The moral economy of memory public and private commemorative space in Post-Pinochet Chile

Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages 235-264

  Collins, Cath ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD DIEGO PORTALES   (Chile)

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EID: 84896220824     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (10)

1. See Hite, "El monumento a Salvador Allende en el debate político chileno", for an account of the political horse-trading that saw the Right permit this initiative in return for authorization for a privately sponsored monument to the right-wing ideologue and key regime figure Jaime Guzmán.
2. See the Chilean publisher lom's "September Collection", developed specifically to publish reactions and responses to the political violence that was unleashed on Chile's own September 11th (1973), at www.lom.cl.
3. The causes of such a complex and largely unpredicted resurfacing of various aspects of the human rights legacy, nearly a decade after the transition to democracy, are varied. Very real contemporaneous events, such as the early retirement in 1998 from the army and entry into the Senate of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet, provoked specific reactive justice initiatives aimed at blocking this other wise effortless transformation from demagogue to democrat. Apparently unrelated structural transformations, including judicial reform, had meanwhile made it more possible for such initiatives to find fertile ground in the national courts, even before, but particularly after, the spectacular events of October 1998 and their fallout, generically known as the putative "Pinochet effect." For detailed accounts of how particular synergies of the structural with the symbolic and apparently incidental have shaped Chile's post-transitional human rights landscape, see Sebastian Brett, "The Pinochet Effect: A Decade on from London 1998", Universidad Diego Portales, www.icso.cl;
4. Roberto Saba, in "El movimiento de derechos humanos y el trabajo actual en Derechos Humanos en Chile" (report prepared for the Ford Foundation, 2002
5. "They sent us these young students who knew nothing about life, really, and didn't even know what had gone on here in Paine. We sat them down and told them how it had been⋯. They would end up in floods of tears and we would have to comfort them. After a while we said it might be better to stop that part of the project" (Relatives' Association member, interview, 22 November 2006, Paine, Chile).
6. The Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales (Ministry of National Patrimony) oversees the acquisition, use, and management of state property (see www.gobiernodechile.cl).
7. "Support" consists for the most part of limited financial support. The list of projects in April 2008 mentions eighteen existing and five partially completed memorials - defined as plaques and similar installations, as distinct from full-blown site recoveries or interventions. However, some regions are overrepresented, and not all are yet covered (see www.ddhh.gov. cl/proy-construidos.html).
8. Some of these include the derogation and/or annulment of the Self-Amnesty Law of 1978, a demand given supposedly binding legal force by a verdict in 2006 of the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (see the Almonacid case verdict of September 2006, at www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec-154-esp. doc;
9. analysis contained in the versions from 2007, 2008, and 2009 of the "Informe Anual Sobre Derechos Humanos", at the Universidad Diego Portales website, www.derechoshumanos.udp. cl/).
10. Both the Valech Commission of 2004 and the reorganization of the program's work were products of a major new policy document, launched by Lagos in 2003, called "No hay mañana sin ayer" (No tomorrow without yesterday). The text of the proposal and accompanying presidential message can be found at www.ddhh.gov. cl/ddhh-propuesta.html.