40 Years are Nothing:

History and memory

of the 1973 coups dtat
in Uruguay and Chile
Edited by

Pablo Leighton and Fernando Lpez

40 Years are Nothing:

History and memory of the 1973 coups dtat in Uruguay and Chile
Edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando Lpez
This book first published 2015
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2015 by Pablo Leighton, Fernando Lpez and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-7642-9
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7642-1

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................ ix
Pablo Leighton and Fernando Lpez
Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii
J Patrice McSherry
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1
Regional Cooperation and State Terrorism in South America
Fernando Lpez
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17
On History and Memory: Some Reflections on the Process of Transitional
Justice from the Experience of Uruguay (1985-2005)
Pedro Teixeirense
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 33
The Gelman Case and the Legacy of Impunity in Uruguay
Debbie Sharnak
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57
The Celebration: Violence and Consent in the First Anniversary
of the Chilean Coup
Pablo Leighton
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 77
ASIS and ASIO in Chile: Transparency and Double Standards Four
Decades after the Coup
Florencia Melgar and Pablo Leighton
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93
Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile: The Struggle
for Memorials in the 21st Century
Nicols del Valle

vi

Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 111

Moving Memories: Marches Remembering and Embodying the Chilean
and Uruguayan Dictatorships
Yael Zaliasnik
Contributors ............................................................................................. 125

CHAPTER SIX
POLITICS OF MEMORY
AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHILE:
THE STRUGGLE FOR MEMORIALS
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
NICOLS DEL VALLE

The coup of 1973 as a new historical frame of memory

With the coup of 1973 Chilean society started a collective process of
cultural transformation which changed the different ways of thinking
about national history. From the point of view of Memory and Human
Rights Studies (see Vermeulen et al. 2012), the coup created multiple
memories from the repression and unjustified violence against human
lives. In other words, with systematic violence infringing human rights,
the Chilean state produced a damaged memory that it still needs repair
and a struggle for justice and truth. Together with terror, the cultural
transformation brought about by the coup instigated a change of memory
regimes, that is, the interruption of procedures, forms and ways of making
memory for the installation of another set of rituals and forms of memory.
The violence of the dictatorship built a new historical framework and
regime of memory where struggles have appeared. Since the coup, the
Pinochet government defined a network of practices that established the
limits of the things one could remember, or things one had to silence or
forget in the ensuing process of democracy recovery. In this context,
memory and human rights have come together as fundamental
concepts of institutional agendas after the authoritarian regime and the
institutionalisation of international law (see Huyssen 2011).
The struggles for memory that started with the coup of 1973 had a new
political arena with the return to democracy. The process of neoliberal
modernisation cut across the 17 years of dictatorship and the subsequent
20 years of the Concertacin de Partidos por la Democracia (Coalition of

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[Centre-Left] Parties for Democracy). It was marked by the permanent

dispute between the memories of the heirs of the dictatorship, who
appealed to the future by means of forgetting the catastrophic past, and the
memories of the victims of repression, who insisted on the importance of
not forgetting the past events so that barbarism would not occur again. In
the postdictatorship governments, a culture of human rights and the
memories of the victims grew slowly and then became the prevalent
discourse; both were promoted by civil society, political parties and
governments since 1990 until the return of the Right to government in
2010 (see Wilde 1999). This political memory presented itself against the
inherited memory of the dictatorship and asserted an ethics of
remembering developed by governments and human rights movements in
recent Chilean history. The aim of this ethic was to avoid the repetition of
the violence and to seek the realisation of justice. Nowadays, the social
struggle for memory appeals to the realisation of justice in several ways,
including judicial processes, social protest, cultural activities and political
discussion.
Memory is a construction that changes by virtue of the agonistic form
of its constitution: the struggle between memory and forgetfulness forges
the memory itself, but also memory is defined through the confrontation
with other memories. In this way, after the installation of the dictatorship,
the confrontation was not only between the memories that justified rightwing authoritarianism and those of the socialist government of Allende;
but rather it was a permanent conflict between what and how events
should be remembered, forgotten or silenced within the memories of each
political side.
The postdictatorship governments tried to reconcile the struggles for
memory through an institutional acknowledgment of human rights claims.
The regime of memory was consolidated through juridical and political
devices, such as presidential pardons, truth and reconciliation commissions,
emblematic trials, policies of symbolic reparation, and the creation of
institutions that aimed to care for memory and human rights. The
Comisin Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliacin (National Commission of
Truth and Reconciliation, known as the Rettig Commission) or the recent
creation of the National Institute of Human Rights in 2009, are some of
these devices. They embody the political and cultural growth of memory
and human rights and can be analysed as technologies through which the
struggles for memory are heard and silenced. In this way,
memorialisation can become museumification (Agamben 2005, 109;
Costa 2009). Chilean memorialisation has resulted in a reification of
memory, pushing subaltern memories into official memory. The recent

Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile

95

history of memorialising practice in the Chilean transition to democracy

coincides with this struggle between subaltern and official memories (see
Lazzara 2006). A culture of human rights has grown through remembering
but has also ended up petrifying memory.
In this chapter I argue that memory is not just about remembering, but
it is also about forgetting. The critical potential of forgetfulness has not
been considered by the contemporary struggles for truth and justice,
because the main identities behind these memories conceive all forms of
forgetfulness as a barbaric justification of dictatorial violence. Despite
these conceptions, my argument is to recover the importance of forgetting
for critical thinking and the politics of memory in contemporary Chile in
order to avoid an officialisation of memory from the remembrances of the
victims. Through forgetfulness it is also possible to look how different
groups and entities that promote memory and human rights dismiss a
critique of other forms of domination and violence behind institutional
solutions. Such is the dialectics of memory and forgetfulness which
constitutes collective memories. The questions are about what kind of
politics can keep the past alive without becoming its prisoners or how to
deal with the past without exposing ourselves to its repetition.

Commemoration: 40 years after the coup

To commemorate is to remember with others a past event.
Remembering together what the coup of 1973 meant has become a
frequent exercise in the Chilean public sphere. Emblematic places and
dates can be good examples for corroborating this fact. After the
commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the coup, the public debate was
marked by the discussion of national memory. Examples of this were the
controversies around the supposed historical deficit of the Museum of
Memory and Human Rights, an institution created under President
Michelle Bachelet (Rivera 2013; The Clinic 2013; Urquieta 2013); the
proposal to change the emblematic 11 de Septiembre street name in
Santiago (EMOL 2013; Montes 2013; Sierralta 2013); and the Day of the
Young Combatant every 29 March, which commemorates the death of the
Vergara Toledo brothers, fallen during the dictatorship (Raposo 2012). In
all these cases, the dispute was about how to produce a memory of the
infringement of human rights, or how to remember the recent past that is
common to all Chileans. The case of the Museum of Memory and Human
Rights produced a strong discussion on national history and the perception
of the coup. The right-wing government led by President Sebastin Piera
criticised the museums pedagogical approach to the coup because it did

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not talk about the political causes and circumstances that led to it.
However, the overwhelming majority of social and political leaders argued
the opposite. They maintained that some situations like the coup do not
have causes, contexts or circumstances which would justify any violent
political action. This answer was a cultural perspective constructed by
many years of struggle in the democratic transition. In each of the
discussions or commemorations of the dictatorships repression there were
attempts to fix a political memory from a particular perspective. This was
done by means of discourses and narratives inscribed in certain social and
cultural practices such as declarations, tributes, monuments, books, songs,
plaques and movies. Still, more than a year on, it remains unsettled what
movements and displacements of memories occurred in the commemoration
of the 40 years of the coup. Furthermore, the exact situation of memory
and human rights in Chilean society and the precise meaning of all the
commemorations of 2013 are unclear.
The 40th anniversary of the coup witnessed the production of many
activities and initiatives in the public sphere about the violation of human
rights. These included reports, documentaries and television series; books,
seminars and academic conferences in which national and international
guests participated; theatre performances and music concerts; and
declarations from all political parties and authorities. New generations in
the right-wing political elite openly stated a doctrinal renovation with the
purpose of leaving behind the dictatorial legacy that prevented them from
being competitive in democracy (Gonzlez 2014; Toro 2014). The
rejection of the dictatorship in the opinion of citizens has spread to all
political domains as reflected in different surveys taken at a national level
(CERC 2013). These facts showed a certain cultural advance in matters of
human rights, but also made explicit the absence of a politics of memory
with strategic perspectives, which can respond to unresolved problems.
The electoral promise of the Bachelet government (2006-2010) of putting
forward a National Plan of Human Rights in consultation with civil society
remains unfulfilled and the lack of an evaluation process of public policies
on memory implemented in the democratic transition simply confirms the
lack of a political strategy.
Memory inscribes itself in space and time; it materialises in
emblematic places or dates, summoning and addressing subjectivities,
inciting strategies for promoting the acts of remembering, forgetting and
silencing some events. During the process of transition to democracy, for
example, the policy of memorialisation called No hay maana sin ayer
(There is no tomorrow without yesterday) promoted by President Ricardo
Lagos (see 2003) consisted, firstly, in the creation of sites of memory to

Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile

97

respond to the claims of communities of memory and civil organisations.

Its principal aim was to offer victims a form of symbolic reparation,
following the conclusions of the 1991 Rettig Report, as well as
underlining the importance of historical memory as a claim for justice to
come. Moreover, whereas in 2013 President Sebastin Piera participated
in the debate of the 40 years without great engagement (Toro 2013; Volk
2013), 10 years earlier President Lagos led the debate by closing down
some authoritarian enclaves built into the 1980 Constitution and,
particularly, by opening up the Presidential Palace of La Moneda through
the reconstruction of a door in 80 Morand Street, one of the most
important memory places for Chilean politics. Just as Lagos constitutional
reforms was his way of dealing with the demands for a new Constitution
still unfulfilled as of 2015, he has been remembered for the opening
of the symbolic door of La Moneda, destroyed and closed since the coup,
to commemorate the fall of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
The political significance of that door comes from the beginnings of the
20th century, when it was used informally by presidents and ministers to
have a close contact with the people and the press. During the coup,
President Allende and the first victims of the dictatorship came out of La
Moneda through that door (Ensignia 1999; Stern 2006, 175-176; Ottone
2012). In 2003, President Lagos liturgically closed a process of
memorialisation through a very formal and official act, a reopening that
made the subaltern memory of 80 Morand Streets door an official
memory (see Ensignia 1999, 2011; Hite 2003). By being incorporated into
the official memory through the act of 11 September 2003, the memory of
the door was deactivated as counter-institutional memory.
Commemorations are moments where the struggles for memory appear
in the public sphere, but they are also strategies for pacifying these
struggles. The 30th commemoration of the coup served to absorb the
counter-memory of the closed door and to bring back the official idea of a
republic. Anticipating the 40th anniversary of the coup, under the
Presidency of Sebastian Piera, the first right-wing leader after the end of
the dictatorship, there was intense questioning of the pedagogical function
of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. In June 2012, Magdalena
Krebs, the Director of Libraries, Archives and Museums assigned by the
Piera government, attacked the museum for its lack of background and
historical context (in Rivera, 2013; Urqueta 2013). According to Krebs,
the Museum would deliver a message that was not easy to understand
because of an incomplete view of history. This polemical statement
which attempted to justify the coup generated a wide debate around the
role of the state in the promotion of memory and human rights in Chile,

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previewing the struggles for memory fully expressed a year later with the
40th anniversary of the coup.
A vigorous discussion about memory took place then within civil
society between groups, NGOs and other organisations that during the
dictatorship were in the trenches defending human rights. This public
discussion also reached Chilean academia with conferences titled, for
example, Uses and abuses of the history.1 After the establishment of
Truth and Justice commissions, the institutional agenda of human rights
was strengthened in recent years with the creation of a Program of Human
Rights at the Ministry of Interior, the National Institute of Human Rights,
the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the very recent
Undersecretariat of Human Rights by the Piera government. The human
rights discourse, proper to every modern democracy, has consolidated
these institutions in the last two decades, making possible a profound
social debate about the past. However, this new regime raises the question
on the real capacity of governmental institutions for promoting a culture of
human rights and taking care of the democratic deficits in Chilean society.
The struggles of social organisations for defining and redefining the
meaning of past events have materialised in their role in creating and
consolidating sites of memory and helping in the formulation of public
policies. These groups have dealt with the creation of a government policy
offering memorials as a way of reparations for crimes against humanity. In
their view this policy does not fully respond to the demands of many
groups of political prisoners, torture victims and families of executed and
disappeared people. For them, memorials seem just precarious aid, lacking
other forms of support to promote memory. In fact, in Chile there are only
two state-funded memorial sites: Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38. There are
many others not supported, such as the Corporacin Paine, Nido 20, Casa
de Memoria Jos Domingo Caas, Casa de Derechos Humanos de
Magallanes, coordinated globally through the Red de Sitios de Memoria
(www.sitiosdememoria.cl) and the International Coalition of Sites of
Conscience (www.sitesofconscience.org). These memorials do not have
budgets for managing cultural and pedagogical activities with local,
national and international visitors. That is why several memorials and
communities manifest the absence of a political strategy to assume the
importance of the sites for the development of human rights culture
(Londres 38 et. al., 2013).

1
See www.acuarentaanosdelgolpe.wordpress.com and
www.especiala40anosdelgolpe.udp.cl.

Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile

99

Memorials and communities of memory

According to Theodor Adorno, suffering is a human affect that is
inaccessible to human language. As he expressed the point polemically,
after Auschwitz no poetry could be written (Adorno 1998, 15-30; 1984,
248). If a brutal act as the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany could be
described, that description would be incapable of exposing the whole
extent of the barbarism (Richard 2008, 19). Adorno tries to determine how
to express an atrocity like Auschwitz, if the matter in question is an event
that overwhelms every possible representation. Adorno did not give any
answers to these issues in his texts about the Holocaust, but he did address
them in his posthumous work Aesthetic Theory (1997). The language of
suffering is a way to represent the non-representable in the aesthetic
dimension of sensitivity and of pictorial thought, more than in
representational thought (see Lemm 2009; Richard 2007). Following
Adornos philosophical approach, the way of doing justice to the lost
memories of the victims of genocide is through art. By recalling Adornos
critique of suffering we can reconsider the importance of places of
memory such as museums, monuments or memorials, among others.
Indeed, these places of memory have as purpose the symbolic exposition
of suffering caused by the infringement of human rights.
For the aim of justice, trials, Truth commissions and economic
reparations are not enough; this is the reason for existence of museums and
memorials. They make justice through a symbolic sense. The Truth reports
and the trials of those who committed criminal acts during the dictatorship
have tried to offer reparations for the damage done. However, a damaged
life cannot be redeemed only through the politics of reparation, truth and
justice, implemented since the return to democracy (Brett et al. 2007; Klep
2012). In fact, justice as the recovery of lost lives is impossible. The act of
reparation is infinite. This is precisely what justifies the construction of
places of memory alongside policies of reparation. Justice must not only
apply from the present towards the future, but it should also be possible to
do justice for past victims through the aesthetic representation of memory.
Justice, then, should be conceived in a wider scope, including different
modalities of reparations, ranging from economic reparations through
sentencing of the perpetrators, to the honouring of the memory of victims.
In the Chilean case, the communities of memory that represent their
suffering symbolically in memorials share a traumatic past. This can be
seen in the books Memoriales en Chile (Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales
2007) and Geografa de la Memoria by the Program of Human Rights
(Ministerio del Interior 2010). In both, the politics of memory of the most

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recent governments of the Concertacin de Partidos por la Democracia

are formally dedicated to the construction of memorials around the country
to serve the initiatives of social organisations. As early as 1991, the Rettig
Report declared the obligation that state authorities have with the victims
of human rights violations to providein the most reasonable
timemeasures and the necessary resources [for] cultural and symbolic
projects for the memory of victims, establishing a new basis for social
life (Comisin Rettig 1991).
According to the geography of memory traced over 32 memorials,
built with the support of the Program of Human Rights and the
Architecture Office of the Chilean Ministry of Public Works, these sites
of memory presuppose communities of memory that took the first
initiative of building the memorials. These communities, private law
corporations, collectives, commissions and cultural centres, have founded
their selves on their remembering of what happened (Jones 2000, 393;
Rosenberg 2000). They lie on the identity substrate of social memory,
which Nelly Richard has detected in images, symbols, narratives and
scenes whose figurative languages, in a postdictatorial landscape, hover
around the traces and gaps of what is missing (2010: 14). Memory, and
especially the memory of repression, presents itself by means of marks and
places moving between the missing and the traces of those who are no
longer here, the executed and the disappeared. In other words, the
common of the community of memory does not get reduced in the
presence of marks and places, but above all, it consists of the enduring
grief about who is missing, the absence of spouses, daughters, sons and
friends.
The abundant literature on the relations between space and memory
starts with Pierre Noras famous work Les Liex de mmoire (Places of
memory) where he defines the place of memory as constructions
designated to detain time, block the work of forgetfulness, fix a state of
affairs, immortalize death, materialize the immaterial to keep the most of
meanings in the minimum of signs (2009: 33). For Steve Stern, the places
of memory can be understood as memory knots, or as concrete referents
that tie up lost memories appealing to the subject, manifesting the tension
between memory and body (2000). The place of memory is a space that
is symbolically built and that tries to define the meaning of the collective
past by remembering what must not be forgotten, and such a place can
take the form of a street, a building, a monument, a museum, a park, a
stadium or an animita (Latin American informal altars that remember
tragic deaths). According to Jelin and Langland (2003), the places of
memory are a type of territorial mark that goes beyond a site.

Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile

101

Memories are settled in marks that correspond to the past through

inscriptions, allowing the act of remembering to circulate, to be
reproduced or modified. The site is a physical or geographical space that
when important events come out it transforms itself into a place with
particular meanings, charged of senses and feelings for the subjects that
lived it (Jelin & Langland, 2003: 3). The concept of place of memory is a
kind of territorial mark of remembering, which includes a direct relation
with subjects, with their feelings, sufferings and hopes. Such are places
that after brutal events like coups or acts of genocide take a collective
meaning expressing the suffering of many people. These places of
memory are meaningful for many people because of their symbolic and
politically restorative function. This close relation between the diverse
places of memory and the communities of memory exposes the need for a
liturgical and collective dimension of commemoration. This has been the
principal driving force behind Chilean public policies and funding of
memorials, but also shows how these policies need to advance further to
respond to community engagements, including economic support.
Memorials are a result of state and civil society initiatives. The
commemorations of violations of human rights had been associated with
specific landmarks in the Chilean geography, due to their functions of
cultural resistance. This form of memory became an imperative part of the
institutional acknowledgment during the political transition to democracy.
Furthermore, these sites of memory were included in an official memory
that reproduces a national discourse about the common past. During the
dictatorship, a subaltern memory was systematically denied. However,
after the government of Pinochet this memory has been progressively
incorporated in the official discourse about the recent political past. After
being a silenced memory, the inclusion of the victims memory into a
national memory made the former lose in some cases their potency against
traditional ways of remembering.
All places of memory are a technology that records in that territory the
non-visible horrors of the past. Actually, many of the memorials have
become real cultural centres that cultivate the memory of repression,
managing diplomas, documentaries, oral and photographic archives,
cultural activities and social research. Also, the relationship between
community and sites of memory is not univocal. The sites of memory
reproduce both remembering and forgetting and it generates a struggle
about the reconstruction of the past or the making of memory. These
places of memory do not only suppose a community, but recreate and
reaffirm their bonds by expressing suffering and opening up the possibility
of talking about what happened. Following Nelly Richard, every place of

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memory associated to the task of promoting and defending human rights

has the mission of recovering and conserving the marks of that traumatic
past. This task consists of giving a testimony of what was experienced in
those places for the public acknowledgement of the suffering and the
creation of a collective history through the technologies of archives,
documents and testimonies (Richard, 2010: 233). In the end, memorials
encapsulate many elements of the discussion of the politics of memory and
human rights in Chile:
Memorials in post-conflict societies are all about processwhat should the
memorial be about, what groups are involved in the memorials impetus
and design, who build it, who funds it, who controls the memorial once
established and to what degree, and how lasting in time does the memorial
prove to be? (Collins and Hite, 2009: 382).

These questions, necessary for any evaluation of the social and

political impact of memorials, are about the initiatives behind their
creation, that is, the communities and the struggles for memory. Everyone
who participates in these communities has something in common: the loss
of a relative or friend. In Chile, the forming of these communities has been
permanently characterised by the struggle for memory itself: first, for
defining the meaning of what happened or how we remember the past
violence; and secondly, to be acknowledged as subjects worthy of respect
and justice. There have been three axes of the struggles and politics of
memory: the truth about the past events has to be known; those responsible
for crimes have to be found and sentenced; and the reparation of the
victims damages is an infinite task. The fact that these discourses have
entered into the official memory through public policies, programs and
institutions, is a result of these struggles.

Sites of memory: between political struggle

and public policy
The public responsibility for truth, justice and reparation in a culture of
human rights must acknowledge that these issues are an interminable task.
For that reason, if the state focuses on the construction of monuments and
memorials it should not forget the protagonists and the heirs of memory.
The communities of memory that maintain and manage the sites of
memory must be supported. After public policies have concentrated their
efforts on sites, one of the recent discoveries is the urgency to study and
consolidate communities of memory to promote a democratic culture (Del
Valle and Galvez 2014). This is corroborated by the experiences of spaces

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103

without community support, which have not had the expected impact and
have become monuments or desolate sites. Some memorials have turned
into ruins. The places of memory cannot be understood as independent of
the communities of memories not only because the sites were mostly built
by these communities. The management and maintenance of the
memorials require an active participation of the communities involved.
The human, technical and economic resources necessary for the
maintenance of a site of memory should be included in the analysis of
public policies. The strategies of the communities for getting together the
minimum resources to administer a memorial or how many communities
have failed in their efforts to manage a site should be considered.
In 2012, the Institute of Public Policy in Human Rights of the South
American MERCOSUR (Common Market of the South) elaborated a
document that responds to the task of evaluating public policy on memory
and human rights (MERCOSUR 2012). MERCOSUR member countries
and partners must aim for the institution of a culture of human rights at a
normative and operative level to corroborate the commitment with these
principles rising from international law. The Latin American agenda in
matters of memory and human rights is characterised by the evaluation of
government policies implemented since the end of dictatorships in the
region (see chapters by Teixeirense and Sharnak). In Chile, the
involvement of communities with sites of memory and, particularly, the
symbolic aims of memorials have not been fully evaluated.
A very large part of the memorials built during the postdictatorial
governments were promoted by organisations of civil society known as
Agrupaciones de Familiares (Associations of Families) and by human
rights organisations. Their efforts are a public exercise of memory through
diverse activities, such as cultural workshops, visits to the memorials,
human rights education, reunions, artistic events and social studies. These
features can be verified in every site of memory that is closely managed by
a community. The promotion of memory and human rights is always a
public action. In other words, when we consider the communities in public
policies their organisational capacities within the public sphere must be
incorporated. The promotion of human rights implies a public exercise to
gain a wider influence beyond the frontiers of memorials, reaching local
governments and civil society. Sites of memory that lack an effective bond
with the environment are geographical spaces that do not accomplish their
purpose.
Theoretically, public policies respond to public problems and seek to
understand them, generating a social impact, thereby creating a public
good. The impact in the case of a place of memory is given by the

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preservation and effective promotion of memory and human rights from

the triad site/community/environment. However, in Chile this does not
happen. There is a need to know the impact that public policies have had
in locally and nationally and in the assertion of a culture of human rights
after of the acknowledgement of their violation.
On 11 October 2013, a group of sites and communities of memory sent
a letter to all Presidential candidates (Londres 38 et al. 2013). This
document confirms the difficult situation of the sites of memory in Chile
and their agenda in the public debate. The partial funding by the state is
one of the first problems. If it is true that there are some sites of memory
that contemplate direct funding, such as Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38,
this measure has meant greater awareness of the inequality with respect to
smaller sites that cannot afford the minimum activities for the
management, preservation and promotion of memory. Most sites of
memory become a heavy load for communities because they do not have
the resources. In addition, the private sector does not have incentives to
promote social responsibility in terms of human rights, like other countries
in the region. That is why the struggle for memory has become a heritage
for older people but not for other generations. Thus, without resources, the
struggle for memory is increasingly difficult.
This general diagnosis shows that Chilean public policy in matters of
memory and human rights has been characterised by a lack of a strategy to
coordinate the different institutions of civil society and the state. Several
organisations and political parties share this point of view. The issue is
about the general line of a memory and human rights policy. In their letter
to the presidential candidates, the communities of memory requested an
acknowledgment of claimed sites by communities of memory; support in
the management and functioning of the sites based in the autonomy of the
communities; assurances that they will receive stable funding; promotion
of research and production of knowledge in these matters; visits to
memorials within the human rights curriculum in school education; and a
definition of a policy that promotes complete public access in the entire
country (Londres 38 et al. 2013). These proposals by communities behind
the sites of memory are a new political strategy about the collective past,
not only related to the memorials but to the coordination of sites, social
organisations and public institutions for the development of a democratic
culture of memory and human rights.

Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile

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Conclusions
The Chilean state has formulated memory and human rights policies to
acknowledge the victims memories by society, but it has not given a
response to claims about the importance of promoting a culture of memory
and human rights. The memory of the victims has become museumified
by the state, that is, fixed and undynamic. Public policies such as the
search for truth, economic reparations, judicial process and symbolic
events had been made to address political demands and human rights
conventions (Ruderer 2010). However, a lack of coordination among the
different policies reveals the need of a public effort with sound political
strategy. These public policies have been isolated measures to respond to
certain social struggles, but they were not designed as part of an overall
strategy. Chile has policies of memory and human rights without the
politics. The political deficit is demonstrated by the absence of an
evaluation of the symbolic in public policies and the social and political
impacts. Currently, these sites of memory built by the state have not
productively related memory and human rights governance with social
organisations. For these memorials to promote and develop a democratic
culture based in memory and human rights, the government should
strengthen that same relation.
Meanwhile, as several organisations and communities who manage the
sites of memory have argued, behind memory and human rights
governance it is possible to find other forms of discrimination and
symbolic violence. For instance, the repetition of national narratives by
public institutions and discourses can solidify the memories keeping only
one way of remembering. This goes against the changing nature of
memory and also establishes inequalities between victims, communities
and sites of memory. Chilean official memory through public discourses
has been characterised as a narrative of victims that defines the political
identities of subjects and social actors. Subjects only become victims, not
martyrs, fighters, heroes or militants. Nowadays, some sites and
communities of memory like Londres 38 have protested against this
univocal official memory arguing that their own memory is not about
victims but is rather a militant memory. This other way of remembering, a
more active memory, does not expect to be acknowledged just by the state,
but it actually struggles against the official devices of memory. Secondly,
official policies prioritise some memories, sites and victims over others,
often reinforcing rivalries between them. These inequalities are mostly
about economic support and the symbolic promotion by the state and
governments. Crucially, if the memories of the disappeared, tortured,

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Chapter Six

executed and exiled have all the same relevance within national memory,
why then are some memorials more important than others? Why are urban
memories more important than their rural counterparts? In this context, the
main task is to contribute to a critique of the regime of memory and the
governance of human rights in Chile. This critique should be against
hidden forms of domination and violence and in favour of certain
subjugated memories. This critique of memory is not against the policies
of memory themselves, but against all forms of symbolic domination
expressed in oblivion, silence or petrified remembering.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Nicols del Valle (nicolasdelvalle.o@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate in

Philosophy at Leiden University (Netherlands) and Universidad Diego
Portales (Chile), and has a Master of Arts in Contemporary Thought and a
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He is a visiting researcher at the
Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, Germany, and a researcher at the
Centre for Political Analysis and Research (CAIP) in Chile. He is also a
visiting fellow at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of
New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His current research areas are in
philosophy, the social sciences, media under democracy, the politics of
human rights, critical theory and biopolitics. The chapter in the present
book was written as part of his research activities in the doctoral program
in Philosophy at the Institute of Humanities, Universidad Diego Portales,
Chile.
Pablo Leighton (pabloleighton@gmail.com) researches the notion and
practices of propaganda in XX century and current media, and specifically
on the history of audio-visual culture in Chile and Latin America since the
1970s until today. He has taught at universities in Australia, United States,
Chile and Honduras, and has worked as film director, screenwriter and
editor in various fiction and documentary productions. He holds a PhD in
Latin American studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile, and in
Media and Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney. He also
has a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of
Art (Boston, US). He is co-director of the Latin American Research Group
Australia (www.latitudesgroup.info) with Fernando Lpez.
Fernando Lpez (f.lopez@unswalumni.com) holds a PhD in History
from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts with
Honours in History from the same institution. Together with Dr Pablo
Leighton, he co-directs Latitudes: Latin American Research Group
Australia. His areas of research focus on contemporary Latin American
History, the Cold War in Latin America and, especially, on how the
military regimes of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia
agreed to formally launch Operation Condor in November 1975.

126

Contributors

J Patrice McSherry (pmcsherr@liu.edu) is a professor of political

science at Long Island University and author of numerous books and
articles on Latin America. Her works include: Cross-border terrorism:
Operation Condor, NACLA Report on the Americas 32(6): 34-35 (1999);
Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System, Social Justice
26(4): 144-174 (1999); Operation Condor: New pieces of the puzzle,
NACLA Report on the Americas 34(6): 26 (2001); Tracking the origins of
a State Terror network: Operation Condor, Latin American Perspectives
29(1): 38-60 (2002); Predatory states: Operation Condor and covert war
in Latin America, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
(2005); Death squads as parallel forces: Uruguay, Operation Condor and
the United States, Journal of Third World Studies 24(1): 13 (2007); and
Introduction to 'Shadows of State Terrorism: Impunity in Latin America
(with Ral Molina Meja), Social Justice 26(4): 1-12 (2007). Her most
recent book is Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s1973, Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2015). She has been
currently teaching at Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile.
Florencia Melgar (florenciamelgar@gmail.com) is an investigative
journalist and independent researcher. She produced No Toquen Nada,
once the highest rating current affairs radio show in Uruguay. She coauthored the books Las palabras que llegaron in 2009 and Sabotaje a la
verdad in 2006. She has worked for SBS Radio and Online, the ABC,
Instituto Cervantes and the website Latinhub.com.au that she directs and
was finalist as Best Use of Online in New South Wales (NSW) Premiers
multicultural Media Awards 2014. Melgar was awarded the best
investigative story of the year in NSW multicultural media for the
multimedia report The Other 9/11. In 2011, she was nominated Latin
Woman of the Year in Australia for the contribution of Latinhub.com.au to
the Latin American community in Australia. She is a PhD candidate at
RMIT University in Melbourne and the title of her thesis is: The
exemption of Australias intelligence agencies from the FOI Act and its
impact in journalism and democracy.
Debbie Sharnak (sharnak@wisc.edu) is a PhD candidate at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison (US) studying the history of human rights,
transnational networks, and international relations. Her dissertation,
"Uruguay and the Contested International History of Human
Rights", examines the origins and evolution of human rights discourse in
Uruguay, particularly during its transition back to democratic rule. The
work addresses issues of transitional justice, the rise of the transnational

40 Years are Nothing

127

human rights movement, and the shifting terrain of human rights in the
1970s and 1980s. Her publications include: "Uruguay and the Reconceptualization of Transitional Justice," in Transitional Justice and
Legacies of State Violence in Latin America, Marcia Esparza and Nina
Schneider, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. (2015) (forthcoming);
"Sovereignty and human rights: re-examining Carters foreign policy
Towards the Third World," Diplomacy & Statecraft, 25(2): 303-330
(2014); Moral Responsibility and the ICC: Child Soldiers in the
DRC, Eyes on the International Criminal Court, 4(1) (2007).
Pedro Teixeirense (pedroteixeirense@gmail.com) is at PhD candidate at
the University of Ro de Janeiro. In 2014, Pedro worked as a researcher for
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), serving as a
Research Analyst with the Brazilian National Truth Commission (CNV)
that investigated the human rights violations committed during the last
dictatorship (1964-1985). His works include: Justia de transio e
processos de transio: alguns aspectos histricos a partir da experincia
uruguaia, Revista Ars Historica, 8 Edio: 23-40 (2014); O que resta da
ditadura, o que havia de ns: histria e memria nos mecanismos de
justia de transio no Brasil, Revista Cantareira (Dossi Os legados das
ditaduras Civis-militares), 20 Edio (Jan-Jun): 6-15 (2014).
Yael Zaliasnik (yzaliasnik@gmail.com) is a journalist and Master in
Literature from Universidad Catlica de Chile, and has a PhD in Latin
American Studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Some of her
areas of academic interest are Cultural Studies, Theatricality, Art and
Politics, and Memory. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the
Universidad de Santiago de Chile. She has published, among others, the
articles 40 aos de performances e intervenciones urbanas de Clemente
Padn (2010) and Memoria en construccin: el debate sobre la Esma
(2011), e-misfrica issues 7.2 and 8.1, The Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics, New York University.