva.cl/criminales/criminales_m/meneses_emilio.htm (accessed 10 February 2013), and Felipe Agüero, “La Interminable Tortura del Silencio” in http://es.groups.yahoo.com/group/testimonios-chile/message/793 (accessed 10 February 2013). 92 Proceso Rol no. 165.085-3, Seventh Criminal Court of Santiago. 93 Patricia Verdugo, “Los protagonistas de la tortura.” La Nación, 8 Jan 2005. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 97 Comisión Nacional de Prisión Política y Tortura. Elizabeth Lira was a member of this commission. 98 The full text is available at www.ddhh.gov.cl/ddhh_propuesta.html (accessed 10 February 2013). 99 Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004.

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100 Ibid., 562. In the period of reconsideration, the Commission qualified 164 cases. Most were children who had been detained with their parents. The final count of minors under eighteen reached 1,244. 101 The authors have spoken with many people who decided not to participate in the Valech commission proceedings or who “just didn’t get around to it.” 102 Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004, p. 646. 103 “Para nunca más vivirlo, nunca más negarlo,” speech given by President Ricardo Lagos, 28 November 2004 (Estudios Públicos, no. 97, Summer 2005), p. 310. Also published as the Prologue to the Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. 104 Juan Emilio Cheyre, “Ejército de Chile: El fin de una visión,” La Tercera, 5 November 2004. Reprinted in Estudios Públicos, no. 97, 2005, p. 505. In English: www.cepchile.cl/dms/lang_2/doc_3480.html (accessed 10 February 2013). 105 For institutional responses to the Valech commission report, see “Informe de la Comision Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura y respuestas institucionales,” in Estudios Públicos, no. 97, 2005, pp. 509-516; particularly “Declaración Pública de la Fuerza Aérea de Chile, 1 December 2004,” ibid. pp. 514-516; “Comunicado Oficial de Carabineros de Chile (30 November 2004),” ibid. p. 513; “Declaración Pública de la Armada de Chile (30 November 2004)”, ibid. p. 511; “Declaración pública del director general de la Policía de Investigaciones de Chile, Arturo Herrera (13 November 2004)”, ibid. pp. 509510. www.cepchile.cl (accessed 25 May 2012). 106 “Declaración de la Corte Suprema (9 December 2004)”, reprinted in Estudios Públicos, no. 97, Summer 2005, pp. 527- 529 (accessed 25 May 2012). Authors’ translation. 107 The pension was, however, not payable if the victim had been previously recognized as an exonerado politico (someone who had lost his/her job for political reasons) and was receiving a pension. Individuals were eligible for only one of these pensions. However, the law provided a one-time payment of approximately $ US 5,500 as a compensation in these cases. 108 Chapter “Impunidad y violaciones a los derechos humanos del pasado (sobre hechos de 2006)” in Informe Anual sobre Derechos Humanos en Chile 2007 (Hechos de 2006) (Santiago: Centro de Derechos Humanos, Universidad Diego Portales, 2007), p. 99. www.derechoshumanos.udp.cl/wpcontent/uploads/2009/07/impunidad_viol acionespasado.pdf (accessed 10 February 2013). 109 Wally Kunstmann Torres and Victoria Torres Ávila, eds., Cien voces rompen el silencio: Testimonios de ex presas y presos políticos de la dictadura militar en Chile, 1973-1990 (Santiago: DIBAM, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana y Regional Metropolitano de ex presas y presos políticos, Serie Fuentes para la historia de la República Vol. XXIX, 2006.). 110 Created by Decreto Supremo Nº 43, “reglamentario de esta Comisión,” published on 5 February 2010 in Diario Oficial. 111 “Informe de la Comisión Presidencial Asesora para la Calificación de Detenidos Desaparecidos, Ejecutados Políticos y Víctimas de Prisión Política y Tortura.” Santiago: 2011.

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www.indh.cl/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Informe2011.pdf (accessed 10 February 2013). 112 “Former police officer acknowledges torture of Mapuche,” Mapuche International Link. www.mapuche-nation.org/english/html/news/n-64.htm (accessed 10 February 2013). 113 “Waikilaf Cadin Calfunao presenta querella por torturas contra gendarmeria chilena,” Mapuche International Link. www.mapuchenation.org/espanol/html/documentos/doc-63.htm (accessed 10 February 2013). 114 Article published at: www.liberar.cl/web/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=108:nuevas-querellas-por-torturas-a-mapuches&catid =1:noticias&Itemid=12 (accessed 28 Jan 2013) 115 On 22 January 2010, Jorge Huenchullan Cayul filed a criminal complaint (querella) charging that agents of the PDI had tortured his brother, Felipe Huenchullán Cayul. www.liberar.cl/web/index.pption=com_ content&view=article&id=107:amenazas-de-muerte-e-insultos-racistas-querella -por-torturas-a-presos-mapuches-de-angol&catid=1:noticias&Itemid=12 (accessed 10 February 2013). Felipe Huenchullán was declared innocent of the charges for which he had been arrested on 24 August 2012, after three years in jail. 116 “La violencia policial en Chile 2008” Authors’ translation. Electronic report coordinated by the campaign ‘ALTO AHÍ!—Basta de Violencia Policial’. www.observatorio.cl/sites/default/files/biblioteca/la_violencia_policial_en_chile %202008.pdf (accessed 28 January 2013). The report was jointly prepared or signed by leading organizations or individuals associated with human rights. These included the Observatorio Ciudadano; Amnesty International (Chile Section); the American Association of Jurists; CODEPU; Corporación OPCIÓN; the Ethical Commission Against Torture (Comisión Ética contra la Tortura); the Center for Mental Health and Human Rights (Centro de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos, CINTRAS); the National Network of Child and Youth Organizations (Red de ONGs Infancia y Juventud Chile); Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia; lawyers Fabiola Letelier, Hugo Gutiérrez and Nelson Caucoto; Bishop Helmut Frenz; Mayor Adolfo Millabur, and a representative of Chile’s professional associations. 117 “Respuestas por escrito del gobierno de Chile a la Lista de cuestiones que deben abordarse al examinar el quinto informe Periódico de Chile”, 16 March 2009. UN Document Ref CAT/C/CHL/Q/5/Add.1, pp.9, 21. www2. ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/docs/AdvanceVersions/CAT-C-CHL-Q5-Add1_sp. pdf (accessed 10 February 2013). 118 Around 29 cases were ongoing for survived torture at the end of 2012, although only one final confirmed custodial sentence—of one hundred days— had been imposed. See Observatorio de Derechos Humanos, ‘Verdad, Justicia y Memoria: violaciones de derechos humanos del pasado’, in Universidad Diego Portales, Informe Anual sobre Derechos Humanos en Chile 2012. (Santiago: Universidad Diego Portales, 2012, pp.22-23).

5 Memorials, Silences, and Reawakenings Cath Collins and Katherine Hite

This chapter analyzes the commemoration of political violence and its victims in the aftermath of Chile’s 1973–1990 dictatorship. We assess the varied political processes involved in commemoration and 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. The chapter explores how a range of actors recognizes that sites and spaces of memory can serve to realize individual and collective commemorative impulses, assuage postponed demands for symbolic or more tangible justice, or (re)assert political identity. Commemorations can become vital spaces for societal soul-searching, not just about the past, but also about the present and future.1 Yet we suggest that the postPinochet memorials constitute fragments in Chile’s landscape. Inviting broader public engagement with the recent past through memorials and memorial sites has proved both elusive and problematic. The first part of the chapter introduces several dilemmas illustrated by the evolving dynamics of a multiactor commemoration field, where many civil society groups interact with an almost equally varied universe of official bodies in efforts to have memorial projects recognized and realized. A central question is what the “right relationship” is between official and private initiatives and publics in the design, construction, and interpretation of memorials. Here we explore the pervasive influence of former authoritarians, the state as a reactive

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rather than proactive force, and the tensions around memorial design and location. We also venture to ask what constitutes a “successful” commemorative endeavor. In the second part of the chapter we signal three kinds of commemorative activity in present-day Chile that best capture current trends in this field. The first is civil-society-driven human rights commemoration, involving often prolonged and fitful struggles among tremendously varied actors at both the local and national levels. Second, we discuss political commemoration as conceptually and practically distinct from human rights commemoration. Political commemoration focuses on the political fractures that surrounded and preceded the dictatorship, attempting to reinterpret or repackage particularly contested moments and leaders to fit evolving political preferences and priorities. Here the main protagonists are government and opposition elites, rather than civil-society-based groups. Finally, we discuss how state responses have been shaped by the particular character and priorities of incumbent political administrations, with particular attention to Chile’s recently inaugurated Museum of Memory and Human Rights. We show how the museum project originated not so much in strong executive leadership on the human rights issue as in persistent “bottom up” pressure finally calling forth an official response. Notwithstanding, and in contrast to other memory sites (such as the former detention centers Londres 38 or Villa Grimaldi) the museum now features frequently in the Chilean media (not least as a target of criticism from the political right). Tens of thousands of national and international visitors have passed through the museum’s doors since they first opened in 2010. Its backstory is therefore particularly apt for demonstrating how, in a highly presidentialist political system, personal emphases and projects can sharply recast memory policy even between two consecutive leaders from the same coalition.2 That the 2010 advent of the first elected right-wing administration in almost half a century should represent yet another “memory watershed” ought accordingly to come as no surprise. Indeed, the surprise lies perhaps in the relative absence of outright official reversal of previous memory initiatives by the administration of Sebastian Piñera after 2010. Although unofficial “countermemory” forces were seemingly emboldened by political alternation, the right-as-government has to date been reluctant to step back too far from symbolic recognition, wrung from it over the 1990s, of the indefensibility of past atrocity. Certain developments in 2011 and 2012 nonetheless questioned the extent or completeness of the public repudiation of repression or authoritarianism that, it is sometimes held, ought to normatively inspire the democratic state’s memory discourse.

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These included sharp public questioning of the museum, a semi-private but publicly financed institution whose fortunes serve as a useful barometer with which to detect or predict imminent changes in the political weather. Who Remembers, Who Forgets? Commemoration as an Active Construct

Over the past two decades or more, the literatures on commemorations and their meanings have moved beyond rather uncritical celebrations of memorials to now widely accepted assertions that monuments and memorials are often attempts to relegate or erase conflict-ridden, politically traumatic pasts.3 Indeed, official monuments are typically state symbolic efforts to proclaim historic continuity and convey national unity and stability, even if such stability hardly represented the reality of the historic moment in which the monument was debated or installed.4 State desires to project consensus and stability through monumental representations are particularly apparent in monuments to dead leaders, though they can also often be conveyed through the aesthetic uniformity of funerary monuments in towns, villages, and cities across a nation.5 Yet the emphasis in the memorial literature on the instrumentalist character of state commemoration would lead us to expect a much more cohesive and proactive commemorative state policy than post-dictatorial Chilean commemorative processes and projects actually display. A numerous and often conflicting array of civil society groups is today demanding that the Chilean state recognize its culpability in past atrocities, end state silence or ambivalence, and mourn the dead by owning the full extent of state-sponsored violence. Rather than relegate away the past, an increasing number of memorial efforts expose the fissures and invite engagement. They challenge the state, and insist that it respond. Memorials in post-conflict societies are largely about process. What should the memorial be about? What groups are involved in the memorial’s impetus and design? Who builds it, who funds it, who controls the outcome? What dialogues does a memorial trigger? Who responds to the memorial once established, and to what degree? How lasting or how fleeting in time does the memorial prove to be?6 Each of these questions is almost inevitably fraught with tensions, and each involves unanticipated as well as anticipated political struggle. Thus one useful way of guarding against a tendency to narrate in the passive voice, to describe what has happened over commemoration as if it were the only possible unfolding of predetermined events, is to keep the

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varied cast of memory actors firmly in view. This cast involves a great diversity of individuals and groups, state and nonstate, old and young, for or against commemoration in its various forms and expressions, skeptical or enthusiastic regarding the role of officialdom and the possibility of meaningful commemoration at all. Chilean memorial processes also involve a substantial bloc of sometimes still-powerful, and usually resource-rich, individuals and groups supportive of or directly involved in the 1973–1990 regime. Although increasingly marginal to official right-wing or military discourse, the core of this sector that openly opposes commemorative demands to acknowledge human rights victims has begun to organize commemorations of leaders of the repressive past, including Pinochet himself. In contexts such as this, officially sponsored commemoration can be expected to be a more difficult enterprise than in contexts where outgoing regimes were more thoroughly discredited or exited by collapse. Commemorations have served as alternatives, complements, and precursors to more direct demands for more truth or more justice, and in this sense have been treated with the caution common to state treatment of all related issues.7 All types of human rights commemoration beyond the most essentially personal, private, and homegrown involve or aim for some kind of public impact and require the negotiation of permission, space, or resources from local or national authorities. As the number, diversity, and visibility of private initiatives have grown since the late 1990s, so has the perceived need for ad hoc official responses to be consolidated, coordinated, and even institutionalized. However, although some government ministries have offered funding access as well as considerable logistical support, the official line has often seemed to be that civil society commemorative demands are a potential problem, to be discouraged or contained. This overall message became predictably more prevalent after the 2010 shift to a right-wing administration. Notwithstanding this ambivalence, the sheer number of memorials has exploded across the country, from the haunting memorial of the Pisagua8 “graveyard” in Chile’s far north, to the memorial to victims of disappearance or political execution that stands in the Municipal Cemetery of Punta Arenas in Chile’s far south. Human rights memorials throughout the country number well over two hundred to date.9 Although recent activities have broadened their scope to include more figurative engagements such as documentary filmmaking, photo exhibitions, or artistic interventions, the majority of these commemorative artifacts have a funerary function or association. These include the wall of names in Santiago’s General Cemetery that still represents

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the only completely state (rather than private or semi-private) initiative of its kind. But many see funerary commemorations as reinforcing an association with death still not proven in the case of the remaining disappeared.10 In the struggles over memory and memory representations, some families reject what Reinhart Kosseleck11 terms the state’s “horizon of expectations,” that is, the state’s defining families’ loved ones as dead in a way that conditions future social or political recourse.12 Funerary memorials are rejected by others because they draw attention to the absence of victims—the dead or disappeared—rather than the presence of survivors or even of perpetrators. A related critique is that funerary representations convey what was done, but not why it was done nor who did it; thereby ignoring the genesis of repressive machinery, including the deliberate creation and training of its agents. Artifacts placed in cemeteries or places of clandestine detention also tend to create or reinforce a peripheral geography of commemoration, restricting it to certain places that are not part of everyday civic or political routine. Physical relegation adds to the sense of a fragmented memory landscape, with the enactment of commemorative policies that almost deliberately avoid engaging the public more meaningfully in collective explorations of the past. Some Chilean grassroots groups have opted to denounce the perceived inadequacies of an exclusive focus on mausoleum-type sites by embarking on countermemorial collective actions. Countermemorials reject what they see as the staid, sedentary, and deadening character of conventional monuments and memorials by inviting dynamic, provocative, public interaction.13 These particular groups carry out consciously temporal, transitory interventions in public spaces, often with the declared aim of making the dead and disappeared inescapably “present” again. Thus, for example, the “Marcha Rearme” in 2005 led an intervention that chose to reverse the direction of the traditional 11 September commemorative march. Instead of marching from the city center to the cemetery’s memorial wall of names, the group carried the names in solemn procession from the cemetery back to the heart of the civic center. The unauthorized nature of the event led to the arrest of some participants, complete with name placards: an apposite irony that only added to the symbolic weight of the intervention. A group of friends and relatives of the “119”14 have undertaken similar activities designed to “reanimate” the memory of their disappeared comrades. Commemorative processes related to sites have generally begun with a campaign group of relatives and survivors who form and lobby to have a site preserved, via national monument status. If successful, the group can press to have sites that are in private hands requisitioned or

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purchased by the state and handed to the group to administer. Yet none of these steps is free of problems or tensions. Sites or buildings targeted by campaign groups have present-day owners, who have to be placated or compensated if the sites are to be recovered. Chile’s Council for National Monuments, a small body with a tiny budget, has found its capacity overwhelmed and has been criticized for drawing on the public purse for what are seen as essentially private demands. The Human Rights Program of the Interior Ministry, which deals mainly with legal and social assistance to relatives of the disappeared, has a “Symbolic Works” area that distributes a small number of competitive grants among private groups. Despite being the main state entity active in the area, however, staffing is minimal and budget capacity cannot keep pace with demand. In 2012 the office’s modest ambitions were restricted to a handful of capital grants for the completion or rectification of earthquake damage to existing works. Anything more would, they signaled, require local authorities to take on responsibility for funding and maintenance of both existing and new works.15 The tension between public and private activities is particularly strong, and striking, because of a tendency on the part of all actors involved to treat human rights commemoration as a private and, moreover, a minority interest, rather than a standalone public duty or commitment. Is the state’s commitment of public funds to private commemorative projects an extension of its previous reparations policy?16 Or is it, as the recent museum might signal, a separate commitment to repudiate past state repression and transmit an official “never again” message? Or is it rather an even-handed effort to promote democratic dialogue? This undoubtedly defensible yet weak form of support for private memory initiatives might well in theory assign equal validity to other versions of, and explanations for, recent political violence.17 These questions are not so much normative theoretical considerations as immediate policy-related issues that the recent growth in commemorative activity has pressed upon the Chilean state and the particular administrations that have directed it since 1990. An articulated policy towards such issues is increasingly both an ethical and a practical imperative, even as political alternation to the right has rendered this a potentially politically fraught or even counterproductive enterprise. The extent to which civil society initiatives can in this sense serve as policy catalysts, forcing official bodies to define or redefine present responses to past human rights crimes, is further explored below.

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What Makes For Successful Memorialization?

In addition to the questions discussed above—what constitutes a suitable space for commemoration, what the state’s role should or will in practice be—Chile’s recent trajectory also raises the question of what can be considered a “success” in this field. If commemoration is understood as essentially a private activity, designed to meet the personal or emotional needs of survivors and relatives, then their own evaluations of the sufficiency of the process and its outcome are enough. In this scenario, the state’s contribution would essentially be an extension of reparations policy, providing public means and resources for the expression and exteriorization of private grief. However, the debate is never that simple. First, the expressed aims of many of the private pro-commemoration actors include the desire to “force” (their term) the state to take a more active role. Here, simple official patronage, in the sense of allowing for or even promoting the telling of a private story or version, is considered insufficient. Instead, say some, “It’s about time that the state told, in its own words, the same story that we’ve all been telling for years”. Rather than “uncovering” the genuinely not known, here it seems that at least for some it is important not only that commemoration should be done but that the state should do it.18 There is also the perverse sense in which individual stories of men and women tortured, executed or disappeared by their own state have already ceased to be entirely private stories at all. Told and retold as claim and counterclaim by regime opponents and officials, their numbers, significance and even existence debated and refuted in the chamber of the UN and before the UK Law Lords, the stories of the Chilean men, women and children who commemoration purports to represent have inescapably become public property. Should commemoration seek to represent who these men and women were, or are, for their families; by their own accounts; or according to their former political comrades? Should commemoration always have to spell out what the state did to its victims and why? What happens when public and private versions collide or contradict, as for example where families wish to downplay or deny political activism to which others want to call attention? What is the correct balance between relating very individual, human stories and conveying collective political or moral messages? Is the “best” memorial one that closely satisfies the aspirations of those who campaigned for it, or one that is highly visible and achieves public notoriety?

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In the Chilean case, and as we will detail below, former and current political activists including ex-detainees have fought since the mid1990s to preserve and reconstruct the notorious former concentration camp Villa Grimaldi. Representing the first such site in the Americas to be recovered and opened to the public,19 Villa Grimaldi is considered a “successful” memorial by most interested parties. It has officially been declared a historic site, local and national government bodies have contributed support, and the Villa has achieved international recognition. Nonetheless, the commemoration process has been fitful and precarious. Administrative responsibility has shifted among state and municipal agencies several times, and an uneasy mix of official and private (external) project-based funding means resources are never secure. Better known, and at least initially more extensively visited, by foreigners than by national groups, Villa Grimaldi has progressed in distinct ways as a representative form of traumatic memory—and most recently as a site of cultural production—and yet it remains comparatively marginal to the Chilean political imaginary. In fact, with the possible exception of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, virtually no commemorative projects to date can claim to have successfully captured the attention and imagination of the Chilean public. If visibility and impact over time, rather than solely the internal value of a commemorative process for its participants, are among a project’s defined objectives, some even risk being classified as complete failures. A much-trumpeted memorial to women victims of the dictatorship, inaugurated in 2006 just days after Pinochet’s death, was successively neglected, abandoned, and then comprehensively vandalized over the months and years that followed. Even apparently successful projects such as Villa Grimaldi and Paine (see below) seem relatively little known outside their immediate circles of participants, supporters, and human rights activists.20 We would argue this lack of recognition is due in good part to failures of will by Chile’s pre-2010 center-left political leadership, echoed of course by its center-right one after that date. It also owes much to the fragmented, atomized nature of many of collective memory voices at the grassroots. Nevertheless, as the range and forms that memorials take continue to expand and multiply, so too do instances of concerted action or dialogue, whether consensual or conflictive, among civil society actors and between these actors and the state. Small but vibrant Chilean subcultures continue to champion collective memories. Some site campaign groups have strong shared political identities based on past or present militancy. The age profile of participants can also shape discourse, form, and outcomes: Chilean

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youth have brought new life to a range of commemorative processes, animating their forms with color, creating dynamic representations on blogs and web pages, and performing theatrically at the sites. Some consciously aim for a present, ethically minded sensibility that makes links to other causes or issues.21 In 2011 and 2012 these links reached perhaps their maximum visible expression when Chilean student protests briefly made international headlines. Site-linked and survivor groups formed “human rights observer” corps to monitor police activity and denounce possible abuses during marches and student protests. The next section of this chapter accordingly draws on primary sources including the voices of “memory entrepreneurs” (Jelín) to trace the insertion of a range of Chilean memorial forms and aesthetics into the contemporary body politic. Taken together, Chile’s existing and nascent memorials represent a fragmented political landscape: sometimes nostalgic and mournful, yet also imbued with vibrancy and possibility. It is therefore at least conceivable that sooner rather than later Chile’s broader public will more actively engage in a politics of memory, one whose overall content or direction cannot, however, be predetermined or even accurately predicted. Human Rights Memorials from the Grassroots: Villa Grimaldi

The former concentration camp of Villa Grimaldi possesses profound meaning and pain, particularly for those who were imprisoned and tortured there. Establishing or reelaborating the site’s form and aesthetics has been a difficult undertaking.22 The site is located in the Santiago municipality of Peñalolén, on the city outskirts close to the capital’s highest Andean mountain range. Built as a nineteenth-century rural estate, by the mid-twentieth century Villa Grimaldi had become a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. After the 1973 coup, the DINA secret police23 expropriated the property and transformed Villa Grimaldi into a clandestine torture center. Some 4,500 prisoners passed through there between 1973 and 1978, of whom at least 211 later disappeared with another 18 known to have been executed.24 In the late 1980s, in anticipation of the imminent end of the military regime, the then-head of military intelligence sold the Villa on to a front company in order to get access to a lucrative property deal. The site’s remaining buildings were bulldozed, and behind the thick metal gates only barren earth, an abandoned swimming pool, and several old trees were left. Survivors and human rights groups got wind of the planned property deal and mobilized local residents to object to planning permission and demand that the site be preserved. Thanks to a sympathetic local mayor,

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they eventually managed to have the site expropriated, and in 1993 the housing ministry agreed to invite bids for a commemorative project and to fund construction of the winning design. The activist group, formalized into a nonprofit corporation, succeeded in having Villa Grimaldi declared a national monument the same year. The site was finally inaugurated in March 1997. The winning project reshaped the site as a “park for peace.” Fragments of colored tile and flooring rescued from the ruins were gathered into sculpted forms and interspersed among the bare earth, grass, and gravel as beautiful but haunting reminders of the fragments that former prisoners reported having dimly seen through their permanent blindfolds.25 A conscious feature of this first design was the decision not to reconstruct installations from the site’s concentration camp period, preserving instead clean sight lines and an open, light-filled interior. Nevertheless, as Chile’s longest-established site-focused group, the Corporación Villa Grimaldi is perhaps naturally one of those where debate, disagreement, and the permanent reshaping and redefinition of commemoration are most in evidence. The ongoing relationship between the site and the group that now administers it accordingly led to almost immediate, and ongoing, reversals of these original design decisions, a dynamic also observable in other groups and site projects. Proposals to reconstruct parts of the original buildings, reversing the regime’s attempt to erase the site’s past through demolition, provoked the most heated early debates. Some felt the reconstruction impulse ran against historical authenticity and might even risk falling into the trap of “theme-park” bad taste. Eventually, a wooden water tower that had been used as a cell was rebuilt. Initially conceived of as a permanent reminder from all vantage points of the park’s sinister past, the tower was nevertheless soon obscured from view by the 2006 construction of a roofed stage for public events and concerts. Experience after the inauguration led the group, previously focused almost exclusively on what the site should look like, and what should go into it, to focus more precisely on what should now happen and be done there. Deciding that it was more important to attract new visitors in order to be able to engage them with the site’s message, the group consciously opted to abandon the original aesthetic in pursuit of a functional, outreach goal. These developments have certainly allowed for expansion of the scope and nature of the activities that take place at and around the Villa. One recent development has been an oral history archive, comprising hundreds of testimonies from survivors and family members that can be viewed onsite in a specially constructed visitor center with basic audiovisual facilities. An educational program trains teachers and

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develops curricula for different age groups. Visitor numbers have grown each year, and the existence of the roofed stage has allowed for events as diverse as theater, poetry recitals, and even album launches by local musicians. From 2009 a museum project was mooted, requiring expansion of the park’s grounds beyond even the original historical confines of the estate and sparking debate about whether to design a museum of repression or of resistance. Villa Grimaldi has accordingly begun to appear as both setting and protagonist in other kinds of memory narration and enactment: in 2005 the son of a disappeared former prisoner held his wedding ceremony at the site, and the Villa is increasingly written about in memory literature from and about the region.26 The formalization and institutionalization of the space also allowed the Villa to acquire projection on the international stage, prominent in civil society networks and coalitions27 and often consulted by groups interested in initiating similar projects. Its increasingly international profile brought the project to the attention of central government early on, after an official visit to the site by Michelle Bachelet in 2006 saw the Villa become a regular stop for overseas dignitaries on official visits to Chile (a practice discontinued, of course, after 2010). Nonetheless, securing resources to provide for the site’s development and even daily upkeep proved a permanent struggle even before electoral changeover: whether pre- or post-2010, there is little visible evidence of sustained official commitment to the space. This absence, together with the site’s physical location on the outskirts of the city, perhaps contributed to a lingering difficult-to-enter element for outsiders, not solely due to the fact of its former direct association with terror. There was until recently no sign outside Villa Grimaldi’s gates, keeping its profile discreet.28 Villa Grimaldi could in its early years feel somewhat insular, a space recreated for dead or disappeared victims by survivors who had also been detained and tortured. Relationships between relatives and survivors, as well as among many of the survivors involved in the project, can be extremely fraught, and attempts to dilute such tension by recruiting a relatively young cohort of paid staff simply spawned new debates about “professionalization” versus “authenticity” in guided tours and other aspects of the corporation’s work. Controversies over who has the right to determine who is publicly commemorated led furthermore in 2012 to a campaign for visible inclusion of the names of survivors alongside those of the dead and disappeared.

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Memorial of Paine29

In a very different vein, the 2006–2007 installation of a memorial in the rural community of Paine, twenty miles from Santiago, followed a relatively cohesive and consensual process, with relatives represented throughout by a single group.30 Such levels of consistency are perhaps particularly remarkable given the history of the site: in Paine’s relatively stable and geographically bounded community, survivors and relatives still rub shoulders every day with known perpetrators. Paine’s history of hacienda estates, with a local landowning elite locked in essentially feudal relationships with bonded laborers or tenant farmers, made it a magnet for agrarian reform during the activist 1960s. The 1973 coup brought swift, concerted, and deadly retaliation in which civilian landowners participated directly in the disappearance of at least seventy local peasant and political leaders, many of them in just one single, fateful night. According to Chile’s official truth commission report,31 Paine has the tragic distinction of having suffered the highest per capita rate of disappearance of any Chilean settlement during the dictatorship. As with Villa Grimaldi, the Paine memorial site’s design includes both symbolic/conceptual and functional, daily-use elements. The Paine memorial consists of a timber “forest,” composed of one thousand individual logs, minus seventy. The missing seventy represent Paine’s disappeared or executed, while the remaining logs stand for surviving family members. The memorial deliberately emphasizes “una memoria viva,” living memory, with the layout contemplating space for events and regular meetings. This last came about through the insistence of the local relatives’ group, who also rejected certain initial design features as “too funereal”. Fully three generations of Paine citizens actively participated not only in the design but also in the physical creation of the memorial: in the gap left by each missing pine post is a mosaic, dedicated to a victim of disappearance and designed and made by that person’s own relatives. Government-financed artists worked with the Paine families for over a year on the production of the mosaics. The intergenerational transmission of stories and experiences stimulated by the mosaic-making process was in some cases completely new and occasionally difficult. Various younger participants reported their perception of older family members as fearful and still traumatized, whereas their own generation was often excited and moved by this first opportunity really to know and depict the personal qualities of a person they had never had the chance to meet. Collaboration between government-sponsored experts and family members also initially proved rocky. The winning project had emphasized the need for “psychological

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accompaniment” of family members. In practice, a group of young psychology students was deputized to lead group therapy sessions. The sessions seemed to many family members like a waste of time, with one participant recounting how families had on occasion had to console the crying psychologists. Ultimately, the family members preferred to continue work solely with the artists, whose input they valued more. The results of the project have included the sharing of previously silenced family histories and also the birth of new forms of commemorative activity. Grandchildren of Paine’s dead and disappeared formed a group known as “The Third Generation”. The group was fairly active at least until 2010, organizing events to support the memorial, speaking in high school and university classrooms and forums, and forming its own youth orchestra, which performed at the 2006 women’s memorial inauguration recounted above. Grandparents tended to emphasize the pain of recalling deaths and disappearances while the intermediate, parental, generation seemed more comfortable focusing on logistical and practical aspects such as the securing of state finance and support. The Third Generation was the keenest of all to recover the memories and biographies, both personal and political, of their missing relatives. Although the group lost some of its impetus with the departure of its main leading light to pursue related studies in Argentina, in a neat piece of synergy the same young man later became outreach coordinator for the Londres 38 site (see below). This represents an important and relatively unusual projection onto the national stage of this rural experience, and in recent times developments in identification and recovery of remains have kept Paine on the agenda and focused the group’s own attentions on the question of justice.32 The early days of the Paine project coincided with a window of government perception that involvement in commemoration could prove a political asset. Chilean president Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) invited Paine’s relatives’ association representatives to the presidential palace and chose to make an official visit to Paine the main event of his last day in office. This official desire to be associated with successful endeavors also seemed to lapse at times into a more or less overt desire to coopt them: the association’s then-president subsequently joined Lagos’s political party, the PPD. The 2008 official inauguration by Michelle Bachelet was widely reported. “Nonofficial” attendees were carefully segregated at a good distance, and behind a strong fence, to prevent discontent over the attendance of somewhat unpopular ex-president Lagos from reaching the ears of the assorted dignitaries and mainstream press.

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The Paine commemoration appears to be successful in many respects. Nonetheless, after inauguration the local relatives' group found, like many others before and since, that they face an uphill struggle to finance the upkeep of the site, let alone to allow for new activities. In the case of Paine, the first signals came early, when original plans for an ample meeting place and cultural center were transformed by government officials into the installation of a converted shipping container to serve as site office and guard hut. Countermemorial Mobilizing

The sometimes marginal or inaccessible location of memorial sites has contributed to the emergence of actors who reject what they see as an unduly museological approach to commemoration. The countermemorial mobilization undertaken by these groups is perhaps predictably the furthest removed from its museological counterpart.33 Groups define and assess their own success using terms such as authenticity (consecuencia), in contrast to the emphasis on visitor numbers or infrastructural developments that site-focused groups often display. This is not to say that countermemorial groups do not think in terms of impact; however, they define this as the reaching of indifferent or even hostile publics who would be most unlikely to approach or acknowledge a fixed site or static memorial. They are also more completely, and consistently, opposed to cooperating with the state, whether to demand financial support or to request permission for their activities.34 One such group, the Colectivo 119 mentioned above, commemorated a major anniversary by carrying personalized, largerthan-life-size cardboard cutouts of disappeared comrades or relatives through the streets before installing them in the main square in front of the presidential palace, where pedestrians were forced to walk amidst them. The location of this action in temporary, but shared, and decidedly public, space was a deliberate act. It reflected the group’s view that the recovery of political commitments, and renewed survivor activism in the present day, is the most authentic homage that can be paid to victims.35 The figures produced for the event were handed to the museum in 2012 for safekeeping, while from 2005 onward the Colectivo joined forces with another existing Colectivo, plus some relatives and survivors, in a campaign to recover Londres 38, a former clandestine detention and torture center located, unusually, in the center of Santiago. The three groups worked in a tense, conflictual but ultimately successful strategic collaboration to demand the establishment of the site

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as an active, fluid, antimuseological space in which memories of struggles and resistance could be shared and transmitted. The government agreed in principle in 2008 to accede to the groups’ joint demand for recovery of the site, convening a working group (“Mesa de Trabajo”) to draw up common (but nonbinding) plans for the site’s transformation. Handed over in 2009, the house was left empty for months owing to lack of delivery of the promised funds and concerns about its structural soundness. However, by 2010, the site was operating as a “house of memory” providing tours and information in Spanish, English, and Mapudungun.36 Its activities remained notably grassroots oriented, including inviting visitors to take on a definite and current social or political commitment, and acting as a hub for a network of those memory sites and human rights organizations that pride themselves on a more non- or anti-establishment identity. Notwithstanding, the increasingly radical wing of the project’s original three groupings withdrew acrimoniously in 2010,37 claiming the project had become “too institutionalized.” Although accusations of institutionalization or “selling out” are frequent, and almost ritualized, among Chilean site groups and in leftwing political circles alike, there is certainly a real danger of groups becoming more caught up than first anticipated in paperwork, officialdom, funding applications, and the like once a desired project gets under way. An association with bricks and mortar seems to accentuate this danger, as too does a proliferation over time of essentially similar groups competing for the same national and international funders’ attention. Perhaps the epitome of groups that eschew such difficulties and accoutrements is the FUNA, a direct-action group, mainly composed of young people, that has mobilized as many as several hundred people at a time for public denunciations of former perpetrators at their homes or workplaces. This group is consciously modeled on the escraches, a similar movement of earlier origin in Argentina that has also spread to Uruguay and, in 2012, to Brazil. The FUNA’s essentially confrontational, mobile, resolutely anti-institutional character perfectly fits a modern, social networking model of activism38 even while it echoes 1980s direct-action tactics including the “outing” of former torture centers by church-inspired groups like the Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo. The FUNA raises questions about the conventional focus on “absent”—dead or disappeared—victims, considering it more important to turn the memorial gaze from the victim onto the perpetrator. Its levels of activity have varied over time since its first appearance over a decade ago, initially largely waxing and waning according to the personal circumstances and other political involvements

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of its extremely committed informal leader and main protagonist. The group, or at least its modus operandi, nonetheless came back into its own in 2011 and 2012 as a conscious reply to attempts to install a rightwing or far right-wing “memory field” through public homages to notorious regime figures (see below). Political Commemoration: Salvador Allende and Jaime Guzmán

Political commemoration often represents or reinterprets particularly controversial figures for the new moment. As mentioned above, the depiction of dead former leaders is often particularly significant in this regard. Nowhere is this dynamic better observed in Chile than in the post-transition construction of monuments dedicated to two diametrically opposed figures: deposed Socialist President Salvador Allende and right-wing military regime ideologue Jaime Guzmán. The Allende monument, inaugurated in 2000, has served as both notice of the former president’s “rehabilitation” and a magnet for present-day progressive activism. The other, opened in 2008, may yet come to play a pivotal role in the political right’s rewriting of dictatorship-era history, one that looks for a more acceptable, and ideally civilian, face to stand for what it sees as the positive legacy of the Pinochet years. The two monuments are, moreover, inextricably linked from their very origins. Although separated by almost a decade in their actual construction, the intraelite bargaining to approve the two monuments involved an explicit tit-for-tat trading of legislative support between left and right. Allende39

Despite a preference at the higher echelons of the Concertación through the 1990s to avoid much direct association with the figure of Allende, already in 1991 maverick loyalists from Allende’s Socialist Party and the center-left Party for Democracy (PPD) were proposing legislation to erect monuments to Allende. The approval process dragged on for four years,40 with no guarantee of an assent at the end of it. The congressional debates struck at the core of bitter, polarized historical memories of victims and perpetrators. Ultimately, congressional approval required a Faustian bargain: a monument for Allende, a memorial for Guzmán. The most notable feature of the whole approval process was its exclusive nature. In contrast to the human rights movement-affiliated grassroots actors behind Villa Grimaldi, Paine, or Londres 38, the

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monument to Allende was a top-down effort. Crucial episodes of the battle to pass legislation, select a location, and approve a design took place behind closed doors. This insularity was itself evidence of one more legacy of Chilean authoritarianism: a broader disjuncture between the Chilean state and civil society. The resulting marked absence of public engagement with politics was characteristic of the 1990s.41 Approval was followed by another contentious debate over location. The proposed site was Santiago’s Plaza de la Constitución, a space charged with immense symbolism. The plaza is located immediately in front of the presidential palace, the site of Allende’s death in the military coup of 1973. Adjudication of the final design of the piece was no less controversial, and the outcome similarly seemed to bear all the hallmarks of forced compromise: the jury selected a rightist sculptor and rejected his first proposal to depict Allende “among the people”. In its final form, the statue deliberately draws parallels between Allende and President Balmaceda, the late nineteenth-century liberal leader who killed himself in the aftermath of Chile’s civil war, and to whom Allende repeatedly compared himself in the last months of his government. Sculptor Arturo Hevia chose to drape Allende in the Chilean flag, evoking the statue of Balmaceda that stands in a city square a few miles away. The effect is to give both monuments a ghostlike quality, notably unlike the nearby solid, realistic image of President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970) that Hevia also sculpted. The Allende monument, inaugurated on 26 June 2000, had by 2003 become a focal point for commemorative activities carried out by thenpresident Ricardo Lagos on the thirtieth anniversary of the Chilean coup.42 As the first Socialist president since Allende, Lagos engaged in actions that day that represented the belated taking on of a symbolic mantle he had previously preferred to downplay. They also confirmed a notable new official current seeking to elevate Allende’s status from that of a failed leader, rarely mentioned, to that of a democrat tragically undone by his times. Thus the Allende monument became a site for dialectical memory work, for both “acting out” and “working through”.43 Those who struggled actively to assert a heroic memory of Allende as a socialist, patriot, and father of the country now embrace his monument in the plaza. The protagonists are no longer restricted to the elites who debated and placed the monument. Unofficial and informal groups also embrace the monument, which subsequently became a magnet for all kinds of progressive political mobilization.44 The location of the monument to Allende can accordingly be seen as establishing a shift from a kind of civic “space” to a social “place” on the plaza. The statue therefore became, in ways probably unanticipated and unintended

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by its elite creators, a site of contested meanings, discourse, and collective action.45 Allende, and with him the more than three thousand Chilean citizens who were murdered and disappeared by the dictatorship, are the ghosts who defy those who would have them erased from memory.46 Jaime Guzmán

Mindful of the proliferation of memorials that in their view commemorate the left, the Chilean right began to mobilize for memorials of its own. A civilian, rather than a military man, a deeply formally religious figure in a country where conservative Catholicism is in the ascendant and, crucially, himself a victim of political violence, Guzmán has long been the standby figure to whom the unrepentant right refers whenever human rights violations are publicly discussed. Guzmán served as perhaps Pinochet’s closest civilian adviser during the dictatorship, playing a central role in drafting the 1980 Constitution whose “protected” model of democracy owes much to Guzmán’s corporatist formation and views. In 1983 Guzmán founded the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), the newer and more reliably pinochetista of Chile’s two mainstream right-wing parties.47 Elected as a senator in the first transitional democratic elections of the late 1980s,48 Guzmán served only a short time before being assassinated on 1 April 1991 by armed leftists of the FPMR (Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front). Guzmán’s former political comrades at the UDI formed a foundation to preserve his legacy and ideas. Members of the foundation first replaced Guzmán’s modest tombstone in Santiago’s General Cemetery replaced by a more ostentatious marble affair, before completing a memorial to him—paid for, like the tombstone, by private subscription—in 2008. The memorial’s location, in a wealthy uptown neighborhood at the foot of Santiago’s gleaming and determinedly futuristic Millennium Towers building can be read as a straightforward symbol of the concentration of support for the former regime among the “new rich” who benefited most from its economic policies. However, the locating and relocating of the Guzmán memorial site shows that in fact the process, as with that of the Allende statue, was quite contested and produced an unexpected outcome. The first proposed site was the Plaza Italia, a prominent city thoroughfare that separates Santiago’s uptown and downtown districts. Undoubtedly more visible than the memorial’s current location, the plaza is also a standard destination for political marches, popular cultural and musical events, and even occasional spontaneous celebrations of national soccer victories. The

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announcement of plans to site the Guzmán memorial there drew an immediate popular outcry from frequent Plaza Italia goers and from residents in the square’s two tower blocks.49 Opponents managed to organize themselves into a significant and resourceful campaign group that succeeded in having the plans shifted to a nonresidential site in a sector of the city where Guzmán clearly enjoyed more sympathy. No state funds were sought or committed to construction of the Guzmán memorial. Nonetheless, in 2008 the Chilean press reported that President Bachelet had agreed to attend, and perhaps even preside over, its inauguration. The announcement was greeted with incredulous dismay by some. Others claimed that the symbolic gesture exemplified the meaning of reconciliation: the right claimed it would show that former political prisoner and exile Bachelet was “the president of all Chileans.”50 The ceremony ultimately went ahead in late 2008 without Bachelet’s attendance. It is perhaps too soon to tell whether the Guzmán memorial and Foundation will eventually become the same kind of magnet for right-wing activity as the Allende memorial has for other constituencies. However, it has certainly become increasingly controversial: the Foundation’s 2012 anniversary celebrations were disrupted by Catholic University students objecting to the use of their campus for such purposes, while the monument itself was damaged in 2011 by a home-made explosive device. The memorial itself is apparently deliberately reminiscent of the famous Mies van der Rohe Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition. It consists of an underground meeting and archive room topped by a large ground-level water pool, out of which rises a row of sculpted human forms.51 The memorial sculpture contains no direct reference to Guzmán, and ironically passers-by have been heard speculating that the row of figures represents the disappeared. The memorial’s design and final location are both indicative of the central and revered place that regime figures continue to enjoy among the Chilean elite. One leading expert remarked that, for all the strides in memorialization that Chile had made in recent years, it was perhaps the only country in the Southern Cone that would tolerate the fact that “the most visible of all the memorials is to the brains behind the dictatorship.”52 Countermemory or Antimemory? Perpetrators and the Intergenerational Transmission of “Triumphant Memory” 53

More recently than the Guzmán–Allende tussle, right-wing activists protagonized a series of even more open apologias for, and homages to,

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former regime figures. On 21 November 2011 there was a book launch and event in honor of “political prisoner” Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, a former secret police agent currently serving 130 years of accumulated prison sentences for 27 homicides and kidnappings. The event, which took place in an exclusive social club in an uptown district of the capital, was enthusiastically supported by the district’s then mayor, former Pinochet bodyguard and military officer Cristián Labbé.54 Although President Sebastián Piñera stayed well clear of the event, the revelation that an official invitation in his name had been politely declined with “every best wish for the success of the event” forced the resignation of a cabinet aide who had, it was claimed, sent the stock reply without the knowledge of her superiors. On 10 June 2012 a group of former military and their sympathizers known as the “11th of September Corporation” organized the premiere of a documentary extolling Pinochet at a downtown, and somewhat downmarket, theater formerly associated with opposition activities and rallies.55 In each case, protesters outside the events seemed to outnumber those in attendance. Nonetheless, this comparatively recent spurt of right-wing commemorations marks a shift toward an offensive rather than a silent or defensive strategy, although right-wing political elite reaction was perhaps, on balance, encouraging. Whether through genuine conversion or a reluctance to be publicly associated with the more unsavory, openly neo-Nazi elements in visible attendance at the Pinochet event, no high-level cabinet figure or party dignitary attended. Government spokesman Andrés Chadwick, charged with explaining to the media why the authorities could not or would not impede the private event, felt obliged to go a step further and declare his own profound repentance (arrepentimiento) at having been part of a government that had violated human rights. Former right-wing presidential candidate Joaquin Lavin rushed to concur. Although others disagreed,56 the overall message was that the right in government was not much keener to wave the pro- than the antiregime flag. Action or Reaction: What Has Commemoration Meant To and For the Chilean State?

We have seen how elite actors from all parts of the ideological spectrum now seem inured to the continued unearthing of Chile’s traumatic pasts, to the point indeed of seeming happy to take the offensive when something stands to be gained politically from disputing ownership of associated symbolic representations. This in itself represents a shift since, through much of the early post-dictatorship period, political figures seemed, like many citizens, to regard the realms of political and

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human rights commemoration as potentially toxic, best downplayed if they could not be completely avoided. This reluctance was historically more explicable on the part of the right, particularly as gradual revelations have rendered the dictatorship’s record less and less defensible. However, ambivalence from the center-left Concertación on the memory issue was more difficult for its proponents to explain or justify, and much more difficult for relatives and survivors to accept. It led at times to activist groups expressing more overt resentment and hostility towards the Concertación than to the political right or military, and led privately driven memorial initiatives to make great play of their independent status. Some deployed a strong antistate discourse, loudly complaining that the state had done nothing. On closer inspection, however, almost all such groups have eventually received direct or indirect state assistance in securing sites and funding interventions. The state has channeled public resources into the design and building of memorials, particularly during the Bachelet presidency of 2006 to 2010. Did this amount to a concerted effort on the part of the state to appropriate symbolic arenas? It seems unlikely, as the process did not seem to respond to any cohesive central design. It did, perhaps, betray a certain desire to deal with “unfinished business,” attempting to cement in certain initiatives or funding commitments ahead of the anticipated electoral victory of the right. Time suddenly seemed short for all those things the Concertación’s transitional generation had promised to do. Accordingly, it was shortly after her 2006 swearing in that Bachelet gave the go-ahead for a national Museum of Memory. First mentioned in 2003 as part of Lagos’s major human rights policy announcement, the proposal had been through so many subsequent modifications as to be virtually unrecognizable. Despite almost three years of planning work and the 2007 awarding of a building contract, when the first stone was officially laid by Bachelet on International Human Rights Day in late 200857 the most notable feature of the proposal was continuing uncertainty over its precise aims and content. There was a sense even among the three-person committee working on the official project of a certain unseemly haste, caused by the fact that Bachelet wanted to inaugurate the museum before she left office and had therefore set a peremptory and ambitious deadline of early 2010.58 The museum was accordingly announced, and the construction contract awarded, before its content or any type of ongoing consultative process had been defined. The backstory of the museum’s origin helps to explain why this haste caused tension with civil society actors. Bachelet’s resurrection of the museum cut across existing negotiations with a consortium of historic human rights organizations, who were looking to negotiate state

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funding for a “Casa de la Memoria” (House of Memory) proposal. Its major difference from the eventual state announcement was that the NGOs themselves were to design, staff, and run the project, conceived of as a way to secure the future of Chile’s valuable and extensive civil society human rights archives, at risk from the declining funding base and uncertain future of many historic organizations. Believing they had basically reached a verbal agreement with the Lagos government, the groups were astounded when the incoming administration announced independently, through the press, plans for a government Memory Museum with the same objectives. The NGOs were informed that their role would be limited to handing over their records to form part of the museum’s collection, complementing official archives from the Rettig and Valech truth commissions. Construction of the museum nevertheless went ahead, at breakneck speed. It opened in mid-January 2010, days before the presidential runoff between Concertación candidate Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle and Alianza candidate Sebastián Piñera. The timing turned the inauguration ceremony into a parade of former Concertación presidents, wheeled out to boost Frei’s fading chances while activists felt decidedly marginalized at their “own” event.59 These and other examples of an elitist, behind-closed-doors approach to the design and execution of the museum60 proved exclusionary and alienating, negatively coloring early human rights community reactions to the project.61 Such a large, costly building, tendered out to external (Brazilian) architects and apparently planning to showcase international artwork, provoked resentment among some who contrasted its apparent ostentation with their own increasingly unsuccessful efforts to find sustenance for much more modest activities. Some openly predicted or perhaps even secretly hoped that the museum would become an expensive white elephant, and a certain amount of Schadenfreude could be detected when February 2010’s grade 8.8 earthquake forced its closure, after only six weeks, for major reparations. Once restored to activity, however, the museum began to exercise a natural gravitational pull, with its convenient location and state-of-the-art facilities making it a sought-after venue for activists too used to making do with draughty halls and substandard equipment. Perhaps unfortunately, what was true of physical capital was also true of the human sort: the museum’s personnel needs attracted the brightest, or certainly the most formally qualified, staff from Chile’s remaining rump of human rights organizations. The combined “brain drain” effect of the museum’s opening, together with that of the National Human Rights Institute in 2010, has perhaps sounded the death knell for some historic organizations that were being run on nostalgia and goodwill. Although

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the museum’s first director was an essentially political appointment, and her successor a figure associated as much with mainstream arts administration as human rights per se, many former activists now enjoy the relative pleasure of reporting for work at an airy, inviting center-city structure close to other important cultural sites and on a main subway line. The museum also represents, as discussed in our introductory chapter, a narrative departure from previous Chilean official representations of the past such as that produced by the Rettig commission. The periodization of the museum makes no attempt to contextualize, and thereby to rationalize, the 1973 military coup and the onslaught of the dictatorship. Beginning rather with a set of introductory images and displays—including photographs of Chilean memorials around the country, together with copies of the two official truth commission reports—that locate Chile in a Latin American and world context of countries attempting to come to terms with atrocious pasts, the museum’s narrative proper begins with the coup itself (the “salón del 11 de Septiembre”). It then guides the visitor through displays on torture, exile and solidarity, media censorship and collusion, popular resistance, prison artwork, and other themes before arriving at a temporary exhibition space. The tour culminates at a final wall of extraordinary arpilleras—somewhat tucked away behind the facing wall of the inevitable museum café—which represent perhaps the most distinctive of Chilean artistic reactions to the repressive period. These colorful “patchwork” tapestries, many made by mothers, sisters, and wives of the dispossessed and disappeared, are expressions of an authentic textile art that chronicles in colored cloth the experience of repression and resistance. While the museum has gained purchase among school groups and casual visitors, the absence of a pre-coup context has drawn recent negative press from well-known right- wing historians and others, including National History Prize award-winner Sergio Villalobos. In a vitriolic spate of letters to the main conservative newspaper El Mercurio in July 2012, he suggested that the museum should be called the “Museum to Failure.” He managed to recruit apparent support from his position from Magdalena Krebs, the conservative Director of the National Libraries, Archives, and Museums Service, which theoretically oversees the museum but is not able to fully control it directly owing to its legal status as a semi-private corporation. Krebs, who said that the absence of a pre-11 September explanation represented a “pedagogical flaw,” was subsequently cited to appear before the Human Rights Committee of the lower legislative chamber. She backpedalled on her

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criticism and apologized to relatives for any offence her words had caused. Noted historians Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt and Gabriel Salazar came to the museum’s defense, though not uncritically, while director Ricardo Brodsky characteristically invited the public to visit and make up their own minds about the polemic. The exchange, which took place primarily through leading media including primetime TV news shows, certainly brought the museum a great deal of publicity coming as it did hard on the heels of an unannounced presidential visit in May 2012 that staff had hoped might signal a softening of official hostility from the new government. Conclusion

The Chilean state’s distinctive aloofness over memorialization has been punctuated by periods of giving in to the apparent desire to put a hand on the tiller. Even at its most interventionist, however, official memory policy has kept a certain prudent distance between itself and essentially private initiatives. Holding sway at the stage of design and finance, but generally opting to exercise relatively little influence over subsequent use, has a range of possible readings. It may allow for a healthy diversity in the range of acceptable views that can be expressed through and by sites and other memorials. It may, on the other hand, simply represent the path of least resistance, treating the spaces thereby created or reclaimed as sites of private conversation between like-minded individuals. Anyone, in this model, is equally entitled to say or claim anything at all, and nothing prevents former perpetrators from claiming that they too are entitled to state support for a place in which to tell their own story. The practical impact, however, is that throughout Santiago and, indeed, throughout the country, memorials have taken on a range of forms that deny closure. Young architects worked with former political prisoners of the National Stadium to design dynamic spaces in the renovated stadium grounds. Theater groups perform in ever-increasing numbers in Villa Grimaldi. The Paine memorial contains, at relatives’ insistence, a meeting space that at least aspires to be used by a wide range of groups rather than solely by relatives of the disappeared. The Memory Museum and Londres 38 have sponsored peripatetic exhibitions currently touring communities around the country. Several sites formed a 2010 “Network of Sites of Memory and Human Rights” to coordinate more immediate responses to present threats such as the aggressive policing of demonstrations.

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Despite the many clashes and contradictions of incompatible memory tropes, it is therefore not necessarily instructive to imagine commemoration processes as inevitably generating a dynamic of stateversus-society or group-versus-group. Such a reading reduces the complexity, the fragile but concentric dimensions, of memorializing. Like the Paine mosaics, memorials constitute memory fragments that can invite a tremendous range of engagement: from the intimately private identification of some relatives and survivors, through hostility, rejection, or the generation of a counternarrative, to the less immediate but nonetheless evocative and perhaps empathetic response that a memorial or associated activity might provoke in its multiple publics. Like good public art, good public commemoration may lend itself to a multiplicity of interpretations, some of them unknowable.

                                                                                                               

An earlier version of this chapter was published in Millennium Journal of International Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (2009), pp. 379-400. Some of the sites and dynamics described are also discussed in Cath Collins, “The Moral Economy of Memory: Public and Private Commemorative Space in Post-Pinochet Chile”, in Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh Payne, eds., Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 1 For an elaboration of the complexity and importance of commemorative processes, see Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). In addition, for the purposes of this chapter, we will often use the term “memorial” as shorthand for both memorials and spaces of memory, including former clandestine detention centers that are now national historic sites of memory. 2 Particularly Lagos (2000–2006) and Bachelet (2006–2010). 3 A paradigmatic contribution to the latter is Pierre Nora. See his “Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7-25. See also Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), for analysis of states’ intent to erase violent pasts, examining instances from World War I memorials to the 11 September 2001 World Trade Center memorial project. For a useful framing of cultural oppositional politics and nationalism through commemoration in the United States, see Marita Sturken Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For her quite distinct, provocative analysis of the US state’s rather deliberate tendency to turn memorials of past violence into commodified, kitsch experiences, see Sturken Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 4 See Eric Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Daniel Sherman argues that, in France, erecting monuments has historically occurred “chiefly in areas (in both the discursive and geographical senses) of political contestation . . . .”. See his “Art, Commerce, and the

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Production of Memory in France After World War I,” in John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 188. 5 Second World War memorials in many British towns and cities display this kind of essential similarity, rendering them instantly recognizable to most locals. See also Sherman in Gillis, ibid., pp. 199-203, or Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” on pp. 127-149 in the same edited volume. 6 This emphasis on process is particularly apparent in the work of James Young. See, inter alia, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 7 See preceding chapters and Alexander Wilde, “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 31 no. 2 (1999), pp. 473-500; Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, El espejismo de la reconciliación política, Chile 1990–2002. Santiago: LOM, 2002.; and Cath Collins “Human Rights Trials in Chile during and after the ‘Pinochet Years’”, International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), pp. 67-86, on Chile’s cautious and contradictory transitional justice trajectory since 1990. 8 Pisagua is a tiny, almost deserted desert town that was used as a detention camp by authoritarian governments between 1927 and 1931 and again after 1946, during a persecution of the Communist Party. Pressed into service again by the 1973–1990 dictatorship, it shot to prominence as the site of the first transition-era discovery of a mass grave. Victims of execution had been dumped in a secret, unmarked grave on the outskirts of the town’s official cemetery. 9 Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights includes an exhibit near the building’s entrance displaying photographs of the country’s human rights memorials, whether public or private. Photographs are added to the exhibit as new memorials are installed or discovered. As of June 2012, the museum had documented 197 memorials. 10 The official demand of relatives’ associations in Chile and Argentina remains “aparición con vida”. 11 Reinhart Kosseleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 272. Cited in Elizabeth Jelín, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 4. 12 Thus, although the 2012 discovery that disappeared people had been included in new electoral rolls caused an outcry from relatives, they certainly did not want their loved ones to be recategorized as deceased. Rather, they demanded legislation giving full state recognition, as in many other countries, to the legal category of “absent through forced disappearance”. (Existing 2009 legislation was deemed insufficient since it placed the onus on relatives to apply for the status on a case by case basis.) 13 James Young, “The Counter-Monument: The Memorial Against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992), pp. 267-296. 14 A group of 119 MIR (Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria) activists whose disappearances were the object of a subsequent international montage campaign. 15 Interview by Cath Collins with Cristian Flores, head of area, Human Rights Program of the Interior Ministry, Santiago, 4 June 2012. A more

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ambitious project to install a photographic exhibition in front of the Moneda presidential palace in September 2013, for the 40th anniversary of the coup, was shelved in early 2013 due to lack of funds. 16 The previous reparations policy involved a relatively complete and welladministered package of financial, medical, and other reparations for victims’ relatives and returning exiles, complemented in 2004 by modest financial reparation arrangements for survivors of torture and political imprisonment. 17 See discussion below of the Guzmán monument for one particularly striking example of the operation of this neutral arbiter logic regarding the state’s role. Another came in 2012, when a row about the correct use of language in school textbooks saw government ministers supporting a move to consecrate use of the terms “military regime” or “military government” in preference to “dictatorship”. Anti-hate-speech legislation put forward at around the same time was roundly criticized as being “undemocratic” in threatening to outlaw overt apologia for dictatorship-era elimination practices. 18 See the discussion of the particular force of official acknowledgement in Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe (New York: Pantheon,1990); and see also Stanley Cohen, States of Denial (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 19 The ESMA, former navy mechanics school, in Argentina was recovered earlier, but its development and opening were delayed by disputes between relatives’ and human rights organizations about how to use the site. 20 Such claims are necessarily subjective but, as an indication, Villa Grimaldi and Paine were mentioned sporadically in selected national newspapers around the time of their inauguration but have been covered only rarely if at all since. Other active projects involving the sites National Stadium, José Domingo Cañas, and Londres 38 (see below) have not to the authors’ knowledge been widely discussed in mainstream media outlets or other public fora. 21 The José Domingo Cañas group and one historical faction of the Londres 38 group (see below) have made particular efforts to link with other social movements. 22 For a creative literary analysis of Villa Grimaldi as a site of memory, see Michael Lazzara, “Tres recorridos de Villa Grimaldi,” in Elizabeth Jelín and Victoria Langland, eds., Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003), pp. 127-147. For a distinct and equally intriguing literary analysis of Villa Grimaldi in the Chilean landscape, see Jens Andermann, “Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2 (June 2012), pp. 165187. 23 The National Intelligence Directorate, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA, was a shadowy and widely feared semi-official intelligence agency operating between 1973 and 1977, whose primary mission was the systematic physical elimination of regime opponents and the sowing of fear amongst the population 24 www.villagrimaldi.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). 25 Ibid. 26 Mónica Echeverría, Krassnoff: Arrastrado por Su Destino (Santiago: Catalonia, 2008); Jelín and Langland, eds. Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales; Michael Lazzara, Prismas de la Memoria: Narración y Trauma en la Transición Chilena (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2008); Bilbija and

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Payne, Accounting for Violence; Teresa Meade, “Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile's ‘Sitios de Memoria’ and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death,” Radical History Review, vol. 79 (2001), pp. 123-139; Macarena Gómez-Barrios, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Victoria Baxter, “Civil Society Promotion of Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation in Chile: Villa Grimaldi,” Peace & Change, vol. 30, no. 1(January 2005), pp. 120-136; Steve Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Nubia Becker, Una Mujer en Villa Grimaldi (Santiago: Pehuén, 2011). The Villa also has a growing list of printed and electronic publications of its own, including the three titles Villa Grimaldi: Ciudadanía y Memorias, Ciudad y Memorias, and Procesos de Memoria (Santiago: Corporación Parque por la Paz and Fundacion Heinrich Boell, 2010) and Archivo y Memoria: La Experiencia del Archivo Oral de Villa Grimaldi (Corporación Parque por la Paz, 2012). 27 Such as the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, www.sitesofconscience.org (accessed 20 January 2013). 28 A sign was finally placed in 2011, as part of a state-funded bicentenary initiative to mark sites of major historical significance. Among the present-day Villa staff team, memories differ about whether the previous omission was deliberate policy or merely the result of a lack of resources, although a homemade sign was located inside the gates—out of view from the road—throughout most of the decade from 2000. 29 See Juan René Maureira, “La importancia de nuestras historias para una memorial social,” and Gabriela Zúñiga F. and Juan René Maureira, “Con el alma sin cicatrizar: Consecuencias transgeneracionales de la desaparición forzada,” Sexto Congreso de Salud Mental y DDHH, Asociación de Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, for two protagonists’ reflective firsthand accounts and analyses of the community’s history and experiences of the memorialization process. For the stories of several of the survivors and widows of Paine, see Patricia Verdugo, Tiempos de días claros: Los desaparecidos (Santiago: CESOC, 1990), and Ruby Weitzel, El callejón de las viudas (Santiago: Planeta, 2001). See also Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration. 30 This is not to suggest, of course, that the association is free from internal disagreements and conflict. 31 For information about the 1991 Rettig Report, see preceding chapters. 32 Anecdotally, a representative from the Human Rights Observatory project currently directed by one of this chapter’s co-authors attended a relatives’ meeting in 2011 to give information about judicial sector work. Conscious of her own identity as a “smart young” urban lawyer, she anticipated that the group’s country-living elderly ladies would be less interested in her than in a simultaneous invitation to take part in the oral testimony project already mentioned above. To her surprise, the meeting gave short shrift to the testimony project representative, declaring “we’re fed up with telling our story so that everyone can see us cry . . . . Where’s the person who’s here about the cases? That’s what we’re really interested in”. Meeting at the Paine memorial, 2011. 33 For a thoughtful discussion of countermemorializing and a range of alternative examples in Chile, see Lessie Jo Frazier, “ ‘Subverted Memories’: Countermourning as Political Action in Chile,” in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe,

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and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1999), pp. 105-119. 34 The FUNA, in particular (see below for details), has a combative relationship with authorities. Many of its larger-scale demonstrations have ended in confrontation, falling foul of a continuing Chilean practice of notoriously heavy-handed policing of public space. 35 Although the group went on to campaign around the “permanent” site of Londres 38, tellingly, they were among those whose plans for its use caused concern among government officials. 36 The language of Chile’s largest indigenous group, the Mapuche. See www.londres38.cl (accessed 9 July 2012). 37 “Quienes somos”, Londres 38, www.londres38.cl/1937/w3propertyvalue-32006.html (accessed 9 July 2012). 38 Chile is one of the Latin American countries with the highest levels of connectivity and high takeup of Facebook, a tool that is noticeably popular among many of the less institutionalized groups owing to its immediacy and low cost. 39 For a detailed account and analysis of the Allende monument, see Katherine Hite, “El monumento a Salvador Allende en el debate politico chileno”, in Jelín and Langland, eds., Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales, pp. 19-56. 40 In marked contrast to similar earlier procedures over monuments to late presidents Alessandri (1958–1964) and Frei Montalva (1964–1970), which took a mere three months from start to finish. 41 See Katherine Hite and Leonardo Morlino, “Problematizing Authoritarian Legacies and Good Democracy,” in Hite and Paola Cesarini, eds., Authoritarian Legacies and Good Democracy: Latin America and Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 42 See Joignant, Un día distinto 43 For a thoughtful and provocative discussion of “acting out” and “working through” as “labors of memory,” see Elizabeth Jelín, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 5-7. 44 On conceptualizing struggles over appropriations or “ownership” of memory, see Jelín, ibid., esp. chapter 3, “Political Struggles for Memory,” pp. 26-45. 45 Elizabeth Jelín and Victoria Langland, “Introducción,” in Jelín and Langland, eds., Monumentos, memorials y marcas territoriales. 46 This borrows from Jacques Derrida’s ethical conceptualization of the specter. Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994). In more literal senses too, Allende’s newfound visibility had repercussions: rumors that he had been airbrushed out of the official visitor’s tour of the presidential palace after 2010 had to be strenuously rebutted, while being named as part of a new swathe of victims whose deaths ought to be properly investigated led to Allende’s own exhumation and reburial by judicial order in 2011. 47 For a very useful analysis of Jaime Guzmán and the rise of his movement-to-party, see Carlos Huneeus, The Pinochet Regime (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2007), pp. 225-270.

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48 Despite trailing in third place in the ballot, Chile’s idiosyncratic binominal electoral system, which Guzmán himself had helped design, ensured his election. 49 See “La Batalla de la Plaza Italia,” 2008, dir. Renato Villegas. 50 The obvious reference was to Allende, who once declared, in the context of a grilling about his more radical reforms and the actions of saboteurs opposed to them, that he was “not the President of all Chileans.” 51 See plans, photographs, and discussions on the architect’s blog at www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/2008/02/29/en-construccion-memorial-jaimeguzman-nicolas-lipthay (Spanish only, accessed 21 December 2012). 52 Martin Abregú, remarks at the conference “El Efecto Pinochet: A Una Década de Londres 1998,” held at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile, 8-10 October 2008. 53 See Leigh Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 54 Labbé lost his post in subsequent (2012) municipal elections, bringing to an end an umbroken sixteen-year career in public administration. Press reports and Labbé himself cited reaction to the Krassnoff event as one of the reasons for his downfall, with Labbé claiming to be the victim of bullying and political correctness. 55 The Caupolicán theater had been the setting in 1980 for a powerful speech by former president Eduardo Frei Montalva, which consecrated him as the main hope for a political opponent to Pinochet and perhaps thereby sealed his fate: he was subsequently assassinated. The theater was also the setting for the 1983 launch of the women’s opposition front Mujeres por la Vida. 56 Patricio Melero, president of the UDI, distanced himself from the timing and the substance of Chadwick’s mea culpa while UDI deputy Jorge Ulloa continued to insist, in a July 2012 press interview, that a “political solution” had to be found for perpetrators accused of human rights violations since it was “unfair” that “no one from the other side is [still] in prison”. See www.icso. cl/observatorio-derechos-humanos, Boletín 18 (June–July 2012, accessed 20 January 2013). 57 The ceremony was itself an instance of the peculiar indeterminacy that surrounded the whole initiative: hand-picked invitees watched Bachelet dig a symbolic shovelful of earth before announcing, to the apparent surprise of all present, an agreement with the Israeli ambassador for the construction of a Chilean memorial to victims of the Holocaust. 58 Cath Collins’s conversations with NGO representatives and two members of the committee. 59 For a discussion of the politics of the museum’s inaugural ceremony, see Katherine Hite and Peter Kornbluh, “Chile’s Turning Point,” The Nation.com, 17 January 2010. 60 An international “consultation” seminar about the museum project was held once it was almost complete. During the two-day seminar, international speakers were whisked off for a private tour of the site, from which national participants were pointedly excluded. 61 Those reservations were echoed by some experts. For critiques of the museum’s design and other features, see inter alia Michael Lazzara, “Dos propuestas de conmemoración pública: Londres 38 y el Museo de la Memoria y

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los Derechos Humanos (Santiago de Chile),” A contracorriente, vol. 8, no. 3 (Spring 2011).

6 Pinochet’s Funeral: Memory, History, and Immortality Alfredo Joignant (translation by Cath Collins)

Augusto Pinochet’s demise on 10 December 2006 provoked an intense, albeit brief, historiographical debate in Chile and beyond. At stake was the struggle not only to impose an interpretation of the origins of the dictatorship that he headed, but also to define Pinochet’s legacy for posterity. Vigorous commemorative tugs-of-war broke out between those who wanted to portray Pinochet as immortal—constructing an active memory that could outlive his death—and those determined to eradicate the man and his regime from public memory. Three months after violence marked the thirty-third anniversary of Chile’s 11 September coup, one of the two main protagonists of that fateful day died in the Santiago Military Hospital. The death of the man who was a villain to some and a hero to others inevitably produced intense scenes of joy and dismay from his opponents and supporters. It also provoked a major official operation, complete with uncertainties and negotiations over the appropriate funeral rites. Such tussles and misgivings could arise over even such a scripted event because the significance of the death itself became an object of dispute. The funeral of the man who had ruled Chile for nearly seventeen years became the last in a series of literal and figurative battles to fix the meaning of 11 September and of its leader. From the news of his demise through to the completion of his funeral, each stage of Pinochet’s death unleashed battles over memorialization in which words became weapons and historical judgments were grandly pronounced. As always in battle,

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there were casualties. A number of protesters were arrested, and unscripted interventions during and surrounding the ceremony itself led to the dismissal from the armed forces of a serving general and of one of Pinochet’s own grandchildren, at the time an army captain. As noted Chilean writer and diplomat Jorge Edwards observed ten days after the funeral, “we are in the middle of a war of words.”1 Pinochet’s death also gave rise to attempts at immortalization, often prompted by a potent mix of high passion and self-interest. Both motivations were in evidence in the elaborate encomia and condemnations produced by chroniclers and analysts, the flood of letters sent to newspaper editors, the obituaries penned by journalists, and the academic judgments passed by historians. Pinochet’s death was scrutinized from all possible perspectives, political, social, and historical, entailing the asking of questions such as: “Can the Concertación coalition survive the death of the man who brought it together?” “Was Chilean society irrevocably transformed by Pinochet?” “What will be the verdict of history?” The depth of feeling revealed during Pinochet’s final days, death, and cremation show just how far the anticipation and also the reality of his death represented a milestone in Chilean history. Was the final outcome preordained, or could things have been otherwise? Speculation about Pinochet’s funeral had, of course, long preceded the actual event. Right up until his London arrest in 1998, a grandiose public ceremony had seemed the most likely bet. The prevailing political climate would have allowed for a simple, and essentially triumphalist, storyline in which Pinochet seamlessly shifted from army commander-in-chief to lifetime senator. His leadership over the political right would have been subtly reasserted and his new role as a democratic legislator gradually normalized, despite the initial vehement objections of some Concertación figures. But, in the event, the portents were much less auspicious: Pinochet returned to Chile in early 2000 to meet a barrage of impeachment proceedings for human rights crimes, a declaration of dementia by the courts, and the impugning of his honor in the Riggs Bank case.2 He became the object of rumors and the butt of jokes. Particularly after the wave of commemorations stimulated by 2003’s thirtieth coup anniversary, one could imagine a quite different future in which the funeral would be a low-key, perhaps even a poorly attended, affair. Which of these imaginings proved closer to reality? The actual December 2006 funeral was undoubtedly a major event with many ramifications. It was, predictably, a media circus from start to finish: the funeral ceremony itself was only one snapshot in a much broader and larger mise-en-scene. The death of the former de facto

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president inevitably raised questions about the future of the Concertación, a coalition based on shared opposition to the dictator. Some held that the Concertación’s raison d’être died along with Pinochet himself. His demise was also, however, a political event its own right. Firstly, because his death activated histories and memories, symbolisms and representations, recountings and recollections. The inescapable immediacy of the economic, political, and social transformations brought on by the regime that he headed were once again made evident. Secondly, and at a deeper level, what made this a true political event was the fact of a former ruler being denied, at his death, the status and rituals proper to a former president. Nor, however, was he denigrated as a mere dictator. In fact, Pinochet was finally rendered the honors due to a former army commander-in-chief, which allowed his dignity to be partially salvaged. Compromise was the order of the day. This was, nonetheless, a truly memorable event, not least because Pinochet’s death unleashed the possibility of full evaluations of his life and work. The Uses of Ceremony and the Metamorphoses of the Corpse

Discussion and disputes about the proper staging of Pinochet’s funeral had been ongoing since well before the actual date of his death and had given rise to a whole gamut of official guidelines and protocols. The exact content of these documents was essentially unknown, but lack of such knowledge did not, of course, preclude endless press speculation about them even ahead of time. Why such premature attention? Many questions remained to be answered about exactly how, and as whom, Pinochet was to be remembered. Who, exactly, was to be honored? Was this to be a state funeral, a military ceremony, or a family affair? The single underlying question was in which capacity or capacities Pinochet was to be honored. One anonymous serving officer declared that the main imperative should be to “give the remains a dignified sendoff,” something for which the exact shape of the funeral rites would clearly be crucial. We should not, however, let the spectacle of the ceremony itself blind us to its deeper significance. Bourdieu’s concept of the “occasionalist illusion” warns us that the meaning of a particular situation is never completely encapsulated in the event itself. 3 David Cannadine’s interpretations of “ceremonial occasions” can also shed some light here, since Cannadine similarly insists that we not restrict our interpretations of such occasions to the terms set by their own internal structures, “indépendant de tout sujet, de tout objet et de tout contexte”.4 Cannadine is interested in modern-day royal ritual and

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shows how this needs to be understood with adequate reference to the particular social, political, economic, and cultural medium within which it is carried out. Cannadine uses the notion of a "milieu" to argue that the “localization” of the ceremony or occasion in its context is more than just historical background: it is what allows the process of interpretation to begin. Cannadine studied the rituals of the British monarchy between 1820 and 1977, a century and a half of royal coronations, funerals, and weddings. He traces a steady, almost imperceptible transition from the dull and inaccessible rites of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century towards much grander contemporary equivalents. The changes go deeper than simple shifts in taste or in notions of decorum. The success or failure of the rituals is determined by how well they adapt to their consistently changing medium. Rituals, then, have to be prepared and performed according to the setting for which they are intended. Their splendor and significance are not inherent but created. Pinochet’s funeral was in some senses uniquely controversial, making its attendant rites and protocols of intrinsic interest. Here again, however, the full meaning of the event goes beyond its formalities and trappings, requiring attention to its very particular political and social context. If we frame our analysis within the “socio-history of the short time (temps court),”5 we see that a full analysis of the funeral recognizes it as a point where “irreducible critical temporalities” converge with the permanent (re)construction of the past.6 This sense of the immediacy of the recent past was evoked just three months before Pinochet’s death in a press report alluding to the equally recent (August 2006) death of former Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner.7 The article claimed that Stroessner’s death had reawakened speculation in Chile about how Pinochet’s funeral should in its turn be handled. The juxtaposition itself placed Pinochet squarely on the regional roll-call of Latin American de facto rulers. The regional factor is, however, only one aspect of the political context of Pinochet’s death and funeral rites. The permanent (re)construction of the past also played its part, with a gradual degradation of Pinochet’s image that reached its height precisely toward the end of his life with the widespread presumption of his moral and criminal culpability. This ignominious fall from grace prompted one group of legislators to sponsor a bill that would have prevented the former dictator receiving honors after his death, forcing the legislature to join the debate about his funeral rites and the dignity that should or should not be afforded to him. Underlying the debate were some unstated notions of what “the people” might want and what Pinochet might himself deserve. Thus Senator Eugenio Tuma, of the Concertación PPD party, claimed in August 2006 that an official funeral

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would be “undeserved and [would] provoke public irritation”. Chile could not, he continued, afford to be seen paying official homage to “someone charged or convicted of multiple homicide”. Iván Moreira, an opposition UDI legislator and inveterate defender of the general, was quick to respond in kind, suggesting that if mere allegations were enough, he himself could easily prevent honors being extended in the future to Concertación presidents by making accusations of corruption against them.8 The bill did not in the end prosper, not least because the time that elapsed between its introduction and Pinochet’s actual death proved extremely brief. It therefore fell to the government to decide what was to happen. Torn, according to commentators, between conflicting desires not to offend either the general’s supporters or relatives of his victims,9 the government chose to engage in a precarious subsequent balancing act, which explains an apparent decision not to involve President Bachelet directly. She was kept at a prudent distance from the ceremonies themselves. The impossible desire to offend no one might also help explain prolonged governmental uncertainty and vacillation about exactly what form the funeral would take. Prevailing social and political conditions demanded one thing; Pinochet’s supporters, another: recognition of the ex-dictator as a former president. Bachelet had to make a decision. The very same high-profile degradation of Pinochet’s legal and public status that made a state funeral unlikely also made it unrealistic to think the event could be circumscribed to a private, family-only ceremony. The government was therefore understandably initially reluctant to commit itself, beyond assurances that it would strictly follow set protocol. This tactic simply put the spotlight on the protocols themselves, whose very existence and contents soon became the stuff of myth and legend. Some said the protocols had been set at least two years earlier. There was, they claimed, a file containing all the details.10 It seems likely that the fabled file or plan, which some went so far as to physically describe,11 did exist. Why, then, so much vagueness and uncertainty about the content of the ceremony? Because the funeral was inescapably bound to its own particular context and time. Forward planning had perhaps covered some eventualities but could never fully capture the surge of strong feeling and conflicting interests that the death actually provoked once it came. The apparently ample room for maneuver that remained despite the much-vaunted plan may be partly explained by the existence of at least two additional, preexisting protocols of obvious relevance. On the one hand, the foreign ministry12 boasted a rule book for public ceremonies,13

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whose utility was largely guaranteed by the deliberately wide margin it left for interpretation. The army, for its part, had drawn up military funeral regulations14 that would be applicable were Pinochet to be honored principally in his capacity as a former commander-in-chief.15 The government was forced to forge a path between these competing, and occasionally contradictory, alternatives. Defense Minister Vivianne Blanlot therefore spoke nothing less than the truth when she claimed that “[t]here is no completely established protocol”.16 In point of fact, regulations did exist, but the selection of one over another required a decision from the president’s office as to which, if any, of the former ruler’s past titles were to be honored. Meanwhile, opinion polls suggested that most people opposed granting Pinochet the honors due to a former president. These considerations explain the curious metamorphosis that Pinochet underwent during the last months of his life and a fortiori after his death. Once it became clear that a quiet family funeral “would not do,” two main possibilities presented themselves. The first was to treat Pinochet as one more former president of the Republic. This status allows its holder the right, during his or her lifetime, to be addressed as “Your Excellency”. Upon the holder’s death, it usually secures declaration of a period of official mourning and the guarantee of a full state funeral. As such, it endeavors to acknowledge some kind of officially recognized, and publicly acclaimed, exercise of statutory authority. The former figurehead is recognized as a sometime repository of absolute political power, exercised in the name of the majority. This type of obeisance is generally not questioned where the continuity of the democratic regime that underpins it is equally unquestioned: the situation in this case, however, was somewhat different. McEvoy claims that the state funeral differs from other mortuary rites in its fusion of three essential elements: “a great man, the Republic and posterity”.17 These three components must usually coexist if the recently deceased is to be granted admittance into the “Pantheon”—in this case, the Santiago General Cemetery where most of Chile’s dignitaries are buried. Pinochet’s presidential status was, however, acquired by decidedly nondemocratic means. Its legitimacy, rather than its legality, was at issue, since at least two dictatorship-era laws or sets of laws can be considered to have effectively conferred presidential status on Pinochet. These are Military Junta Decree No. 806, of 17 December 1974, and the 1980 Constitution, whose ratification also appears to anoint Pinochet president of the Republic. Iván Moreira is accordingly technically correct when he claims Pinochet as a president of the Republic,18 as is fellow UDI legislator Marcelo Forni when he

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claims that his presence at the military hospital where Pinochet is fighting for his life represents nothing more than an understandable concern for “the state of health of a [former] president of the Republic”.19 Moreira and Forni both clung to the letter of the law, conveniently skating over the political and social circumstances in which it was made. “Rules,” in this interpretation, “is rules,” and their provenance is irrelevant. Once the presidential decision not to declare a state funeral was made known, former Pinochet governmental spokesman Francisco Javier Cuadra characterized the decision to deny Pinochet the title of president of the Republic as “mean-spirited”.20 A few days before Pinochet’s death, Catholic priest Iván Wells, presiding over a book launch, used the peculiar title of “captain general,” rather than president, insisting that Pinochet had “brought the country back to greatness”.21 On the day of the funeral itself, Pinochet’s children staged a spectacular departure from protocol by placing the presidential sash their father had used on the coffin. The gesture was an overt attempt to restore presidential dignity to the body by commandeering one of the two essential symbols of Chilean presidential office.22 If Pinochet was not to be treated as a former president, the most obvious alternatives were to honor him as a former commander-in-chief or as a lifetime senator, his most recently acquired title. Ultimately, commander-in-chief was chosen, a status perhaps preferred in part because unlike the others, it had not been self-awarded (Allende himself had appointed Pinochet to the post in August 1973, just a month before the coup). This choice nonetheless also provoked anger, personified in Francisco Cuadrado, grandson of assassinated previous commander-inchief Carlos Prats.23 Cuadrado queued anonymously in the line of public mourners at Pinochet’s wake, only to spit on the coffin in a sign of contempt once he reached the head of the line. Once the nature of the funeral had been decided, the question of the fate of the corpse remained. This question arose very early in the course of Pinochet’s final illness, but it was not a matter that could be unilaterally decided by Bachelet or her government. A full burial, especially in the publicly accessible space of the General Cemetery, could create future commemorations, inventing a new “memorable date” around which Pinochet supporters could gather. At the same time, a grave would offer opportunities for countermemory and be exposed to the possibility of desecration. Both Pinochet’s family and the army seemed only too well aware of the risks.24 The impasse was resolved by what appears to have been Pinochet’s own decision to opt for cremation,25 but the cremation presented its own difficulties. “What is to

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be done with his ashes?” asked one journalist.26 An urn, after all, offered almost the same possibilities for commemoration and countercommemoration as a gravestone would have done. Various options were suggested, ranging from the lodging of the ashes at the national Military Academy (Escuela Militar) to their installation at the headquarters of the Pinochet Foundation. The decision was finally made to take them to his private family estate in the countryside, avoiding the problem of public access. The lengthy saga demonstrated yet again the precarious status of the figure of Pinochet, neither a president of the Republic nor a body that could be buried in the usual way. The metamorphosis of the cadaver, as well as the uncertainty about sites for the interment of the body or scattering of ashes, testify to both the significance of Pinochet's death and the degradation of his image, the latter finally rendering it unthinkable to treat him as a former president. This terminal ambiguity shows through in the language of a newspaper editorial at the time: “in practice, yesterday's ceremony took on the character of [a] state [event]. . . . [T]he army, one of the principal institutions of the state, rendered [Pinochet] the highest honor within its power to grant”.27 The army’s decision however skips conveniently over the very real difficulties caused by the decision to honor a sick man whose corpse became a political battleground even before his physical demise. Illness, Death, and Immortality

The inherently problematic nature of the figure of Pinochet was evident even before the questions of honors and remains arose. Once his illness was made public, Chile’s right-wing parties were forced to calculate the political costs and benefits that were likely to accrue from taking up positions of closeness to or distance from Pinochet. The language of proximity and distance captures the real discomfort that Pinochet's illness produced. This discomfort provoked angry outbursts from Pinochet supporters against leaders of the political right: “Where is the right of this country?” asked the Pinochetistas keeping vigil outside the military hospital. This rhetorical question was usually closely followed by accusations of betrayal.28 Particular vitriol was reserved for the UDI, the party historically most closely associated with Pinochet, and for General Juan Emilio Cheyre, Pinochet’s second successor in the post of army commander-in-chief.29 This strategic distancing on the part of the official right was defended by UDI legislator Felipe Salaberry, asking where it was laid down that the UDI had to turn out en masse at the military hospital.30 The irate accusations and counteraccusations

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exposed the considerable distance between this situation and the usual scenario that surrounds the death of a public figure. The question of whether or not to visit Pinochet in the hospital became a difficult political conundrum.31 Pinochet’s dying, which was glossed over or denied for several days owing to overly optimistic reports of his health, was a medical fact rather than a political one.32 At the same time, his illness could not really be separated from its political significance. The right-wing political leadership pursued an avoidance strategy, particularly noticeable in the case of its two most recent presidential contenders, Sebastián Piñera and Joaquín Lavín.33 Piñera kept well away from any Pinochet-related event, apparently to avoid a drain of votes from the center,34 while Lavín merely sent his condolences without feeling the need to attend the funeral.35 This profound unease was not shared by all: a significant number of business and political figures linked to the right did choose to attend the funeral. The medical reports issued in the days leading up to Pinochet’s death were consistently vague almost to the point of seeming deliberately misleading. A succession of bulletins declared his condition to be “critical but stable”. This vagueness was enough to keep dozens of reporters on permanent alert outside the military hospital, and it certainly did not prevent the rumor mill from grinding. It did, however, reduce the focus of attention to the rather prosaic language of doctors’ reports rather than the panegyrics that usually accompany attempts to immortalize someone as a great public figure. Only in two senses could the medical bulletins be said to have played into the hands of the wouldbe immortalizers. Firstly, the bulletins repeatedly ratified the fact of the general’s continued existence, feeding his supporters’ grandiose claims of “Pinochet: Immortal”. Secondly, and more importantly, they defined him as a unique figure, sufficiently strong and attached to life to prevail in the face of old age and illness. This narrative was taken up, in preference to any fuller accounts of his suffering, in order to allow supporters to extol the virtues of a supposedly exceptional man without directly evoking his human condition as someone at the point of death. This enterprise of immortalization, if it existed at all, can be said to have begun several days before Pinochet’s death, in the context of the debate about the status to be awarded to his soon-to-be remains. An account of his illness did play a part, albeit a relatively minor one, in the enterprise. A blow-by-blow account emerged that began with a euphemistic evocation of malaise a few hours before his eventual hospitalization and continued through small, humanizing details in accounts of his being administered the last rites. The former ruler had, it was said, felt “tired and listless” following dinner at his residence and a

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visit from some of his children and grandchildren.36 By late afternoon he felt worse, and had taken to his bed for several hours. On attempting to get up, he had become breathless and dizzy until he finally lost consciousness. Admitted to the military hospital at 2 am, and operated on twice after having suffered a heart attack,37 Pinochet received the Sacrament of the Sick from priest Iván Wells. Wells later recounted how Pinochet had opened his eyes and stuck out his tongue, as if to receive communion.38 Others present had told the priest: “He wants to take communion.” This was duly administered, in a ceremony during which Pinochet had, it was said, repeatedly attempted despite his weakness to lift his hand in order to make the sign of the cross.39 Although the human dimension of the infirm body is clearly to the fore in these accounts, the descriptions draw a certain veil of privacy over any actual suffering. Malaise is mainly suggested or implied, never described in detail, and there was little sign of any effort to resolve the controversy surrounding his figure, regime, and acts through some attempt to glorify him through suffering. The language used about Pinochet’s illness and organs is impeccably technical and medical: a “myocardial infarction”; “angioplasty procedures” for a pulmonary edema.40 The list of Pinochet’s less immediate, preexisting illnesses and infirmities nonetheless grew steadily in the reports. He was also suffering, it was said, from the accumulated effects of “age-related hearing loss . . . asthma, enlarged prostate, goiter, an abdominal hernia and varicose veins” as well as arthritis of the knee, a ruptured vertebral disc, and diabetes.41 Passions and Interests: The llusions of a Funeral

How did Chileans experience Pinochet’s dying and his funeral? To what extent did they feel truly involved? Did Chilean society really (re)polarize around the death? Is it possible to talk seriously about a “rePinochetization” of Chilean political and social life at the time of his death? How did people feel or claim to feel about Pinochet’s funeral, his legacy, his regime? It is always difficult to talk about general feelings or “the opinion of the country” without being unduly swayed by the visible joy of his detractors or the sight of a sea of distraught admirers praying over the general’s coffin. All such explanations or interpretations of the impact of his death run the risk of invoking nebulous concepts of the general view or purporting, implausibly, to report majority feeling. In reality, as ever, we know very little about what “most people” feel, think, or are moved by. In a recent study questioning the attribution of sentiments to participants in political celebrations, political scientist

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Nicolas Mariot critiques the “disconcerting ease” with which “[social] scientific analyses politicize behavior.”42 Ultimately, all the researcher can do is transform the passions and interests provoked by Pinochet’s illness and death into the stuff of journalistic record, note the demographics of the population, and interpret survey results. It takes considerable effort to avoid the temptation to attribute or project feelings onto “the masses,” speculating how many people rejoiced as opposed to how many mourned and what, if anything, it might all mean. On that front it is in fact interesting to draw an essentially journalistic sketch of the Pinochet supporters keeping vigil outside the military hospital while he was dying. Without a doubt, the sadness and sense of despair were real. The question is how representative, if at all, these people were of the general population. Here it is instructive to recall a historic precedent: the jubilation that gripped many Chileans during the 1974 and 1975 celebrations of the coup of 11 September.43 Those who celebrated back then did so filled with an excess of patriotic fervor: their fears had been allayed and their interests were being taken care of. The crowd outside the military hospital was perhaps not so very different, in that each of its members could likewise cite personal reasons for supporting Pinochet and set forth quite convincing reasons for their own desolation. The only thing missing was the fear: fear, back then, of the Marxist or Communist threat. Pinochet’s admirers cite a host of reasons for their loyalty, ranging from memories of Allende-era dispossession to some notion that a sacrifice had been made in difficult times: “What connects me to Pinochet is that during the Popular Unity [government] they took my grandparents’ land”; “I am grateful to the General, because under his government I was able to educate my children [when] before I did not have enough to eat”; “the General gave me all of the medicines I needed to survive”; “I had three children who didn’t even get enough to eat, but then came the military coup, and today all my children are professionals”.44 All of these testimonials smack of gratitude for favors granted, a meeting of needs that is the bedrock of the acknowledgment and the loyalty. This testimony may help us to understand the contents of some of the messages posted on the crush barriers used to keep this community of believers at a safe distance (“Pinochet, thank you for existing”)45 as well as the chants (“Our General knew how to rule. . . . It was a great government that knew how to give us security and tranquility. Thank you, thank you, Pinochet, you were a great President”).46 It seems quite appropriate to use the term “community” for this band of followers. True believers in Pinochet’s goodness, they formed

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an entourage grateful for his selfless work. Beyond the individual interests that each one felt Pinochet had satisfied or defended, the group was united by the desire to hail him as their former ruler. A common bond was formed between a group of strangers; they briefly became a moral community through their shared vigil. This notion of community was strengthened by the way they went about organizing the vigil, sharing out practical tasks among the group. Reporters took note of this “transient camaraderie”: “yesterday one woman was put in charge of collecting money to buy drinking water,” while ten more “spent their first night on the sidewalk, beside a makeshift altar, with a [newly purchased] Christ figure still wrapped in plastic and votive cards of Padre Pío and Saint Teresa of the Andes.”47 It would be going too far to consider this an essentially religious gathering, despite the plethora of Christian symbols or even the assertion of one fervent admirer who proclaimed that Pinochet “is God.”48 However, it is difficult not to see these people as a moral group united by a common memory of past wellbeing and even contentment. Shared memories and common feelings are the conditions of entry for the group and serve to keep at a distance those whose acknowledgment is of a different kind. Nationalist or farright groups also gathered, generally described in the press reports as made up of “young people dressed in jeans, white shirts, and black ties”. These in turn claimed that “they had nothing to do with another contingent of nearby activists, who described themselves as National Socialists”.49 As always, any group that considers itself a moral community produces strict conditions of admittance, in this case reserving the right to exclude those who did not express sufficient sadness, grief, or desolation. The extreme-right and nationalist groups may in fact have shared similar sentiments, but they chose to express them in activist rather than sentimental terms. We can, in other words, identify certain types of feelings or interests from the press reports, particularly from those published around the time of Pinochet’s death.50 However, the sadness expressed by ordinary people and by business interests also allow us to draw up a composite picture of what kinds of people lamented the death, to the point where grief sometimes spilled over into anger. Occasional altercations and disputes that took place in the days preceding Pinochet’s death are telling: the air of gloom around the military hospital was evenly matched by joy and even euphoria among his opponents and detractors. The TV coverage homed in, understandably, on this contrast and began to use split-screen coverage of the opposing tendencies. This allowed them to make the most of what Delage has called “the hermeneutic prerogative of the image”51 to talk about a “renewed [political] polarization” in the

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country. The chances of direct contact between supporters and opponents were slim, since the two groups used quite distinct spaces, separated by substantial distances, to give voice to their sadness or celebration.52 There were, however, occasional acrimonious exchanges of insults and even blows, and it is to these that we now turn. One particularly notorious example saw an enraged Pinochet supporter turn her wrath on a series of targets. Luz Gajardo was one of the ringleaders of the verbal attack and hail of plastic bottles that had greeted former army commander-in-chief Juan Emilio Cheyre on his visit to the military hospital. She also allegedly attacked a passing cyclist who insulted her group. Days later she was arrested, having taken a stick to a nearby office building, smashing five of its windows.53 The curious nature of her choice of target was resolved once it became clear that it was not the building but the attitude of a group of construction workers that had incited her wrath. They had apparently broken into a chorus accusing Pinochet of being a murderer (asesino).54 The resulting charge sheet against Gajardo—aggravated damage, public disorder, and threats55—is technically correct but fails to capture the profound class resentment and rage that underlay her actions. Similar rage, again with an evident class component, was expressed by other groups of demonstrators against construction workers on another nearby building.56 While there is no denying that the grief over Pinochet’s death was shared by people from a range of social backgrounds, the collective anger against workers suggests an essentially reactionary identity. Discussing the phenomenon of opponents who celebrated Pinochet’s demise in 2006 with a toast —described by some as “barbaric”—an editorial in a mainstream daily newspaper drew parallels with the coup supporters who had popped champagne corks on 11 September 1973 when Allende’s death was announced.57 Were these contrasts—joy and sorrow, verbal and physical confrontations—really signs of a “polarized” society, irrevocably split between supporters and critics of Pinochet’s regime and legacy? Surely not, since, firstly, any claim of widespread polarization is exaggerated if one looks at police and press estimates of the numbers of people taking part in the various activities and events. About 50,000 people are said to have filed past the coffin to pay their respects in the days before the funeral,58 while around 15,000 people attended the funeral service itself.59 On the other side, “numerous spontaneous celebrations [took place] on Sunday afternoon, minutes after the death of the general”; and around 3,000 people are estimated to have gathered in celebration in front of the presidential palace, in response to a call issued initially by the Communist Party.60 Secondly, the “numbers game” accounting

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tended to conflate the characteristics of visible, mobilized followers and activists with the views of ordinary people, whose interest in the event was more sporadic. Some pointed out the flaws in this thinking. One letter to the editor in La Tercera of 15 December asked a series of pertinent rhetorical questions: “Did the country actually grind to a halt? Were routines abandoned, did people not turn up for work? Can we really talk about a ‘divided country’ on the basis of 9,000 people celebrating in the Plaza Italia, 4,000 sobbing outside the military academy [where the funeral was held], and 50,000 who attended the wake?”61 Well-known TV and print journalist Fernando Paulsen claimed that the general’s critics and supporters had between them managed, for the space of one day, to “reduce the entire country to a photographic contrast between two minorities.”62 Politicians, parties, journalists, and more than a few historians conflated the views of a mobilized minority with those of the majority and turned this into “public opinion.” Historians and sociologists labored to extrapolate an illusory general state of public opinion from the visible manifestations of grief and joy, even venturing to “explain” how Pinochet’s death was being experienced by the younger generations.63 The stridency with which political actors and political parties reacted betrayed an increasing gulf between mobilized opinion, deeply political in nature, and ultimately indifferent opinions based on vague memories and uncertain knowledge. If the death of the former general elicited, contrary to appearances, so little genuinely transversal public reaction, it is because Pinochet had already, years before, ceased to belong to the present time. A Strange Tribunal

Press coverage of the death took what was little more than a distant echo of mobilized opinion and transformed it into a clamor, treating it as symptomatic of the broader national experience and of public opinion. In doing so, it helped set the scene for a curious kind of historical tribunal at which various historians were summoned to testify, through interviews, accounts, and newspaper articles. Although more than a few were reluctant to answer the call, many historians and even the occasional political actor agreed to try their hand at issuing some kind of vague and impromptu historical verdict on Pinochet just days before his funeral.64 Historian Ángel Soto has suggested that this kind of improvised “tribunal” (his term) confers perhaps too much power on historians, given that “history is still being written”.65 Patricia Arancibia66 likewise refused to pass definitive judgment, claiming “The

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historian is not a judge to pass sentence, nor is it history’s job to condemn or absolve.67 In a similar vein, Catholic University historian Ricardo Couyoumdjian contended that “we are not [yet] ready to issue a historical judgment”.68 Yet what would it mean to be “ready” to issue such a judgment? Does this desire to put off the moment of so-called historical judgment not betray a rather basic understanding of history according to which a certain amount of time has to elapse, at which point a reckoning can be made? Does this attitude not suggest a certain renunciation of the specific challenges of historicizing the present moment or the recent past? There seems to be a certain desire to let time go by in order to let events lose their immediacy and become inert, or at least unexamined, past time. The apparent solution offered by divorcing history from law, separating out historical explanation from the administering of human justice, is not uncontroversial either. National historian Alfredo JocelynHolt uses Pinochet’s death as the occasion to set out a series of preconditions that, according to him, must be met in order for historical analysis to be possible. “Let’s demystify him, judge him, and after that, the historians can have their say.”69 Making the demystification and judgment of Pinochet into conditions in the absence of which the former ruler cannot be thought about historically, Jocelyn-Holt excuses himself from testifying before this strange tribunal. He pleads for a continuance, the postponing to a later time of historical judgment: “no historical judgment can preempt the verdicts proper to our criminal justice system. It’s not their job to hand the dead man over to the historians.”70 This kind of suspension of the writing of history is probably what JocelynHolt has in mind when he claims that Pinochet is “outside of History.”71 But for how long? At what point will Pinochet enter into History, become a suitable object for analysis and historical criticism? Undoubtedly, not before justice has pronounced a verdict, although even this might not be sufficient given that Pinochet is an “eternal survivor”.72 In this approach, the historian conditions his discourse and reflections on a separate resolution of the guilt or innocence of the former dictator, and on the question of a moral definition of his figure and legacy. This is perhaps a rather convenient abdication of responsibility, an escape route that allows the thinking about, and writing, of History to be put off until all legal and moral conditions are met. Under these conditions, there is no doubt that the history of the present becomes a real challenge. Dealing with the past becomes an insuperable difficulty, and we begin to understand why Couyoumdjian suggests abstention. In juridical terms, the existence of a confession was classically considered to render unnecessary the accumulation of actual

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evidence. Claudio Rolle not only accepts but embraces this judicial metaphor, likening the function of the historian to that of the investigative magistrate or public prosecutor: to investigate in order to “understand a person’s behavior”.73 Rolle’s words and his bold analogy may in the end offer the prospect of a way forward, in which history is written not with a view to resolving legal and moral dilemmas but in order to help us think and understand. How, then, should we interpret the affirmation that “History will be the judge”? Several of the historians who did choose to take part in the public tribunal declared themselves incompetent when faced with this particular question. Others confused the judgment of history with the more or less informed pronouncements of supposedly eminent historians, who handed out plaudits or condemnations mostly to satisfy an unspoken demand that they “do history.” Jocelyn-Holt waxes ironic about this demand, referring somewhat disparagingly to the fashion for reenactments of defining moments of national history. He suggests, for example, a “staging of the massacre of Santa María de Iquique74 in the street in front of La Moneda,” or “guided tours of old patrician mansions,” and refers to business corporations commissioning books from historians and deciding what they are to write about. More than one honorable member of the profession has, he claims, succumbed to this demand for historical produce and been prepared to churn out the requisite “worthless memorabilia”.75 Why should we expect anything different in 2006, on the subject of Pinochet’s death? In this sense, the hunger for history that is plastered all over the pages of the newspapers is the same desire for junk food rather than real nutrition that JocelynHolt implicitly denounces. The only difference is that in the case of Pinochet, historians themselves became the sought-after product. Once historians declare themselves willing to address a public made up mainly of newspaper readers, they act like practitioners of some sort of applied history, which scrutinizes the future, Pinochet’s posterity, and his legacy in order to satisfy a demand for history that is quite openly also in the business of creating a market for opinions. These historians who choose to act in the tradition of the US public historian, one who claims “implicitly to be in a position to analyze ‘what is’ or ‘what will be’”.76 In the Chilean variant of this practice, the historian’s opinion is used to evaluate the past and infer some kind of significance for the future. How should we treat such opinions? We should name them for what they are—opinion—and we ought also to deconstruct their premises and assumptions. In this way Ricardo Krebs, recipient in 1982 of Chile’s National History Prize, maintains that “history changes when new opinions arise,

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and therefore historical judgments are never definitive”.77 He goes on to refute contemporary “overseas” criticism of Pinochet, complaining that in many countries “they fail to mention that he obeyed the Constitution and handed over power” in March 1990.78 Nonetheless, by taking refuge in the sensationalism of the single or unique case,79 Krebs avoids recognizing that this Pinochet is the same one who schemed to launch the 1973 coup, in contemptuous disregard of the 1925 Constitution that bound him to be loyal irrespective of his opinion of the Allende government. The historian Patricia Arancibia likewise enjoins us to think methodically, reminding us that “history seeks to understand, and does so by taking into account the duality of human nature and the circumstances and context of each era”.80 It is perhaps uncontroversial to claim, as Krebs and Arancibia do, that historians and their discipline aim to interpret and to understand, in order to explain. Those three aims or moments require much more than a simple description of facts and events. However, if history is to be a producer of knowledge, it cannot either tie itself indefinitely to pronouncements that function like “black boxes” and become, inevitably, reservoirs of ignorance. These include statements that invoke some vague concept of “human nature” or suggest that “historical judgment” must be subordinated to the “maturity and education of the people (pueblo),” whatever that means.81 It may well be true that, as Arancibia also claims, “history is thought of and written from the perspective of the present, with each generation perceiving the past from within its own mental and cultural categories”.82 Yet, if we simply give in to or go along with our own particular prejudices and ideologies without at least problematizing them or subjecting them to conscious scrutiny, we prevent ourselves from thinking sensibly not only about the past but also about the present. Bernardino Bravo Lira (the 2010 recipient of Chile’s National History Prize) suggests that certain conditions should be met before a judgment can be passed: [the historian ought] “to gather representative data; to determine its degree of accuracy; and to reconstruct the facts”.83 These three he believes to be necessary but insufficient stages in moving towards the production of knowledge, a step requiring the additional asset of “the courage to proclaim the truth”.84 These three stages may indeed be necessary ones, although their strict fulfillment could quite easily produce a detailed description rather than an explanation. To what, however, does “the courage to speak the truth” refer? This rhetorical invocation of a moral stance to be taken by the historian contains an irreducible conundrum of its own, since it begs the question of how we are to separate wheat from chaff or truth from lies. In calling for the “truth,” Bravo Lira treats truth as something that is simply there

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to be found and can be arrived at through some kind of quasi-forensic police examination of facts and events. He forgets that truth is essentially a metaphysical entity of its own, whose discovery requires both rigorous formulation of research questions and a careful consideration of our own habits and categories of thought.85 Julio Retamal’s judgment stands out from all the rest precisely for its crudeness. Lacking in any methodology and apparently unacquainted with the use of concepts, this is quite clearly mere unadorned opinion. According to this historian, “the good things [Pinochet did]” should be allowed to outweigh the rest, since, after all, no more than “three thousand, maybe fifteen thousand people” suffered. What’s more, when it comes down to it the whole thing was “not his fault,” something that “the left does not want to understand,” since the left is, he says, used “to feeding off ferocity, a constant whipping up of hatred”.86 His opinion was echoed by another historian, Regina Claro, who acknowledged “[those] human rights [things] (lo de los derechos humanos)”, but claimed these had been “very minor compared to other dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, [or] Castro”.87 The completely intemperate use of language and of comparisons indulged in by Retamal and Claro reifies the “left”, relativizes horror by introducing some kind of sliding scale of pain, and merges Castro with Pinochet. We might well consider that both Retamal and Claro are perfect examples of a demand for cheap history producing its desired object, a marketplace for opinion that cares little for the content of what is actually said. There are any number of examples of other public historians who attempt to dress up their judgments in erudite language, treating the public tribunal as a marketplace in which they produce opinions in return for recognition. In some cases, particularly perhaps that of Patricia Arancibia, the opinions at least seem to have some foundation, as when she refers to the different categories that are available to us when we judge the past from the standpoint of the present. In many other cases, however, the historian’s opinion becomes a tradeable good once it tacitly endorses a teleological view of history. Of course, all opinions are legitimate as such. But opinions with historical pretensions, issued by historians, are not all of equal value and are open to critique. Historians cannot attempt to elude their particular responsibility in this regard. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “all historians, whatever else their objectives, are engaged in this process inasmuch as they contribute, consciously or not, to the creation, dismantling and restructuring of images of the past which belong not only to the world of specialist investigation, but to the public sphere of man as a political being”.88

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Some of our sample of historians were seized by an attack of irresponsibility that placed them in direct opposition to Hobsbawm’s vision. This widespread irresponsibility seized some historians and many political scientists when they analyzed the funeral event, and usually manifested itself as either an urge to assimilate or an urge to relativize. Both came about through poorly constructed comparison, whether of leaders, regimes, or actions. The most common assimilation error was to draw parallels between Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet, bolstered by the historical irony created by the two suffering serious illness at roughly the same time. But there was also a specific local political flavor, revealed when Minister of the Interior Belisario Velasco referred to Pinochet’s death as the classic demise of passing of a rightwing dictator. The epithet provoked a chorus of criticism.89 One, perhaps the most talked-about for having provoked a subsequent reaction from the historian Ángel Soto,90 came in a newspaper column by political scientist Patricio Navia. Navia refuted the ministerial judgment and made himself at the same time into a spokesman for the whole of Chile, “a country that does not”—according to Navia—“make distinctions between dictators of the right and dictators of the left”.91 In all cases, he says, “right, center, or left, dictators steal, kill, and polarize societies”.92 This may be true, if one accepts the starting premise that the term is correctly applied to both Pinochet and Castro and their respective regimes. The problem is that not all historians and analysts are willing to accept the label “dictator” to refer to Pinochet,93 preferring to call him a “de facto ruler,” “authoritarian leader,” or simply “president.” We are forced here to recognize the strong negative charge attached to the term “dictator,” often left to stand as a sufficient descriptor while the associated analysis goes on to recount a litany of horrors, reproducing an essentialist conception of evil. Just days earlier Navia himself had chosen instead to comment on the enduring power of Pinochet’s and Castro’s ideas, the first in the form of an economic model still in force in Chile and the second as the “ideal of equality and social justice”94 behind the Cuban revolution. These nuances and distinctions in the realm of ideas are, however, immediately swept aside by the drawing of a bold equation between the two “imposing legacies”. This can look like a desire to deny or simply to play down the question of the specific content of each regime. Undeniably, atrocities have taken place in each or, if we choose a slightly different form of words, each has committed human rights violations in the name of the quite different conceptions of justice and well-being that each espoused. But as soon as discussion of these two forms of leadership is reduced to the imprecise terminology of “dictator,” and their political regimes lumped together in

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a fictional single category of “dictatorships”, they are run together in ways that lend themselves more to unhelpful stigmatization and moral judgment than systematic comparison. We can see a similar dynamic at work in the problematic use by some left-wing thinkers of the term “fascism” to define Pinochet’s regime. Their borrowing of the term empties it of the specific features that characterized Mussolini’s Italy or even Hitler’s Germany. The latter was, according to Ian Kershaw, “charismatic domination” transformed into a system of government, with Hitler gradually acquiring “growing autonomy in the complex play of relationships of power within the Nazi state”.95 Kershaw himself criticizes the generic use of the concept of fascism to locate the Nazi regime alongside others, believing it to be tantamount to a form of denialism or “a banalization of the horrors of Nazism”.96 The drawing of hasty and somewhat specious parallels between Pinochet and Castro is similarly unwise, since it ignores or denies what is actually specific to “Pinochetismo” and what may be particular to “Castroism”. Likewise, Chile has seen misrepresentations of Allende’s Popular Unity government equating its conscious deployment of political propaganda to the systematic production of misinformation by totalitarian governments.97 In fairness, the comparison between Castro and Pinochet has a long pedigree in the world’s media. International press agency EFE, for example, noted that “both have considered themselves saviors of their country and each has forced thousands of their own citizens into exile”. Its account concluded that “together they represent the last vestiges of a bloodthirsty era”.98 Leaving aside for a moment the references to pain and to blood, EFE’s “analysis” does not help us towards any greater insight into the specific characteristics of each of these two forms of political organization. Peruvian author and sometime political candidate Mario Vargas Llosa is guilty of the same omission when he suggests that both are little more than “embodiments” (figuras emblemáticas) of a single horrific lineage”.99 Let me be clear: there is no desire here to cast doubt on the reality of the horror that does, concretely, figure in all forms of dictatorship. Nor do I question the comparison between Pinochet and Castro by some appeal to relative scales of death and destruction, chalking up more or less fatalities to each account. My criticism is a deeper one that has to do with a need, often ignored, to take seriously the issue of the specific ways in which adversaries are to be eliminated and, particularly, whether or not actual annihilation is planned. Here it jars to compare Pinochet-era disappearances and executions to mass exile and execution of dissidents in Castro’s Cuba in the same ways, and for the same reasons, that it jars to conflate them with the Jewish Holocaust or Stalin’s gulags. Once we choose to

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overlook the question of the meaning of the repression, ignoring differences between regimes and focusing only on the common presence of the person of the dictator, then any and all comparisons and equations are possible: Pinochet, Kim Il Sung, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Somoza, Saddam Hussein, or Duvalier. The elisions may then go further: we lose the capacity to distinguish clearly between authoritarianisms, totalitarianisms and sultanates,100 or between “lefts”’ and “rights” that , once taken to extremes, start to find points of contact101 even while some are, or are portrayed as being, “less evil” than others.102 The risks of denialism and relativization go even wider. For more than a few historians and newspaper readers, the bon gré mal gré acknowledgment that Pinochet-era human rights violations had actually taken place did not prevent their being justified as necessary. We have seen above how Julio Retamal and Regina Claro both acknowledged the violations, but at the same time Retamal seeks to relieve Pinochet of all responsibility while Claro downplays their gravity by irresponsible comparison with “dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, or Castro”.103 Many of the newspaper articles, interviews, and readers’ letters that appeared around the time of the funeral made a nod to form, sparing a line or two to mention the human cost of the Pinochet regime, but not a few treated this as an unfortunate “burden that had to be borne”. One reader’s letter suggested that the left was itself no stranger to this logic, choosing only to “hush up the atrocities committed by their Russian and European comrades” . . . “not to mention Cuba”.104 This imputation of unique or shared criminal culpability to the Chilean left was also used to justify human rights violations per se as “regrettable, but inevitable”.105 Such explicit justifications were the exception rather than the order of day, but it is noteworthy that such outlandish views were afforded a mainstream hearing. The Catholic Church did not escape criticism over its own role and discourse around Pinochet’s death and funeral, during which it betrayed a truly magisterial capacity for denial dressed up in the language of forgiveness and redemption. Thus, after visiting Pinochet on his sickbed, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz alluded to human rights violations without ever quite naming them when he said: “whatever the things that someone might have to be regretful for, one must never forget that we are all children of God’s forgiveness”.106 The cardinal’s bon mot undeniably falls squarely within the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness, according to which all types of harm done or sin committed are commended to the creator’s infinite mercy. Nonetheless, the cardinal went on to perform a much clearer denial and downplaying of the question of harm done when, presiding over Pinochet’s requiem mass at

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the capital’s military academy, he gave thanks to God “for all the qualities that he gave [to Pinochet], and all of the good [Pinochet] did for our homeland and for his own institution [the army]”.107 There can be no doubt that the Cardinal here adds his own voice to the tribunal, issuing a historical judgment distinctive only for coming under the guise of institutional discourse rather than opinion. This is more than a mere “end-time” discourse or the hagiography typically extended to a former ruler in recognition of the dignity of his office: it is also a funeral eulogy in which the personal merits of Pinochet are extolled. The requiem mass commended to God Pinochet’s supposed personal qualities while at the same time consecrating and certifying the supposed virtues of his government and legacy. While the exaltation of personal virtues is somehow understandable in light of the traditional funeral eulogy rendered in Chile to deceased presidents almost as a matter of form, the Church’s institutional silence about the harm caused serves the interests of denial. It is not so much that a requiem mass or a homily ought instead to have been used as a pulpit for denunciation or for the expression of other versions of the truth. The problem is that, in this case, the matter of blame or imperfection was glossed over altogether in favor of a totalizing tribute to the former ruler and his work. “The discourse devoted to the dead at the moment of their passing” is indeed, as Bonnet writes, always first and foremost “the rite (sacre) of the living”.108 Errázuriz’s words are not just any other eulogy, given that they represent the official position of an institution. In this case, the entire Catholic Church, with all the weight of history, tradition, and liturgical solemnity behind it, spoke and passed judgment. For Chile the position of the Catholic Church was, moreover, particularly charged given its previous role as a bastion of defense of human rights during the dictatorship. Errázuriz’s choice of words and gesture around Pinochet’s death was therefore a particularly stark reminder of the doctrinal and political gulf between the present ecclesial authorities and Cardinal Raúl Silva, who had presided over the Chilean church during the 1980s. Memories of the Future

What, if anything, remains to be said about Pinochet, his memory, and his posterity several years after his death? Little of note has emerged, other than persistent rumors that he may have secretly fathered a child and increasing public indifference to commemorations of his death by dwindling groups of supporters. Nothing has happened to reverse his steady pre-mortem decline, and few therefore feel called to actively defend his legacy.109 Already in 2007 and 2008, the first and second

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anniversary commemorations of his death were virtually ignored by the press. The mainstream media made do with a few rote obituaries, lacking even the levels of emotional intensity discussed by Fowler.110 A few new documents have come to light, among them a kind of “political testament,” whose existence was revealed by the Pinochet Foundation (although details of its content remained obscure). A few days after Pinochet’s funeral, there was some talk in the press of renaming a street after him in the uptown Las Condes district of Santiago.111 The exact form suggested was “President Augusto Pinochet,” a clear attempt to restore the presidential dignity denied to him in funeral protocols. Would that decision, had it gone ahead, have been sufficient to rehabilitate Pinochet and reverse his gradual degradation? It would not: it would have represented at most a local tribute that could not have been extrapolated onto the national stage nor held to somehow represent the collective national will. The idea was later abandoned, or at least has not resurfaced, but it is telling that it was mooted by the local council of one of the capital’s wealthier districts. Only if a host of working-class city districts or regional councils were to take up the same idea would it potentially represent a genuine national restoration of dignity in the context of local memory politics.112 Pinochet’s death also began to loosen the inextricable personal association between him and 11 September, a date that had already been stripped of its status as an official public holiday. At the moment of his death that date, 10 December, suggested itself as a possible rival the date of the coup as potentially significant markers around which living memories of Pinochet, Allende, and the “eleventh” (once) could converge. Names and dates can of course become magnets for social commemoration even when this is not enshrined in explicit policy measures. Nor do these measures, where they exist, necessarily betray the existence of what Ángel Soto castigates as the “typical repertoire of centrally planned [i.e., socialist] states”.113 For Chile, it is highly likely that multiple (and divergent) memories about 11 September 1973, about Allende and his government, or about Pinochet’s “achievements” will persist. This does not, however, mean that all of these memories will be afforded equal weight and value. As ever, there will be memories that predominate while others are subjugated; and commemorations that capture the attention of enlightened, mobilized, and perhaps even public opinion will coexist with eccentric and marginal countercommemorations. In other words, “we have no memories of the future, but we do have imagined memories of the future”.114 Some of these could become the source material for collective memory, while others may be

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restricted to the immediate circle of those who developed them unless some major shift thrusts them to greater prominence. Historians register mainstream memories and more rarely manage to also capture some of the more marginal versions often overlooked for lack of an authoritative spokesperson.115 However, and again pace Soto, memory is not the “raw material of the historian”.116 The distinct memories that underlie accounts of a date, a funeral, its protagonists and their legacy, certainly inform the practice of the historian, but do not overdetermine it. It is still the case that historians work principally from written archives, oral testimonies, and iconographic documentation (or “relics,” in the sense of Goldthorpe).117 These constitute “objectified” forms of data about which it is always worth asking questions such as for whom and in what form they were originally produced and how they have been received.118 Drawing distinctions between history and memory allows us to understand how it is possible for a historian to develop a narrative about one man, his regime, or his legacy that may be at once appropriately founded on known facts and roundly criticized for going against the grain of received wisdom or dominant memory. This is in fact the perfect situation from which to appreciate that history and memory are indeed made of different stuff and can take separate tracks. When this happens, historical narratives verge on revisionism and are likely to be branded as such depending on the nature of the evidence that is threatened or the demystification that has been attempted. Much will depend on how the alternative versions are received from historians. While the term “revisionism” is not quite appropriate in the Chilean context, we can at least venture the hypothesis that the view of Pinochet and his regime that currently dominates is the stigmatizing and degrading one currently reproduced by the present crop of mainstream practitioners of history. Any revisionism that might emerge would, accordingly, have to be the work of historians presently relegated to the sidelines or simply as yet unknown. This is a far from impossible scenario, particularly if the political changes that have occurred since Pinochet’s death are later seized upon as an opportunity by those who would like to reevaluate him and his work. It is, for instance, instructive to note that, in 2009, then-president of the senate Jovino Novoa had previously served as subsecretary general of the government under the Pinochet dictatorship, and that Marcelo Venegas, the newly appointed president of the constitutional court, had in 1986 been director of DINACOS, the military regime’s principal censorship agency. These changes offer opportunities to rehabilitate not so much Pinochet himself as the civilian political forces that supported him, and

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could certainly serve to inspire or embolden any revisionist offensive being planned by new historians. If the reputation of late nineteenthcentury Chilean president Balmaceda could end up being rehabilitated five years after his defeat in a civil war—and subsequent suicide—this was not solely due to the twin effects of his funeral and a rapid electoral recovery by his supporters. It can be explained primarily by the fact that “the Balmaceda-ist historiography was clearly more complete, and more widely read, than that of the victors of 1891”.119 This event is sufficient in and of itself to demonstrate the potential real-world importance of debates among historians. What is more, the very fact that future historians will be called upon to appear before similar tribunals will continue to confirm what is often forgotten: that “the contentious nature of history reflects politics par excellence”.120 It is also a fact that revisionism over Pinochet’s death in Chile is as likely to come from the left as the right, in the context of very dynamic disputes about memory. As Kershaw reminds us, talking about controversies between German historians over Nazism, “‘revisionism’ is not only an insult, but also a term whose meaning varies and can cause confusion. Some of the staunchest critics of ‘revisionists’ in the seventies were themselves described as ‘revisionists’ in the recent ‘historians’ dispute”.121 Perhaps what the memory of the future has in store for us is an “equilibrium that blends memory-as-rupture with memory-as-salvation,” which would in turn provide true foundations for a “new dominant collective memory”122 —although any such inglorious redemption of a dictator might just require too particular a set of realignments and conditions. A historically improbable future, then, albeit a far from impossible one.

                                                                                                                1

Jorge Edwards, La Segunda, 22 December 2006. Proceeding from the discovery of millions of dollars in secret accounts held by Pinochet family members at the Riggs Bank in Washington DC, USA. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (París: Editions de Minuit, 1980), p. 98, note 9. 4 David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 104-105, in French in the original text 5 Boris Gobille, “L’événement Mai 68: Pour une sociohistoire du temps court,” Annales HSS, no. 2 (March–April 2008), p. 324. 6 Ibid. 7 La Nación, 21 August 2006. 8 www.noticiasprotocolo.blogspot.com, 23 August 2006, original source Diario Hoy.net. 2

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9 www.noticiasprotocolo.blogspot.com, 4 December 2006, source El Morrocotudo. 10 La Tercera, 4 December 2006. 11 La Tercera, 10 December 2006. 12 Editors’ note: Cancillería is the national equivalent of the US State Department, which in Chile oversees all diplomatic and internal protocol-related matters. 13 “Reglamento de ceremonial público y protocolo de la Cancillería.” 14 Contained in the “Reglamento de servicio de guarnición.” 15 The same regulation had been invoked on two previous occasions in recent memory. One was the demise, in 2002, of General Sergio Castilla (exarmy commander-in-chief, 1968–1969). The other, much more highly symbolically charged, was the belated 2004 commemoration of the 1974 death of General Carlos Prats. Prats, a loyal constitutionalist, had been Pinochet’s immediate predecessor as army commander-in-chief. Exiled to Argentina, he was assassinated there together with his wife in 1974 on the orders of his former comrade in arms. 16 La Tercera, 5 December 2006. 17 Carmen McEvoy, ed., Funerales republicanos en América del Sur: Tradición, ritual y nación, 1832-1896, (Santiago, Ediciones Centro de Estudios Bicentenario, 2006), p. xv, emphasis in the original text. 18 www.noticiasprotocolo.blogspot.com, 23 August 2006. 19 La Tercera, 4 December 2006. 20 Literally, as “pequeñeces,” small-minded behavior. La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 21 El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 22 The other symbol, whose use would in any case not have been called for on this occasion, is the seal of Bernardo O’Higgins, one of Chile’s founding fathers. For more about the significance of the sash, see discussion of its role in the March 1990 handover of power between Pinochet and incoming elected president Patricio Aylwin in Alfredo Joignant, El gesto y la palabra (Santiago: LOM-Arcis, 1998). Regarding the subversion of the funeral protocol and manipulation of the presidential sash, see also contemporaneous press reports in La Tercera, 13 December 2006, and El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 23 A spectacular episode that was scarcely publicized by the press: La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 24 La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 25 One of Pinochet’s sons, Augusto Pinochet Iriart, suggested that his father had overcome his religiously motivated distaste for the idea of cremation “for the sake of his family and the country”. La Tercera, 15 December 2006. 26 La Tercera, 10 December 2006. 27 La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 28 Expressed in chanted slogans such as “Dormant right, Pinochet saved your life”. El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 29 Cheyre held the post between 2002 and 2006, during which time he was responsible for various modernization programs that had entailed taking some strategic distance from the Pinochet legacy. While visiting Pinochet during the latter’s illness, Cheyre’s car was attacked by Pinochet supporters. Water bottles rained down upon the vehicle, and its occupant was roundly denounced as a “hypocrite”, “scoundrel”, and “traitor”. El Mercurio, 5 December 2006.

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La Tercera, 4 December 2006. La Tercera, 10 December 2006. 32 El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 33 The two had competed in 2005 for the right-wing presidential nomination, Lavin for the UDI and Piñera for Renovación Nacional. 34 La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 35 La Tercera, 16 December 2006. 36 La Tercera, 4 December 2006. 37 Ibid. 38 El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 39 Ibid. 40 La Tercera, 4 December 2006. 41 Ibid. 42 Nicolas Mariot, “Qu’est-ce qu’un ‘enthousiasme civique’? Sur l’historiographie des fêtes politiques en France après 1789,” Annales HSS, no. 1 (January-February 2008), p. 119. 43 On this topic, see Alfredo Joignant, Un día distinto (Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 2007). 44 El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 45 El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 46 El Mercurio, 4 December 2006. 47 La Tercera, 5 December 2006. Saint Teresa, “Santa Teresita’” is a local saint; Padre Pío, an Italian Capuchin friar and saint believed to have the gift of healing. Both are common devotions in traditional Chilean Catholic circles. Translator’s note 48 Ibid. 49 La Tercera, 13 December 2006. Chile has a small but active neo-Nazi movement, representatives of which were also in evidence at Pinochet’s funeral and at a 2012 homage to his memory. Translator’s note. 50 The funeral itself was a different matter, as press reporting ceased to be about anonymous figures and street groups and focused on the reactions of eminent persons and businessmen explaining why they had chosen to attend the funeral. Their answers alluded to “a personal and private sentiment of ‘gratitude’ to the former general for his defense and strengthening of property rights”. La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 51 Christian Delage, “L’image comme prevue: L’expérience du procès de Nuremberg,” Vingtième siècle, Revue d’histoire, no. 72 (October–December, 2001), p. 74. 52 Supporters concentrated around the (uptown) military hospital, while opponents occupied the Plaza Italia, a major marker of the uptown/downtown frontier, and the square in front of the La Moneda presidential palace. (Translator’s note: The latter, perhaps not coincidentally, contains a statue to Allende that has become a major focus of left-wing demonstrations in recent years.) La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 53 La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 54 Ibid. 55 La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 56 Ibid. 57 La Tercera, 12 December 2006. The column provoked an irate tirade from one indignant reader, denouncing the “fallacious” comparison: “Muerte de 31

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Pinochet V,” letter to the editor by Emilia Infante, La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 58 La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 59 La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 60 La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 61 Letter to the editor by Raúl Valdivia Fernández, La Tercera, 15 December 2006. 62 Fernando Paulsen, “El minuto de las minorías,” La Tercera, 16 December 2006. 63 Sociologist Jorge Larraín claimed that young people were experiencing the death of the former ruler with particular intensity, claiming moreover that the explanation for this lay in “characteristics proper to the adolescent stage of life, such as emotionality, viscerality, and passion”. He drew a contrast with older generations who, he felt, had “a greater awareness of what happened and how it happened,” owing to their lived experiences of the coup and aftermath. La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 64 “Regarding the historical Pinochet, I believe deep down that a great many years will need to go by before we can really obtain an impartial perspective on his government,” said right-wing (UDI) Senator Evelyn Matthei in “Reacciones,” El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 65 Ángel Soto, “Legado y funeral de Pinochet,” La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 66 Arancibia, a historian, is also the sister of a Chilean intelligence agent sentenced to life imprisonment in Argentina in 2000 for his role in the 1974 assassinations of Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert. 67 Patricia Arancibia, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 68 Ricardo Couyoumdjian, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 69 Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, “Qué despinochetización ni qué perro muerto,” La Tercera, 10 December 2006. 70 Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 71 Jocelyn-Holt, “Qué despinochetización” 72 Ibid. 73 El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 74 The reference is to a 1907 massacre of between 2,000 and 3,000 striking saltpeter workers in the northern city of Iquique, on the orders of a local military commander but with the tacit support of the government of the day. The event has become an emblematic moment in the history of the Chilean workers’ movement and part of broader Chilean collective memory. 75 Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, “El pasado chatarra que consumimos,” La Tercera, 7 January 2007. 76 Henry Rousso, “L’histoire appliquée ou les historiens thaumaturges,” Vingtième siècle, Revue d’histoire, vol.1, no. 1 (1984), p. 111. 77 Ricardo Krebs, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 78 Ibid. 79 A treatment that was also sought after by media outlets, which were constantly looking to stress the supposed differences between Pinochet and other de facto rulers. We were repeatedly reminded, for example, that unlike his counterparts elsewhere, “Chile’s former ruler received his final sendoff in a military ceremony, surrounded by thousands of supporters and at the center of worldwide attention”. La Tercera, 13 December 2006.

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Patricia Arancibia, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Bernardino Bravo Lira, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 84 Ibid. 85 Veyne is accordingly correct to remind us that “conceptual tools are the locus of advances in historiography” to the extent that “having concepts is equivalent to conceiving of things” (p. 158). The historian’s task is “to know how to take a given event and ask more questions about it than the average person would”. This in turn is impossible to achieve without “the formulation of new concepts,” an “operation that enriches the vision” (p. 254). Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire: Essai d’épistémologie (París: Seuil, 1971). 86 Julio Retamal, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 87 Regina Claro, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 88 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, p. 13. 89 Not least from former Defense Minister Jaime Ravinet, like Velasco a member of the Christian Democrat party, DC. Ravinet drew up a tally of the respective sins of left- and right-wing dictatorships in which, if anything, the former came off worse: “if anyone wants to claim that the right-wing [dictatorships] are worse I must say I have my doubts”. Interview with Jaime Ravinet in La Tercera, 16 December 2006. 90 Ángel Soto, “El legado de Castro y Pinochet,” La Tercera, 5 December 2006. 91 Patricio Navia, “Dictadores de derecha e izquierda,” La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 92 Ibid. 93 Nor, of course, for Castro. Editor’s note. 94 Patricio Navia, “Pinochet y Castro en sus horas finales,” La Tercera, 4 December 2006. 95 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Un essai sur le charisme en politique (París: Gallimard, 1995), p. 17. Author’s translation, 96 Ian Kershaw, Qu’est-ce que le nazisme? Problèmes et perpectives d’interprétation (París: Gallimard, 1997), p. 85. Author’s translation. 97 The comparison was drawn by conservative historian Alejandro San Francisco in the article “El debate por la memoria histórica,” La Tercera, 21 December 2006. For a critique of this strange allusion, see a letter to the editor appearing the next day from Ernesto López entitled “Memoria histórica,” La Tercera, 22 December 2006, and San Francisco’s subsequent reply in the same medium, La Tercera, 23 December 2006. 98 Analysis from the EFE news agency, published under the title “Paralelo con Fidel Castro” in La Tercera, 4 December 2006. 99 Vargas Llosa, “Las exequias de un tirano,” El País, 17 December 2006. 100 In this regard, see the important book by Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 101 Edwards, La Segunda. 102 Sebastián Abudoj, “Allende y Pinochet,” La Tercera, 9 December 2006. 103 Regina Claro, El Mercurio, 17 December 2006. 81

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104

editor.

Sebastián Abudoj, “Allende y Pinochet,” previously cited letter to the

105 Former Pinochet regime ambassador Miguel Serrano, letter to the editor entitled “Salud de Pinochet II,” El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 106 El Mercurio, 5 December 2006. 107 La Tercera, 12 December 2006. 108 Jean-Claude Bonnet, “Les morts illustres: Oraison funèbre, éloge académique, nécrologie,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 2 (Paris: Quarto-Gallimard, 1997), p .1831. 109 The untidy rump of the unconditional Pinochetista supporter group made its most recent public appearance by organizing a June 2012 homage in a downtown Santiago theater complete with the screening of a hagiographical documentary on Pinochet. The event attracted street protests and some violence, largely unfavorable public comment, and even rumors of possible actions for plagiarism over the inclusion of footage shot by regime opponents. The lasting impression was however one of a dwindling group that did not manage to convince a single leading right-wing politician of the day to attend. See Chapter Four. 110 Bridget Fowler, “Collective Memory and Forgetting: Components for a Study of Obituaries,” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 22, no. 6 (2005), p. 61. 111 La Tercera, 13 December 2006. 112 Interestingly, perhaps, the capital does boast several “President Salvador Allende” streets, and other kinds of local memory politics are on display in working-class areas. Santiago’s Pedro Aguirre Cerda district, under a Communist Party mayor, boasts streets dedicated to “Popular Unity”, “Carlos Marx”, and iconic union leader “Clotario Blest” all within the space of a couple of blocks. Editor’s note. 113 Soto claims to detect this tendency in Spain’s recent “law of historical memory” in his column “¿El juicio de la historia?” La Tercera, 22 December 2006. While the enactment of laws undeniably has its origins in state decisions or preferences, these are subject to the scrutiny and approval of [word missing] as are decisions, in Chile at least, to permit the erection of statutes paying tribute to (some) former presidents and political leaders. Those approved include former presidents Jorge Alessandri (law 19.013 of 5 December 1990), Eduardo Frei Montalva (law 19.014 of 17 December 1990), Salvador Allende (law 19.311 of 24 June, 1994), and former right-wing senator Jaime Guzmán, assassinated in 1991 (law 19.205 of 6 February 1993). On this topic, see Katherine Hite, “El monumento a Salvador Allende en el debate político chileno,” in Elizabeth Jelín and Victoria Langland, eds., Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales (Madrid and Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003), pp. 19-56. These decisions clearly track the political makeup of the legislature of the day. In that sense, they are straightforward examples of sociopolitical decisionmaking that is perfectly democratic, not least because it can potentially be reversed. This is a long way from supposedly “totalitarian” lawmaking. 114 Richard Ned Lebow, “The Future of Memory,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science vol. 617 (May 2008), p. 39. 115 Here the historian Gabriel Salazar constitutes a notable exception, recording popular history from below. His recognition operates as an “authorizing” voice giving greater visibility to, for example, social and oral histories of the day of the coup.

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Soto, “¿El juicio de la historia?” John H. Goldthorpe, “The Uses of History in Sociology,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 42, no. 2 (1991), pp. 211-230. 118 Both the oral and written documentation that the historian employs constitutes, at bottom, little more than a collection of tracks or traces, in the sense given to the term by Carlo Ginzburg, Mythes, emblèmes, traces (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). They are perhaps fragments of a history that is, inescapably, “mutilated knowledge” (see Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire, p. 24, author’s translation). These documents that become traces constitute the real source material of the historian and must, as such, be critically interrogated. If too many gaps have been left between the traces, these must be addressed through what Veyne calls “retrodiction”. This refers to a type of synthesis that seeks to “fill gaps in our immediate comprehension” (Veyne, p.23, note 10, author’s translation). If we are prepared to call these principles of historical epistemology “memory,” then everything becomes memory. 119 Alejandro San Francisco, “La apoteosis de Balmaceda: Desde la tumba solitaria a la gloria (Santiago, 1896),” in McEvoy, ed., Funerales republicanos en América del Sur, p. 193. 120 Martin O. Heisler, “Introduction: The Political Currency of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 617 (May 2008), p. 22. 121 Kershaw, Qu’est-ce que le nazisme? p. 429, note 4, author’s translation. 122 Peter Winn, “El pasado está presente: Historia y memoria en el Chile contemporáneo.” in Anne Pérotin-Dumon ed., Historizar el pasado vivo en América Latina, p. 27. Electronic book, published at www.historizarelpasadovivo.cl (accessed 20 January 2013). 117

7 The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra (translation by Cath Collins)

This chapter analyzes Chileans’ memories of the authoritarian regime of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), of the repression that they lived through in those years, and of the figure of the strongman who is ineluctably associated with that particular period of Chilean history. The chapter examines the results of a series of opinion polls carried out by the Center for Contemporary Reality (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea, CERC).1 The polls were begun in 1986, while the authoritarian regime was still in place,2 as part of a public opinion study program at Santiago’s Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, dependent at that time on the Catholic archdiocese of Santiago. The program, directed by Carlos Huneeus, aimed to track changes and continuity in Chileans’ opinions and attitudes. The first poll was carried out after an initial pretest, consisting of a questionnaire administered to a representative sample of 400 students at each of three different universities. At the time the regime was on the defensive, suffering the effects of an economic crisis that had led it to embark on a liberalization policy. The resultant opening up created more plural spaces, which allowed the poll to be carried out. Press censorship was suspended and media sources, particularly radio, were providing ample coverage of political events. These were supplemented by the emergence of new newspapers and magazines. The regime also allowed the reestablishment of political parties and trade unions, which were instrumental in organizing mass antiregime protests.3 After the return to democracy in 1990, CERC ∗

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transformed itself into an NGO and continued its opinion poll work. CERC’s data represent a unique source, as no other research center carried out regular tracking of Chileans’ views about that phase of their political history, about General Pinochet, or about his effect on public attitudes and mores.4 Some scholars of civic culture dispute the validity of polls carried out in authoritarian settings, since they believe public opinion cannot meaningfully be said to exist under such circumstances. Not only are citizens afraid to express their true thoughts, there are also limitations on freedom that may prevent them from obtaining sufficient information to allow them to form a personal view. Two US academics have made this argument in the course of their own work on civic culture in new Latin American democracies. They claim that “[a]uthoritarian governments discourage, bar, or interfere with surveys, and citizens do not feel free to answer sensitive questions honestly”.5 The history of social research in Latin America nonetheless does not bear out this affirmation. Polls conducted under various military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Brazil,6 provided extremely useful information about popular interests which informed the decisions of opposition leaders during transitions towards democracy. In those countries in which survey-based research was not carried out, the reasons often had little do with authoritarian settings and were more often related to the absence of an academic community interested in that line of research, or a lack of the requisite institutional or economic resources.7 Analysis of public opinion is relevant not only for appreciating the singularities of memory but also for understanding the features that shape political culture in a new democracy such as the Chilean one, which demonstrates only lukewarm support for the principle of democracy. The continued active presence of Pinochet as army commander-in-chief during the first eight years of transition had an effect on civic culture, which is largely defined, as Rustow argued, in the early years of a new democracy. This is, after all, the period when individuals amass their first direct experience of their new institutions and form opinions about their strengths and weaknesses.8 Chile’s continued lack of enthusiasm for democracy contradicts the dominant trend in one part of the literature, which associates economic growth and reduction of poverty with an increase in explicit support for democracy.9 Public opinion studies also help explain political behavior, as opinion about the Pinochet regime has been a key factor for predicting voting patterns in presidential elections.10 It has helped us to distribute “undecideds” between presidential candidates, allowing for accurate

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prediction of final results. This factor proved particularly useful for the 2005 and 2009 contests, long after the end of the authoritarian period. Civic culture is not only defined during democratic periods. It has a long pre-history connected with a country’s political development, the kind of family socialization that is prevalent, and the effects of authoritarian domination. This latter can notably alter previous patterns, particularly in the presence—as in Chile—of a strong form of discourse and action that divided the country, perhaps as nowhere else in Latin America, into opposing camps of friend and foe. Economic progress was also used as a method of legitimation that offered mechanisms of integration to certain social sectors. The authoritarian past and the role of Pinochet, particularly in democracy, are both indispensable for understanding Chile’s present-day civic culture. A time-series study provides the best possible method for tracing this trajectory and confirms how deep the impact of the former dictator and his era has been. The chapter begins by analyzing political and institutional features that explain the force of memory, which have to do with regime characteristics and the singularities of the democratization process. We go on to analyze the results of polling questions about the coup, the intensity of subsequent repression, and overall evaluations of the military regime. In a third section of the chapter we analyze Pinochet’s image through a typology of responses to a question that asks whether Pinochet will go down in history as a dictator or as “[Chile’s] best ruler of the twentieth century”. The chapter’s conclusions sum up our findings and highlight the costs or toll that memory has taken on present-day civic culture in Chile. We find this to be markedly divided over issues of the past. The Institutional Context of Memories of the Pinochet Regime

Chile’s authoritarian regime had a strong impact on the formation of civic culture, owing to the strength of its hallmark characteristics. A violent military coup and reshaping of the political order were followed by a plan to refound society. Economic transformations with a neoliberal orientation redefined the bases of state and society, with the twin aims of legitimating the authoritarian regime and creating an economic support base for a future political system in which the regime’s civilian collaborators would maintain their position of dominance once the military had returned to barracks. This was a dual state, since it deployed coercion—with a heavy human cost—together with economic

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reforms based on market freedoms designed to bring the country out of underdevelopment.11 The violence unleashed by the coup led to serious human rights violations including around 3,000 deaths or disappearances. The inclusion among these of former army commander-in-chief Carlos Prats and his wife shocked the population: military violence was unexpected, since Chile had no tradition of widespread violence following a coup. Nor was there any sense of a genuine confrontation with guerrilla groups, such as might have justified a drastic defensive reaction by regular forces to armed aggression against them. This had been the case in Argentina during the 1976–1983 “Proceso” regime, particularly in 1976, in confrontations with the Montoneros. This Argentine left-wing guerrilla movement had somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 members at its height, in 1974 and 1975.12 Members had military training, arms, and the kind of economic resources that allowed the group to launch attacks on regular military installations, inflicting significant material damage and casualties. By the time Isabel Peron’s administration fell, in 1976, there was already a history of armed confrontation between guerrillas and the armed forces. Other armed actors in Argentina included the left-wing Popular Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP) and an extreme right-wing paramilitary force known as the “Triple A” (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, AAA) that carried out the assassination of dozens of political figures and journalists.13 Uruguay’s guerrilla movement, the Tupamaros, likewise carried out various violent operations in the years leading up to the 1973 interruption of democracy. Numerous police officers and civilians were killed.14 Aside from this relative absence of guerrilla violence, Chile’s experience was also characterized by the combination of military domination and personalized leadership. General Pinochet concentrated in his own person the functions of president of the republic, head of government, army commander-in-chief, and leader of the ruling political coalition. He was extremely adept at concentrating power in his own hands and achieved high levels of cohesion. He managed to incorporate a range of right-wing individuals and groups into his government without having any former secretary or subsecretary of state break with him publicly and cross to the opposition, as had happened to Franco in Spain (1939–1975) or to the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985). Nor did he suffer any kind of “semi-opposition” or partial dissent from sectors that, while supporting him, might have allowed differences on matters of specific policy to be made public.15 Pinochet managed all of this through the use of mechanisms of cooptation and through the

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preservation of ample distance between the regime and opposition. This breach favored a friend-foe separation dissuading desertions to the other side and was accompanied by a bellicose language far more extreme than that employed by other dictators of the same period.16 Pinochet’s power was built on multiple legitimation strategies: legal legitimacy as army commander-in-chief and electoral legitimacy based on his claim to be acting with the country’s backing. This claim was bolstered by the holding of noncompetitive elections in 1977 and 1980.17 At the third such attempt, the 1988 plebiscite, Pinochet failed to win the contest but did garner a significant 43 percent share of the vote. The concentrated nature and multiple sources of Pinochet’s power led to the identification of his own person with the regime as such. Pinochet himself once claimed that “not a leaf stirs in this country without my knowledge”, and the regime is generally referred to as the “Pinochet regime”. This is relatively unusual among the Latin American dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, known collectively as “new authoritarianisms” and more typically characterized by institutional (that is, collective) military participation in political power and efforts to avoid personalization.18 Pinochet was the only dictator of this particular class of Latin American authoritarians who kept his grip on power for the duration of the entire regime. Pinochet handed power over in person to an elected successor rather than being overthrown, as in the case of General Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay since 1954, finally overthrown in a 1989 palace coup.19 Pinochet’s Leadership Among the Political and Economic Elite of the Democratic Period

Chile’s former dictator retained his status as army commander-in-chief after transition. This state of affairs, unique among the new democracies of the period, is partly explained by the reformist and institutionally channeled nature of Chile’s regime change. Transition—to the centerleft Concertación administration headed by Christian Democrat president Patricio Aylwin (1990-94)—took place within the bounds established by the 1980 Constitution, which stipulated continuity for commanders-in-chief of the armed forces. Pinochet’s continued prominence is also explained because his position was supported by the leaders of the right-wing UDI (Unión Demócrata Independiente) and RN (Renovación Nacional) parties, which now made up the political opposition. Business leaders, suspicious of the incoming democratic authorities, also supported Pinochet. They regarded him as an insurance policy against possible political excesses on the part of a new

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government that, after all, included ministers from the Socialist Party of deposed president Salvador Allende (1970–1973). A portion of the public also supported the general, respecting him as a former president of the republic who had, moreover, “saved the country from Communism” and “rebuilt the economy”. Pinochet’s remaining at the head of the army constituted the maximum possible expression of the continuity that was characteristic of Chile’s regime change. The mere fact of his presence in the new democratic order suggested that the authoritarian past would play a major role in the building of the new politics, and would limit that new politics in ways that went beyond the institutional limitations set down by the 1980 Constitution. Continuity was also a feature of the new intake of opposition legislators. Most of the deputies elected to represent the UDI or RN, and the UDI’s three elected senators,20 had held high cabinet office under Pinochet or had been part of the “legislative commissions” that advised the military junta. These parliamentarians also defended Pinochet’s regime and his person, even when he was exercising pressure on the new government in ways that clearly bordered on illegality.21 Right-wing politicians’ defense of Pinochet stretched even to justifying the previous regime’s suspension of political rights and its commission of “excesses”—opposition code for human rights violations. Those who were prepared during the 1990s to explicitly recognize and repudiate past violations were few and far between, not least because those who did so earned Pinochet’s wrath and found their political careers under attack.22 The UDI even went so far as to call on memories of the military regime and Pinochet’s role in it to bolster their electoral support in working-class districts in elections over the 1989–1999 period. They did this in order to attempt to gain relative electoral ground on their supposed coalition partners RN, with whom the binominal electoral system in fact placed them in effective competition. RN had done much better than the UDI in the 1989 elections, and part of the UDI’s distinctive character lay precisely in its being considered closer to the regime and to Pinochetismo. The high regard in which Pinochet was held by captains of industry was clearly visible over the 1990s. In interviews for a 1997 edition of a high-circulation national economic magazine, twenty-eight prominent businessmen were asked which Chilean they most admired. Fourteen of them named General Pinochet.23 Their number included the former president of the country’s main business federation,24 president at the time of the major international energy company ENERSIS. The list of admirers also contained a previous president of the country’s most influential industrial association,25 the managing director of its leading

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telecommunications company,26 and other important business figures. Over the course of 1997 Pinochet initiated a carefully orchestrated campaign to allow him to step down with full honors from the post of army commander, which he had held continuously since late August 1973, and to take up his seat as a lifetime senator. That same year, he was feted by two major business associations. The national mining association, Sociedad Nacional de Minería,27 and the national chamber of commerce, Cámara Nacional de Comercio, both chose to honor him with awards, the latter in the form of the “Diego Portales Palazuelos” Prize.28 According to press reports of the ceremony, chamber president Alfonso Mujica “thanked the former president for all he had done for the country, in laying the foundations for its progress, well-being, and economic and social development”.29 During Pinochet’s enforced stay in London between 16 October 1998 and 2 March 2000, detained on a Spanish-originated warrant accusing him of human rights violations, business organizations condemned the British and Spanish governments’ actions. The Sofofa took out a press insert extolling the work of the military regime.30 The president of the Production and Commerce Federation (Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio, CPC) showed his direct support by traveling to the British capital to express solidarity with Pinochet on behalf of his membership,31 as did the presidents of the two main rightwing parties (UDI and RN). The two right-wing presidential contenders, Sebastián Pinera (RN) and Joaquin Lavín (UDI), expressed support for Pinochet at public events, and Lavín also traveled to London to personally reinforce the gesture.32 Pinochet’s staying on as army commander-in-chief for eight years after the 1990 regime transition helped keep the memory of the regime he had presided over in the public eye. He also refused to restrict his sphere of influence to his own institution, which needed to embark on a process of modernization and democratic reinsertion. Instead he made regular incursions into the political arena, defending the interests of his institution, his own person, and his family. Far from seeking to contribute to democratic consolidation, he seemed determined to impede it.33 He repeatedly justified the coup and the military’s violent tactics and sought to evade truth and justice for past human rights violations. His endgame or objective was to force the government to pass a full stop law similar to those passed by the first transitional administrations of Argentina and Uruguay. To paraphrase the title of Alain Rouquié’s book, Pinochet attempted to place democracy itself in the shadow of the dictatorship.34 Pinochet’s behavior was justified by his supporters in the political opposition, the business world, and the media, but it was

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challenged by his adversaries and those who had voted no in the 1988 plebiscite. These people could not comprehend how Pinochet could continue at the head of the army. His refusal to withdraw from the political arena helped maintain the divisions between Chileans: the minority who defended him, and the majority who questioned him. His presence harmed the fledgling democracy’s image in the eyes of its citizens, who were forced to continue cohabiting with the dictator. Juan Linz and Alfredo Stepan rightly draw attention to the precipitous decline in satisfaction with democracy seen in the CERC poll of August 1993 when compared to that of 1990, attributing it to the political damage caused by Pinochet’s actions against the Aylwin government.35 One notable characteristic of public opinion about the military regime and General Pinochet is its notable consistency over time, up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. His twenty-month detention in London from late 1998 did not noticeably reduce the sympathy shown to him by a significant sector of the population, the business community, and the right-wing elite. For these sectors, he had fallen victim to an international conspiracy against him. All of this was, however, destined to change from 2004, when US Senate investigations into 9/11-related terrorist funding turned up secret million-dollar bank accounts held by Pinochet in Washington’s Riggs Bank.36 This information prompted related domestic investigations. Chilean government legal agency the Consejo de Defensa del Estado (CDE) discovered numerous investment accounts, in a series of fiscal paradises, held in the names of Pinochet, family members, and close collaborators. This was a rude awakening for Pinochet’s supporters who had always considered him a true patriot acting for the good of the country and with no thought of personal gain. They could forgive human rights violations given that there had been, in their view, a “war against Marxism”, but they could not so easily brush aside these economic abuses to feather the family nest. We have argued above that Pinochet’s continuation in his military post kept memory alive, with his presence on the political scene serving as a permanent reminder of the coercive character of the previous regime. His determined, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to block efforts to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice led to two acts of defiance of democratic legality that led the former opposition to fear authoritarian reversal.37 Once he had stepped down as army commander-in-chief, Pinochet became a lifetime senator (in March 1998). He seemed to plan a career in politics that would whitewash his former image as a dictator. This lofty ambition was cut short by his detention in London in October of the same year and by his subjection to domestic investigations and charges in the so-called Caravan of Death

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human rights case. The case led to the removal of his parliamentary immunity, forcing his lawyers to have recourse yet again to arguments of his medical unfitness in order to have the case suspended. Memories of the Coup

The extent of division among Chileans can be seen in polling data that clearly demonstrate sharply opposing views about the military coup. According to supporters of the regime, the coup was the inevitable outcome of an incipient civil war, marked by episodes of extreme leftwing violence. Historian, lawyer, and journalist Gonzalo Vial has been perhaps the most consistent proponent of this view.38 Vial claims that the military’s actions were motivated by the “certain and imminent possibility that the situation of extreme polarization and sociopolitical divisions in which Chile found itself would in the end polarize and divide the armed forces themselves, leading to civil war”. He adds that “most socially influential figures, including some from within the armed forces, wanted the coup” (emphasis in the original text) and claims that civil war was averted by Pinochet, “that mysterious figure who has weighed heavily on us all these years (and whose shadow still haunts us)”. Vial wrote: “By late August 1973, [Pinochet] could not avoid the coup. The navy, the air force and the army generals and colonels were already committed, and it would have gone ahead come what may. But it was still possible that the coup would go on to unleash a civil war. We already know what his decision was. Ought we to reproach him, or ought we rather to thank him?”39 This same argument, in which military violence is justified by being linked to violence unleashed in the 1960s by left-wing parties, is also put forward by a study carried out by Chile’s Finis Terrae university in association with right-wing think tank the Freedom and Development Institute (Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo), linked to the UDI party.40 The case is supported with reference to party documents and political speeches that demonstrate maximalist views and preach revolution according to Marxist–Leninist principles. However, the evidence stops far short of proving the existence of some kind of state of civil war at the point at which the military decide to carry out a coup.41 In effect, the documentation cited does little more than provide a chronology of disparate political events since the government of President Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964). The events have no obvious thread or connection other than having been reported in the press and being considered by the study’s authors to constitute post-hoc evidence of “political violence.” The list includes strikes, land invasions, and student

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

occupations—which ought more properly to be classified as examples of political protest—and even incorporate searches ordered by judicial authorities. These kinds of protest actions in a context of extreme polarization can be interpreted as signs of a crisis of democracy but are not necessarily manifestations of political violence. The argument also omits to mention violence practiced by an extreme right-wing paramilitary force, whose botched 1970 attempt to kidnap army commander-in-chief René Schneider ended in his death. The operation, which had been intended to derail Allende’s ratification by Congress in the post of president of the republic, became Chile’s first high-level political assassination since the 1838 death of Diego Portales. Accordingly, it is important to consider public opinion about the events leading up to the coup with a question about whether or not there was an effective or incipient state of civil war in 1973. In the seven polls in which this question has appeared, a significant portion of the population agrees that “in 1973 there was a state of civil war that forced the military to act with a strong hand.” (see Figure 7.1 and Table 7.1) The highest proportion of agreement was found in the 1990 poll, at 41 percent. This dropped to 34 percent at the second appearance of the same question in 1998. The decline continued in 2008, with 29 percent, but the figure rose again to 35 percent against the backdrop of the 2009 presidential campaign. The favorite in that campaign was right-wing presidential hopeful Sebastián Piñera (RN), who had not supported the Pinochet regime. A large majority of UDI and RN voters agreed in 2009 that there had been a civil war situation, with results little changed from those of 1990 (see Table 7.1). UDI voters had polled 65 percent agreement in 1990 and polled 61 percent in 2009. RN voters polled 61 percent in 1990 and 54 percent in 2009. Analysis of the results by age cohort shows a notable increase in the later polls of “don’t know/ no reply” responses among the 18 to 25 age range (27 percent of whom answered in this way in 2007), showing that the passage of time decreases the salience of the issue for this age group.  

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Figure 7.1. Was There a Civil War in Chile in 1973?

57

55

52

51

58

51

41

49

38

Percentage

34

35

33 29

15

14

11

8 1

13

16

3

Aug. 90 Dec. 98 Dec. 99 July 03 Oct. 07 Sept. 08 Oct. 09 Agree** Disagree*** Don't know/No reply Source: CERC Barómetros, 1990–2009 Question: “How strongly do you agree that in 1973 there was a state of civil war that forced the military to act with a strong hand?” * In August 1990 the question was phrased in the following way: “In 1973, Chile was living in a state of civil war/ Chile never arrived at a state of civil war. Which of those alternatives best represents your own view?” ** Total of replies “Strongly agree, agree” *** Total of replies “Disagree, strongly disagree”

208

*In August 1990 the question was phrased as: “With which of these two views are you most in agreement: ‘In 1973, Chile was in a war situation’ OR ‘Chile never reached a war situation’?” **Total of responses “agree” and “strongly agree.” *** Total of responses “disagree” and “strongly diagree.”

Source: CERC Barómetro, October 2009

Q. “How strongly do you agree or disagree with the statement that in 1973 there was a civil war situation that forced military to apply a strong hand?” Agree** Disagree*** Don’t know/ no reply Year ’90 ’98 ’99 ’03 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’90 ’98 ’99 ’03 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’90 ’98 ’99 ’03 ’07 ’08 Age range (%) 45 32 31 35 26 24 35 46 47 58 54 57 56 46 9 21 11 11 27 20 18-25 40 32 32 39 28 27 27 52 52 58 46 52 56 56 8 15 9 15 16 17 26-40 38 35 35 36 35 32 38 56 53 57 55 48 60 48 7 12 9 8 8 7 41-60 40 39 34 40 33 25 49 52 54 53 51 56 57 39 8 7 13 9 12 17 !61 Voting intention (%) 65 63 63 68 65 47 60 29 26 31 25 18 44 34 7 11 6 8 18 8 UDI 61 75 67 66 56 51 54 34 18 20 33 36 39 34 6 6 12 1 8 10 RN 33 31 27 29 31 13 24 60 55 63 63 64 68 67 7 13 10 8 4 19 PDC 28 19 13 11 9 14 8 70 73 81 89 81 75 75 3 7 7 0 10 1 PPD 17 15 14 5 8 3 23 80 79 81 93 89 94 72 3 5 5 2 4 3 PS All respondents (%) 41 34 33 38 30 29 35 51 52 57 51 55 58 49 8 14 10 11 14 13

Table 7.1. Was There a State of Civil War in Chile in 1973?*: Responses 1990–2009 by Age and Voting Intention

6 12 9 17 5 16

19 17 14 12

’09

the

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Memories of Human Rights Violations

During the transition there was a certain amount of debate among Concertación politicians, including some from the left of the coalition, about how much importance Chileans attached to the need for truth and justice about past human rights violations. It was suggested that the issue might not be a priority, given its relatively infrequent appearance as a reply to open poll questions asking people to name “high priority problems.” Some analysts and politicians drew the conclusion that this important question could therefore be left off the democratization agenda. However, open questioning was not the correct way to discover national opinion about such a sensitive issue. Comparative experience shows that economic matters always predominate in replies to open questions about priority issues, displacing political problems since economic difficulties tend to be experienced by a large majority of the population. For Chile, economic problems were certainly a priority since the impact of the 1982–1983 economic crisis was still making itself felt. The crisis had hit the population hard, but so too had the government’s policy response, which had privileged fiscal equilibrium over the protection of income levels for the poorest or stimulation of employment. Most retirement pensions had been frozen.42 A poll carried out in the Santiago metropolitan area in June 1986 largely supports this intuition: the majority (67 percent) of responses to open questions about “priority problems” mention economic issues. Only a total of 18 percent mention political subjects. These include violence and terrorism (4.6 percent), democratic transition (7.8 percent), divisions among Chileans (4 percent) and human rights (at only 1 percent).43 Later polls produce broadly similar findings. Accordingly, if we want to find out whether and how much human rights matter to a population, we should ask directly about them. Respondents can be questioned about various dimensions of the issue, beginning with whether they considered themselves or their immediate family to have been victims of human rights violations. In April 1989, a year before the regime ended, we posed this question to interviewees. A relatively significant 17 percent of respondents said yes. Among selfdeclared regime opponents the figure was proportionately higher, reaching 27 percent among those who said they had voted no in the previous year’s plebiscite. Among those who identified themselves as left wing the figure was higher again, at 37 percent. The figure was extremely low, by contrast, among right-wing sympathizers.

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

Coercive tactics were employed by the regime throughout, not only during the initial seizure of power. Comparative experience shows that militaries usually use violence to carry out a coup, but abandon or scale down its use once they have gained control of the country and reorganized the government.44 The Pinochet regime, by contrast, also employed coercion once it was established in power, particularly in response to the high levels of mobilization and protests that the opposition managed to stage during the early 1980s period of opening up already described. Beginning with violence unleashed by the military against an opposition protest of 11 August 1983, and continuing against all subsequent protests, the wave of repression led to numerous deaths and dozens of injuries. Military violence surpassed the limits that the political authorities tried to place on it, since the latter’s view was that violence was to be employed only to dissuade further protest and not to cause national scandal and horror, such as occurred when a police unit kidnapped and slit the throats of three Communist Party members in 1985.45 The incident outraged public opinion and affected even regime supporters, as did an attack by a military patrol a year later that left a young journalist dead and his companion, Carmen Gloria Quintana, severely disfigured after the pair were doused in petrol and set on fire. These incidents left a profound and lasting mark on Chileans’ memories.46 In order to access opinions about the intensity of repression we applied a question posing two contrasting views: either human rights violations had been systematic or they had been isolated incidents. The results can be seen in Figure 7.2. A clear majority, 61 percent, of those polled in 1998 believed that repressive acts were “systematic,” while a minority of 24 percent viewed them as isolated cases. Fifteen percent chose not to reply. This latter group was evenly distributed among age groups, with no notable peak among younger respondents. This profile has remained largely constant in later polls with the exception of 2005, when a larger proportion (71 percent) declared violations to have been systematic. In September 2009, however, the profiles were almost exactly back to their initial levels: 60 percent declared abuses to be systematic, 24 percent held them to be isolated incidents, and 16 percent did not know or did not reply. On this occasion, however, the proportion of younger respondents choosing not to take a position had risen to 24 percent.

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Figure 7.2. Magnitude of Human Rights Violations During the Military Regime: Responses 1998–2009

67

66 61

Percentage

71

72

68

64

61

59

24

24

26 15

14

24 18 15

12

11

Dec. July 03 Dec. 99 04

Systematic abuse

Dec. 05

Oct. 06

24 16

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17 11

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2

1 Dec. 98

21 18

18

Oct. 07

Isolated incidents

Sept. Sept. Aug. 08 09 11

Don't know/No reply

Source: CERC Barómetros, 1998–2011 Question: Some people say that during the military regime there were systematic violations of human rights. Other people say there were just isolated incidents. Which of the two views is closer to your own?

Replies to this question about the systematic nature of violations are heavily influenced by political orientation, as can be seen in Table 7.2. Only a minority of UDI and RN voters, but the vast majority of PDC (Partido Demócrata Cristiano), PPD (Partido por la Democracia), and PS (Partido Socialista) voters, believe violations to have been systematic. There are no significant differences between age cohorts, other than that over the past few years the proportion of don’t knows/no replies has risen among the youngest segment (18 to 25).

212

‘99 % 69 68 65 58 % 37 31 80 91 89 66

71 71 67 58

37 56 75 91 98 66

62 59 63 48

42 42 46 92 94 59

40 50 91 90 92 71

79 70 70 72 41 49 81 88 90 68

68 72 64 60 22 46 88 96 96 67

66 68 69 61 23 47 62 73 96 59

59 59 59 59 41 37 87 88 90 60

64 63 60 45 44 43 86 94 95 72

70 73 72 75 54 61 15 7 6 25

20 25 28 28 46 43 18 6 5 26

32 22 25 35 51 37 8 2 1 18

15 13 18 27 51 42 5 5 2 18

13 18 19 19 41 41 12 8 8 20

18 17 21 26 55 46 7 2 3 19

10 18 22 26 65 39 14 26 1 24

17 23 29 22 51 45 8 7 5 24

14 19 27 41 36 45 12 0 2 11

6 11 11 15

9 8 5 4 4 9

11 7 6 24

12 15 6 2 1 15

7 19 12 17

2 3 13 0 0 15

14 17 15 15

9 9 4 5 5 11

8 12 11 9

18 9 7 5 2 12

14 11 15 6

23 9 5 2 1 13

3 3 3 5

11 14 24 1 3 17

24 18 12 18

8 18 5 4 5 16

22 18 13 13

19 13 3 7 2 17

24 16 18 10

Systematic abuse Isolated incidents Don’t know/ No reply ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘11 ‘99 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘11 ‘99 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘11

Source: CERC Barómetro, August 2011

Year Age range (%) 18-25 26-40 41-60 !61 Voting intention (%) UDI RN PDC PPD PS All respondents (%)

Q. From what you know or what you have heard, would you say that during the military regime there were systematic abuses of human rights, or would you say that these were only isolated incidents?

Table 7.2. Scale of Human Rights Violations: Responses 1999–2011 by Age and Voting Intention

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Another significant aspect of memory has to do with the responsibility for abuses that may be attributed to civilians who held high office in the regime. This question is particularly relevant since various of them went on to become elected district mayors or UDI or RN deputies or senators. Many claim to have been ignorant at the time of the real magnitude of violations, claiming that had they known, they would have acted differently. A large majority of the population nonetheless rejects the claims made by civilians who held high office in the regime to have been unaware of human rights violations. Over two-thirds of respondents believe that those people were well aware of what was going on. Even among UDI and RN voters, this is the majority view (expressed by 51 percent and 65 percent, respectively). Only a small minority of Chileans (11 percent in the 2009 poll) accepts the explanation that civilian authorities were kept in ignorance of abuses. As the truth about violations has come out, the suggestion has been made that high-ranking civilians should declare a mea culpa, much as the armed forces chose to do after Pinochet’s retirement. (The army, at least, distanced itself from the military regime and acknowledged past institutional implication in repression, firstly during the Mesa de Diálogo process and later in statements issued by the high command.) A majority of poll respondents believe that this kind of mea culpa is called for: 64 percent at first time of asking (in 2003) and 73 percent by 2009. These high totals logically suggest that at least a portion of right-wing voters must hold this view. The percentages who actively oppose the idea are moreover low, at 18 percent in 2003 and 14 percent in 2009. At the same date, 13 percent didn’t know or failed to reply. The Image of the Military Regime

Chileans retain fairly stable memories and evaluations of the military regime over time. Our time series, shown in Table 7.3, begins in the last years of the regime, since the first poll to introduce this question was the national 2,400-person sample of November 1987, which has a representativity score of 98 percent of the population. From that time on, only a minority has expressed a positive view of that period of national history. In 1987 itself, 23 percent held positive views (claiming to hold a “very good” or “good” opinion of the military regime); 42 percent viewed the regime’s record as “middling”, and 33 percent drew a negative balance (total of those holding a “bad” or “very bad” opinion). Only 2 percent refused to reply, showing moreover a noticeable openness towards poll participation on the part of the population. This same question about overall evaluations of the regime was applied on

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

four separate occasions before the regime’s end in March 1990. In August 1989, views of the regime became more favorable. Positive opinions rose seven points to 30 percent, and negative ones dropped six points to 27 percent. The change can be attributed to the regime’s behavior in the runup to democratic handover that followed the 1988 plebiscite. A constitutional reform, approved by a wide margin in a plebiscite carried out on 30 July 1989, diluted some of the more authoritarian components of the 1980 Constitution. This benevolent image did not last, however: in the April 1990 poll taken just after the (re)installation of democracy, positive views of the outgoing regime had fallen to 23 percent and negative ones stood at 33 percent. The relatively stable pattern of opinions was disturbed in March 1991, when positive replies plummeted to 11 percent and negative ones jumped to 41 percent, but this proved to be a one-off result. The change may be explained by the effects of the ejercicio de enlace that Pinochet had carried out in late December 1990 to assert his independence in the face of Ministry of Defense moves to seek his resignation. The operation was also designed to express the general’s displeasure at the activities of a parliamentary investigative commission. The commission was looking into payments made to one of Pinochet’s sons by a military-owned company. Further changes came in October 2005 and August 2006. In these last two polls, positive replies fell to 14 percent, while negative opinions scored 42 percent in 2005 and 43 percent in 2006. Table 7.3. Views About the Pinochet Regime: Responses 1987–2011 Q. “What is your opinion of the 17 years of General Pinochet’s government? Would you say those years were…”*

November 1987 July 1988 August 1988 December 1988 August 1989 April 1990 December 1990 March 1991 April 1994 March 1998 March 1999 May 2000 April 2002 April 2003

Good (%)**

Regular (%)

Bad (%)***

Don’t know/ No reply (%)

23 31 29 26 30 23 26 11 27 23 25 34 32 26

42 45 42 45 43 42 34 38 34 35 34 34 34 34

33 22 26 26 27 33 39 41 37 37 35 33 30 32

2 6 4 3 2 2 2 1 2 5 7 5 4 8

The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion

July 2003 July 2004 September 2004 December 2004 April 2004 July 2005 October 2005 December 2005 May 2006 August 2006 December 2006 April 2007 July 2007 October 2007 December 2007 April 2008 July 2008 September 2008 December 2008 April 2009 July 2009 October 2009 December 2009 May 2010 September 2010 December 2010 May 2011 August 2011

29 21 20 23 24 17 14 19 20 14 26 18 18 15 19 20 16 23 19 20 19 21 21 18 19 10 14 7

33 37 42 29 30 30 37 30 33 39 29 32 38 30 28 35 36 31 30 36 36 33 35 29 27 23 21 21

31 38 32 44 39 46 42 45 39 43 39 41 37 46 43 37 34 37 39 32 31 33 35 46 50 54 58 63

215

7 4 6 4 6 6 9 6 9 5 6 9 7 9 9 9 13 9 12 12 14 12 7 7 5 12 7 9

Source: CERC Barómetro, August 2011 * Prior to 1994, the question was phrased as: “How were the 17 years of Pinochet’s government?” ** Total of replies “very good” and “good.” *** Total of replies “bad” and “very bad.”

It is interesting to note that on the numerous occasions on which this question was used up until 2008, don’t know or no reply answers were in a minority, always scoring below 10 percent. The figure, however, rose to 13 percent in the July 2008 poll and stayed similarly high in the July 2009 version, only to fall again subsequently. Chileans’ welldefined views on the military regime prove it to be a very present issue in public opinion in spite of the passage of time. Evaluation of the regime varies, perhaps unsurprisingly, according to political identity (see Table 7.4). Most UDI and RN voters—over 60 percent in both cases—held a positive view of the regime even after Pinochet’s death in

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

2006. In December 2009, 54 percent of UDI voters and 46 percent of RN voters expressed a favorable or very favorable opinion. Table 7.4. Views About the Pinochet Regime: Positive Responses 1990–2011 by Voting Intention Q. “What is your opinion of the 17 years of General Pinochet’s government?”* Accumulated responses “good” or “very good” UDI RN PDC PPD PS All (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) April 1990 69 62 8 18 7 23 December 1990 68 72 10 -6 26 March 1991 65 60 10 5 3 21 March 1998 77 64 8 6 1 23 March 1999 78 77 15 6 3 25 May 2000 68 71 7 7 5 32 April 2002 59 62 8 7 6 32 April 2003 60 59 8 5 12 26 July 2003 58 58 24 3 1 29 July 2004 40 49 6 5 2 21 September 2004 68 22 4 3 2 20 July 2005 57 42 9 1 6 17 October 2005 54 26 3 2 5 14 December 2005 45 41 7 11 5 19 May 2006 50 43 9 10 8 20 August 2006 47 42 8 3 4 14 December 2006 63 58 12 7 16 26 April 2007 57 34 8 4 6 18 July 2007 67 42 2 9 1 18 October 2007 42 28 6 2 3 15 December 2007 57 47 12 4 1 19 April 2008 61 34 9 10 11 20 July 2008 46 40 5 4 2 16 September 2008 28 40 15 23 2 23 December 2008 50 39 8 10 8 19 April 2009 36 35 8 5 14 20 July 2009 45 54 9 3 2 19 October 2009 31 45 16 2 4 21 December 2009 54 46 6 6 5 21 May 2010 32 41 9 9 4 18 September 2010 42 43 11 8 3 19 December 2010 19 23 10 2 0 10 May 2011 30 32 13 6 4 14 August 2011 38 29 3 1 2 7

Source: CERC Barómetro, August 2011 * Prior to 1994, the question was phrased as: “How were the 17 years of Pinochet government?”

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217

The alternation to a right-wing government in 2010 coincides with a precipitous decline of favorable views of the Pinochet regime. Table 7.4 shows that in the September 2010 version of the poll, just under half of voters identifying with the governing UDI and RN parties were prepared to agree that the seventeen years of General Pinochet’s government had been good or very good (42 percent and 43 percent, respectively). However, just three months later, in December of the same year, those figures had fallen to 19 percent and 23 percent. CERC also applied a second question aimed at discovering opinions of the military regime. This one was adapted from polls carried out by the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas de España, CIS) to study memories of the authoritarian regime of General Francisco Franco (1939–1975). Although the regime had come to an end a full quarter of a century earlier, in 2001 Spaniards still held defined views about the period. In the CIS’s 2001 poll, 49 percent of respondents said the regime had “both good and bad points”; a third viewed it as “bad”, and only 11 percent were prepared to describe it as unqualifiedly good. The “don’t know/no reply” score was notably low, at only 6 percent. CERC first used a version of this question in October 1989, just before the end of the Pinochet regime. At that time its results, shown in Table 7.5, were fairly benevolent towards him. “Both good and bad points” scored 55 percent; “good”, 24 percent; and outright “bad”, 22 percent—much lower than in the Spanish case. Only 1 percent of potential respondents abstained. This result has to be interpreted against the backdrop of the presidential and parliamentary election campaigns that were being carried out in fulfillment of the 1980 Constitution’s rules of succession. The Constitution set out a reformist path of regime change in which the military would respect the results of the 1988 plebiscite by returning to barracks. Even though he lost the plebiscite, Pinochet obtained an extremely high vote, demonstrating levels of ongoing support that no other Latin American dictator or former Communist bloc leader of the time could boast of at the end of their regimes.

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

Table 7.5. Overall Views of General Pinochet: Responses 1989–2009 Q. “In your opinion, when you consider the regime run by General Augusto Pinochet, do you think it was…” Don’t Partly good, Completely Completely know/ Partly bad bad good No reply (%) (%) (%) (%) October 1989 55 22 24 1 March 1991 58 29 11 2 March 1992 54 26 17 3 October 1993 51 28 18 4 July 1995 53 29 14 4 June 1996 50 29 17 4 September 1997 53 27 14 6 September 1998 56 25 14 6 September 1999 58 26 13 4 September 2000 56 24 16 4 September 2001 54 24 16 6 September 2002 60 21 16 4 September 2003 62 21 13 4 September 2004 56 23 18 3 October 2005 45 35 13 8 August 2006 52 33 9 6 July 2007 49 26 12 13 July 2008 44 25 13 18 July 2009 45 23 14 18 Spain* 49 34 11 6 Source: CERC Barómetro, July 2009 *CIS 2001 study using categories “a negative period for Spain/ a positive period for Spain/ a mixture of good and bad”, in regard to the Franco regime.

This pattern was to be preserved in later polls with only two exceptions. In these, the most popular “partly good, partly bad” response rose above its 1989 baseline to reach 60 percent in September 2002 and 63 percent in 2003, each time at the expense of the “solely good” evaluation. These changes were probably influenced by media reporting in the leadup to the 2003 thirtieth anniversary of the coup. Repeated images of the coup and of related repression were aired, leading the army to feel the need to take some distance with a “never again” statement issued by its commander-in-chief. In the 2003 poll, only 13 percent of all respondents persisted in viewing the Pinochet regime as a positive good, although

The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion

219

this view remained buoyant among UDI and RN voters. However, the proportion condemning the regime as “only bad” remained below 30 percent, except briefly and by a small margin in 2005 and 2006. Negative views of the regime were most common among Concertación voters: in 2006, PDC, 47 percent; PPD, 58 percent; and PS, 53 percent. The Intensity of Memory: Typology of Opinions of General Pinochet

The high levels of personalization of power in the Pinochet regime make it essential to examine the image of the general himself in order to get a full picture of the persistence and depth of Chileans’ memories of the military regime. Pinochet had, after all, awarded himself a series of titles and high offices—including head of state, head of government, army commander-in-chief, and leader of the governing coalition—which left him as the only possible vehicle of conciliation of the varied elite interests and personalities that made up his political support. Here three questions were applied, one of them open—“How do you think that General Pinochet will go down in history?”—and two closed. One of these had a reply with a negative connotation —“he was a dictator”; the other, positive—“one of the best rulers of the twentieth century.” Results can be seen in Figure 7.3.

Percentage

Figure 7.3. Two Opinions of General Pinochet: Dictator or One of the Best Rulers?

63 68

71

61 66 63 75 69 78 82 79

27 24 26 31 27 31

19 23

One of Chile’s best rulers Source: CERC Barómetros 1996-2011

71 66

81

14 12 15 15 18 13

A dictator

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The Politics of Memory in Chile

In each of the two closed questions, respondents had the option to agree or disagree. The first closed question pushed respondents to define their views about the repressive streak that was such a dominant feature of the regime, while the second was designed to speak to those who valued his economic record. This latter was made much of by Pinochet’s supporters and was even grudgingly acknowledged by some of his opponents. These two closed questions have been applied year by year since 1996, when Pinochet was still army commander-in-chief. This repeated use has allowed us to accumulate data over a long period: a period that has, moreover, witnessed events that could not fail to affect Pinochet’s public image, including his 1998 UK detention and the 2004 Riggs Bank scandal. We can also access opinions held after the former dictator’s death in December 2006. Responses to the open question “How will Pinochet go down in history?” can be seen in Table 7.6. They show predominantly negative responses at 53 percent in 1998 (the first year in which the question was posed). Negative responses peaked at 68 percent in 2006 (just before his death) and dropped to 47 percent in 2009. That same year saw a relatively high 16 percent of positive responses (Pinochet as a good president, as a hero) and a high incidence of abstention. UDI voters maintained by far the most favorable views, with 67 percent giving responses classed as positive. Among RN voters positive views were less widespread at only 4 percent. A clear majority of Chileans considers Pinochet to have been a dictator: 67 percent in the first poll, with a steep hike to 74 percent in 2003, year of the thirtieth anniversary of the coup (see Table 7.7). In 2006 the figure reached a peak of 82 percent, dropping in later polls to reach 66 percent by 2009. In the same year, the “don’t know/no reply” total peaked at 19 percent. Before 2003, over 20 percent rejected the idea that Pinochet should be classed as a dictator. The significance of this relatively small group should not be underestimated, since it contains those with the most favorable view in general of Pinochet and of the regime. Replies appear to be influenced by political affiliation: a majority of UDI and RN voters reject the term “dictator” while a large majority of Concertación voters accept it. This situation, largely consistent over the 1990s, began to change in these electoral groups from the September 2001 poll onwards, with higher numbers (36 percent and 48 percent) of UDI and RN voters agreeing that Pinochet was a dictator. Those figures continued to rise in subsequent polls, with the exception of 2004 and 2009. In 2011 the accumulated figure (for all respondents, independent of political affiliation) jumped to 81 percent, a steep rise from 2009, which may be

221 1 1 11 5 5

- Coup leader

- Other neutral

Other answers (%)

Don’t know (%)

No reply (%)

4

8

12

0

1

3

5

9

8

5

8

28

49

5

11

11

2

1

0

0

3

4

8

11

22

45

0

7

0

17

24

’00

5

13

10

0

1

1

5

7

4

6

11

22

43

1

9

0

10

20

2

8

7

11

1

1

5

18

8

5

10

17

40

7

6

0

12

25

’01 ’02

5

11

13

0

1

1

4

6

5

2

14

25

46

0

11

1

5

16

’03

3

11

10

0

0

1

3

4

7

5

16

25

53

0

5

1

11

17

’04

5

10

8

0

1

1

3

4

8

6

18

24

56

0

3

0

5

8

’05

4

7

8

0

0

0

3

3

16

7

19

26

68

0

3

1

5

9

’06

6

11

3

0

1

1

2

4

11

2

13

35

61

2

4

1

7

14

8

21

2

0

0

0

3

3

10

3

12

26

51

4

3

0

6

13

’07 ’08

2009

6

1

4

6

7

0

0

0

4

4

3

4

0

4

5

10

4

0

1

3

2

6

4

2

5

22

11 33

20 18

13

0

34 19

67 44

5

20

2

0

0

0

4

4

10

4

14

35

63

0

0

0

4

4

*Broken down by voting intention for 2009 only.

Source: CERC Barómetro, 1998–2009*

1

0

0

0

1

8

15

0

0

0

1

0

1

8

1

10

20

3

0

1

1

3

5

8

3

12

24

47

7

2

0

7

16

61 65 1200

0

5

0

0

0

0

2

2

17

4

33 31

36 36

90 76

3

0

0

0

3

UDI RN PDC PPD PS Total

1188 1200 1200 1174 1200 1200 1200 1200 1200 1200 1200 53 202 102

0

- Soldier

N

2

- Just another president

10

- Murderer, genocidal

4

30

- Dictator, tyrant

Neutral opinions (%)

53

Negative opinions (%)

1

1

- Other negative

2

5

- Other positive

12

0

0

- Bad president

8

13

5

15

19

’99

Positive opinions (%) - as a good president who rescued the country from chaos - will be remembered with affection - as a hero

’98

Table 7.6. Responses to the Open Question: “How Will General Pinochet Go Down in History?” 1998–2009*

collins-p221_Layout 1 5/1/13 4:02 PM Page 1

222 85 88 67

PPD (%)

PS (%)

All respondents (%)

68

90

89

77

71

97

92

88

63

93

91

84

Source: CERC Barómetro, 1997–2011

77

PDC (%)

28

56

76

94

80

35

65

90

91

88

48

63

89

88

75

51

74

93

95

90

65

69

93

90

89

70

78

90

93

93

76

82

93

98

93

69

77

97

92

91

71

90

97

79

61

68

37

RN (%)

48

55

59

31

’08

’07

Q: “How do you believe that Pinochet will go down in history?” Responses: “As a Dictator.” Jul. Sept. ’97 ’98 ’99 ’00 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’01 ’01 UDI (%) 26 26 34 30 25 36 42 52 36 63 51

Table 7.7. “General Pinochet Will go Down in History as a Dictator”: Responses 1997–2011 by Voting Intention

66

92

98

90

56

30

’09

81

94

96

92

62

62

’11

collins-p223_Layout 1 5/1/13 3:32 PM Page 1

The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion

223

explained by the accession of the right to the presidency in 2010. This appears to have had a strong impact on these opinions, as reflected in the fact that by 2011 a comfortable majority of UDI and RN voters considered Pinochet a dictator (62 percent). In the case of UDI voters, this represented more than double the number who had held that view just two years earlier. The alternation of political power had a strong effect on the opinions of Alianza voters. Until 2002, between 24 percent and 31 percent of respondents held the view that Pinochet was “one of the best rulers Chile has had in the twentieth century,” a view that attracted 27 percent support in 1996. This favorable image declined in 2005 to reach a low of 12 percent in 2006. However, a majority of respondents always rejected this same view: 59 percent in the first poll, rising in later polls to reach 79 percent a few months before his death in 2006. These answers, like the previous set, are associated with political identity: a majority of UDI and RN voters approve of the view of Pinochet as the best ruler of the twentieth century while only a minority of Concertación voters accept it. Within this group Christian Democrats are the most benevolent towards Pinochet, with 31 percent classing him as the twentieth century’s best ruler. We have used the replies to these two questions about Pinochet to construct a fourfold typology. “Hardline Pinochetistas” are those who display opinions doubly favorable to the general: they reject the term “dictator” and view him as the country’s best ruler of the twentieth century. “Soft Pinochetistas” reject the term “dictator” but do not accept him as the best ruler: they are critical of at least some aspects of his rule. Next we have the “Soft anti-Pinochetistas,” those who consider Pinochet a dictator but at the same time view him as the best ruler, generally because they approve of his economic management. They see the regime’s economic model as having laid the foundations for growth and, in effect, view his regime as a developmental dictatorship as defined by Klaus von Beyme.47 Our fourth category is made up of “hardline antiPinochetistas”, those who are doubly opposed to the figure of Pinochet since they consider him a dictator and also reject the idea that he was the best ruler of his era. Finally, there is a group of respondents who did not reply to either question, whom we have classified here as “undecided.”

224

The Politics of Memory in Chile

Typology of Chileans’ evaluations of General Pinochet

 

Q: How do you believe that General Pinochet will go down in history? As one of Chile’s best rulers of the twentieth century?

Q: How do you believe that General Pinochet will go down in history? As a dictator?

Yes

No

Yes

No

“Soft antipinochetistas”

“Hardline Pinochetistas”

Value his achievements as a ruler in spite of his dictatorial nature

Hold a generally favorable view of Pinochet

“Hardline antipinochetistas”

“Soft Pinochetistas”

Hold a negative opinion of Pinochet himself, but a positive one of his government

Hold a positive opinion of Pinochet himself, but are critical of his government

Over the fourteen-year period in which these questions have been posed, certain changes can be seen in opinions about Pinochet. These should be interpreted taking into account the political context produced by his detention in London and, perhaps more importantly, by the Riggs Bank scandal. This latter had a devastating effect on Pinochet’s supporters, destroying their image of the statesman who had made sacrifices for the good of the country with no thought of personal gain. In general terms, we see a certain continuity provided by the relative stability of the fourfold typology over time. The predominant view is that of the hardline anti-Pinochetistas, a category that attracts just over half the population, give or take: between 2004 and 2008 adhesion to this category climbed to over 60 percent, before falling again to around 1996 levels. The “undecideds” were in a minority, representing between 12 and 17 percent of respondents between 1996 and 2007. In the last two polls, this group grew substantially, representing one out of four respondents in the 2009 poll. The age breakdown of this group over time is interesting. In 1996 there were no significant age differences within the category of undecided: 18 percent of young respondents; 17 percent of young adults; 18 percent of adults; and 18 percent of senior citizens.

225

!

!

!

!

16

17 16

4

15

8

57

15

4

15

9

56

16

5

23

6

50

15

6

18

9

54

13

9

17

12

49

15

5

11

13

56

14

8

13

9

57

15

4

10

9

63

11

6

8

8

67

13

5

9

8

66

22

4

9

6

59

24

5

9

9

53

14

5 2

7

71

Source: CERC Barómetro, 1996–2011

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2011

7

15

8

55

6

17

8

52

Figure 7.4. Typology of Opinions of General Pinochet, 1996–2011

Percentage

Undecided

Soft Pinochetismo

Hardline Pinochetismo

Soft antiPinochetismo

Hardline antiPinochetismo

Respondent Categories in Descending Order:

!

!

collins-p225_Layout 1 5/1/13 4:01 PM Page 1

226

The Politics of Memory in Chile

However, in 2009, the category was weighted towards the younger age profiles (32 percent of young respondents, 26 percent of young adults, 24 percent of adults and 15 percent of senior citizens).48 These figures suggest a growing indifference towards the person of Pinochet among 18 to 25 year olds. Hardline Pinochetistas were a minority of 17 percent in the 1996 poll, but this grew to a high point of 23 percent in the year 2000. However, from 2001 onwards the number of respondents identifying with this group entered a steady decline, taking it to 8 percent in 2009. Younger people have become scarcer in this group: while in 1996, 17 percent of all young respondents were in this category, by 2009 it was only 3 percent. Numbers of soft anti-Pinochetistas have stayed relatively constant over the fourteen polls. In 1996 they made up only 8 percent of respondents, and this figure has stayed almost the same, rising only in 2002 and 2003 (to 12 percent and 13 percent, respectively) before dropping back to 9 percent in 2009. Finally, soft Pinochetistas were the smallest group in 1996 (6 percent of respondents), a figure that stayed extremely stable from then on, varying only in 2009 and then by only one percentage point (at 5 percent). In comparative terms, the clearest distinctions that emerge are between the polar opposites of hardline Pinochetistas and hardline anti-Pinochetistas. The internal makeup of these two groups does not differ significantly by gender, age, or educational levels. Their principal differences are concentrated in political variables. The first group is largely made up of those who locate themselves on the right of the ideological scale and of Alianza voters; the second group is mainly composed of people who self-identify on the center or left of the ideological spectrum, and of Concertación voters. We wanted to examine more closely the evolution of this typology over time, in order to draw more solid conclusions about factors that might explain the rise in hardline anti-Pinochetismo. Did Pinochet’s detention in London weigh more heavily, or was it the Riggs Bank case? In order to expand the case sample to provide a particularly solid empirical grounding, we segmented the poll databases into three time series, grouped around those two major events (see Table 7.8). Accordingly, we took as a first group the 1996 to 2000 polls, which incorporated Pinochet’s 1998 detention in London. A second group was 2001 to 2004; the third, 2005 to 2011. This exercise demonstrated the strong impact of the Riggs case on the worsening of Pinochet’s image among the population in general and among right-wing voters in particular. In practice, we saw that in the first two periods preferences are stable at both extremes of the typology: the hardline Pinochetistas

The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion

227

and the hardline anti-Pinochetistas. This comparison suggests that there is no significant effect of the London detention on his public image in Chile. There is, however, a strong effect caused by the US Senate revelations about Pinochet’s million-dollar secret US accounts, since in our third period—which begins just after the case broke—hardline antiPinochetismo shows a steep nine-point rise, to 63 percent, with an almost equivalent fall of 7 percent in hardline Pinochetismo, from 15 percent to 8 percent. The other categories in the typologies do not show significant differences between periods. Table 7.8. Evolution of Typology of Opinions of General Pinochet, 1996–2011

Soft antiPinochetistas (%) Hardline antiPinochetistas (%) Hardline Pinochetistas (%) Soft Pinochetistas (%) Undecided (%) N

’96– ’00

N

’01– ’04

N

’05– ’11

N

8

455

11

483

8

564

54

3,153

54

2,460

63

4,542

17

985

15

664

8

584

5

313

7

296

5

322

16

930

14

645

16

1,190

5,836

4,548

7,202

Source: CERC Barómetros, 1996–2011

Political Profile of the Hardline Pinochetista and Hardline anti-Pinochetista Typologies

As discussed above, political identification variables are those that are most strongly correlated with the positioning of respondents in the typology of opinions about Pinochet. Comparing the two most diametrically opposed groups, we see that respondents who self-locate on the right of the political scale have shown a sustained tendency, over the fourteen polls, to voice opinions that we have classified as hardline Pinochetismo. However, the percentage of right-wing respondents in this category has also dropped, particularly after the 2004 Riggs case.49 Interestingly, the evolution of the Pinochet opinions typology among UDI and RN voters shows a high degree of instability (see Figure 7.5). In the first measure, in 1996, just over half (52 percent) of

228

The Politics of Memory in Chile

UDI and RN voters were classifiable as hardline Pinochetistas. This percentage dropped in the next three measures but recovered strongly in 2000 to a peak of 60 percent. This is the year that saw the right’s best electoral results since transition, second only to their later, 2010, presidential victory. The right, in the person of candidate Joaquin Lavín, had come within a few votes of winning the presidency outright in the first round in 1999, and the Alianza did extremely well in municipal elections held the following year. In the years following 2000, the percentage of right-wing voters who defined themselves in the hardline Pinochetista typology fell to 22 percent in 2005—the year in which the impact of Riggs was most visibly felt—and again to 19 percent in 2007. In 2011 adherence to this typology fell again, to 18 percent, bringing it down to almost a third of what it had been fifteen years previously. On the other hand, as can be seen in Figure 7.6, respondents who locate themselves on the center and left of the political spectrum predominantly place themselves as hardline anti-Pinochetistas, with a rise from 2003 in the percentage of centrist voters, specifically, whose replies put them in this category.50 Aside from ideological selfadscription, the other relevant political variable is respondents’ reported voting intentions. Alianza voters are generally to be found in the hardline Pinochetista quadrant of the typology, as discussed above, although Figure 7.5 shows that from 2001 the percentage of Alianza voters whose replies place them in this category has diminished. Finally, Concertación voters and self-identified left-wingers51 consistently place themselves largely as hardline anti-Pinochetistas (Figures 7.7 and 7.8). Voters for Concertación parties share a profile with self-ascribed ideological center- or left-affiliated respondents, with a majority of both (overlapping) categories located among hardline anti-Pinochetistas (Figures 7.6 and 7.7). The percentage of Concertación voters located in this quadrant rose from 70 percent in the first,1996, poll to 85 percent in the most recent, 2011, application (Figure 7.8).

229

!

!

!

11

9

53

11

17

44

8 15

6 15

14

19

46

13

20

10

5

60

9

17

8

6

48

14

24

9

14

34

20

24

13

5

31

27

24

16

4

22

24

34

11

12

22

19

36

7

8

19

22

45

18

4

21

17

40

19

7

27

18

30

19

6

18

10

48

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2011

11

12

52

10

15

Source: CERC Barómetro, 1996–2011

Percentage

!

Undecided

Soft Pinochetismo

Hardline Pinochetismo

Soft anti-Pinochetismo

Hardline antiPinochetismo

Respondent Categories in Descending Order:

Figure 7.5. Evolution of Typologies of Opinion about General Pinochet among Alianza Coalition Voters (UDI and RN parties), 1996–2011

!

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230

The Politics of Memory in Chile

Figure 7.6. Hardline Anti-Pinochetismo Among Respondents with Center and Left Wing Political Affiliations, 1996-2011

80 79

59

54 56

Percentage

92

89 85 84 87 83

52 54

62

57

57 57 50

85

76 77

62

62

68

51 54

88 90

49

56 57

63

86 84

83 81 71

71

76 59

67 66 59

69

53

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2011

Left

Center

Average for all respondents

Source: CERC Barómetros 1996-2011 Figure 7.7. Hardline Anti-Pinochetismo Among Concertación Coalition and Left Wing Voters, 1996-2009

92

89

Percentage

80 70 52

71 54

74 57

84 79

57

81 78

85 84

89 76

100 100 89 87 81 83 63

50

54

49

56

67

98 89 87 78

90 83

66 59

53

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Concertación Left Average for all respondents Source: CERC Barómetros, 1996–2009

231 12

11

12

6 4 3

74

7 5 2 6

81

3 5 3 8

81

5 2 3 6

84

9 3 6

4

77

5 1 4 6

85

2 4 3 8

81

2 1 2 6

89

4 1 2 5

88

5 2 2 5

87

1 4 3 9

83

4 1 1 9

84

7 1 2 6

85

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2011

6 5

6 4 6

71

8

70

Source: CERC Barómetro, 1996–2011

Percentage

!

Undecided

Soft Pinochetismo

Hardline Pinochetismo

Soft anti-Pinochetismo

Hardline antiPinochetismo

Respondent Categories in Descending Order:

Figure 7.8. Evolution of Typology of Opinions of General Pinochet among Concertación Coalition Voters (PDC, PPD, and PS parties), 1996–2011

!

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232

The Politics of Memory in Chile

Conclusions

This chapter has analyzed Chileans’ memories of Pinochet and of the military regime, via public opinion polls carried out by CERC on a regular basis between 1986 and 2011. The inclusion of 2011 has allowed us to consider initial change or continuity associated with the political alternation that saw right-wing candidate Sebastián Piñera take over the presidency in 2010. The data show that Chileans hold diametrically opposing views about this period of national history. Opinions vary widely as to the political conditions surrounding the 1973 military coup, the use of repressive force by the military and security forces, the record of the authoritarian regime once in office, and the figure of General Augusto Pinochet. Chileans are divided about their past, although a majority today holds a largely negative view of the person of Pinochet and of the military regime’s record, rejecting the use of violence against critics and dissidents. Nonetheless, a substantial minority of around a quarter of the population holds a positive view of each of these same characteristics. There is, in other words, no homogenous political culture in Chile of the kind that Almond and Powell consider indispensable for stable democracy. In regard to the past, Chileans seem irreducibly divided.52 The same is true of their opinions about democracy.53 We have paid particular attention to memories of Pinochet, offering a typology of his supporters and opponents and of soft and hardline categories within each group and showing how this fourfold schema continues to be discernible over the fourteen years for which we have data. The polls demonstrate that the mere passage of time has not necessarily weakened memories of the military regime. The memory is still present not only among those who lived the coup and its aftermath as adults, but also among some who were children or who were not yet born during the 1970s. Those of this generation who hold strong views about the regime’s policies have formed these on the basis of information received through family socialization, friends, things they have read, and exposure to reports in the mass media including news of sentences passed in the courts against perpetrators of past human rights violations. The strength of memory can be explained by the intensity of the violence employed from the day of the military coup onward and also by the decision taken by the country’s new rulers to keep the threat of this violence latent throughout the whole period of the regime. This threat was used to prevent or dissuade opposition activities or protests, even after the regime had consolidated its hold on power. This dynamic was particularly visible and intense after 1983, when the period known as

The Memory of the Pinochet Regime in Public Opinion

233

“the opening” (la apertura) was characterized by the confluence of heightened repressive violence against opponents together with structural liberalization. Substantial change ensued, and press censorship was relaxed to the point where mass media, particularly radio, was able to report on political events including acts of repression. The persistence of conflictive memories can also be explained by Pinochet’s decision to continue as army commander-in-chief after stepping down from the presidency in 1990, a decision supported by UDI and RN legislators as well as business leaders and a portion of the general population. His continued visibility in this role during democracy kept memories of his regime and his leadership style alive, a style in which coercion and a sharp discursive divide between friend and foe were central elements. A greater level of recent consensus in rejection of human rights violations on the part of elites who previously justified these or played down their significance has aided the formation of a clear societal majority critical of the military regime period and of General Pinochet. Elite change took place after the 2004 Riggs Bank case, and the effects of the case are particularly clearly visible in the 2011 poll, in which a majority of UDI and RN voters classify Pinochet as a dictator. This marks a clear and important break with the decade of the 1990s, during which it was common to see UDI and RN legislators speaking out publicly in favor of the military regime and defending the figure of Pinochet. The second major event that changed the opinions of Alianza voters towards Pinochet and his dictatorship was the ascent of their coalition to the presidency in 2010. This produced increased identification with democracy among these groups, as seen in an increase of the levels of support they express for it.54 The most recent polls, especially that of 2011, also show that the vitality of memories of the military regime is weaker among younger people. This age group shows a relatively high proportion of “don’t know/no reply” responses to these particular questions. At four decades’ distance from the 1973 coup this kind of development in memory is perhaps to be expected. It does not, however, necessarily signify that indifference will begin to prevail as regards the authoritarian period, the role of Pinochet, the gravity of human rights violations, or the personalization of power. All of these elements were made inescapably present in democracy when Pinochet chose to remain as commander-in-chief of the army during its first eight years. At least some on the right are, moreover, conscious that their prolonged identification with the Pinochet regime has been electorally damaging: after all, when they finally took the Moneda in 2010, it was with a candidate from a business background who had by

234

The Politics of Memory in Chile

his own account voted against Pinochet in the 1980 and 1988 plebiscites.

                                                                                                               

Carlos Huneeus would like to thank Fernando Rubilar of CERC for his assistance. 1 These are face-to-face interviews from a nationwide sample, mostly with a sample size of 1,200 individuals (although some of the pre-1990 polls have 2,400 interviewees). The sample design, fieldwork, and data processing were all carried out by CERC staff. 2 Here we adopt the definition of authoritarian regime used by Juan J. Linz in "An Authoritarian Regime: Spain," in E. Allardt and Y. Littunen, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems. (Helsinki: Transactions of the Westermarck Society, 1964). 3 Carlos Huneeus, “Political Mass Mobilization Against Authoritarian Rule: Pinochet´s Chile, 1983-88”, in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 197212. 4 The Center for Public Studies (Centro de Estudios Públicos, CEP) started a program in 1987 to conduct polls at biannual intervals, which has continued through to the present day. The polls do not, however, research memories of the military regime, the figure of Pinochet, or support for democracy. The CEP, the country’s main center-right think tank, was founded in 1980 by business people and ministers associated with the military regime’s economic model (the socalled Chicago Boys). See www.cepchile.cl. 5 John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Political Support and Democracy in Eight Nations. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 103, note 22. 6 See Brian H. Smith and Frederick C. Turner, “Survey Research in Authoritarian Regimes: Brazil and the Southern Cone in Latin America since 1970,” Statistical Abstract of Latin America, vol. 23 (Los Angeles: Center for Latin American Center Publications, University of California, 1984), pp. 795814. Under the Franco regime in Spain (1939-1975), polling began in 1963 with the founding of the Instituto de Opinion Pública (IOP), which regularly conducted polls on a range of issues. See Juan Díez Nicolás, “Spain,” in John Geer, ed., Public Opinion and Polling around the World: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), pp. 728-732. 7 The Latin American Social Science Faculty, FLACSO, a region-wide academic institution with an office in Chile, also carried out regular polls in Chile from 1986. These were, however, discontinued when the transition began. 8 Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, vol. 2, no.3 (April 1970), pp. 337-363. 9 See, e.g., Juan J. Linz, "Legitimacy of Democracy and the Socioeconomic System," in Mattei Dogan, ed., Comparing Pluralist Democracies: Strains on Legitimacy. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 65-97. 10 The results of polls carried out while the Pinochet regime was still in power show that Chileans did not appear fearful of giving their opinions, pace the apprehensions of US advisors to the “No” campaign for the 1988 plebiscite. The advisory group placed great emphasis on the “fear factor” that they

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anticipated would play a major part in the result. This prediction was largely based on work with focus groups, showing that this particular technique for social analysis cannot be used as a proxy or sounding board for public opinion. Our view at CERC was that the economic crisis of 1983 had lessened the grip of fear, producing a civil society that showed itself capable of mobilizing in ways, and to an extent, that would not have been possible if fear had continued to operate unabated. 11 Carlos Huneeus, The Pinochet Regime. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007). 12 Richard Gillespie, Soldados de Perón: Los Montoneros. (Buenos Aires: Grijalbo, 1998), updated 2nd edn., pp. 246-247. 13 On political violence in Argentina before the fall of the democratic regime in March 1976, see Peter Waldmann, “Anomia social y violencia,” in Alan Rouquié, ed., Argentina hoy (México: Siglo XXI Editores, 1982). On the coercive nature of the subsequent military regime, see Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar (1976-1983): Del golpe de Estado a la restauración democrática. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003). María José Moyano has carried out a detailed study of victim numbers before and during the military regime, published as Argentina´s Last Patrol: Armed Struggle 1969-1979. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 14 José María Sanguinetti, La agonía de la democracia: Proceso de caída de las instituciones en el Uruguay 1963-1973. (Montevideo: Taurus, 2008). 15 Juan J. Linz, “Opposition to and under an Authoritarian Regime: Spain,” in Robert A. Dahl, ed., Regimes and Oppositions. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 171-260. 16 Argentina’s “Proceso” military regime of 1976 to 1983 did not break off relations with the political opposition. General Jorge Videla, de facto ruler between 1976 and 1981, made occasional conciliatory gestures that were unheard of under the Pinochet regime. See Hugo Quiroga, El tiempo del “Proceso”. Conflictos y coincidencias entre políticos y militares 1976-1983. (Rosario: Editorial Fundación Ross, 1994), esp. pp. 168-173. 17 Carlos Huneeus, “Elecciones no-competitivas en las dictaduras burocrático-autoritarias en América Latina,” Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, no. 13 (1981), pp. 101-138. 18 Alfred Stepan, “The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion,” in Stepan, ed., Authoritarian Brazil. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 47-68. 19 In Brazil the president was selected by the armed forces for a nonrenewable five-year term. In Peru’s “Armed Forces Revolutionary Government” of 1968–1978, the apparently powerful General Velasco Alvarado was nonetheless removed from his post and replaced by General Mercado Jarrín. Argentina’s first military regime president, Jorge Videla, was designated by the other armed forces commanders-in-chief for a four-year period (although he eventually served for five), and a total of four military officers served as president between 1976 and the 1983 transition to democracy. 20 These senators included Jaime Guzmán, Pinochet’s principal civilian adviser. The RN intake also included, as senator, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, who had been Pinochet’s minister of the interior between 1983 and 1985.

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21 An example is the 1993 boinazo episode, in which commandos in battle dress gathered in the vicinity of the presidential palace in a gesture clearly intended to intimidate. 22 One of these was RN senator Sebastián Piñera, later elected president of Chile (in 2010). Piñera fell victim to an army dirty tricks campaign in the early 1990s, when a telephone conversation between Piñera and a friend was covertly recorded by an army espionage unit that routinely tapped the phones of numerous government and opposition politicians. The recording was aired live on TV by a businessman, provoking the first significant political scandal of the transition period. 23 See the magazine Capital, no. 12 (July 1997), pp. 33-37. See also Capital, no. 19 (January 1998), which features Pinochet as its cover portrait. The issue contains a long article by former Pinochet minister Francisco Javier Cuadra entitled “Pinochet: the man, the soldier, the politician,” pp. 14-21. 24 The Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio. 25 The Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, known as “Sofofa.” 26 The Compañia de Telecomunicaciones de Chile, CTC, controled by Telefónica España. 27 The mining association’s gesture was to have serious repercussions, as it was repudiated by the chief executives of the largest foreign mining companies operating in Chile. These companies formed part of the Mining Council (Consejo Minero), the principal mining industry interlocutor with the government to which Chile’s state-owned mining company Codelco also belongs. 28 Portales (1793–1837) was a businessman and government minister, credited by some with laying the foundations of Chile’s centralized and bureaucratized state administration and criticized by others for his notably authoritarian leanings. Editor’s note. 29 “Comercio distinguió a ex presidente Pinochet con premio Diego Portales,” El Mercurio, 7 June 1997, section B1. 30 In the text of the declaration, Sofofa expressed its “recognition to the Government of the Armed Forces, which allowed the recovery of a functioning social order and the establishment of a modern economic framework”. “La Sociedad de Fomento Fabril frente a la detención en Londres del senador Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,” El Mercurio, 2 December 1998 (author’s translation). Sofofa president Felipe Lamarca had been director of Chile’s Inland Revenue service, the Servicio de Impuestos Internos (SII) between 1978 and 1983. 31 Federation leaders expressed their distaste for the impeachment process carried out against Pinochet in the national courts after his return, which culminated with a Supreme Court finding against him. The business association criticized the case on the grounds that it undermined the economic confidence necessary for successful development. The president of the CPC called in 1999 for diplomatic relations with the UK to be broken off: “W. Riesco pide romper relaciones diplomáticas con Gran Bretaña,” El Mercurio 1 July 1999. 32 Lavín traveled to London on 7 November 1998 together with fellow UDI deputies Patricio Melero and Julio Dittborn and former RN party president Ricardo Rivadeneira. 33 Felipe Agüero, “Democratización y Militares: Balance de Diecisiete Años desde la Transición,” in Manuel Alcántara and Leticia M. Ruiz

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Rodríguez, eds., Chile: Política y Modernización Democrática. (Barcelona: Edicions Bellatera, 2006). 34 Alan Rouquié, A la sombra de las dictaduras: La democracia en América Latina. (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011). 35 Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 217. 36 See detailed accounts in earlier chapters of this volume. 37 Namely, the ejercicio de enlace of December 1990 and the boinazo of May 1993. See above, main text, and preceding chapters for more detail. The boinazo occurred when President Aylwin was away on a state visit to Norway. Against the advice of some of the ministers who were part of the delegation— including Edgardo Boeninger, minister of the presidency—Aylwin and his then foreign minister Enrique Silva Silva refused to suspend the visit and return home, fearing that such an action would be interpreted by Pinochet as a sign of weakness. 38 Gonzalo Vial, “La guerra civil de 1973: quiénes la querían y quiénes no. Quién la impidió,” La Segunda, 15 July 2003, p. 9. Vial was Pinochet’s education minister in 1978 and 1979, and he went on to serve on the Rettig commission and the Mesa de Diálogo (see chapters 1 and 2, particularly, for details of these instances). 39 Ibid. 40 Patricia Arancibia Clavel, ed., Los orígenes de la Violencia Política en Chile, 1960-1973. (Santiago: Universidad Finis Terrae/Libertad y Desarrollo, 2001); Patricia Arancibia Clavel et al., Los Hechos de Violencia en Chile: del discurso a la acción. (Santiago: Universidad Finis Terrae/Libertad y Desarrollo, 2003). 41 In a similar vein, the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP) published six volumes of documents from and about the Chilean left compiled by philosopher Víctor Farías. See Farías, ed., La izquierda chilena (1969-1973): Documentos para el estudio de su línea estratégica. 6 vols. (Berlin: Gerhard Weinert GMBH-Centro de Estudios Públicos, 2000). 42 Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Entre el neoliberalismo y el crecimiento con equidad: Tres décadas de política económica en Chile, 3rd edn. (Santiago: J.C. Saez Editor, 2003). A version of this text has been published in English as Economic Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 43 Carlos Huneeus, Los chilenos y la política. (Santiago: CERC-ICHEH, 1987), table 11. 44 Linz, “An Authoritarian Regime”. 45 One of the men also worked for Church human rights defense organization the Vicaría de la Solidaridad. See the degollados case, as discussed by Collins in this volume, 46 The particular consequences of these repressive actions are analyzed in Huneeus, “Political Mass Mobilization against Authoritarian Rule: Pinochet´s Chile.” 47 Klaus von Beyme, “Authoritarian Regimes—Developing Open Societies?” in Dante Germino and Klaus von Beyme , eds., The Open Society in Theory and Practice. (The Hague: Martius Nijhoff, 1974). 48 See table 6.1 for exact age ranges used.

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49 This category is defined as respondents who ascribe to themselves an ideological score of 7 or above on a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 represents the left and 10 the right of the political spectrum. 50 Centrist respondents are defined as those who ascribe themselves an ideological score of 5 or 6, and left-wing respondents as those who ascribe themselves a score of 4 or lower, on a 1 to 10 scale where 1 represents the left and 10 the right of the political spectrum. 51 Defined as per the previous note, as respondents who ascribe themselves a score of 4 or lower on a 1 to 10 scale where 1 represents the left and 10 the right. 52 Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1966). 53 This issue is analyzed in Carlos Huneeus and Luis Maldonado, “Demócratas y nostálgicos del antiguo régimen: Los apoyos a la democracia en Chile,” Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, no. 103 (JulySeptember 2003), pp. 9-49. 54 Barómetro de la Política CERC, August 2012, www.cerc.cl.

8 Afterword Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant

In March 2010, Chile’s center-left Concertación government was forced to pass the torch after twenty uninterrupted years in the executive. At the time this Afterword was completed (in early 2013) Chile was well into its first elected right-wing administration in half a century, and it is not the same country as it was when president Sebastián Piñera was sworn in. Somewhat contrary to initial predictions, though, Piñera’s Alianza “Coalition for Change” has not ushered in the definitive consolidation of Chile’s post-Pinochet political and economic model. This is certainly in part because, as Chile expert Alan Angell has repeatedly pointed out, Chile’s 1980s neoliberal conversion was neither as complete, nor as completely preserved, as is often assumed.1 Moreover, the first years of Piñera’s somewhat uneasy time at the helm saw major mobilizations of the type that the 1990s literature termed “new social movements,” groups whose actions and demands called into question some of neoliberalism’s basic tenets, even as the movements failed to follow classic class interest or party-ideological lines. The social, environmental, and equity costs of unregulated capital were particularly highlighted by the mobilizations, which began with a 2010 environmentalist campaign against the privately funded, multinational “Hidroaysén” hydroelectric power project that required flooding parts of Chilean Patagonia. The project was, arguably, needed—Chile has a chronic energy shortage—and its negative consequences would be relatively invisible: dams were to be built in a remote area that the vast majority of Chileans will never see. All of this only made the strength and vehemence of the ongoing protest campaign 239  

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even more unexpected. Next, 2011 brought massive and internationally reported student protests against Chile’s highly segregated, expensive, and unequal higher education system. Parents, trade union leaders, and assorted other groups and causes swelled the student ranks, and for a time this looked like a movement expressive of deeper, largely inchoate, frustrations. In 2012 a range of issue groups, from ecologists protesting plans for more conventional coal-fired power plants to activists calling for antidiscrimination legislation and the recognition of gay marriage, took to the streets and grabbed the headlines. These struggles have very little to do with the human rights violations of the Pinochet dictatorship, at least on the surface. They are much more directly, and viscerally, connected to civil-society challenges to the political, doctrinal, and economic core of the current model2 and are therefore related to the market conversions that proved the regime’s most enduring legacy.3 The new challenges have also brought calls for a new constitution, taken up as a campaign issue by three of the four 2009 presidential candidates4 and echoed by the 2011 and 2012 student movement. The students essentially questioned the dictatorship-era elevation of a privatized vision of higher education to the status of constitutional shibboleth, a status that it still enjoys. Although these particular disputes emerged publicly only in and after 2010, they clearly represent currents that have a much longer gestation period. One common thread is a vigorous questioning of the “Chilean model,” its routines, taboos, and institutional dead ends. This challenge does not amount to an unambiguous desire to do away with the model altogether.5 Current events do evoke other collective memories of mobilizations over specific issues. These include the high school student movement of 2006,6 appeased by the naming of a presidential commission to review the legislative framework applicable to secondary education. Perhaps more immediately, present-day mobilizations both echo and include the memory of dispossession that prompts Mapuche indigenous communities to sometimes violent action and state authorities to almost invariably violent repressive response, shored up by dictatorship-era antiterrorism laws.7 Current struggles also recall, however, the more distant and less well known variants of 1980s activism. Even back then, an incipient environmentalist movement challenged both the Pinochetista model and the traditional left. Left and right alike had trouble laying claim to, or engaging intelligently with, the ever more vocal Mapuche indigenous movement emerging from the south. These are the new and not so new memories that have reentered the public imagination since the 2010 handover of political power, and that our authors portray or to which they allude in their various chapters in

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this volume. Steve J. Stern, in his Foreword, asks how the politics of memory has shaped subsequent definitions of the politically legitimate and illegitimate. His suggestion that Chile, like the rest of the region, lives in a “post-heroic” phase perhaps helps explain the failure to find a single project or leader to embody the generalized, medium-intensity desire for “something different”. The curious mix of echoes of the past with a contemporary yearning for innovation is clearly visible in politics at every level. The attempts of Marco Enriquez-Ominami and others to rise to the challenge from within the traditional political arena have fallen flat, while iconic student leader Camila Vallejo was voted out of her post at virtually the same time that she was being celebrated by the US and European press. The almost certain return of Michelle Bachelet as the Concertación’s alternative for 2013 awakens fond memories in some quarters but hardly promises to excite a new generation. Formal party politics seems indeed to have little to offer in the way of fresh faces, beyond a recycling of the children or grandchildren of the great and the good: in municipal elections of late 2012 the Concertación won back some lost political ground with the successful mayoral candidacies of Carolina Tohá, daughter of Allende’s minister of defense, and Carlos Cuadrado Prats, grandson of the constitutionalist army chief assassinated on Pinochet’s orders in 1974. Maya Fernández Allende, granddaughter of the deposed former president, almost carried off a surprise victory in the Santiago municipality of Ñuñoa before a recount pushed her into second place. It may be no coincidence that one of the few national faces of the 2012 political scene apparently embraced with genuine public fondness was Iván Fuentes, the soft-spoken leader of a crosscutting regionalist protest movement that paralyzed the Patagonian town of Puerto Aysén in early 2012. Representing a region that had lined up solidly in favor of Piñera at the 2009 presidential election, the movement put forward demands that were essentially developmentalist and economic: a regional development policy, fuel subsidies, even a free-trade zone. These forced some uncomfortable verbal and ideological acrobatics from the diehard old-style revolutionaries who initially rushed to claim the cause as their own. It was yet another demonstration that the new politics, while strongly echoing the past, does not always play out along traditional left-right lines. Despite this decline in voter self-identification with the left or the right as stable ideological preferences, the fact that it falls to a rightwing government to steer Chile through the forty-year coup anniversary of September 2013 is undoubtedly poignant, as we suggest in the Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, Alexander Wilde shows how the Concertación’s handling of the specific question of past atrocities has at

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times been no more deft than that of the political right, despite the rallying call represented by Lagos’s 2003 slogan, “No tomorrow without yesterday”. In Chapter 3, Cath Collins implies that recent advances in the criminal justice dimension of accountability for the past exhibit a distinctive penchant for temporary accommodation that leaves basic arrangements, and some big questions about collusion, deliberately untouched. Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman meanwhile question the extent to which moral and momentous lessons have been learned about what makes a good, or an inclusive, society. Does Chile remain inordinately suspicious of the transgressive, the different, the enemy within? In Chapter 5, Katherine Hite and Cath Collins discuss how commemoration tends to spill over and around official reluctance, but risks being instrumentalized by the authorities. Memorialization can easily become the catchall category of policy about the past, treated as a series of blank canvases offered up to all to sketch their diametrically opposed conceptions of what is right, what is true, or what can be said. Alfredo Joignant, in Chapter 6, shows how these conceptions are also present in the current generation of historians, ensuring that the practice of history itself embodies the contested politics of the day. What, then, will historians find to say about September 2013’s fortieth anniversary of the Chilean coup? How, if at all, will connections be made with the simultaneous anniversaries of fifteen years of Pinochet’s retirement from the army, fifteen years of active domestic investigations of past crimes, or fifteen years since the London Clinic affair? Will anyone stop to wonder or compare whether, and how, national views of this moment in history differ from external ones? The aim of this book has been to contribute to the debate over these questions, primarily from the perspectives of political scientists, both domestic and international. The book’s contributors share the view that in Chile, as elsewhere, what is generally thought and believed about the historical and political community of yesterday visibly and intimately shapes how citizens choose to live together—or separately—into the future. Chile’s future political community will be defined in presidential elections in late 2013, following hard on the heels of the anniversary commemorations of 11 September. Chapter 8 gives some clues as to how voters may be expected to approach Chile’s sixth presidential elections since the return to democracy. It seems certain that they will be at least as subject as were the previous five to being framed by debates about the immediate past, even as the dictatorship period itself becomes a historical, rather than a lived, memory for a majority of the country’s population.

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Major questions that emerge from this trajectory and that will demand answers in that new political period include, first, how did Chile come to be held up as a “model” transition, with an economic record and a democratization process often thought worthy of praise and emulation? Second, how did this model then come to be so roundly questioned and criticized from within? How did the move from dictatorship to democracy give way to acute critiques of privatized education, an apparently unreformable Constitution, and persistent inequality? How can we account for a transition from 1988’s engaged, massive, and joyful embrace of newly returned democratic openings to today’s generalized political indifference, as illustrated by the signal failure of more than five million Chileans to even register to vote in the 2009 presidential elections? Were 2012’s municipal elections, with their 60 percent abstention rate, a sign of further decline in formal political participation to come? It is difficult to know why so much disenchantment or dissatisfaction suddenly surfaced around the threshold of the first formal political alternation (from center-left to center-right) of the new democratic period, but its existence is undeniable. The answers to all these questions are, moreover, inevitably bound up with mainstream or alternative memories, some of which were silenced for many years owing in good part to the successes of the model: memories, for example, of the generation who marched as schoolchildren in 2006 and again as university students in 2012, or of the gay rights activists who stood their ground against casual and deeply rooted prejudice to demand recognition and rights. This particular group is perhaps especially emblematic in having had to defy not only ideological prejudice but almost universal social, moral and religious opprobrium in a country that remains culturally conservative.8 Nonetheless, what is today recognized as a movement-in-waiting was already making its presence felt during the eighties, with performance art and underground fringe cabaret productions that challenged the homophobia and prejudices of both right and left. Alongside current social demands and the “new” memories that go along with them, memories more directly or classically associated with the dictatorship continue to have political as well as historical currency. The periodic resurfacing of dominant and subaltern memories of dictatorship-era atrocities has had its literal counterparts as ongoing criminal investigations have led to the exhumation and then reburial of iconic political and cultural figures of the left, including Salvador Allende, Pablo Neruda, Victor Jara, and Miguel Enríquez. On each occasion the activity galvanized families, friends, and comrades to commemorate or even celebrate, with largescale gatherings, cultural events, and the establishment of new and more

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publicly prominent sites of burial as points around which to congregate on significant dates and anniversaries. These gatherings are pressed into twin service: they keep the past alive even as they call forth renewed political commitments in the present, linking past class struggles to current social demands.9 It was under the Piñera government that “countermemories” of the dictatorship began to make themselves heard. We do not argue any direct causal relationship between a right-wing executive and the rise of fringe groups with revisionist tendencies, who reject the denomination “dictatorship” and furiously defend the military regime. Indeed, if anything, the more extreme proponents of Pinochetismo in the present day are often acting out of a deep and acute sense of having been betrayed by the government they thought of as theirs. The Alianza, once in government, has moved in concert with the broader trend portrayed by Huneeus and Ibarra’s polling data: success in the democratic game is associated with a definite spike in right-wing support for that game and its rules. In response, the countermemories advocated by associations of former military officers and sympathizers want to rescue the notion of a strong regime bent on imposing order, portrayed as a necessary antidote to the malignant forces that had plotted to overthrow established mores. In an important study of collective memory and postwar East and West Germany, Jeffrey Herf emphasizes the close relationship between partisan control over official discourse and society’s attention (or inattention) to traumatic memory.10 The 1949 Konrad Adenauer electoral victory, Herf claims, signaled German society's desire to “forget” the injustices of the past, to forge on toward the democratic, capitalist reconstruction of West Germany. Adenauer's campaign discourse (and subsequent presidential discourse) stood in direct contrast to that of Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Kurt Schumacher, who publicly called for Germans to examine the past and determine individual responsibility. The result of this dynamic between Adenauer and the citizenry, Herf argues, was years of public silence about the evil past: . . . the West Germans could foster either memory and justice or democracy but not both. This inherent tension between memory and justice on the one hand and democracy on the other would appear to have been one of the central themes of postwar West German history. . . . The emergence of a national electoral majority in favor of the argument that daring more democracy required more memory and more justice did not take place until the 1960s.11

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Herf argues that it is no coincidence that the first real public debates over the Nazi past took place with the SPD victory of Willy Brandt in the late 1960s, and that they continue, with lesser or greater intensity, through today.12 Beyond the obvious differences in scale and context—and the fact that Chile arguably did not view itself as possessing a self-evidently evil past—Herf’s thesis may be suggestive inasmuch as it points to executive leadership, or its absence, as a key factor in the establishment of political space for public debate regarding the repressive past. This thesis seems to be partially borne out by the experience of postreunification Germany in regard to the Stasi secret police archives, which were finally opened to the public in 1992. The fifteen-month delay between reunification and the implementation of public access was allegedly due, at least in part, to the reluctance of some key West German political figures to have their own past contacts or collusion with the former Communist regime made public.13 In a similar vein Eugenia Allier Montano, writing about Uruguay, associates newly active phases in the memory debate there with their respective presidencies. She claims that after a period of suppression of the recent past, a “memory of denunciation” arising under the liberal center-right administration of Batlle (2000–2005) gave way to the application of justice under the subsequent, center-left, Vázquez administration (2005–2010).14 Even where memory or justice initiatives are predominantly civil society driven, the perception or anticipation of greater receptivity from a new government can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, generating or accentuating trends that an agile political leader will recognize and may take advantage of. The recent history of Argentina under the Kirchner and Fernández presidencies (2003–2007 and 2007–present, respectively), is a case in point, one in which the potentially divisive consequences of partisan appropriation of memory discourse are, moreover, particularly evident. Both Peronist administrations placed themselves squarely behind an already incipient reopening of the memory question vigorously promoting renewed prosecution of perpetrators and adopting a public vocabulary of “state terrorism” and “repressors” quite at odds with the more euphemistic treatment prevalent in Chilean official discourse. The association has been utilized to boost the moral credentials of the respective governors, deflecting unwelcome questions about the radical pasts of high-level party officials or the transparency of large-scale, state-funded charitable operations administered by the iconic Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.15 The basic thrust of accountability policy has survived this politicization to garner explicit mainstream political support, with prosecution of

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former perpetrators unanimously declared “state policy” by the lower house of Congress in May 2010. Countermemory, in the form of rejection of or reaction to these changes, has been largely restricted to the hinterlands of utter unacceptability, nonetheless making itself graphically felt in the still unsolved disappearance of a key trial witness, Julio López, in 2006. In Chile countermemory operates at a variety of levels, increasingly distant from official discourse whether of left or right. One tendency, not blessed with the intellectual weaponry or sophistication displayed by the conservative historiography discussed in Alfredo Joignant’s chapter for this book, is spearheaded by the Corporación 11 de Septiembre, headed by former military man Juan González, whose bizarre pronouncements have almost reached the level of self-caricature in recent years.16 A rather less threadbare operation, closely connected to former regime agents currently in prison, runs as a website under the name Despierta Chile. The private Pinochet Foundation, founded in 1995, persists in efforts to rebrand the coup as the “heroic gesture” (gesta heroica) of 11 September, although in recent years Pinochet’s image, previously given pride of place on the foundation’s website, has been given a lower profile.17 These virtual manifestations of countermemory also have their “irruptions” and their intergenerational transmission. Both were on view, the latter in the form of visible alliances between the Pinochetista old guard and a generation of young neo-Nazis, during the private screening of a pro-Pinochet documentary organized at the downtown Caupolicán Theater in Santiago (see accounts in previous chapters). The venue was not casually chosen: the theater has associations with 1980s memories of heady, vibrant political gatherings against the dictatorship. Some months previously, a member’s club in one of Santiago’s affluent neighborhoods was the setting for an equally striking episode. The publication of a new edition of the book Miguel Krassnoff: Prisionero por servir a Chile, an elegy to a former regime agent currently in prison as a convicted murderer and kidnapper, occasioned a pitched battle between attendees and a crowd of relatives, survivors, and their supporters gathered outside. Both examples illustrate how “present” memories can be. The second example also reinforces their intimate link to present political landscapes: Cristián Labbé, the mayor who defiantly supported and defended the homage to Krassnoff, himself attributed his subsequent and unprecedented defeat at the municipal polls to fallout from the event, although his unabashedly repressive attitude to student protests and school occupations in his district may also have played a part.

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The link drawn by Labbé is nonetheless plausible, in part because dominant collective memory, while not homogeneous nor even always permanently on display, reacts to countermemorial instances and signs. Dominant memory actively awakens in response to new events that challenge it: such was the case in June 2012 when Magdalena Krebs, director of Chile’s national museum, library, and archive service (Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, DIBAM), reignited previous controversy surrounding Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights. In a letter published in the mainstream daily newspaper El Mercurio, Krebs claimed that the museum’s educational value had been compromised (limitada) by its decision to “restrict its mission only to [depicting] human rights violations, without telling visitors about the events that gave rise to them”.18 This echoed rightist criticism at the time of the museum’s January 2010 opening regarding the lack of a pre-1973 historical narrative, betraying moreover the constant and profoundly mistaken conviction on the part of the right that political context can meaningfully be adduced to relativize or even eliminate culpability in a human rights framework. Krebs’s letter provoked an avalanche of criticism of the historical relativism her words embodied. The blow was nonetheless keenly felt by the institution, coming as it did hard on the heels of a presidential visit by Piñera that some had hoped marked the official seal of approval of their arrival as an accepted part of the national narrative. Symbolic politics continues to play itself out, then, at and around the museum as well as in Providencia, where Labbé’s replacement, independent candidate Josefa Errázuriz, mused soon after her victory about the possibility of making a change to the 11 September street name. The street was renamed in honor of the coup in 1980, at the height of the regime, and its provocative title had been hotly defended ever since by the loyal Labbé. If new mayor Errázuriz were to succeed in reverting to the original, entirely anodyne, name of Nueva Providencia, the gesture might well unleash local versions of the symbolic battles that already occur at the national level over the apparently innocuous, but in fact highly charged, subjects of street furniture and the naming of public spaces. The year 2013 is particularly susceptible to such outbreaks in the run-up to September’s fortieth anniversary. The sporadic but persistent use of barricades, firecrackers, and even the discharging of firearms with which some in Santiago’s peripheral, working-class districts greet significant September dates19 are likely to be equally or more in evidence in 2013 as memory and countermemory compete for the attention of an only apparently indifferent public.

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When we think in comparative terms about the ways postauthoritarian regimes attempt to craft consensus in the wake of conflict, repression, and loss, we might conclude that while the Chilean political elite attempted to craft a post-dictatorship politics of consensus, there was never a broadly accepted agreement about how to remember and interpret the dictatorial past. Noted Chilean social historian Gabriel Salazar has argued that Europe did reach such an agreement in the postwar and post-totalitarian period, resulting in definitive acceptance of the virtues of social democracy. He believes, however, that Latin America’s Southern Cone has not yet crafted a similar “historical rupture” around the state terror period of the recent past.20 In Chile there was nothing to parallel, for example, the trajectory of France under Charles de Gaulle in the post-Vichy period. De Gaulle perpetuated the heroic myth that virtually all of France had stood in the Resistance, a massaged memory then gratefully accepted as a way to gloss over and to forget far-reaching complicity with the Nazis. Parallels with Europe, and with post-war contexts, will never be more than tangentially useful, however: in particular because post-Vichy France seemed to accept that its immediate past contained political, military, or moral failures that needed to be expiated or explained away. France was, after all, recovering from its own military defeat, followed by the fall of an almost universally reviled occupying power. This is a starting point quite different from that of Chile, where the regime left with its head held high, and repudiation of outgoing authoritarians has had to be painstakingly, and only partially, constructed after the fact. Chile has accordingly never possessed a single “refounding myth” around the repressive past, nor did its new leaders engineer a profound break with the economic, legal, and constitutional edifice constructed by their authoritarian predecessors. At best the Concertación may claim to have profoundly reshaped Chile’s democratic tradition, given its identity as a long-term center-left collaboration unprecedented in Chile’s political history. The question of how to think about societal complicity with the dictatorship has therefore not arisen in precisely those terms, since the notion of “complicity” presupposes a negative moral judgment that is not (yet) a given. Questions such as “Who benefited and how can or should they be held accountable?”21 or “Who were the bystanders, and why did they not speak out?”22 have yet to be explored in Chile to the same extent that they have in, for example, modern-day Argentina, Germany, South Africa, or France.

Afterword

                                                                                                                1

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Alan Angell, in the Prologue to Peter Siavelis and Kirsten Sehnbruch, eds., Concertación Governments in Chile, 1990–2010: Politics, Economics, and Social Policy under the Rainbow (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, forthcoming 2013). 2 Some, including the political scientist Patricio Navia, prefer instead to view them as the essentially bourgeois woes characteristic of an emerging consumer society wanting better quality services at lower personal cost. 3 See Alice Nelson, “Marketing Discontent: The Political Economy of Memory in Latin America,” in Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh Payne, eds., Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 339-364. 4 Predictably, perhaps, by the centrist and left-wing members of the quartet, namely, Jorge Arrate, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, and Marco Enríquez-Ominami. 5 This is contrary to the popular thesis of imminent or actual collapse put forth by sociologist Alberto Mayol in his book El derrumbe del modelo: La crisis de la economía de Mercado en Chile contemporáneo (Santiago: LOM, 2012). Questioning whether the model has (yet) quite collapsed does not, however, mean embracing the shortsighted view that the general sense of malaise is basically an illusion, a mistake made by Marcel Oppliger and Eugenio Guzmán in their equally recent book El malestar de Chile: ¿teoría o diagnostico? (Santiago: RIL editors, 2012). 6 The movement was known colloquially as “The March of the Penguins” (La marcha de los pingüinos) after the black-and-white school uniforms of the youthful protesters. 7 These laws allow for augmented sentence tariffs for otherwise “ordinary” crimes, such as arson, and permit dual military and ordinary court proceedings against civilians. 8 See comparative and national opinion poll studies by the Latin American Public Opinion Project, LAPOP, at www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/ ; Universidad Diego Portaleswww.encuesta.udp.cl/articulos/analisis/ ; and Latinobarómetro www.latinobarometro.org (accessed 8 January 2013). 9 This process can cause tension, as when Salvador Allende was reburied in 2012: a planned political rally was cancelled at the request of the family, who wanted to keep the moment private. 10 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 11 Ibid., pp. 6-7. 12 More recent debates in Germany are best symbolized, on the one hand, by the Historikerstreit—the Historians' Debate—initiated in the mid-1980s. For a useful anthology see Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). Debates have also arisen over conceiving and constructing national monuments in Germany. See Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, “Topography of Terror in Berlin: Is Remembrance of Forgetting Possible?” Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 1995). 13 Interviews by Cath Collins with present-day archive staff, Berlin, January 2011.

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14 Eugenia Allier Montaño, Batallas por la Memoria: Los usos políticos del pasado reciente en Uruguay (Mexico City, Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de México, 2010). See also Francesca Lessa, Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2013), and Francesca Lessa and Gabriela Fried, eds., Luchas contra la Impunidad: Uruguay 1985-2011 (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2011). 15 See Luis Gasulla, El negocio de los derechos humanos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2012). 16 In the end-of-year edition of satirical newspaper The Clinic for 2012, González proudly claimed that 2012 had been the apogee of unabashed Pinochetismo, which was, he said, back in the ascendant. His claims chimed poorly with the practically null attention paid to December’s sixth anniversary of Pinochet’s death, with even family members in scarce attendance at the commemorative religious service. González’s previous gems, some of which were repeated in the same interview, include flatly and publicly refuting his own sister’s account of having been tortured under the military regime. 17 The site’s banner photograph was recently changed from Pinochet in full dress uniform to a picture of a crowd of young people, while its home page focuses almost exclusively on the foundation’s student scholarship program. 18 “La opción que tomó el Museo . . . de circunscribir su misión solo a las violaciones de derechos humanos, sin proporcionar al visitante los antecedentes que las generaron,” El Mercurio, letters to the editor, 23 June 2012. 19 E.g., the anniversary of Allende’s UP electoral victory, which comes on 4 September, just a week before the coup anniversary. 20 Gabriel Salazar, “Holocausto y totalitarismo en el Cono Sur,” in Dolencias históricas de la memoria ciudadana: Chile, 1810–2010 (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2011), pp. 25-36. 21 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 22 Diana Taylor, “Percepticide,” Chapter 5 in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 119-138.

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Villa Grimaldi. Archivo y Memoria: La Experiencia del Archivo Oral de Villa Grimaldi Santiago: Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi 2012. ____________. Ciudad y Memorias. Santiago: Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi and Fundación Heinrich Boell, 2010. ____________. Ciudadanía y Memorias, Ciudad y Memorias and Procesos de Memoria. Santiago: Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi and Fundacion Heinrich Boell, 2010. _____________. Procesos de Memoria. Santiago: Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi and Fundación Heinrich Boell, 2010. Villa Grimaldi memory site. www.villagrimaldi.cl Von Beyme, Klaus. “Authoritarian Regimes-Developing Open Societies?” In Dante Germino and Klaus von Beyme, eds., The Open Society in Theory and Practice, pp. 109-120. The Hague: Martius Nijhoff, 1974. “W. Riesco pide romper relaciones diplomáticas con Gran Bretaña,” El Mercurio, 1 July 1999. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin and Barry Schwartz. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” The American Journal of Sociology vol. 97, no. 2 (September 1991), pp. 376-420. Waldmann, Peter. “Anomia social y violencia.” In Alan Rouquié, ed., Argentina hoy, pp. 206-249. México: Siglo XXI, 1982. Weitzel, Ruby. El callejón de las viudas. Santiago: Planeta, 2001. Weschler, Lawrence. A Miracle, A Universe. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wilde, Alexander. “Avenues of Memory: Santiago’s General Cemetery and Chile’s Recent Political History,” A Contracorriente vol. 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008), pp. 134-169. www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente/spring_08/Wilde.pdf ______________. “Irrupciones de la memoria.” In Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ed., Historizar el pasado vivo. www.historizarelpasadovivo.cl ______________. “Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 31 (1999), pp. 473-500. ______________. “The Past Embodied,” A Contracorriente vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 2008), pp. 237-247. www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente/fall_08/wilde_rev.pdf Wilson, Richard. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Winn, Peter “El pasado está presente: Historia y memoria en el Chile contemporáneo” in Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ed., Historizar el pasado vivo. www.historizarelpasadovivo.cl Young, James. “The Counter-Monument: The Memorial Against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry vol. 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992), pp. 267296. ______________. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Zamorano Reyes, Ernesto. La pena de azotes. Santiago: Imprenta y Encuadernación Bellavista, 1909.

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Zúñiga F. Gabriela, and Juan René Maureira. “Con el alma sin cicatrizar: Consecuencias transgeneracionales de la desaparición forzada,” Sexto Congreso de Salud Mental y DDHH, Asociación de Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, n.d.

Note on Contributors

Cath Collins has been Professor of Transitional Justice at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland since March 2013. She is also Director of the Human Rights Observatory and was formerly Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile (2007-2013). She has worked in and researched on Chile since 1996. Her previous publications on this subject include the book Posttransitional Justice? Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador, Penn State, 2010. Katherine Hite is the Frederick Ferris Thompson Professor of Political Science at and chair of the Political Science Department at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA. Her relevant publications include the books Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain, Routledge, 2012; and When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–98, Columbia, 2000. Carlos Huneeus is Associate Professor at the Institute of International Studies, University of Chile and executive director of CERC, the Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea in Santiago, Chile. His most recent books include The Pinochet Regime, (Lynne Rienner, 2007) y La Guerra Fría Chilena: Gabriel González Videla y su ley maldita (Random House Mondadori, 2009). Sebastian Ibarra graduated in sociology from the Universidad de Chile and obtained his Masters degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Since 2007 he has been Researcher and Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile. His research focuses on the impact of neoliberal transformations on the structures and practices of social solidarity, and on urban studies (socio-spatial dimension of social capital, urban conflicts and social movements).

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Alfredo Joignant is Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile and a former president of the Chilean Political Science Association (1998-2000). He has held visiting professorships at the Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris III University, and Institut d’Études Politiques de Grenoble, France. His most recent publications include the coedited books Notables, tecnócratas y mandarins: Elementos de sociología de las élites en Chile (1990-2010), Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2011; and Gouverner par la science: perspectives comparées, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, in press. Elizabeth Lira is a psychologist by training and currently directs the Center for Ethics at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile. She was a member of Chile's Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture and was formerly president of Chile's Higher Council of Science, FONDECYT, and a board member of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences. She received the American Psychological Association's International Humanitarian Award in 2002 and the Eclipse Award from the Minneapolis Center for Torture Victims in 2011. Her many relevant publications include Politicas de Reparacion: Chile 1990-2004 LOM/ DIBAM, 2005 (with Brian Loveman). Brian Loveman is Professor Emeritus of political science at San Diego State University, California, USA; and is the author or editor of more than twenty books on Latin American history and politics, interAmerican relations, and US foreign policy. His book Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism, 3rd edn., Oxford University Press, 2001, is the most widely read history of Chile in English. Steve J. Stern is the Alberto Flores Galindo and Hilldale Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He has published many books and articles on Latin American history. His book Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988, Duke University Press, 2006, received the Bolton-Johnson Prize for the best book in English in Latin American history. In 2012, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alexander Wilde currently directs a two-year research project on religion and violence in Latin America at American University, Washington DC, USA. He is the author of the book Conversaciones de caballeros, la quiebra de la democracia oligárquica en Colombia, Tercer Mundo, 1982, and coeditor of The Progressive Church in Latin America, Notre Dame, 1989. A former Ford Foundation Vice-President and Representative for the Andean Region and Southern Cone, he lived in Chile during 10 years of its long democratic transition.

Index 11th of September Corporation 152 1980 Constitution 12, 33, 40, 55, 64, 110, 150, 170, 201, 202, 214, 217

Asociación de Abogados Pro Derechos Humanos 108 Aylwin Government 16, 33, 37, 47, 110, 204 Aylwin, Patricio 16, 64, 70, 120, 190, 201 Azócar, Guillermo 101

Academia de Guerra Aérea (AGA) (Air Force War Academy) 112 Academia de Humanismo Cristiano 213 accountability 12, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 88, 129, 242, 245, 253, 254, 259 Acevedo, Sebastián 45, 109, See Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo Adenauer, Konrad 244 agrupaciones (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos AFDD and Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Poíticos AFEP) 42, 46, 49 Agüero, Felipe 12, 25, 27, 57, 114, 130, 236, 266 Alessandri, Arturo 101 Alessandri, Jorge 194, 205 Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (“Triple A”, AAA) 200 Allende Gossens, Salvador vii, xiii, xvii, 4, 11, 24, 32, 103, 148, 161, 194, 202, 243, 249, 257 Allier Montaño, Eugenia 250 Amnesty International 45, 108, 132 Amnesty Law of 1978 35 Angell, Alan 23, 57, 58, 88, 239, 249, 254, 265 anniversaries of the coup 8 appropriation of memory 2, 245 apremios ilegitimos 112, 113, 120, 129, 130 Arancibia, Patricia 178, 181, 182, 192, 193, 237 Arellano Stark, Sergio 113 arpilleras 155

Bachelet, Michelle xv, 14, 34, 56, 57, 59, 143, 145, 157, 162, 241 Balmaceda, José Manuel 97 Barrientos, Claudio 1, 24 Battle of Lircay 95 Blanlot, Vivianne 170 Blest Gana, Alberto 95, 125 Cámara Nacional de Comercio 203 Cannadine, David 167, 189 Caravan of Death 65, 72, 113, 129, 204 Cárdenas, Lázaro xiii Carmine, Victor 104 Casa de la Memoria 154 Castro, Fidel 183, 193 Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) 108, 113, 117, 122, 128 Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea (CERC) (Center for Contemporary Reality) 28, 29, 86, 197, 198, 204, 207, 211, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 227, 230, 232, 234, 235, 237, 238, 252, 253, 268 Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas de España (CIS) 217, 218 Chadwick, Andrés 152 Cheyre, Juan Emilio 57, 118, 131, 172, 177 Chilean memorial processes 136 Chilean military coup (of 1973) 4, 91 Chile’s Council for National Monuments 138

271

272

Index

Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristiano, DC) 9 Christian Democrats 4, 86, 223 Claro, Regina 182, 185, 193 “Colectivo 119” 146 Collins, Cath 1, 7, 13, 21, 26, 29, 44, 52, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 83, 84, 86, 88, 133, 157, 158, 162, 165, 197, 237, 239, 242, 249, 257 Comisión Investigadora de los Actos de la Dictadura (Commission to Investigate the Acts of the Dictatorship) 100, 126 Comisión Nacional Sobre Verdad y Reconciliación (CNVR) 16, 258, See National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation and Rettig Commission Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture) 27, 116, 124, 130, 131, 254, 258. See Valech Commission Comité de Cooperación para la Paz en Chile (COPACHI) 107 Commemoration(s) 14, 19, 20, 29, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 145, 146, 148, 152, 153, 157, 160, 171, 172, 186, 187, 190, 242, 257, 264 commemoration of political violence 133 commemorative processes 135, 137, 141, 157 Committee to Defend the Indicted Sailors (Comité de Defensa de los Marinos Procesados) 106 Communist Party (Partido Comunista, PC) 9, 10, 46, 81, 86, 102, 105, 106, 158, 177, 194, 210 Simón Bolívar headquarters 81 Concepción Lawyers Association (Colegio de Abogados de Concepción) 106 Concertación 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 53, 55, 56, 61, 62, 63, 66, 69, 71, 73, 77, 85, 87, 110, 111, 115, 148, 153, 154,

166, 167, 168, 169, 201, 209, 219, 220, 223, 226, 228, 230, 239, 241, 248, 249, 251, 254, 265 Concha Salas, Hernán 105 Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio 203, 236 Consejo de Defensa del Estado (CDE) 204 Contreras, Manuel 14, 33, 53, 88, 113 Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo (CODEPU) 112, 113 Correa Sutil, Jorge 55, 57, 82 Corvalán, Luis 9 Council for National Monuments (Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales) 60 countermemorials 137 Cuadra, Francisco Javier 171, 236 Cuadrado Prats, Carlos 241 Decree Law 5 (12 September 1973, Declaration of State of War) 107, 128 de Errázuriz y Madariaga, José Antonio 94 degollados 71, 86, 237 democratization 1, 2, 27, 33, 50, 199, 209, 243, 256 de San Martín, José 107 Díaz, Victor 81 Díaz, Viviana 81 Diez, Sergio 9, 10 DINA (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia) 33, 38, 53, 129, 159 Dirty War (Argentina) viii, ix disappeared 14, 18, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 63, 71, 81, 84, 85, 86, 94, 110, 111, 115, 119, 122, 123, 128, 129, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 155, 156, 158 Domingo Cañas, José 59, 113, 159 Edelstam, Harald viii Edwards, Jorge 166, 189 El Mercurio 25, 98, 124, 125, 130, 155, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 236, 247, 250, 254, 255, 261, 263, 265, 266, 267

Index 273

Enemies of the state 21, 92, 100 Engaged state (estado de compromiso) xiii Enríquez, Miguel 4, 5, 243 Enríquez-Ominami, Marco 3, 5, 249, 253 Errázuriz, Francisco Javier 185 Errázuriz, Josefa 247 Escalona, Camilo 4 exceptionalist Chilean democratic and republican traditions 7 Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) 49, 57, 59, 64, 114, 125, 234, 255, 256, 260, 262, 266 Fernández, Sergio 9, 10, 11 Fernández Allende, Maya 241 Flame of Freedom 35 Forni, Marcelo 170 Frei government 39, 41, 53, 110 Frei Montalva, Eduardo xiii, 24, 103, 162, 149, 194 Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo 3, 34, 110, 154, 249 Frenz, Helmut 107, 132 Fujimori, Alberto 77 FUNA 147, 161 Fundación Futuro 58, 65, 258 funerary monuments 135 Gajardo, Luz 177 García Márquez, Gabriel vii, viii Garretón, Roberto 56, 62 “Garzón effect” 82 González Videla, Gabriel 102, 168 gradual prescription 75, 88 Guerrero, Ramón 97 Guevara Vargas, Guillermo 102 Gumucio, Manuela 4 Guzmán, Juan 18, 72, 129, 132 Guzmán Errázuriz, Jaime 18, 29, 35, 148, 150, 161, 194, 235, 254 Guzmán Errázuriz, Jaime Memorial 150 Herf, Jeffrey 25, 52, 244, 249 Hevia, Arturo 149 Hidroaysén 239 historia oficial 36

historical memory 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 60, 194 Historical truth(s) 32, 37, 39, 41, 44 Historikerstreit 31, 52, 249 Hite, Katherine 1, 7, 13, 21, 24, 26, 27, 60, 133, 157, 160, 161, 162, 194, 239, 242, 257, 268 Hobsbawm, Eric 157, 182, 189, 193, 253 Honorato, Magali 103 Huenchullan Cayul, Felipe, 120 human rights memorials 43, 136, 141, 158 Human Rights Observatory (of Diego Portales University) 56, 60, 63, 88, 160, 257, 268 Human Rights Program of the Interior Ministry 48, 59, 138, 158 Huneeus, Carlos 6, 8, 9, 22, 26, 52, 58, 62, 83, 161, 197, 234, 235, 237, 238, 268 Ibáñez, Carlos 92, 99 Ibarra, Sebastián 6, 9, 22, 52, 197 Ignatieff 77 Impunity 5, 13, 21, 61, 62, 72, 77, 83, 92, 96, 98, 100, 250, 254, 260 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 108, 118, 128, 258 Inter-American Court on Human Rights 77, 82 International Commission of Jurists 108 “Irruptions of Memory” 21, 22, 26, 33, 53, 85, 158, 267, See Alexander Wilde Jaña, Efráin 113 Jara, Victor 243 Jiménez, Tucapel 71 Jocelyn-Holt, Alfredo 54, 156, 156, 179 Joignant, Alfredo 1, 6, 22, 24, 27, 165, 190, 191, 239, 242, 246, 268 judicial truths 19, 39 Juica, Milton 88 King Ferdinand VII 94 Koch, Osvaldo 103

274

Index

Krassnoff, Miguel 28, 87, 113, 152, 246 Krebs, Magdalena 155, 247 Krebs, Ricardo 189, 192 Labbé, Cristián 28, 152, 246 Lafferte, Elías 101, 126 Lagos, Ricardo 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20, 27, 31, 34, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 70, 73, 115, 116, 117, 131, 145, 149, 153, 154, 242, 251, 259 Lavín, Joaquín 45, 173, 236 Law 19.992 118 Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy (Law 8.987) 102 Leighton, Bernardo 83, 103, 126 Letelier, Orlando 54, 71 Lima Inquisition Tribunal in Chile 94 Linz, Juan 204 Lira, Elizabeth 7, 13, 19, 21, 25, 26, 44, 53, 56, 58, 85, 91, 125, 126, 129, 130, 158, 242, 260, 269 Londres 38 48, 134, 145, 148, 156, 159, 161, 162, 260 Longueira, Pablo 46 López, Julio 264 Loveman, Brian 7, 13, 19, 21, 25, 26, 44, 53, 58, 85, 91, 125, 126, 128, 129, 158, 242, 260, 269 Mallon, Florencia 1, 24 MAPU Party (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria) 105, 114 Mapuche 1, 2, 120, 123, 132, 240, 256, 261 Marcha Rearme 137 Marin, Gladys 71 Mariot, Nicolas 175, 191 Martínez, Carlos Alberto 101 Martínez, Gutemberg 9, 1 Memorial Wall 37, 47, 137 memorialization 1, 20, 21, 28, 47, 48, 53, 139, 151, 156, 165, 242 memorials 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 34, 43, 47, 48, 49, 52, 76, 133, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 150, 153, 155, 156, 157, 257, 267, See countermemorials and human rights memorials

memorials to victims 13, 34, 47 memory entrepreneurs 141 Memory politics 1, 8, 17, 19, 187, 194 See politics of memory Memory struggles x “memory watershed” 134 Meneses, Emilio 25, 113 Mesa de Diálogo (Mesa, Roundtable) 18, 24, 34, 41, 42, 44, 51, 56, 58, 74, 237, 213, 255 Millán Colicheu, Elvis 120 Milošević, Slobodan 6 Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales (Ministry of National Property) 48, 60 Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) 17, 105, 158 Montt, Manuel 97 Morales Adriasola, Raúl 104 Morandé 80 41 Moreira, Iván 169, 170 Moren Brito, Marcelo 124 Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo 58, 64, 129, 147, 266, See Sebastián Acevedo Mujica, Alfonso 203 Municipal Cemetery of Punta Arenas 136 Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos) 2, 14, 34, 48, 59, 81, 134, 140, 165, 247, 260, 262 National Commission Against Torture (Comisión Nacional Contra la Tortura) 109 National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (Comisión Nacional Sobre Verdad y Reconciliación 16, 28, 33, 59, 263, See Rettig Commission National Historical Monuments 48 National Institute of Human Rights 48, 119, 120, 262 National Party 104, 105 Navia, Patricio 183, 193, 249 Neruda, Pablo ix, 102, 127, 243 Nino, Carlos 15, 28

Index 275

Nixon–Kissinger regime viii No hay mañana sin ayer 44, 46, 115, See There is No Tomorrow Without Yesterday Novoa, Jovino 188 Núñez, Ricardo 11, 27 O’Higgins, Bernardo 35, 190 Ominami, Carlos 4, 9, 10, 25 “ongoing crime” thesis 72 Organization of American States 9, 92, 108, 122, See Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Ossa Bulnes, Juan Luis 104 Paine 88, 140, 145, 157, 159, 157 Paine Memorial 144, 146, 148, 156 Park for Peace (Parque por la Paz) 142, 160, 267 Partido Demócrata Cristiano, DC (Christian Democratic Party) 9, 211 Partido por la Democracia (PPD) 211 Partidos por la Democracia (Concertación) 28, 110, 254 Patio 29 47, 89 Pérez de Arce, Hermógenes 10 Pérez Yoma, Edmundo 18, 42 Perón, Juan Domingo xiii Pezoa Véliz, Carlos 99 Piñera, Sebastián 3, 120, 134, 152, 154, 173, 232, 236, 239, 242, 244, 247 Pinochet, Augusto vii, xiv, 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117, 122, 123, 133, 136, 140, 148, 150, 152, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181. 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227,

228, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 246, 251, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 262, 262, 264, 265 Pisagua 46, 84, 102, 136, 158 Plan Z xi Plebiscite (1988 Plebiscite) 26, 36, 51, 53, 69, 110, 126, 201, 204, 209, 214, 217, 234 Policía de Investigaciones (PDI) 43, 56, 87, 104, 118, 120, 121, 126, 131, 255 Policide viii, xi, xiv, xvii political commemoration 133, 134, 148 politically traumatic pasts 135 politics of memory 1, 2, 3, 5, 40, 45, 62, 141, 241, 264 Politzer, Patricia 56, 57, 62 Popular Front government 102 Popular Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP) 200 Popular Unity government (Unidad Popular) 2, 10, 11, 24, 32, 104, 105, 107 Portales, Diego 95, 124, 206, See Portalian State Portalian State 92, 95 practice of torture in Chile 92, 123 Prats, Carlos 171, 190, 192, 200 Programa de Medianoche 9, 265 progressive truth recovery 76 prosecutions 1, 14, 15, 16, 21, 34, 37, 43, 44, 47, 48, 61, 76, 78, 81, 85, 111, 112, 254 Quintana, Carmen Gloria 210 Rehren, Alfredo 125 Renovación Nacional (RN) 9, 191, 201 Reparations 1, 13, 14, 17, 19, 29, 33, 44, 46, 58, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 76, 85, 116, 118, 119, 138, 139, 154, 159 Retamal, Julio 182, 185, 193 Rettig Commission (Comisión Rettig) 17, 18, 27, 33, 43, 47, 57, 66, 86, 237, See National

276

Index

Commission on Truth and Reconciliation Rettig, Raúl 110 Rettig Report (Informe Rettig) 29, 55, 58, 84, 160, 253 Reveco, Fernando 113 revelations 14, 24, 34, 39, 40, 66, 76, 153, See progressive truth recovery Revolution in Liberty (“revolución en libertad”) 33, 103 Riggs Bank 40, 166, 189, 204. 220, 224, 226, 233 Rolle, Claudio 180 Romo, Osvaldo 29, 113 Rousso, Henry 25, 32, 52, 192 Salazar, Gabriel 156, 194, 248, 250 Schneider, René 206 Schumacher, Kurt 244 season of memory 13, 21, 31, 34, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51 Silva Henríquez, Raúl 107 Social memory 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 45, 50, 262 Socialist Party (Partido Socialista, PS) 3, 4, 9, 11, 103, 104, 105, 148, 202 Sociedad Nacional de Minería 203 Sofofa (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril) 203, 236 Solís, Alejandro 89, 123 Soto, Angel 178, 183, 187, 188, 192, 193, 194, 195 Spanish Inquisition 93, 94 Stepan, Alfredo 204 Stern, Steve J. 26, 53, 54, 241, 262 Straw, Jack 112, 129 Stroessner, Alfredo 168, 201 student protests 5, 141, 240, 246 study of memory 5, 6 Supreme Court 28, 29, 37, 38, 43, 57, 60, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 98, 108, 109, 110, 118, 127, 236 Talaveras (Spanish political police) 95, 122 Teitelboim, Volodia 133 Tejas Verdes 113, 123, 128, 266

The Clinic 19, 250, 265 The Third Generation 145 There is No Tomorrow without Yesterday 31, 44, 115, See no hay mañana sin ayer Tohá, Carolina 241 Tohá, José 104 Toribio Medina, José 93, 124, 262 torture 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 34, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 63, 65, 70, 75, 78, 81, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 132, 159, 160, 250 transitional justice 1, 62 Traumatic memory (traumatic memories) 2, 5, 6, 140, 244 Tribunal of the Holy Office 93, 94 truth-telling 14, 16, 18, 19, 59, 252 Tuma, Eugenio 168 Tupamaros 200 Ulloa, Francisco 95, 124 UK House of Lords 73, 111 Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI) 9, 10, 45, 46, 150, 169, 172, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 211, 213, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 223, 227, 228, 233 United Nations 16, 92, 108, 112, 120, 122, 263, 265, 266 United Nations Ad Hoc Working Group on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile vii Universidad Diego Portales 27, 56, 57, 60, 63, 77, 84, 88, 131, 132, 162, 249, 251, 257, 266, 268, See Human Rights Observatory UN Working Group on Reparations 19 Valech Commission 13, 18, 19, 28, 34, 44, 45, 50, 51, 60, 91, 92, 93, 109, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 131, 258 Valech, Sergio 28, 44, 91, 116 Valparaíso Court Martial 106

Index 277

Vargas Llosa, Mario 184 Vázquez Aministration (Uruguay) 245 Velasco, Belisario 183 Vera, Robustiano 96, 125 Verdugo, Patricia 58, 65, 130, 160 Vergara, Carlos 113 Vergara, José Eugenio 97 Vial, Gonzalo 17, 92, 221, 255 Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity) 58, 59, 64, 83, 85, 107, 128, 265 Vichy 25, 32, 52, 248, 264 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín 94, 97, 124, 133 Villa Grimaldi 47, 48, 113, 134, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 156, 159, 160, 260, 267 Villalobos, Sergio 155 von Beyme, Klaus 223, 237, 267 Wells, Iván 171 Wilde, Alexander 7, 8, 13, 19, 21, 24, 26, 23, 31, 53, 54, 55, 85, 158, 68, 241, 269 Wilson, Richard 16, 28 World Council of Churches 108 writs of habeas corpus (recursos de amparo) 91, 107, 117 Zapata, Basclay 113

About the Book

How do individual and collective memories of the repressive Pinochet regime affect the fabric of Chilean politics and society today? How have the politics of memory in Chile—including the official policies and symbolic representations that address the painful violations of the past— evolved over the years since Pinochet's demise? The authors of this important new book provide an authoritative assessment of the politics of memory in Chile and consider, as well, the comparative lessons of the Chilean case. Cath Collins is professor of political science at the University Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. She is author of Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador. Katherine Hite is professor of political science and holds the Frederick Ferris Thompson Chair of Political Science at Vassar College. Her publications include Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain and When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–1998. Alfredo Joignant is professor of political science at the University Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. He is author of several books in Spanish, including Los enigmas de la comunidad perdida and Un día distinto. Memorias festivas y batallas conmemorativas en torno al 11 de septiembre en Chile, 1974–2006.

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