Chilean Dictatorship Research Articles

APSI

Abstract During the dictatorship in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, a small number of publications openly published prodemocracy critiques. APSI magazine was one of them. This teaching tool shows how to read for criticisms of Pinochet in an overground magazine that could not always overtly criticize the sitting regime.

El lugar de la violencia hacia los pobladores durante la dictadura cívico-militar en Chile: disputas y silenciamientos en la construcción de narrativas oficiales (1973-2023)

Objective/context: The article analyzes the tensions in the construction of official and alternative truths about the repression of pobladores during the civil- military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990). Despite the magnitude and massiveness of the repression against this group, it has only been officially recognized in a nominal and exclusive way. Based on a socio-historical reconstruction of the place occupied by the repression toward the impoverished sectors of the city, we investigate the narratives contained in the official reports of the truth commissions and the alternative responses of civil society. Methodology: A case study based on documentary analysis of reports, press, and secondary bibliography. Conclusions: The study evidences the contentious character of settlers in the canonical narratives on political violence during the civil-military dictatorship. In this context, civil society has played a key role in the dispute over the meanings and temporalities of violence; similarly, the place of pobladores as key actors in the political dynamics of the last decades is discussed. Originality: Given the scarcity of works that focus on the representation of pobladores in building official and alternative truths, our findings highlight the gaps and debts in constructing truths about the places and subjects of violence fifty years after the coup d’état in Chile.

Biopolitics and Inscriptions: Raúl Zurita's Poetry as a <i>communitas</i> of Pain

This article analyzes part of the poetic work of Raúl Zurita, expressed both in some of his poetry books and in his "inscriptions" or material inscriptions and in his corporal self-mutilations to determine the functions that his art fulfills in the face of neoliberal biopolitical practices (Foucault, Agamben, Calveiro) and as a bet for a communitas of pain (Diéguez). It explains the meaning and function of books such as Purgatorio (1982), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985) and zurita/in memoriam (2007), or interventions such as her verse "ni pena ni miedo" in the Atacama Desert, her presence in memorials or her intervention "El mar del dolor"; all as differentiated forms of resistance from art, against strategies of power that tried to "let die" part of the society in the context of the military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) and also in other contexts of human rights violations.

Análisis de las acciones ciudadanas del alumnado al estudiar la dictadura civil militar chilena

Various measurements on the civic values of young Chileans have shown their inclination to justify dictatorships in the case of offering order, security or economic benefits, in addition to the validation of violence to resolve conflicts. Considering this background, the purpose of this article is to analyze the citizenship actions that students develop in the present and project in the future to protect democracy and human rights during the study of the Chilean dictatorship, based on a wide variety of historical documents. This is an exploratory qualitative research that analyzes, from the methodology of content analysis, 70 answers developed by 35 students belonging to two high school classes of a private school in Santiago, Chile. The results show that the students consider themselves in the present and project themselves in the future as active citizens committed to democracy and human rights. Thus, actions such as valuing the vote, listening to those who think differently, staying informed, participating in demonstrations, respecting others and learning from the past are the most relevant for the participants. In spite of the above, the responses of the young people also show that they avoid conflict and understand their exercise of citizenship as part of their individual personal development, in addition to showing little knowledge about institutions, civil organizations and the multiple forms of political action that people can develop.

Blood on the Peaceful Road: The Second Issue of Latin American Perspectives and the Struggle against the Chilean Dictatorship

Blood on the Peaceful Road: The Second Issue of <i>Latin American Perspectives</i> and the Struggle against the Chilean Dictatorship

Memories in between: Daughters from the Chilean diaspora in Sweden speak about their mothers

While literature on memory and dictatorship in Latin America is extensive and narratives departing from the memories of children are evolving, the (gendered) intergenerational processes at the core of the experience of military terror, from the specific location of the diaspora, have so far been marginal in both research and in public debates. What is the language through which collective experiences of violence and political persecution are told to the next generation in diaspora contexts? What does it mean to articulate narratives from the dictatorship in Chile with memories emerging from the diaspora located in Sweden? This understanding is a vital point of departure in our study of young female adults whose parents came to Sweden after the Pinochet military takeover, a group that we here refer to as the daughters of the Chilean diaspora in Sweden.

La educación en el proceso inicial de articulación institucional de la Dictadura Civil Militar en Chile (1973-1975)

This article seeks to analyze the role assigned to education in the first moments of institutional construction of the Civil Military Dictatorship in Chile (1973-1975). Methodologically, a historical study was developed based on the analysis of different types of sources, such as laws, decrees, minutes and strategic documents, documents that communicate the main ideological guidelines of the regime. The conclusions indicate that education in these documents is located in a place of political restriction, neoliberal in economics and conservative in values.

Geographies of violence: the Chilean police militarization and surveillance methods

The direct targeting of protesters’ eyes during the October 18, 2019, is an example of the systematic policy of violence carried out by the Chilean state against the protest. The abuses by the shock forces extend beyond causing blindness to the protesters and encompass a range of physical and psychological abuses. These abuses are a legacy of the institutional tools of the Chilean dictatorship, designed to depoliticize revolutionary movements. From a geographical, institutional, and anarchist perspective, the research sought to understand, through the analysis of data and content from over 3,000 files, the actions of the police from the period of 1973 to the present, which promote the dismantling of revolutionary movements, thus historically reproducing connected acts of violence in areas of popular conflict. This phenomenon is recognized as “violent geographies”. The research revealed that institutions, organizations, and coercive agencies, through their process of militarization and politicization, employ various mechanisms of social control. On the one hand, there are tangible aspects, such as armament and the militarization of spaces, as well as confrontations. On the other hand, there are intangible factors, such as administrative vices, categorizations, and stigmatizations. These mechanisms contribute to discrediting organized groups and territories and foster both direct and indirect forms of violence, which can be more insidious and ongterm. Nonetheless, within these violent geographies, “protest geographies” also emerge, representing collective actions of mutual support and cooperation. These actions keep the flame of the uprising alive continuously.

(Re)Building a Community through collective art

This article explores the themes of exile, memory, and how a community can heal through collective art-making. Since 2018 the project Bordando por la memoria- Embroidering Memory has been working on textiles that memorialize the lives of the men, women, and children killed in the Chilean dictatorship. It is a patchwork of personal testimonies and gives historical context to the use of making textiles in Chile as a way of collective resistance. Written from the perspective of a second-generation Chilean it fills the gap of always being the subject and not the expert. It aims to discuss the importance of making art for people collectively whilst speaking to the needs of a group as well as the need to keep memory alive.

State Repression and Opposition Survival in Pinochet’s Chile

Why do some groups survive government repression while others get eliminated? This paper offers a corrective to the widely held theory that locally embedded opposition organizations with large and interconnected networks of civilian supporters are better adapted to survive. It argues that extreme and selective violent repression from a capable state requires strict compartmentalization and social detachment. These measures slow the speed and reach of repression. I test these propositions by examining the top targets of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Cross-checking individuals on the Pinochet’s target lists against the victims lists, the article shows that the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) had a significantly lower rate of victimization than the other top targets. Archival and interview data demonstrate that MIR’s higher survival rate is due to the mechanisms proposed. This study renders intended repression observable and offers implications for the survival of a wide range of actors.

Reparation Policy in Gendered Political Violence: Gendered Torture During the Dictatorship and the Recent “Social Explosion” in Chile

This study explores the gendered violence dimension present in the torture exerted in Chile and the problems that continue to affect the reparation policies. The analysis covers the cases of political prisoners during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) and that of the people detained within the context of the social protest of October 18, 2019. The methodology used for this study includes desk research on secondary sources on gendered political violence and torture such as scholarly books, journalistic and academic articles, and non-governmental organization reports, analyzing their contents from a perspective based on human rights and gender. We argue that the crystallization of gender-based violence exerted by Chilean State agents is linked to the biases present in post-dictatorship reparation policy and reflect on the impact of these biases on the assurances of non-repetition of human rights violations.

Repackaging in South–North Policy Learning: The Chilean Model of Pension Reform as a Lopsided Exportschlager

South–North policy learning faces many obstacles and often leads to missed opportunities or distorted translations. Given the pariah nature of the Chilean dictatorship, international learning happened against all odds. Drawing on several sources – media content, parliamentary debates, and some background interviews – the article illustrates how the Chilean pension reform became “repackaged” in two ways. First, it was concealed, meaning proponents avoided referencing Chile. Second, it was imperfectly translated, which led to several distortions, such as avoiding a reflection on the political prerequisites for stable pension reforms. Some general lessons are derived for South–North policy learning.

Un espacio ambiguo

This essay focuses on the circulation of visual arts during a specific period of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile: between 1975 and 1981. It was during these years that the economic measures that led the country to a neoliberal economy began to be implemented, while policies of intervention and censorship continued. This article will examine relationships between intervention and censorship in Chile and their impact on the circulation of art by means of a case study on the contest known as the Colocadora Nacional de Valores, which was held annually between 1975 and 1981 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, an institution under government control. In this contest, works that commented on the country’s political situation were exhibited and given prizes. This article attempts to link the contest’s sponsors to Chile’s economic turn to account for this turn’s cultural facet. Studying the history of this contest enables us to reflect on the various factors that influenced and allowed the circulation of visual arts at a time when an official defense of freedom (of economic activity) coexisted with government policies of control, censorship, and intervention.

‘The struggle does not only go on, but it is continuous’: Artistic resistance in Santiago de Chile: Delight Lab and CADA

Art accompanies demonstrations, deriving motifs from them and strengthening the sense of community by developing a collective imaginary. In times of repression, violence and censorship during the Chilean dictatorship, the interdisciplinary artistic collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (1979–83) transformed the streets into their exhibition space. Decades later, the collective Delight Lab paid tribute to CADA. The connection between the two collectives is approached from a mnemonic perspective. The research design focuses on memory activism showing how the recurrence of certain images from the past contributes to empower contemporary movements.

Oral and maxillo-facial injuries in victims of political repression during the Chilean dictatorship.

Chile was under a civil-military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. During that time, systematic violations to human rights were perpetrated. Oral and maxillo-facial trauma was not an exception, and such trauma was carried out through different methods of torture or ill treatment by agents of the State. Currently, Chile has laws and programs in the public healthcare system to carry out the re-habilitation and reparation process in victims, and the registration of the suffered injuries is considered an important part of these med-ico-legal procedures. The aim of this study is to describe and classify the type of torture or ill-treatment in the orofacial area of victims of political repression during the Chilean military dictatorship and relate them to the injuries registered in written reports. 14 reports of oral and maxillo-fa-cial injuries of tortured victims from 2016 to 2020 were analyzed, considering the alleged history of the patient, the visible effects on the oral examination, and the type of torture that was inflicted. Historical clinical records and X ray exams were analyzed when available. 6 variations of torture and ill-treat-ment that involve the maxillo-facial area were caused by agents of the State during the dic-tatorship period. According to the patient ́s account and the clinical examination, all of the torture techniques applied caused, directly or indirectly, the loss of teeth. This resulted in not only physical problems, but psychological problems for the victims.

The Histories We Tell

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt discusses the emphasis on history and memory in recent Latin American cinema. Taking Pablo Larraín’s No (2012), about the plebiscite that marked the end of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, as an ur-text, he examines the more recent films Bardo, falsa crünica de unas cuantas verdades (Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2022), Nuestra película (Our Movie, dir. Diana Bustamante, 2022), and Argentina, 1985 (Santiago Mitre, 2022). These films suggest that Latin American filmmakers are again claiming cinema as an active participant in fashioning how the region’s history is understood, both from within and abroad. Building on the metafictional conceit that to (re)write history is to (re)shape it, they highlight the “story” aspect of “history” by asking viewers to (re)examine how and what one chooses to see, to watch, to remember.

Introduction: How Augusto Pinochet’s Constitution Came into Existence and How it Endured until 2022

For the past forty-two years Chile has been governed according to the infamous 1980 Constitution. Bequeathed to the country by its military dictator Augusto Pinochet, this text was originally designed to sustain an infinite de facto dictatorship in Chile. While this did not happen, and despite having been repeatedly amended since 1989, the 1980 Constitution is still considered an illegitimate text by most Chileans, as the 2020 Chilean national plebiscite has illustrated. The introduction provides a genealogy of the 1980 Constitution, explains the right-wing ideology underpinning it, and explores the scholarly debates over its supposed merits and the feasibility of its replacement with a new constitution.

Jaime Guzmán, Gremialismo, and the Ideological Origins of the 1980 Constitution

This article seeks to understand the ideological origins of the 1980 Constitution, examining the role that Jaime Guzmán and his movement, gremialismo, played in defining the central concepts that characterized Chile’s new authoritarian order. It argues that both the definition of a new “protected democracy” and the establishment of a “Subsidiary State” integrated the conceptual proposal that Guzmanian gremialismo had formulated ever since its foundation in 1967 and until the military coup d’état in 1973. Divided into four sections, the article first explores the ideological definitions of this early phase of gremialismo. Next, it reviews Guzmán’s position on whether the Chilean dictatorship should follow a transformational vocation, and delves into the gremialistas’ concepts of democracy and the State. Understanding gremialismo in its own terms allows us to rethink both the democratic—or anti-democratic— character of Guzmán’s political project, as well as the relationship between the idea of “Subsidiary State” and neoliberalism.

The KISSinger of Death: Henry Kissinger and the Letelier-Moffitt Assassination

On September 21st, 1976, Orlando Letelier was assassinated in the streets of Washington, DC. The murky story of the assassination has slowly emerged in the decades since, revealing the key roles of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Operation Condor. However, with the level of intelligence available to the United States about the Chilean dictatorship, how was the assassination able to take place at all? Was the United States complicit? This paper illuminates the role of the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination by investigating declassified documents from US National Security Archive from the months leading up to the murder. While the existing historical record does not show that Kissinger was directly involved in the Letelier assassination, Kissinger could have prevented this tragedy and failed to. I suggest a variety of possible explanations as to why Kissinger failed to act; however, the full truth remains riddled with secrecy and ambiguity. Until the full historical record is revealed and efforts are made to unshroud the mystery of this story, there will be barriers to believing the words of the government, barriers to collective healing, and there will be barriers to knowing history itself.

Enseñando a Sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil. [Teaching How to Feel. Ethical Repertoires in Children’s Fiction.] by Macarena García González

Enseñando a Sentir. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil. [Teaching How to Feel. Ethical Repertoires in Children’s Fiction.] by Macarena García González Agustina Palenque ENSEÑANDO A SENTIR. Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil. [TEACHING HOW TO FEEL. Ethical Repertoires in Children’s Fiction.] By Macarena García González.1 Ediciones / Metales Pesados, 2021, 182 pages. ISBN: 978-956-6048-46-6 ________ Teaching How to Feel: Ethical Repertoires in Children’s Fiction (2021) is a book that challenges. It challenges the premise of children’s literature as “useful” to teach about emotions as it challenges adults’ hopes for literature as a way to raise more empathetic people (9). Macarena García González approaches the widely spread discourses about emotions from an innovative perspective. In her work, emotions are analyzed as part of social relationships instead of individual responses that need to be understood and managed. Moving beyond the discussion between aesthetic or pedagogical purposes in the field, she proposes a rather original angle: “We return again and again to the question of the uses of fiction to think about the emotional and affective dimensions that are also ethical and political”(24).2 The book is structured into eight chapters that focus on the emotional dimension of texts for children from different points of view. Some of these offer critical analyses of literary texts, and others share research experiences of reading responses with children. “The Rise of Picture Books and Socio-Emotional Education” reflects on the growing production of picturebooks and the agendas of socio-emotional education for early childhood in public discourses. The author dialogues with the contributions of sociology of emotions to reflect on a specific trend of picturebooks. She observes that these narratives may work as accomplices of a pedagogy of emotions that tends to “discipline” feelings in the pursuit of a certain idea of happiness. “Politics of Emotions in Inside-Out” examines Pixar’s movie as a good example of how certain psychological traditions shape popular narratives of emotional culture (42). García González reflects on the way this text may be read as an example of the “imperative of happiness” as an individual achievement. “Emotions on the Edge: Taboo Subjects and Adult Anxieties” presents an empirical study of children and books. The author analyzes how certain “edgy” topics are discussed with young audiences. This chapter offers important reflections about adult interventions in these mediated situations. “Imagining Migration: Narratives of Hospitality” deals with a frequent theme in current children’s literature. García Gonzalez shares [End Page 70] reflections from the analysis of a corpus of texts that deal with the subject of migration in general and international adoption in particular—the subject of her doctoral thesis. The author warns that in many cases, these texts approach complex issues in a simplistic way, telling singular stories of people who migrate and mobilize the help of the locals: “The operation of these stories is to leave out of our knowledge something that would seem harmful for us to know: global injustice” (84). “Necropolitics in The Isle and The Mediterranean” builds on the theme of the previous chapter with Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. García González analyzes here two works by Armin Greder, which highlight the brutality with which certain populations are left to die. “The Problem with Narratives of Empowerment for Girls” problematizes certain books for children aligned with mainstream “girl power” discourses. According to the author, the problem with these narratives is that they suggest a simplistic idea of individual empowerment. From an intersectional perspective, the author wonders: “Can a text be feminist and, at the same time, reproduce colonial imaginaries? I am afraid that a merely post-feminist text that embodies ideas of achievement and overcoming, or an approach to liberal feminism with the slogan for gender equality does not involve rethinking how dominations are produced, and how some lives develop more precariously than others” (121).3 “Narrating the Silences of the Dictatorship” studies the way the Chilean dictatorship is presented in books for children. The author analyzes several texts to understand how both references and silences work to express the intensity of...