Remembering Pinochet's Chile

On the Eve of London 1998

Bibliographic Data

ID2776010
AuthorsVolker Frank (University of North Carolina at Asheville, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume86
Issue2
Pages414-416
Publication date2006-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2005-045
OpenAlexW2059826140
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Remembering Pinochet’s Chile, the first book of Steve Stern’s trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile — is yet another fine contribution to Latin American studies published by Duke University Press. It is readily accessible to readers not familiar with Chile or Latin American dictatorships but also has a lot to offer to experts on Latin America. Specifically, Stern seeks to introduce the reader to one of Chile’s most painful chapters, the period between 1973 and 1990, and how individuals, and also the nation as a whole, remember these years. By now we have a lot of structural, economic, political, and sociological explanations of what happened in Chile during those years, but we have not yet heard enough from those who witnessed it firsthand: the upper-middle-class housewife, the twenty-something military soldier, the military officer in charge of those young recruits, the parent who lost a son or a daughter. The questions posed to these witnesses are often similar: How do victims and perpetrators alike remember the period? How did it happen? And how, if at all, do they try to make sense of those years, the brutal human-rights violations, and the disappeared? Stern’s “subjects” tell the reader their own story; all are different, yet all together form part of what he calls “Chile’s memory box” (p. xxviii).Two substantive comments are in order. First, Stern’s Remembering Pinochet’s Chile is a pertinent addition to the witness accounts, personal histories, and documentary material already available. I did not find it too distracting that Stern draws a picture that we would expect from a case such as Chile. Thus, the upper-middle-class woman remembers 9/11/73 as a day of “national salvation” (p. 7), the military officer who took part in interrogations has little to regret, the Communist mother tells us about her two disappeared sons, the Christian Democrat family tells us about persecution and threats. These stories reflect Chile’s sociopolitical landscape of Left, Center, and Right. And to the degree to which they follow such a pattern, they also confirm it in the sense that there are profoundly different class experiences of dictatorship, human-rights violations, and fear of arbitrary state violence (during Allende and Pinochet). These differences have major implications, not just in terms of how Chileans remember that painful past but also how they may be able to mend their personal lives in a nation that still struggles to come to terms with the past. In terms of the stories themselves, Dona Elena (the middle-class housewife) is overall not convincing, as we do not learn anything new from what she remembers. The brief account of Gabriela the schoolteacher, who was eight years old in 1973, is mostly irrelevant or too short to tell anything important. Yet all other stories are fascinating, captivatingly told, and they provide the reader with a lot of food for thought. There is, for example, Colonel Juan F.’s “indifferent memory” — chilling remarks about how military officers handled leftists and Allende supporters and how officers today manage to live with accounts or memories of human-rights violations. By juxtaposing Juan F.’s story with his own and other documented material (most importantly, Patricia Verdugo’s Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death, North-South Center Press, 2001), Stern succeeds in making a powerful point: regardless of what is said, remembered, or admitted, some people bear responsibility for what happened in Chile after 1973.Second, Stern’s conceptual and theoretical approach in Remembering Pinochet’s Chile is concise and coherent. Already in the introduction (p. xxvi), Stern tells the reader of his intentions. Rather than presenting his material in a dichotomy situated between “a memory against forgetting” and what he calls the “Faustian bargain” (p. xxvii) of “ oblivion” of the middle class and the wealthy, he argues “for [a] study of contentious memory as a process of competing selective remembrances, ways of giving meaning to and drawing legitimacy from human experience” (p. xxvii). Thus, he argues, “the point of oral history research becomes not only to establish the factual truth or falsehood of events in a memory story told by an informant but also to understand what social truths or processes led people to tell their stories the way they do” (p. xxviii). Personal history is categorized in five major memory types: heroic, dissident, indifferent, loose, and emblematic. The stories fit these memories neatly and convincingly. The crucial concept is emblematic memory. It is “both a framework of meaning and a way of organizing cultural argument about meaning” (p. 107). According to Stern, then, emblematic memory is not a memory of an event frozen in time; it is a social, a human process, painful and psychological, and as such it varies, it is relative though true none the less. And to the degree to which people experienced 1973 and its aftermath differently, emblematic memory is contested. If the analysis is framed in this way, several extremely important questions emerge: What drops out of memory frameworks? What is silenced (p. 5)? What can we learn from all that? Repeatedly in the text, Stern draws parallels to the Nazi Holocaust, and while I may not concur with him that “Chile is Latin America’s example of the German problem” (p. xxv), the comparisons he draws are profound and extremely important.The chapters are logically sequenced, but at times the footnotes are excessively long. The methodological appendix is helpful, and the essay on sources and the purpose and parameters of oral research should appeal especially to scholars engaged in that kind of research.Remembering Pinochet’s Chile delivers a powerful story that raises important historical, theoretical, personal, and political questions. It invites dialogue and debate and will help build academic bridges. Many scholars and researchers will find it a valuable asset in the classroom and for their own study

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Art history · Democracy · Dictator · Dictatorship · Latin Americans · Media studies · Officer · Order (exchange) · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Stern · Trilogy · Witness · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Gender Studies · History · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

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