Laurence Birns, ed. The End of Chilean Democracy: An IDOC Dossier on the Coup and its Aftermath, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), 10, 20, 32, 34, 67-82, 90, 110.
Luis Roniger, and Mario Sznajder, The Legacy of Human-Rights Violations in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15-20, 99-110.
Macarena Gomez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 37-72, 132-155.
Marjorie Agosin, ed. Inhabiting Memory: Essays on Memory and Human Rights in the Americas, (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2011), 51-129.
Nancy E. Morris, “Canto porque es necesario cantar: The New Song Movement in Chile, 1973-1983,” Latin American and Iberian Institute: 1-31.
Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, Narrow But Endlessly Deep: The struggle for memorialization in Chile since the transition to democracy (Acton: ANU Press, 2016), 23-38.
Sergio Bitar, Prisoner of Pinochet: My Yeaar in a Chilean Concentration Camp, Translated by Erin Goodman, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), 1-10, 105-160.
Steven J. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 11-22, 34-64, 78-90, 130-133.
To see the timeline of events that I’ve created to help you visualize the most important points in Chile’s political history surrounding the Cold War, follow the URL below!
To see the Knight Lab story map I’ve created to help you visualize the chaotic globetrotting of a selection of Chilean exiles in the Pinochet period, follow the URL below!
This module is dedicated to the poetry of the music—for the lyrics of the nueva canción were deep, thrilling, imaginative and chilling all at the same time. Within this sampling of songs as well as many, many others from other artists, images suggesting an emerging collective consciousness reign. Common tropes include oppression, survival, a “red dawn” (and a new tomorrow), the musical style itself, gender equality, respect for ethnic diversity, and not a lot of messages of typical socialist atheism (most likely because in Chile, a Latin American Catholic country, the movement and Unidad Popular would have lost support if they didn’t leave a space for religion in their dreams for the country). The nueva canción became a “popular” platform for the messages of the Chilean socialist experiment which grew from the 1960s and flourished—or at least became the officially espoused musical loudspeaker of socialism—during the Allende years (1970-1973). For the central role that it played in the public relations of the Allende administration as well as for its groundbreaking uplifting of the local while Allende’s Unidad Popular rejected the global hegemonic influence of the United States, the lyrics of these songs merit an analysis.
Brace yourselves, it’s gonna get real heavy real fast!
“Manifiesto”
The film accompanying the music in this video includes footage from the coup d’état on September 11, 1973 as well as images from the bombing of the Presidential Palace.
First, the lyrics…
Yo no canto por cantar
ni por tener buena voz,
canto porque la guitarra
tiene sentido y razón.
Tiene corazón de tierra
y alas de palomita,
es como el agua bendita,
santigua glorias y penas.
Aquí se encajó mi canto,
como dijera Violeta,
guitarra trabajadora
con olor a primavera.
Que no es guitarra de ricos
ni cosa que se parezca.
Mi canto es de los andamios
para alcanzar las estrellas.
Que el canto tiene sentido
cuando palpita en las venas…
del que morirá cantando,
… las verdades verdaderas.
No las lisonjas fugaces
ni las famas extranjeras
sino el canto de una lonja
hasta el fondo de la tierra.
Ahí donde llega todo
y donde todo comienza,
canto que ha sido valiente,
siempre será canción nueva,
siempre será canción nueva,
siempre será canción nueva…
And in English…
I don’t sing just to sing
or because I have a good voice.
I sing because the guitar
makes sense and is correct.
It has a heart of earth
and wings of a dove
it is like holy water,
blessing joy and grief.
Here my song fit,
as Violeta used to say,
hardworking guitar
with the scent of spring.
My guitar is not for the rich
or anything like that.
My song is a scaffold
for reaching the stars.
For a song has meaning
when it beats in the veins
of he who will die singing
the truths that are true.
Not for fleeting praise
or for foreign fame
but for the song of a market
until the center of the earth.
There, where everything meets
and where everything begins,
the song that has been brave
will always remain ‘canción nueva.’
“Manifiesto,” or “Manifesto” (1973-4), and the album of the same name were released after the coup and Jara’s death in September 1973, and the song went on to become one of his most famous. He performed almost all of the songs, but the album was compiled and released posthumously, even though Jara is given credit as the producer of the album. The order of the songs and the titling of the album “Manifesto” serves as one of the first eulogies of the practitioners of the nueva canción for Jara’s life and death, letting the deceased posthumously declare for himself victory in death, as is implied in the stanza, “For a song has meaning/when it beats in the veins/of he who will die singing/the truths that are true.” When Jara opens the song declaring that he doesn’t sing just to sing, that’s both a reference to the sincerity of his message and a criticism of “Western” (aka American) music. It had pervaded in Chile since the 1950s and, at the time of penning in 1973, had been deliberately deemphasized by the Allende regime in favor of domestically-produced music that would give people pride in the heritage of their nation, and represented the nationalization of Chile’s music scene. The guitar, or the song of the folksinger favored by this nationalization process, herein is the correct choice for Chile. His reference to “Violeta” is an homage to Violeta Parra, the brave and often solitary pioneer of the nueva canción movement who mixed herself with the rural folksingers to bring their music to the nation.
Jara’s guitar not being for the rich is emblematic of the rural, peasant roots of the nueva canción movement, and reaching the stars became a popular image of hope for the future. It also helped, of course, that one of the symbols of socialism, largely inherited by the Soviets, is the image of a red, white or gold five-pointed star, also making this an allusion to the ideal communist future in particular. “Not for fleeting praise/or for foreign fame” is another allusion to the idea that the nueva canción should put the best interests of the Chilean people first. The music wasn’t meant to generate a lot of money (even though it did), but was supposed to be there to democratically represent the views and pains and dreams of the Chilean people.
Finally, “the song that has been brave/will always remain ‘canción nueva,’” when we relate this final idea back to the title, “Manifiesto,” brings forth some interesting points of discussion. “Manifesto” was a truly clever title. It states outright, as much of socialist literature does, the intention of the song. It minces no words, and the song went on to embody the spirit of the whole movement. But “Manifesto” is also an obvious and direct allusion to The Communist Manifesto (1848) of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the foundational document of the world’s communist and socialist movements. That the final line carries the message that “the brave song will always be canción nueva” is significant, for it ties the musical movement back to the roots of socialism, and even suggests that the rural folklorist roots of this Chilean musical advent are the roots of Chile’s socialism.
“Canto de las estrellas”
First, the lyrics…
No me alcanza la razón
Ni el amor, ni la palabra,
Mis manos que ahora labran
En este instrumento un son.
Si no alcanza mi visión
Y nunca me ha de alcanzar
Pa’ poder interpretar
El pensar de víctor jara,
Quien dijera en su plegaria
Yo no canto por cantar.
Cómo se escuchan tus sones
Con tonos de consecuencia,
De verdad y de paciencia
De pensar sin más presiones,
No canto por ilusiones
Dijo delante de dios,
Ni canto porque entre dos
Sea el camino menos largo,
No canto ni por encargo
Ni por tener buena voz.
Cantó porque el sentimiento,
Cantó porque la amistad,
Cantó por la realidad,
Cantó por el sufrimiento,
Cantó porque su talento
En la música desgarra
Cantó porque las amarras
Se soltarán de la gente,
Se le oyó decir ausente
Cantó porque la guitarra.
Tu vida encaminada
Por un ideal diferente,
Por estar entre la gente,
A la muerte llevada.
Y no puedo ser librada
De la fuerza y la opresión,
Que apretado el corazón,
Tu canto hoy día se aferra
Porqué cantarle a la tierra
Tiene sentido y razón.
Yo no canto por cantar
Ni por tener buena voz,
Canto porque la guitarra
Tiene sentido y razón.
And in English…
I cannot comprehend the reasoning
Nor the love, nor the word
My hands which now forge
A song from this instrument.
If my vision does not reach me,
It does not need to
To be able to understand
The thinking of Víctor Jara,
Who said in his prayer,
“I don’t sing just to sing.”
How they listen to your songs
With tones of consequence
Of truth and of patience
Of thinking without more pressures
“I don’t sing for the thrill,”
He said before God
“Nor do I sing so that between two choices
The journey be shorter
I sing neither by request
Nor for having a good voice.”
He sang because of feeling
He sang because of friendship
He sang for reality
He sang for suffering
He sang because his
Musical talent is jarring
He sang because the moorings
Will set the people free
Even in absence he was heard
He sang because of the guitar
Your life directed
Toward a different ideal
For being among the people
To death he was brought
And could not be freed
From the force and oppression
That squeezed his heart.
Today your song has taken hold
Because singing to the earth
Makes sense and is correct.
I don’t sing just to sing
Nor for having a good voice
I sing because the guitar
Makes sense and is correct.
“Canto de las estrellas” (Song of the Stars”) was released in 1996 by Inti-Illimani to commemorate both the life of Víctor Jara and the purification of the Estadio Chile where Jara and many others were detained, many of whom in the end being tortured and killed. The folk ensemble Inti-Illimani was a contemporary of Jara and the two worked together closely on many songs, concerts and initiatives. The song is riddled with references to Jara’s contributions to the nueva canción, such as “Who said in his prayer/‘I don’t sing just to sing.’” This references both Jara’s beliefs and two of his songs: “prayer” alluding to “Plegaria a un labrador” (“Prayer to a laborer”) (1971) and “‘I don’t sing just to sing’” alluding to the opening line of “Manifiesto.” The musicality of Inti-Illimani’s tribute truly sweeps the listener to the stars and serves as a beautiful audial memorial to Jara’s life and legacy. The entrance of a smooth, jazzy saxophone interestingly reflects the changes that Inti-Illimani had gone through since fleeing from Chile in 1973 and taking up a life of exile in Europe, primarily in Italy. This song represented their Chilean homecoming and also a warming-up to Western musical influences in the time of their exile. The song ends with an excerpt from a Chilean hymn being sung in one of the languages of Mapuche schoolchildren on the eve of the inauguration of the Víctor Jara foundation, another reference to the celebration of diversity that the nueva canción movement and Víctor Jara helped inspire in Chile.
“Venceremos”
First, the lyrics…
Desde el hondo crisol de la patria
Se levanta el clamor popular
Ya se anuncia la nueva alborada
Todo Chile comienza a cantar
Recordando al soldado valiente
Cuyo ejemplo lo hiciera inmortal
Enfrentemos primero a la muerte
Traicionar a la patria jamás
Venceremos, venceremos
Mil cadenas habrá que romper
Venceremos, venceremos
La miseria (al fascismo) sabremos vencer
Campesinos, soldados, mineros
La mujer de la patria también
Estudiantes, empleados y obreros
Cumpliremos con nuestro deber
Sembraremos las tierras de gloria
Socialista será el porvenir
Todos juntos haremos la historia
A cumplir, a cumplir, a cumplir
And in English…
From the deep cauldron of the motherland
Rises the popular outcry
It heralds the new dawn
All Chile starts to sing
Remembering the valiant soldier
Whose example made him immortal
First we confront death
Betray the motherland no more.
We shall prevail, we shall prevail
A thousand chains will have to break
We shall prevail, we shall prevail
We’ll know how to beat poverty (or fascism)
Peasants, soldiers, miners
The lady of the motherland too
Students, employees and workers
We will carry out our duty
We will sow glorious lands
Socialist will the future be
All together we will make history
Achieve, achieve, achieve
Last but not least, “Venceremos” (“We shall prevail”), composed by Inti-Illimani in 1970 but most famously performed by both that ensemble and that of Quilapayún, became the official anthem of the Unidad Popular movement and therefore warrants a few words of analysis. Firstly, the title. “Venceremos” was not unlike some of the other songs of the movement in its brand of (socialist) triumphalism—and was especially not unlike “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (“The People United Will Never Be Defeated”) (1970), one of the most internationally renowned songs of the nueva canción repertoire, the title of which also became an Unidad Popular slogan and a slogan for similar movements in many languages around the world. This triumphalism both raised the spirits of one side of the country—on the side of the Unidad Popular—and aggravated the anger of the other—the right wing of Chile’s politics, which felt the triumphalism being rubbed in its face. It is by far the most screamingly socialist song the movement ever produced, for “Socialist will the future be,” and especially conveys common communist tropes of agrarian reform (“We will sow glorious lands”) and of the Marxist view of history (“All together we will make history”). Of course, there are also the multiple lines that visualize peasants, soldiers, miners, women, students, employees and workers all marching together towards the “new dawn.” The song itself is obviously a march, also along the lines of other, more traditional communist music.
Different versions of the song, as with many of the nueva canción movement, do exist and reflect the different and interchanging messages that different artists wished to convey. For instance, the line “We’ll know how to beat poverty” is the wording of Inti-Illimani. When Quilapayún began to sing the song, however, “poverty” was replaced for “fascism,” perhaps in anticipation of a looming, potential coup d’état attempt on the Allende administration by right-wing forces. This specter came in with the recognition that slowly South American democracies and other governments were being swallowed up by right-wing military juntas, and the fear that the lone stable socialist democracy in the region was going to be lost to the same fate. After the successful coup in 1973, the bold triumphalism of “Venceremos” was rendered obsolete, but in later renderings by exile musical groups became a source of collective memory and hope for a return to democracy and freedom of expression in Chile.
Music occupies a unique role in memory. Memory involves countless triggers, many of them audial. We learn to assign particular meanings to certain sounds. The beeping of an alarm, the wailing of a siren, the tone of an individual’s voice—but music is different from any other form of sound, for it is in every aspect planned out, organized—even if it is free-form, there are still harmonies and patterns at work—and it is deliberate. One of the most important things about music is that it is intentional. Of course, pieces of music can become associated with things that the creators would rather not intend, but there is indeed an intention on the part of the composer or songwriter to convey some sort of meaning.
Music played a uniquely important role in Chilean life during the Cold War and went through different phases that were directly affected by the political situation of the country. The most important musical style in Chile during this time and the focus of this module is the Nueva canción movement. It was always associated with Socialism and the political left in Latin America, and although there were similar movements all over the hemisphere, the Chilean Nueva canción became one of the most unique and world-renowned, especially as it globalized in the wake of the coup d’état, but I’ll come to that…
The first time the term “nueva canción” (“new song”) came into public use was at a thirteen-day-long conference called the Encuentro de la Canción Protesta from late July to Early August 1967, in which fifty musicians from eighteen countries took the opportunity to hear each other’s work, exchange experiences and ideas, “discuss the role of singer and song” and establish friends and contacts. At the conference, myriad terms were used to discuss the new, simultaneous rekindling of interest from around Latin America in investigating the roots—often with flairs of the indigenous—of Latin American folk music. Terms like canción protesta, canción comprometida, canción política revolucionaria, nueva canción, canción folklórica, canción popular, canción política, canciones de lucha y esperanza, nueva trova, canto libre and canto nuevo. Artists themselves were consciously participating at this conference in the construction of the genre. Indeed, many of the names would persist in various forms around Latin America, and “nueva canción” or “nueva canción política” would be the two names that would become associated with Chile by the end of the 1960s.
Cuba being the venue for this unique conference of socially-committed music was of course no accident, as the Communist Party, which made sure to control all public events within the nation, certainly had a hand in setting up the conference. The Cuban stake was, of course, that it would be a focal point to gather and inspire leftist musicians who would go back to their respective countries with new contacts and emboldened revolutionary ideals that would line up with the Cuban policy of spreading its view of revolutionary communism around the region.
One of the reasons that Chile was becoming so prominent in the neo-folklore movement of the time was because one of Latin America’s most influential folklorists of the period came from Chile—and her intellectual progeny would go on to form an entire generation of socially-conscious folklorists. Violeta Parra was Chile’s most active and unique and independent folklorist of the 1950s. “Her approach was different.” She sought out and collected material from “male and female cantores (rural musicians)” with their cooperation, learned and combined their repertoires, performed with her “informants” and helped to recover forgotten parts of songs. She compiled an impressive inventory of music collected in this manner and composed much of her own music independently as well. Víctor Jara, one of her later contemporaries, memorialized her life—and her suicide—and would liken her to a guitar-toting musical social worker in his music. Many many other singers who drew their inspiration from her did the same. But it was Víctor Jara who best filled the giant hole that Parra had left behind, and he rose to international fame even before the events that were to come.
One of the aforementioned terms, canción comprometida, translates to “committed song,” referring to the necessarily socially-conscious nature of the material being composed and rediscovered. Much of the literature produced or rehabilitated at this time dealt with the lives of the peasantry, which lent the genre its popular appeal. “Popular” also refers again to the social nature of the genre, that the nueva canción movement from the very beginning celebrated and popularized the people’s music. The subject matter, therefore, was often about diverse topics and issues relevant to the peasantry including harvests, agricultural work, agricultural challenges, religion, cultural autonomy, love, abuse, depression, political representation as well as economic and racial disparities, among other subjects. This topical diversity and openness lent the movement to representing a wide swath of social justice issues.
The liberal nature of the nueva canción movement lent itself to political activism, and many of the singers and musicians themselves became social activists. When the coalescence of a left-wing political coalition came into shape in the run-up to the 1970 election, the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), it adopted the popular songs of the nueva canción repertoire for use in the campaign. One song was commissioned to be the anthem of the coalition. Entitled “Venceremos” (We Shall Prevail), the new anthem, which had been penned by Claudio Iturra (Víctor Jara penning an alternative version of the text) and composed by Sergio Ortega, and “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (The People United Will Never Be Defeated), also composed by Ortega with lyrics by the group Quilapayún, became the principal and wildly popular slogan-songs of the campaign.
After the Unidad Popular candidate, Salvador Allende, won the presidency, the nueva canción movement became an important part of president Allende’s administration, serving as the moral compass and as the public face of Allende’s policy objectives of socialist-style reform and achieving its peak of domestic popularity between 1970 and 1973.
Bad moves of governance and indecision on bridging political divides on the part of Allende as well as ostracization by the United States for his nationalization policies gave the Allende administration many challenges. His political opponents, already unhappy with the messages of equality and redistribution emanating from the nueva canción movement, directed their ire as well at the musical proponents of Allende’s policies.
When, on September 11, 1973, the watershed coup d’état violently exploded in Chile, members of the nueva canción movement were deliberately sought out and targeted by the men fighting under the leadership of the Army’s Commander-in-Chief and leader of the coup, Augusto Pinochet. The movement became an object of repression and suddenly became a vehicle of subversion in the public discourse of the Pinochet regime.
One of the most notorious and symbolic moments and crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) was the arrest, torture and murder of Víctor Jara in the indoor stadium Estadio Chile—in 2004 renamed Estadio Víctor Jara. Jara, when arrested at one of the Santiago universities where he worked the day after the coup began, was taken to the Estadio Chile, he attempted to keep calm and reassure the other prisoners that everything would be all right. After writing more poetry and singing for the people, Jara was found out by their guards to be the famous folk singer, and he was taken away to be tortured. On top of everything else the guards focused on mutilating Jara’s hands so that he could no longer play guitar. They mocked him, for he would no longer have been able to play guitar, at least not for a very long time. Of course, it did not matter much in the end anyway, as he was riddled with over forty bullets—an ugly, ignominious end for one of Chile’s most prominent and dignified artists.
After Pinochet took power, the repressions began in earnest. Most of the practitioners of nueva canción music fled the country in fear of their lives and learned to live in fear even while abroad that they might be subject to attack, thanks to the transnational dissident repression apparatus that Operation Condor (1975-1990) established. High-profile groups Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún, each named with indigenous words from Chile and each of which had collaborated with Jara, sought refuge in Western Europe, where they and the dissident culture they came to embody blossomed. It was estimated that by the end of Pinochet’s right-wing military regime, over 200,000 Chileans had either been forced into exile or had fled into exile abroad. This created a loose global Chilean diaspora within which the nueva canción survived and was diffused in order to delegitimize the Pinochet government.
After a while, elements of the persecuted musical genre were allowed to publicly resurface in Chile, and this brought the creation of the “Canto nuevo” genre of folk music and a splitting of many of the most famous nueva canción ensembles into a more politicized faction and a more subtle faction. Both “nueva canción” and “canto nuevo” mean “new song,” but the canto nuevo was effectively a socially and politically ambivalent genre which, in Chile, was forbidden from making or playing any music that had to do with social justice issues, especially where the dictatorship was concerned. On the one hand, the Pinochet government destroyed the momentum and sundered the support that the movement had earlier received within its own borders, but in exile the movement flourished as a reminder of the injustices that had been visited upon Chile in 1973 and as a series of inspirational voices for change.
The forced globalization of the nueva canción movement created new “memory communities,” in the words of Susana Kaiser, but these were of a transnational and intercultural nature as Chileans used the music of the nueva canción to remember what were for them the more optimistic times and messages of hope while peoples of other nationalities experienced this form of music in their own lives and it began to become associated with local political and activist movements and their own memories as well.
For Chilean exiles like Sergio Bitar, formerly Allende’s Minister of Mining and a high-ranking member of the Allende administration, Jara’s “Te recuerdo Amanda” (I Remember You, Amanda) came to symbolize the time he spent incarcerated on the frigid Dawson Island, which makes sense considering that that particular song deals with the death of a loved one and the harrowing hollowness of loss.
The music of the nueva cancion became a part of the healing process and witnessed a resurgence of nostalgia in the 1990s when the Pinochet dictatorship fell and exiles began to cautiously return to the country en masse. However, the nueva canción by this point was the music of a different time, and the interest toward it reflected this trend. New genres such as rock and pop had come to dominate the newly redemocratized mainstream, and nueva canción now survives largely as the memory of a time of protest.
On September 11, 1973, one of the most important and game-changing moments in the history of the hemispheric Cold War in Latin America took place: in Santiago, Chile, the democratically-elected government of socialist president Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens and his Unidad Popular (UP, Popular Unity) coalition were suddenly and violently removed from power in a dramatic and brutal coup d’état which gave rise to a new military-led government under the direction of Allende’s former Army commander, Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet would go on to lead Chile from 1973 through the end of South America’s Cold War in 1990, the year in which he was removed from power and democracy was restored to Chile.
Allende’s reign was democratic and optimistic for social change but pushed Chilean society hard to forcibly rearrange it in socialist style, a style which was popular among his political base but alienated moderates and those of the wealthy, oligarchical political right, many of whom championed Pinochet after his seizure of power. The Pinochet years saw an initial economic recovery and boom—largely facilitated by the lifting of the United States’ unofficial economic sanctions which the Nixon administration had imposed on Allende to weaken his legitimacy within Chile—but the boom which was initially attributed exclusively to the hard-handed regime change and politics of Pinochet faded in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, from the instant the coup d’état broke out, the Pinochet regime set out to eliminate political “subversives,” which initially meant communists but came to mean anyone who fell out of line with the state or was even suspected of harboring leftist sympathies. This policy of eliminating his political opposition produced initial support but mixed results in the long-term. By 1990, glaring evidence supplied both from within Chile and from transnational actors—including an over-200,000-strong Chilean exile diaspora, which had extended itself into over 140 countries and several cases of which shall be enumerated herein—alleging widespread, systematic and intentional violations of human rights had torn at the credibility of Pinochet’s regime just as it had at the other former military juntas that the United States helped to install and had since given way to rebirths of democracy. The same was about to befall the Pinochet regime.
In the 1970s, Pinochet had promised a referendum for 1980, which came and along with popular support—along with allegations of ballot-fixing—deepened his grip on power and even instituted constitutional reforms which made him President for life with full impunity protections. The reforms of that year also promised another referendum to be held in 1988. When that year came and the plebiscite that was staged clearly demonstrated that the “NO” vote to Pinochet’s continuance was supported by 55% of the population, he resolved to begin the process of stepping down.
This was, however, not out of principle. The moment of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR’s ultimate collapse beginning in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disparaging comments made against the dictatorship by Pope John Paul II upon his visit to Chile in 1987, the souring of Pinochet’s Chile in the public opinion of the United States, and significantly the outpouring of support for victims of human rights violations of the Pinochet regime by transnational activists all culminated in Pinochet’s conclusion that his reign could not last forever.
As soon as he stepped down on March 11, 1990 and was succeeded by Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, the process of remembering the Pinochet years began. With the return of democracy came the full return of freedom of expression and of the press, as opposed to Pinochet’s half-hearted concessions through the years. Criminal investigations were immediately opened by Chilean jurists as well as jurists in other countries even while the still-reformulating government attempted to avert exacerbating the intense political divide by focusing in its official Truth and Reconciliation Commission on solely those two concepts: truth and reconciliation. This meant that the goal was not to assign blame, but simply to move forward peacefully and discover the truth of what had happened to upwards of 2,000 victims of murder and forced disappearance as well as more than 27,000 victims of torture on the part of the state (the actual numbers are most certainly higher than the official ones). Overall, by the end of the rule of the Southern Cone (most of South America’s) military juntas that culminated with Pinochet’s release of power in 1990, it is estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 people were murdered and that approximately 400,000 people were held prisoner and tortured at the hands of the collective of Southern Cone junta dictatorships. The victims were each suspected of having ties to the political left or simply general opposition to Pinochet’s rule and that of the other juntas. At times people were rounded up almost indiscriminately for any number of suspected leftist tendencies—even if one was dressed or improperly kempt in the street in some cases.
Eventually, impunity laws were creatively circumvented by jurists and national courts, and many perpetrators of human rights violations, including Pinochet himself, were arrested and tried—but not all found guilty. General Pinochet never saw through a completed trial until his death came about, however, though there were works in progress at the time. Bringing justice for the victims and their loved ones, and for all of Chile, has since been a corresponding and incomplete work in progress. Perhaps nothing can really ever give justice to the victims of a dictatorship.
In post-dictatorship Chile, memory is a very consciously popular topic. The scholarship on memory in Chile is unprecedentedly bountiful, and hardly any book or publication on memory, especially post-trauma memory, can escape referencing the memory construction and problems of memory that have occurred in Chile up to the present.
Even in the decade of the 2010s, denunciations of known or discovered torturers of the Pinochet regime continue. Known as a “funa,” or “bringing the rotten to light” in Mapudungun, a language of the Mapuche people, professional denunciations have been committed by Comisión Funa (The Funa Commission), “an organization that was born to combat impunity through social, collective punishment of the individuals who were involved in crimes against humanity who still find themselves living in freedom.” The Funa Commission had achieved over 200 meticulously-documented public denunciations of individuals before 2015, and many of those cases led to prosecutions of torture, disappearance and murder crimes. Most of the cases hit impunity boundaries and many individuals continue to live freely, albeit publicly shamed.
The 1991 Rettig Report, the concluding report of Chile’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, recommended the setting up of projects and sites that support memory, such as museums and memorials. It would not be until 2006, however, when Michele Bachelet, Chile’s first female president and herself a survivor of the Pinochet regime’s torture who lost her father to the junta, was elected that the process of building such a memorial would begin. Before the end of her term in 2010, Bachelet would ensure the creation of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, but with great political jockeying that many scholars (especially memorial historian Amy Sodaro) argue compromised the long-term process of memory and true reconciliation—not the sweep-it-under-the-rug mentality of the early 1990s—that such a construction should entail. Nevertheless, inspiration and much of the information in the museum itself were drawn from the vast archives of documents and testimonies collectively held by the transnational human rights networks that operated in Chile and which were “declared part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program in 2003,” and it was synthesized into the present-day museum. The controversy, however, revolves around the fact that the museum remains a generally depoliticized space for the documentation of human rights abuses all around, which doesn’t necessarily seek to implicate individuals or groups for the crimes documented. Photographs, newspaper articles that served as state propaganda, interactive exhibits and many other things fill the museum with necessary information and have the effect of leaving the viewer to make sense of the political significance.
Conversely, there is the museum at Villa Grimaldi and its Peace Park, which very much links the human rights abuses of the Cold War to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Villa Grimaldi, on the outskirts of Santiago, had been a wealthy estate for many of the leading intellectuals and artists of Chile to gather alongside its various owners until the 1973 coup. Thereafter it became a torture center for the DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), the secret police branch of President Pinochet’s government, through which over 4,000 of the ~27,000 individuals who were tortured passed. It became one of the largest and most notorious of Chile’s torture centers, especially marred by the Pinochet regime’s partly successful, partly foiled last-ditch effort to bulldoze the complex. In 1995, the former commandant of the torture-center-turned-DINA-headquarters, the head of the DINA, Marcelo Moren Brito, was convicted of human rights crimes and sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the Pinochet regime, and died in 2015. In 1997, a Peace Park opened at Villa Grimaldi, an open, uncensored homage to the torture, sexual torture, murder and disappearance that was carried out there.
In essence, then, Villa Grimaldi and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights present two differing perspectives on memory, one depoliticized and one explicitly politicized. Having visited neither museum and merely being an outside researcher of these issues, this researcher cannot currently offer an educated opinion regarding which site is more useful and proper for the most accurate portrayal of Chile’s Cold War history, but it is important to recognize that these museums each convey distinct interpretations of Chilean national memory because Chile is today moving toward the future while still negotiating how to face the memory of its unique past—as are all peoples.
There are many, many, many other ways in which the memory of the Chilean coup d’état can be explored. Monuments, music, timelines and maps (check out the other modules!) are but a few ways in which one can represent with dignity the history and the stories of the people who lived through this period in Chilean history. This study consciously focuses on only a few aspects, desiring to give those few the best analysis possible, especially the nueva canción movement, which in this author’s opinion doesn’t get enough credit as an agent of history in Chile.
~Brandon J. Reimers, May 11, 2018
International Studies Capstone Seminar Spring 2018
"Venceremos:" Memory and the Chilean Coup d'état 