Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: on the Eve of London 1998. Book One of the Trilogy: The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile by Steve J. Stern, Battling For Hearts And Minds: Memory Struggles In Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988. Book Two Of The Trilogy: The Memory Box Of Pinochet’s Chile by Steve J. Stern (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2008 It offers an account that combines history, and anthropology, as well as the scientific aspects of HIV/AIDS. The AIDS Pandemic in Latin America makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of contemporary Latin America’s problems and serves as a wake-up call to the disease’s devastating impact in the region. Laura K. Stephens Department of Criminal Justice, Social & Political Science Armstrong Atlantic State University REMEMBERING PINOCHET’S CHILE: ON THE EVE OF LONDON 1998. BOOK ONE OF THE TRILOGY: THE MEMORY BOX OF PINOCHET’S CHILE. By Steve J. Stern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 280, $19.95. BATTLING FOR HEARTS AND MINDS: MEMORY STRUGGLES IN PINOCHET’S CHILE, 1973–1988. Book Two of the Trilogy: THE MEMORY BOX OF PINOCHET’S CHILE. By Steve J. Stern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 576, $27.95. In The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile, Steve J. Stern has taken on the awesome task of explaining the multiple, contradictory ways in which the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) is remembered by the Chilean people. In the trilogy’s first two books (Book Three is forthcoming ), Stern delivers a powerful performance, giving the reader a highly conceptualized, individualized introduction to the workings of historical memory (Book One) and a brilliantly crafted, deeply layered narrative of the interaction between memory and history (Book Two). “This trilogy,” he wrote, “studies how Chileans have struggled to define the meaning of a collective trauma” within the “long process of making and disputing memory by distinct social actors within a deeply divided society” (Book One, xix). Stern, a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an extremely influential historian of Peru, traveled south across the Atacama for this, his most recent research project. The first two books of the trilogy have already garnered much attention from Latin Americanists. The second book of the trilogy, in fact, Battling for Heart and Minds, was recently awarded the prestigious Bolton-Johnson Award of the Conference of Latin American Historians for 2007. Both books, for different reasons, will certainly be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars in many different areas of specialization: from the functioning of authoritarian regimes, to the development of democratic and human rights movements, to the methodology of oral history. By developing an innovative approach to historical memory based on the relationship between “loose,” personal memories and “emblematic” memory frameworks, Stern has given us a new way to understand not just the Pinochet era but all such periods of contentious memory struggle. 114 Book Reviews Stern’s main argument in the trilogy is that memory became the main battlefield in the war between the Pinochet regime and its defenders, on one hand, and those who sought to expose the regime’s systematic campaign of human rights violations and remove Pinochet from power, on the other. “Memory projects,” he declared, “[. . .] ended up becoming central to the logic by which people sought and won legitimacy in a politically divided and socially heterogeneous society that experienced a great turn and trauma” (Book One, xxi). Specifically, Stern wrote about memories of the internal war waged by the regime against “subversives” following the violent overthrow of the government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. We now know, thanks to the work of groups like Chile’s Rettig Commission (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1990–1991), that, in a country of 10 million, internal war resulted in the “disappearance” (murder ) of 3,500–4,500 persons, the torturing of 25,000–100,000 persons, the detention of 150,000–200,000 persons, and the exiling of 200,000–400,000 persons from Chile (Book One, xxi and footnote 3, p. 158–161). In describing Pinochet’s prolonged act of war turned inward, Stern borrowed one term and coined a new one. He borrowed the term “radical evil” from scholars of the Holocaust and Argentina’s Dirty War. He invented the term “policide” or the slaying of the body politic, to “enrich the vocabulary by which we refer to the killing of collective groups, social arrangements, or ways of life” (Book One, 31 and footnote 27, p. 180). Given...