In his 1998 play, La tierra insomne o La puta madre, Chilean playwright Marco Antonio de la Parra represents theatrically the political, psychological and historical complexities undergone by his nation from the pre-Allende to the post-Pinochet period. Through the resurrection as effigies of two non-living characters, the dramatist demonstrates how collective memory and amnesia in the Chilean context are performative processes that can be reworked and revised through the theatrical mode. In his dramatic critique of the Pinochet regime, de la Parra employs meta-theater to incite both on-stage and off-stage audiences to consider critically the political motivations for creating an amnesic nation while he questions the official history of Chile's recent military government. The innumerable versions of the violent death of Chilean folk musician V?ctor Jara demon strate his countrymen's penchant simultaneously to retell, reinvent, and suppress stories about the past under Dictator Augusto Pinochet. The Jara story is well known, although it is infrequently narrated the same way twice and is yet to be recognized as a part of the country's official history. On September 11,1973, at the very moment that Pinochet staged the coup to oust Salvador Allende, Jara sang at the Universidad T?cnica, just a few miles south of where planes maneuvered through high-rise buildings to bomb the presidential palace. In one version of the story, when the singer heard about the siege in downtown Santiago, he passed his guitar through the audience in a gesture of solidarity and protest. Several hours later, the musician and other university dissidents were rounded up and transported to the now infamous Stadium of Chile, where the first group of political prisoners was detained. Some captives remember Jara's tortured body during his five-day incarceration. They say that the military riddled his flesh with lit cigarettes and beat him to death with such brutality that his eyes were swollen shut and his body was covered with blood. Some testify that the authorities broke Jara's hands, while others insist that they were publicly amputated to demonstrate the regime's imposition of its power and to reinforce the helplessness of the counterculture. Although the details of his story may never be verified, many believe that after several torture sessions, Jara was killed by machine gun and buried in a mass grave. When questioned about the performer's torture and death, officials denied all accusations and insisted that the Jara story was an invention. Despite the testimony of eyewitnesses in the stadium, the military claimed that the musician was never captured (Constable and Valenzuela 31). Although the authorities initially employed performances of brutality to augment their con trol over the nation, they later sought to repress accounts of such acts. The regime that had once utilized these public displays of violence to create a culture of fear within Chile now denies human rights violations in order to frustrate the opposition's attempt to reconstruct a version of national history that questions the impunity of military officials. The military's denial of its involvement in Jara's story demonstrates the inability to incorporate the personal histories of torture victims Cardone, Resha