Film and Genocide

3. Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide: RecentChilean Documentary Films and the Writing of History

Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide Recent Chilean Documentary Films and the Writing of History michael j. lazzara Historizar es una forma de unir lo que fue con lo que es . . . [Historcizing is a way of uniting what was with what is . . .] pilar calveiro Quotidian definitions of genocide tend to emphasize numbers or statistics as the primary methodology for determining whether genocide occurred in a given context. If the number of dead strikes us as large—so the logic goes—then the extermination of an ethnic, racial, religious, or political group amounts to genocide; if the number strikes us as small, then we ask whether a given tragedy has truly reached “genocidal proportions.” This numbers argument, I would like to argue from the outset, is dangerous and inaccurate. In fact, it has been used repeatedly in post-Pinochet Chile to defend the extermination of leftist revolutionary opposition by pro-dictatorship factions that were first interested in instituting a neoliberal counterrevolution and later in upholding neoliberalism as immovable and unquestionable. How many times have we heard that over 30,000 people disappeared in Argentina, while in Chile it “only” took 67 3 3,000 murders to achieve the country’s so-called economic miracle? It goes without saying that such utilitarian arguments do not hold sway. Not only are they flawed in their logic, but they are also morally and ethically reprehensible. Let’s be clear, then. What happened in Chile between 1973 and 1990 was genocide.1 Scholars have well established that Augusto Pinochet and his henchmen sought to eliminate all political and ideological opposition in calculated and premeditated ways. This elimination took place in waves. In the first wave, which occurred between late 1973 and 1974, the regime focused on eliminating the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), the most radical leftist group considered by Pinochet to be public enemy number one. In waves two and three, targeted repression focused on the Communist Party and the Socialist Party in 1975 and 1976, respectively. Beyond these killings, often euphemistically referred to as “forced disappearances,” the 2004 Valech Report established that over 30,000 people were tortured as part of Pinochet’s genocidal state policy. Additionally, tens of thousands went into voluntary or involuntary exile. These are facts. But if we leave our definition of genocide there, we risk missing a key point: genocide is more than just mass killing. It includes moral debasement and attacks on art, cultural practices, politics, language, and identity. Its implementation is highly structured and bureaucratic. The media, technology, official rhetoric, institutions, and civil society: all of these entities are essential for implementing genocides of the type that occurred in Chile. In that sense, as Keith Watenpaugh has noted, “genocide is modern in both its intention and its function.”2 Perhaps one might say that it is the major theme of twentieth-century modernity: in the name of preserving economic and political power, governments exterminate sectors of the population deemed undesirable or detrimental to the healthy functioning of the body politic. The years of dictatorship and the years that followed in Chile have undeniably proven that the genocide of 1973 to 1990 had a traumatic, deep, and lasting impact on the social body. At the same time, Chile’s genocide must be seen as part of a larger history—a larger neoliberal backlash that occurred in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1990s, and that left about half a million people dead and countless others traumatized. This backlash, of course, is linked to broader histories of colonialism, economic and cultural imperialism, and particularly to cold war politics. The 1960s and 1970s were the years in which the utopian vision of a more just society, a society founded in socialist ideals, went head to head with traditional oligarchic power that sought to preserve its chokehold on society and to advance the interests of capitalist ideology. The political, economic, and personal fallout of that historical confrontation has been profound and has generated responses by artists, intellectuals, and common citizens still struggling to make sense of the past amid a torrent of 68 michael j. lazzara 69 Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide competing, conflicting, and often whitewashed memory narratives. This is not the place to recap all that has been said about the complexities of narrative and memory in post-dictatorship Latin America. Instead, I would like to focus on a very...