Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile's "Sitios de Memoria" and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death

Under the banner headline "Unexpected Vistas in Chile," the travel section of the January 20, 2000, Sunday New York Times sought to lure both the adventurous and the sedate to a country of fabulous mountain resorts, lush rainforests, health spas, fine wines, and European-like cities. Nonetheless, Chile's association with military rule, and the fame of its ex-dictator, Augusto Pinochet, were considered well enough known to the informed tourist so as to merit oblique references in several of the featured articles. Inserted in Edward Hower's piece on studying Spanish and living in Chile's capital city of Santiago, right after his account of a night enjoying folk music in the clubs, but before his description of his walk among the wealthy mausoleums in the aristocratic section of the municipal cemetery, is a description of the "memorial that has been erected to those who were executed and 'disappeared' during General Pinochet's dictatorship. On a slab of white stone about three stories tall, several thousand names are inscribed." ¹ He writes little more about the wall, except to point to it as place where Chileans commemorate their troubled past, and to compare it with the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. In a separate travel piece on the hot springs and health resorts of central Chile, Annick Smith comments: "My companion, Bill, drove while I navigated, both of us a bit frightened, for we were venturing down a foreign road in a country a mere handful of years beyond police-state status, and had only a rudimentary knowledge of the Spanish language." ² Their fears were unfounded, we discover, as they explored lovely spas and peaceful rural towns in the shadow of the Andean peaks.

If Chile's transition from dictatorship to democracy bears mentioning among the well-photographed articles enticing the tourist to its luscious rainforests, endless beaches, and ski resorts, one would presume that an appraisal of the historic events of the 1970s and 1980s infuses the national consciousness. However, a closer look at the way Chile is constructing the memory of the military period and portraying in museums and national markers the recent history of human rights abuses reveals a deeply contradictory and tentative historical account.

From 1973 until 1990, Chile endured one of Latin America's most repressive military governments. Then in 1990, lulled into allowing a referendum on his future as president because he was convinced the electorate would keep him, General Augusto Pinochet instead found himself voted out of office. The 1990s marked the beginning of Chile's transition from dictatorship to democracy, as thousands of exiles returned from their years of asylum in Europe, Canada, and the United States, and a coalition of Christian Democrats, Socialists, and other parties came to power in a government called the Concertación. Throughout the 1990s, a Christian Democrat held the presidency, but in January of this year Chile's transition entered a new phase with the election of Socialist Party candidate Ricardo Lagos to the presidency and leadership of the Concertación. Although the first Socialist to win the presidency since Salvador Allende's victory in 1970, Lagos ran on a platform of moderate reforms more similar to European social democracy than Allende's Unidad Popular socialism.

Chile's center-left democracy that seeks to blend free-market economics with increased spending on social programs is something of a political and economic laboratory. This uneasy balance between reconciling the goals of Allende's democratic socialism with Pinochet's brutal neoliberalism hangs precariously in the political arena and infuses the current debate over public history, especially the extent to which and how the martyrs of the dictatorship should be remembered. Beginning in the early 1990s, the democratic government erected a number of historical markers, called sitios de memoria or memory sites, to remember...