40 Years are Nothing:

History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile

Edited by

Pablo Leighton and Fernando López

40 Years are Nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile Edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando López 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 López 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 López Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii J Patrice McSherry Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Regional Cooperation and State Terrorism in South America Fernando López 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 Nicolás del Valle

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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

NICOLÁS 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 Concertación 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 right-wing 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 Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (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

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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 Sebastián Piñera criticised the museum’s 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 dictatorship’s 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 (González 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 mañana 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

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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 Sebastián Piñera 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 Morandé 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 Morandé Street’s 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 Piñera, 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 Piñera 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 Piñera 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 Corporación Paine, Nido 20, Casa de Memoria José Domingo Cañas, 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.

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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 Adorno’s philosophical approach, the way of doing justice to the lost memories of the victims of genocide is through art. By recalling Adorno’s 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 Geografía 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 Concertación 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 provide…in the most reasonable time…measures and the necessary resources [for] cultural and symbolic projects” for the memory of victims, “establishing a new basis for social life” (Comisión 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 Nora’s famous work Les Liex de mémoire (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.

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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 process—what should the memorial be about, what groups are involved in the memorial’s 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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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.

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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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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

Nicolás 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 López. Fernando López (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.

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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 Raúl Molina Mejía), Social Justice 26(4): 1-12 (2007). Her most recent book is “Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s-1973”, 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 co-authored 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) Premier’s 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 Australia´s 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

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human rights movement, and the shifting terrain of human rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Her publications include: "Uruguay and the Re-conceptualization 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 Carter’s 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 Río 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: “Justiça de transição e processos de transição: alguns aspectos históricos a partir da experiência uruguaia”, Revista Ars Historica, 8ª Edição: 23-40 (2014); “O que resta da ditadura, o que havia de nós: história e memória nos mecanismos de justiça de transição no Brasil”, Revista Cantareira (Dossiê Os legados das ditaduras Civis-militares), 20ª Edição (Jan-Jun): 6-15 (2014).

Yael Zaliasnik (yzaliasnik@gmail.com) is a journalist and Master in Literature from Universidad Católica 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 años de performances e intervenciones urbanas de Clemente Padín” (2010) and “Memoria en construcción: el debate sobre la Esma” (2011), e-misférica issues 7.2 and 8.1, The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York University.