Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America

1. Prison-Malls: Architectures of Utopic Regeneration

| 21 When writing a spatial history of transitions to postdictatorship societies in Latin America, the word “opening” seems to offer a good starting point, as it traverses different discourses, habits, and languages, crystallizing the mood of the times. The notion of opening acts as a foundational matrix that implicitly highlights how the previous social dynamic was characterized by the idea of enclosure, evoking an image of a society imprisoned in a past from which it needed to flee. In the dominant languages of politics and mass media , opening (apertura) became a kind of order-word organizing a system of equivalences through which the passage to the “post” of postdictatorship was expressed. One can see it in different slogans of the times, such as opening up to democracy (apertura democrática), opening up to the global market (deregulation ), and opening up to a vision of the future as opposed to dwelling on the past (vivir con los ojos en la nuca). In spatial language this opening can be seen in the closing of prisons and detention centers that played a key role during the dictatorships. Reopening them transformed and fulfilled other key functions in the new society. At the same time, a decade after the dictatorships ended, critical and Prison-Malls Architectures of Utopic Regeneration 1 22 | PRISON-MALLS literary language started to thematize the keyword “postdictatorship” as an open prison, tracing a question that sounds simple but that requires a work of imaginative experimentation: How is the free postdictatorship society built around the image of an open prison? If the prison, as a space of confinement for that which disturbs or threatens a society, is the most crucial space during a totalitarian regime, then the act of figuring the society of postdictatorship freedom as an open prison suggests that society is still imprisoned in systems of control that were established in former authoritarian regimes, but in a more subtle, less obvious form. In this sense the open prison can be interpreted in relation to the working hypothesis used by many sociologists that the most recent Southern Cone dictatorships were transformative and founding moments that were not limited (as in the past) to mere reaction or counterrevolution but constituted projects of social transformation that created matrices for the future to come.1 Therefore, instead of thinking of postdictatorships as coming after dictatorships, in a linear fashion, the figure of the open prison allows us to think of the many ways in which dictatorial processes framed the social and political life of the decades that followed as a form of afterlife of habits that had become naturalized and invisibilized. Importing Prison Architecture: The Carceral Utopia as an Ideal of Regeneration and Adjustment Two spaces were crucial in signaling the life and afterlife of the dictatorships: prisons and malls. My goal is to theorize the crucial space of confinement in the dictatorships, and the crucial site that was imported during and after the transitions, as spaces of the future and of commercial success. Both refer to an architecture linked to imaginaries of security and control, to patterns that define the geographies of freedom and democracy and the subjects included and excluded from them. Even though malls emerged as the dream-images of democratic freedom of consumption, they also functioned as spaces that expressed habits of social control that were imposed and naturalized during the dictatorships. One can detect a continuation of certain habits of selfimposed surveillance in the most publicized and popular malls: the sense of safety while walking about freely. Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian has emphasized that in postdictatorship Chile, malls became a kind of utopia featuring several elements of the legacy of the military dictatorships—ideal spaces in which there was freedom of movement within a highly surveilled site, a peculiar fantasy that embodied the neoliberal sense of democracy in the form of an open prison. For this reason a critical montage that reads both spaces simultaneously allows us to see the problematic kernel of postdicta- PRISON-MALLS | 23 torship in the multiple temporalities they embody—a social diagram that is still imprisoned in the legacy of the dictatorship. The case of the transformation of Punta Carretas Prison in Montevideo, Uruguay, into Punta Carretas Mall allows us to visualize a broader process in the history of confinement, the dreams of progress and social regeneration. Punta Carretas Prison was the most important detention center for male political prisoners in...