Transitional Justice and Commemorative Practices: Processes of Memorialisation in Chile

Abstract

The memorialisation of the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990) displays a dynamic polarisation, with Chileans strongly divided about the events of 11 September 1973, when the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, turned against democratically-elected President Salvador Allende. This dissertation analyses the processes of memorialisation in Chile, produced by the contestation and negotiation of narratives of the past by political and social actors. In these processes, new symbolic, discursive and physical spaces emerge, allowing people to voice multiple perspectives and understandings of the military dictatorship. In the context of transitional justice, the creation of memorials has become an important instrument of symbolic reparation and democracy building; it has become a ‘tool’ in the transitional justice toolbox, comparable with trials, truth commissions and reparation projects. This dissertation is a contribution to a ‘thicker’ understanding of transitional justice through anthropological research. It describes processes of memorialisation in Chile from an anthropological perspective. The goal is to reveal a profound historical perspective, intricate networks of social and political actors, and the power relations at play that tend to be ‘flattened out’ in overly instrumentalist use of the transitional justice toolbox. The processes of memorialisation are mapped out through the analysis of the Rettig Commission (1990-1), the Roundtable on Human Rights (1999-2000), the Valech Commission (2003-4) and of the material manifestations of understandings of the dictatorship in memorials, monuments, reclaimed former secret detention- and torture centres and museums in Santiago de Chile. The 1991 Rettig Report focussed primarily on the individual fate of the detained-disappeared, while the 2004 Valech Report outlined the imprisonment and torture used by the military dictatorship and acknowledging 27,255 persons as victims of these human rights violations. Over time, the position of military leaders changed from open denial to formal recognition of human rights violations under the military regime. The dissertation looks at spatial and material expressions of processes of memorialisation from a landscape perspective, capturing the essential dynamic nature of the sites. The ethnographic history of the grounds of Peace Park-Villa Grimaldi, and the analysis of the creation of the Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido y el Ejecutado Politico (1990-1994), Monumento Mujeres en la Memoria (2003-2006) and the Memorial Londres 38 (2005-2008) show how they became part of the memory landscape of Santiago de Chile. The early focus on the victims of forced disappearance has shifted to include the living memory of victim-survivors in commemoration practices, adding the dimension of social and political agency. The analysis shows that memorialisation is co-constituted by the active forces of the government and the grassroots organisations. The inauguration of the memorial in honour of the assassinated senator Jaime Guzmán showed the memory politics of political elites, as did the burial of Pinochet in 2006. The Museum of Memory and Human Rights (2010) can be understood as an attempt at nation-building, but not solely as an expression of political strategy. It is now a powerful new site in the memory landscape of Santiago de Chile, embedded into the broader processes of memorialisation in Chile.