Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988 (review)

The December 2006 death of Augusto Pinochet caused a new irruption of memory that proved that despite many advancements toward truth, justice and reparations for the victims, contentious passions about the legacy of Pinochet's dictatorship continue to divide the Chilean populace on some level. A greatly reduced, though alarmingly significant, faction of pinochetistas kept vigil outside of the Hospital Militar during the general's last days and paid homage to him upon his death. At the same time, in other parts of Santiago and throughout the country, throngs of Chileans took to the streets to celebrate the end of a dark era and to mark a critical juncture in Chile's ongoing transition to democracy. The evident divisiveness of Pinochet's death makes Steve J. Stern's reflection on the former dictator's rise and fall all the more timely. Stern's book, the second in a trilogy that seeks to historicize and classify memory debates in Chile at three key historical junctures (on the eve of Pinochet's 1998 arrest by Scotland Yard, during the years of dictatorship, and during the years of transition), provides an updated resource on the 1973-1988 period and a treasure trove of details that will be of undoubted usefulness to researchers and students at all levels.

By placing his focus on memory as a critical concept, Stern allows readers to understand the gradual emergence of four competing "emblematic" memory frameworks—memory as salvation, memory as rupture, memory as persecution and awakening, and memory as a closed box—that cut across social sectors and co-existed in Chile by 1988. While shying away from epic re-castings of social mobilization against the dictatorship, Stern seeks to show how a few isolated and valiant "voices in the wilderness" (the Catholic Church, various human rights organizations, the relatives of the victims, etcetera) made their cries for truth and justice known through sustained force and the creation of ever-expanding networks of solidarity. In many ways, Stern's book seems to be about how such isolated, individual memories burgeoned into shared, collective memory scripts (with variants) and how, over two decades, sparse pockets of resistance birthed a multi-pronged counter-official culture that eventually managed to bring down the dictator by a slim margin in the October 1988 plebiscite.

At its core, Stern's book is really about two Chiles—that of the 1970s and that of the 1980s—thus proving that the dictatorship years were not uniform in terms of memory struggles or oppositional dissidence. The 1970s, according to Stern's account, were largely characterized by the military's attempts to propagate a heroic image of itself as Chile's savior. Even before the coup, but certainly in its aftermath, Pinochet, the junta and the political right scripted September 11, 1973 as the moment in which Chile was saved from a Marxist-Leninist threat and an impending civil war was abated. For Pinochet and his adherents, a quick and well-targeted dose of violence was necessary to do away with the even more menacing violence perpetrated by the left. Rhetoric portraying supporters of Popular Unity as "demonically deceiving and bloodthirsty" revolutionaries (p. 39), censorship of the press, contrived exposés on the true face of Allende, support of the gremialistas and the Chicago Boys, along with ceremonies and celebrations that evoked Pinochet's government as a contemporary iteration of the Portalian state, all contributed to the consolidation of the notion of Pinochet as "savior."

In tandem with the dissemination of the military's salvationist rhetoric, Stern also notes the emergence, throughout the 1970s, of alternative memory truths—stories of state-sponsored violence and forced disappearances—that sought to counteract the military's official story and that circulated early-on in the international arena (particularly among exile communities, at the United Nations, Amnesty International, and within the Carter administration), and...