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Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

Remembering perpetrators through documentary

film in post-dictatorial Chile

Daniela Jara

To cite this article: Daniela Jara (2020): Remembering perpetrators through documentary film in
post-dictatorial Chile, Continuum, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2020.1737434

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1737434

Published online: 09 Mar 2020.

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CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1737434

Remembering perpetrators through documentary film in

post-dictatorial Chile
Daniela Jara
School of Sociology, Universidad de Valparaíso, Center for the Study of Social Conflict and Cohesion (COES),
Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Theory and Subjectivity (CEI-Tesys)

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this article, I explore the representations of perpetrators of Perpetrator;
human rights violations in post-dictatorial Chilean cinema, specifi- postdictatorship;
cally in documentary film. My objective is to examine how cultural representations;
documentary film; Chile;
memory has been produced through several cinematic produc-
cultural memory; transitional
tions. To this end, I focus on the representation of perpetrators in justice
a corpus of four contemporary documentary films: El Mocito (‘The
young butler’, Marcela Said and Jean de Ceartau 2011), Viva Chile
Mierda (‘Long Live Chile, Damn It!’, Adrián Goycoolea, 2014), El
Pacto de Adriana (‘Adriana’s pact’ Lissette Orozco 2017) and El
Colour del Camaleón (‘The colour of the chameleon’, Andrés
Lübbert, 2017). I argue that cultural memory has gradually
expanded the imagination with respect to what is at stake in
encounters with perpetrators in the post-dictatorship. The way in
which this encounter is resolved in different documentary films is
relevant to acknowledging the narratives and meanings of state
violence in the post-dictatorship, as well as the tensions around the
implementation of the transitional project and its fractures.

Introduction
Since the recovery of democracy in Chile in 1990, after 17 years of dictatorship, there have
been significant institutional, social and cultural challenges in dealing with the legacies of
state violence and its tear in the social fabric of today´s society. One such challenge
concerns encounters between victims and their perpetrators and the effects that these
encounters would pose on a society which is divided in terms of moral and political
perspectives about the past. According to Onu Bakiner (2015), one of the intersubjective
effects of the aftermath of violence in postconflict societies are the contesting representa-
tions of former perpetrators of human right violations, even decades after the events have
occurred. However, in Chile, the official narratives of the transition avoided this potential
conflict, choosing instead to reformulate it by introducing the language of reconciliation,
in which truth and memory became disentangled from the imperative of justice.
Contesting official reconciliation narratives, several documentary films have produced
language with which to conceptualize, problematize and reimagine some of the unre-
solved aspects of the post-dictatorship in the last few decades. Although in the 90 s works

CONTACT Daniela Jara daniela.jara@uv.cl School of Sociology, Universidad de Valparaíso. Center for the Study of
Social Conflict and Cohesion (COES) and Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Theory and Subjectivity (CEI-Tesys)
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. JARA

focusing on the memory of perpetrators of state violence were rather exceptional, in recent
years the topic has burst into cultural memory. Encounters with perpetrators, in the lens of
new generations, have provided various new elements to aid in the social task of narrating
evil (Lara 2007). This has coincided with a transnational boom around conceptualizing the
perpetrators,1 due to the contemporary opinion that the perspective of the person who has
committed crimes against humanity also needs to be taken into account (Dunnage 2019;
Critchell et al. 2017; Canet 2019b). At the local level, this new trend seems to indicate that
we are witnessing a new moment within the process of memorialization in Chile (Jara 2018;
Jara and Aguilera 2017), in which the memory of the perpetrators, who are portrayed
precisely as perpetrators and not as martyrs, has been subjected to public scrutiny.
In this article, I focus on the representation of perpetrators in a corpus of four contem-
porary documentary films: El Mocito (‘The young butler’, Marcela Said and Jean de Ceartau
2011), ¡Viva Chile Mierda! (‘Long Live Chile, Damn It!’, Adrián Goycoolea 2014), El Pacto de
Adriana (‘Adriana’s pact’, Lissette Orozco 2017) and El Colour del Camaleón (‘The colour of
the chameleon’, Andrés Lübbert 2017). These films are about encounters with perpetrators
and aim to share their testimonies while at the same time revealing their inconsistencies
and limitations. I argue that exploring how these documentary films imagine and trace
these encounters with perpetrators, is key to giving an account of the way in which the
narratives of evil and the meaning of state violence have been constructed during the last
years and how they have also changed. I suggest that the latter sheds light into the tensions,
fractures and debts of the implementation of the transitional project in Chile.
In the first section, I contextualize the post-dictatorial scenario into which these works
intervene. I reveal the way in which various documentary films have gradually delimited
terms in order to represent perpetrators. I explore how public and social memories that
sought to demolish the hegemony left by the dictatorship in the beginning of the 90s
tended to imagine perpetrators as radically evil unapologetic torturers, such as Manuel
Contreras and Osvaldo Romo. This, I argue, was a response to institutional ambivalence
and a weak legal and political ability to process social conflict. In this context, I draw
attention to cultural productions that have gradually and slowly expanded the collective
imaginary in regards to the perpetrator. To do this, I introduce the reader to three
historical referents of the selected corpus: La Flaca Alejandra (‘Skinny Alejandra’,
Carmen Castillo and Guy Girard 1994), Mi Vecino es un Torturador (‘My Neighbor is
a Torturer’, Toni Comiti and Manolo d’Arthus 1997) and Circunstancias Especiales
(‘Special Circumstances’, Hector Salgado and Marianne Teleki 2007).
After, I go on to describe the post-2000 context, marked by the thirtieth year of
the coup, a shift to postmemory and the voices of a new generation of memory
producers. It is during this period that I suggest that cultural producers began to see
and depict perpetrators with a new lens. Analysing the documentary corpus,
I suggest that, taken together, they deconstruct the social identity of perpetrators,
giving a complex account of their motivations and social histories, while still main-
taining the gravity of the atrocities committed. Together with other recent produc-
tions, this corpus problematizes the reductionistic representation of perpetrators,
shifts the focus from victim to the perpetrator, and mediates their testimonies
utilizing different sources, such as interviews to family members and researchers,
and historical archives.
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 3

The perpetrator’s social identity in the post-dictatorship

In post-coup Chile, the representation of perpetrators has been at the heart of the division of
memory. While according to one political sector, former agents of state violence saved the
country from an internal war, human rights activists, left-wing militants and various civil society
actors, such as historians, cultural producers and artists have tried to challenge this perspective
by producing narratives and imaginaries around the practices of state violence. Popularizing
and defining the very concept of human right violations and its moral meaning has been one
of the assets of these cultural and political struggles. Over time, these initiatives and public
interventions have shaped a sustained effort to elaborate atrocities socially. For María Pía Lara
(2007) in the aftermath of violence societies produce narratives evil that allow them to produce
shared moral ideas about the past, present and future. Although international activism and
human rights organizations challenged the regime’s narrative of military salvation through the
production and circulation of information about state terror and human rights activism, the
subjects of testimonies were only portrayed as victims. In 1984, however, there was an
important milestone in this long-term process of truth making: that year, a sub-official of the
Air Forces, Andrés Valenzuela, called El Papudo, confessed his participation in tortures to the
journalist Mónica Gonzalez. However, throughout the years' cases like Valenzuela, in which
a perpetrator would empathize with their victims, has been scarce.
Once the dictatorship was electorally defeated in 1988, new democratic governments
that followed promoted institutional efforts towards transitional justice. Among them was
the implementation of the Rettig Truth Commission, the National Corporation for Truth
and Reconciliation, the Valech Commission I and II, and the Mesa de Diálogo. The truth
commissions and corporation aimed to recognize and denounce people’s diverse and
traumatic experiences of state violence as well as channel the demand of thousands of
citizens to know the truth and the fate of the disappeared. These official mechanisms
encouraged the recognition of victims of state violence, who were previously neglected,
and provided a sustained moral explanation for the atrocities committed by Augusto
Pinochet´s regime. The Mesa de Diálogo, in 1990–2000, consisted of several discussions
on pending human right issues, including members of the Armed Forces and human
rights lawyers. These mechanisms of transitional justice promoted an ambivalent repre-
sentation of the past; on the one hand they promoted the recognition of victims, and
commemorated them in memorials, but at the same time they also legitimized a path of
weak criminal and social sanctions against the perpetrators of human rights violations.
The public’s judgement was focused on a few scapegoats that personified the atro-
cities committed in the recent past, while Pinochet stood as the Commander in Chief of
the Armed Forces until 1998. One of the scapegoats of the regime was Manuel Contreras,
the first director of Pinochet’s secret police, DINA (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia:
National Intelligence Directorate), initially prosecuted for the so-called Letelier case, the
murder of a Chilean diplomat in Washington in 1977. The trial began in 1991, while
Contreras was found guilty in 1996. This was the first in a series of sentences handed
down against him that, in 2015, would add up to a sentence of more than a thousand
years in jail. The public television broadcast of the Letelier case trial had an enormous
impact on Chilean society. From then on Contreras became the symbol of human rights
violations and of radical evil. However, this also allowed the Armed Forces and other pro-
Pinochet sectors to distance themselves from his monstrous figure.
4 D. JARA

A second case in which a similar phenomenon occurred was that of the torturer
Osvaldo Romo. When asked about his participation in torture practices, Romo says ‘my
conscience is clean – I would do it again. I would not leave a parakeet alive’. As his
interviewer, journalist Nancy Guzmán, says in retrospective, this had other unforeseen
implications, one, for example, being that the detailed description of Romo’s torture
practices generated a critique by some left-wing activists because they considered that
the victims were tainted or dirty after his testimony. This is because his testimony
emphasized that torture caused the breakdown of individuals, in a context in which
‘breaking down’ implied becoming an informant to the regime.
The mediatic interventions of both Contreras and Romo have shown some of the
paradoxes involved in producing and transmitting the memory of perpetrators in post-
conflict societies: when the torturers speak, they vindicate the instrumental and admin-
istrative rationale of state violence. After their testimony, new waves of memory division
resurface within society. In her study, ‘Unsettling Accounts’, the scholar Leigh Payne
(2008) posed the dilemma faced by post-conflict societies when they realize that perpe-
trator’s confessions in transitional contexts do not suggest repentance or truth, but rather
sharpen the division of memory. Unlike the criminal system, in which ‘the offender’
generally accepts that he has violated the law, perpetrators of historical cases of transi-
tional justice do not generally consider themselves criminals or perpetrators. Moreover, in
the case of Chile, as in those of other Latin American dictatorships, they consider
themselves to be saviours and martyrs (Feld and Salvi 2016). In her analysis on the public
figure of Romo, Payne notes: ‘. . . Romo’s confession reinforced the regime’s notion that
a few renegade individuals, and not the military forces as a whole, had committed the
violence attributed to the regime. Romo embodied the exception, the aberration, to the
regime’s otherwise noble mission, thereby exculpating the regime’ (2008, 122).
Thus, the impunity of the perpetrator and his incarnation in specific men, together with
institutional political ambivalence had an effect on the psycho-geographic landscape of
the post-dictatorship. Traces of denial and anxiety were part of the victims' experience of
navigating the daily social space of the post-dictatorship. This experience is described in
several productions dealing with the period, such as Nostalgia de la Luz (‘Nostalgia for the
light’, Patricio Guzmán 2010), or the book De la Tortura No se Habla (Patricia Verdugo
2004), and has also become an emblematic plot of social memories -those stories that
have become milestones in collective memory- narrating the fear that victims of different
forms of state violence felt towards the very idea of encountering their perpetrators in the
street, in the courts of justice or even in the truth reports themselves. In his work Nostalgia
de la Luz, Guzmán interviews a therapist specialized in episodes of ‘revictimization’ in
a small town. She describes that these episodes were triggered after the encounters of the
victims with their torturers in the street, where many former state agents walk free.
Despite the fact that some of them have had to serve sentences, in many cases, they
did not have to serve them in prison.

The perpetrator in post-dictatorship film

In his article ‘Documenting the legacies of the Chilean dictatorship’, Fernando Canet
proposes that ‘cinema is one of the main sources of public narratives that contribute to
the construction of the collective memories of a nation’ (2019a, 126). In a similar vein,
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 5

Jeffery Alexander, when studying the post-Holocaust narratives, finds that cultural pro-
duction (cinema, television and literature) has an important productive and creative role
in the formation of a post-cosmopolitan ethic (2016). In the case of Chile, several scholars
have contributed to this reflection on cultural memory. Works like those of Michael
Lazzara (2008), 2011, Lazzara (2016), Kristin Sorensen (2008) Lisa Digiovanni (2012,
2016), Antonio Traverso (2017), Ana Ros (2018), and Fernando Canet (2019a) have pio-
neered this effort in the cinematographic field. Attempting to make a taxonomy of the
cinema of the period which deals with the recent past, Traverso proposes that the cinema
produced can be categorized as either representing an agonistic or reconciliation
approach (2017). Although these categories shed light on post-dictatorial cinema, the
films that make up the corpus that I analyse here cannot be considered through these
categories alone. I argue that the corpus that problematizes the encounters with perpe-
trators share a similar characteristic: a departure from the representation of the perpe-
trator as the characterization of radical evil.

Encounters with perpetrators in the early 90 s

At the beginning of the post-dictatorship, in 1994, Carmen Castillo and Guy Girard’s film, La
Flaca Alejandra, dealt with the problem of betrayal within the left and of complicity with the
regime. This documentary film produced representations that were difficult to assimilate
with the public opinion at that time. Carmen Castillo, an artist, had also been the wife of
Miguel Enriquez, leader of the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria: Revolutionary
Left Movement), who in 1974 was shot and killed by the secret police, DINA. Castillo worked
through this traumatic experience first in La Flaca Alejandra, and years later in Calle Santa Fé
(‘Santa Fé Street’ 2007), where she relives and represents the dramatic personal events
entangled in the impact of her husband’s death on a collective level. The disproportionate
nature of the violence used against Enriquez, his own charisma, and the fact that Castillo
had been pregnant at the moment at which they were assaulted, have contributed to the
enormous impact and resonance of his killing in collective memory.
The aforementioned film is about the story of la Flaca, the alias of Marcia Merino, who
was an important MIR militant and who informed against Enriquez. As part of her various
attempts to reconstruct her memory after her exile, Castillo makes this film about the
story of la Flaca by attentively listening to the woman’s experience of a breakdown after
her political imprisonment. Castillo explores the mechanisms that led Merino to her
dehumanization and to collaborate with her torturers. The film did not have an easy
reception, nor did a press conference held by Merino in 1992 called Pido Perdón (I
apologize). On the day of the press conference, Merino, who had been invited to
collaborate with the incipient investigations into the crimes of the dictatorship by the
Chilean Commission of Human Rights, anticipating harsh criticism, was accompanied by
the journalist Gladys Díaz, who represented the exact opposite. The journalist had written
Yo Acuso (I accuse), in which she accused Manuel Contreras as her torturer.
Castillo’s work carefully articulates these tensions that were rising in the early transition.
While la Flaca seemed to represent a broken and excluded subject, Castillo also shed light
into the left’s own attempts to build a heroic memory. Through Merino’s story, Castillo
transgressed the idea of resistance, which implied the commandment of not breaking down
during torture sessions. The narrative of resistance is a central element in the production of
6 D. JARA

common values as a part of the memory framework planted by left-wing communities. This
can be seen today in memorials such as that of the National Stadium, in which those
individuals that did not breakdown are remembered. Drawing attention to experiences of
breaking and weakness also transgressed to another frontier: the essential difference
between victims and perpetrators (for example, suggesting that la Flaca could be a victim
and perpetrator at the same time). Working with ambiguous categories, Castillo opens up
disturbing questions about the experience of torture and about the socially available
frameworks for remembering experiences. The destabilization of the distinction between
victims and perpetrators was, however, controversial.
Years later, a similar controversy was captured by the academic Lazzara after inter-
viewing Luz Arce, also a traitor of MIR and an informant for the regime over a period of
years. In 2008 he organized a seminar to discuss the figure of the collaborator, inspired on
his book, Luz Arce: Después del Infierno (2008). In the epilogue of the English version of the
book, he describes how human right organizations and activists were reluctant to accept
that the perpetrators, or in the case of Luz Arce, informants, were going to be humanized
through an intimate exploration of their grey zones.
In 1997, the documentary film, Mi Vecino el Torturador, by Toni Comiti and Manolo
d’Arthus, originally made for European television under the Chilean title, Torturadores en
Libertad, was screened. Here, we see Marcia Merino (la Flaca) and Luz Arce, two women
with similar and dramatic histories, confronting their torturers and previous accomplices.
The film also includes Ángela Jeria, the wife of a constitutionalist soldier tortured by the
regime, and the mother of Michelle Bachelet, who, years later, would be the first female
president of Chile and the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In the
documentary, Bachelet’s mother can be seen confronting her neighbour exiting the
elevator of their building. Her neighbour was Moren Brito, one of her torturers.
The documentary film’s objective is twofold: it shows the systematic denial of respon-
sibility by the perpetrators, emphasizing the schizoid character of the transition, but it also
shows the perpetrators in the aftermath, continuing their lives out of uniform. The former
torturers are found in particularly vulnerable situations: retired, they are filmed shopping
in the supermarket, mowing their lawns, or living in slums with few resources. The only
figure that destabilizes this contrasting portrait of perpetrators in Mi Vecino el Torturador is
that of Osvaldo Romo. The film includes in its ethnographic tour through the streets of
Santiago the first interview conducted by journalist Nancy Guzmán with Romo in 1995,
above described.
The last referent in the current trend of documenting the memory of perpetrators is
Circunstancias Especiales (2007). The narrator is a former political prisoner at the age of 16,
who, after being tortured for 3 months, had to flee the country. After decades of living in
the exile, and finally coming to terms with his own memory, awakened with Pinochet’s
detention in London, Hector decides to return to Chile and meet his torturers and those
responsible for his friends’ deaths. He says, ‘When I go to their houses and knock on the
door, those people who were involved in killings and torture . . . I don’t know what is going
to happen . . . I honestly hope that they will sit down and talk’. Through his personal
search, he is advised to forget. Twenty-seven years later after the coup, Hector finds out
that reconciliation is an awkward metaphor, as none of the people he looked for wanted
to talk. This work resembles Mi Vecino el Torturador in that the protagonists of both were
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 7

former victims who confront their tortures, but who do not find any of the answers they
were looking for in terms of confronting their past.

The first decade of the twenty-first century: 30 years after the coup
Around 2000, after the 30th anniversary of the coup, there was a memory boom in Chile.
Scholar Isabel Piper even called the events of that year ‘the farandulization of memory’ (2014).
Films, ceremonies and books were all produced to commemorate 30 years of democracy after
the coup. Research seminars and conferences made memory a topic of public concern. Around
2000 an official narrative about the atrocities committed was being established and as a result
victims were officially recognized and commemorated in memorials. In fact, in 2010 a museum
was specifically dedicated to memories of the dictatorship (the Museum of Memory and
Human Rights). After the publication of the ‘Valech Report I’ in 2004, which reported on the
magnitude of political prisoners and their torture during the dictatorship, the gravity and
immensity of the harm committed began to be reflected in the public sphere, even though not
all victims were officially recognized in the report.
Since 2004, the production of cultural memory of the dictatorship by new generations
began to articulate an unprecedented personal and generational perspective from the
standpoint of new relationships with broad, diverse experiences, some of which even
entered into dispute with victims’ dominant subjectivity and their ideational frameworks.
Before describing the characteristics of this generational shift within political documen-
tary films, and examining how it explores encounters with perpetrators, I will take a detour
at Luis R. Vera’s work, Fiesta Patria (‘National Holiday’, 2007), a fiction film that frames the
generational disjuncture in moments of memory transmission in a post-conflict society.
The story takes place during a family meeting in which a couple brings together their
two typical Chilean families for Sunday lunch to meet for the first time. However, once
gathered, the secret and sinister connections that link both families start revealing
themselves. Vera proposes a metaphor for Chile of that time: the film shows how the
present is built on violent and hidden connections and sinister relationships, which make
every social encounter potentially traumatic or cathartic. Among the relatives, there is
a former soldier who had tortured a former activist, also present at the lunch, even though
neither of them wish to remember the experience. Vera concentrates on the young
couple and highlights what that their relationship lies outside this history: having ignored
each other’s pasts, they discover their extended family’s past in this meeting. Vera
criticizes what he sees as the hypocrisy of a society (especially by the generation of the
70 s) that is built on the non-recognition of mutual violence, and in some ways, the silent
complicity of society with the perpetrators. The film ends in a plot twist: The young couple
decide to go away, take a motorcycle, and leave: they do not recognize the legacies of
their respective families and prefer to move on.
I cite this film as an example of a post-modern local critique of the transitional political
scene. Fiesta Patria reflects the anxieties of the transition, the imagination of a new Chile
separated by generations, the imagination of a future which has been emptied of the
past. All this was triggered by the encounter between victims and perpetrators, gathered
in that family space (the classic idea of community). On the other hand, the way Vera
resolves the conflict is tinged with a restrictive understanding of what the links between
the generations are, and, in his criticism of the exhaustion of meanings, he also proposes
8 D. JARA

an exit that does not contemplate the relationship between memory and the generations
and its inter and transgenerational intersection.
The cultural production that followed Vera’s work has allowed us to revise this pessimistic
transitional imaginary, and to build new spaces and languages of political imagination.
A documentary films such as Macarena Aguiló´s El Edificio de los Chilenos (‘The Chilean
building’ 2010) and Germán Berger´s Mi Vida con Carlos by (‘My life with Carlos’, 2010) gave
voice to various forms of postmemory or memoirs by the second and third generations. In the
following section, I will suggest how this new wave of documentary film-making by second
and third generations expanded the recognition of their own experience and suffering after
the dictatorship and the different forms of violence experienced and transmitted.

The boom of the perpetrator in documentary film

In 2013, a televised meeting illustrates and condenses a series of interpellations that
constitute the latest shift in the memory of perpetrators in postdictatorial Chile. During
that year, Ernesto Ledjerman, the son of a left-wing couple murdered in 1974, makes
a televised appearance in which he confronts Juan Emilio Cheyre, known as ‘the general
of the transition’. In this context, Ledjerman’s plea embodies a significant twist in relation
to the representation of perpetrators: it is not the scapegoat-type perpetrator who is
confronted, but instead the very general of the Armed Forces during the transition.
I suggest that Ledjerman’s appeal to Cheyre signals a new moment in the social
narration of evil. Here, we see a moment of reimagining the perpetrator beyond the
limits and simplification of radical evil. In fact, Cheyre was recently convicted for having
been an accomplice in the ‘Caravana de la Muerte’ case (Caravan of death´s case),
reconfiguring the social representation of perpetrator (also as accomplice) and expanding
the domain of responsibility. There is another element in Ledjerman’s intervention that
makes this encounter and confrontation particularly interesting. As a child of ‘desapar-
ecidos’ (missing people), the person seeking justice in this case is a man, reconfiguring the
gender patterns of memory. Previously, women were traditionally the ones who looked
for missing relatives (usually fathers or husbands who were left-wing militants) in the
Sothern Cone dictatorships. The children and grandchildren of the disappeared, due to
their position in kinship, reconfigured the gendered dynamics of memory-searching.
The representations of perpetrators and accomplices in the post-dictatorship, driven in
particular by cultural producers and activists from the post-coup generations, become the
object of multiple cultural productions on the second decade of this century. In this new
stage of cultural production, we can consider documentary films such as El Mocito (2010),
Viva Chile Mierda (2013), El Color del Camaleón (2017) and El Pacto de Adriana (2017).2
In 2011, El Mocito by Marcela Said and Jean de Certeau was released, gaining attention
from the public and the media (Lazzara 2016; Ros 2018). The protagonist of the film is
Jorgelino Vergara, a civilian who worked closely with the DINA in a low-ranking position.
Through a series of life-story interviews with Vergara and other individuals who provide
insight into his trajectory, including his brother and a well-known human rights activist,
the filmmakers explore how an individual’s life can become entangled in state terrorism.
At only 15-years-old, Vergara migrated from the countryside to the city in search of
a job. It was then that he met Manuel Contreras and became his family servant for 2 years.
From there, he began to collaborate with the DINA and one of its extermination units,
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 9

Brigada Lautaro, at Simón Bolivar detention centre, where there were no survivors (most
of the communist leaders taken there were killed in the first years of the military coup).
Therein he worked as a servant assisting in tasks such as feeding the prisoners, moving
corpses, serving coffee to the agents, etc. Marginality and survival were entangled in
Vergara’s story, whose everyday activities consisted of witnessing kidnapping, torture and
killing at the extermination centre.
Once democracy was restored, and after years of searching, the human rights division
of the PDI (Investigative Police) found Vergara living in a remote place and took him to
testify before Judge Victor Montiglio in the context of a lawsuit. In the film, he describes
how he has lived clandestinely for years, fearing persecution by the judicial system due to
his first-hand information about practices of kidnapping, torture and killing. Thus, in the
late 90 s, to protect his name and avoid charges, he became an informant of the judicial
investigation and on request of the judge, he had to reveal what he personally saw and
knew about the detention centre. His position as a firsthand witness was significant to
invigorate the quest for past investigations and allowed for the identification of more
than 70 individuals responsible for crimes against humanity. In fact, he was a key part of
the largest human rights investigation of the period so far. His testimony, as well as el
Papudo´s voluntary confession in the 80s, were exceptional spaces of truth in the search
for memory in Chile. Exploring his life opened up a new set of dilemmas concerning state
violence and its various structures and circumstances.
Throughout the film Vergara stresses the fact in front of the judicial system he is
innocent, as he had no direct participation in crimes. However, questions arise about to
what extent he effectively chooses to be there, his moral status and if he could be
considered an accomplice of state terror, even beyond criminal responsibility. He states
clearly, throughout the film and in other interviews, that although he was at the Simón
Bolivar centre, he was not involved in the crimes committed. His participation consisted,
in his words, of just being there. However, his fear of being found and of having to come
to terms with his past in front of the public eye problematizes the moral status of
innocence that he pleas. His testimony oscillates contradictorily between a voice in
which he positions himself as one of the DINA members, and then he distances himself
as merely a servant who even felt pain for the victims, describing himself as a survivor. He
identifies neither with the military, nor with the agents nor with the victims, he was simply
there, as a completely amoral subject (or, at the same time, immoral).
The film does not provide a conclusion in its examination. Said and de Certeau
humanize Vergara’s life story and shows the black and white elements of his implication
with terror. In Ana Ros’ words, ‘His humanization, therefore, forces us to reflect upon the
circumstances and the social structures that push a “common man” to become involved in
the extermination and mortification of so many others’ (2018, 114). At the same time,
there is no redemption for Vergara either. As a survivor, he is also an opportunist and even
tried to obtain economic compensation as a victim of the dictatorship, presenting himself
as victim of the dictatorship too.
In 2013 Viva Chile Mierda, by Adrián Goycoolea, was released. Although, from my
perspective, the script has some problems in terms of consistency, the director explores
and reconstructs a historical event that is worth reconsidering in the post-dictatorship: the
first confession of a former perpetrator of Pinochet’s regime. The story is told by
Goycoolea’s aunt, a left-wing sympathizer, who after having been traumatically detained
10 D. JARA

and imprisoned during the first days of the coup, went into exile with her entire family.
Although they were not politically involved in any group or party, she and her husband
were detained for suspicion of being involved with the persecuted MIR.
During the film, various family members are interviewed, including three of the
couple’s children, today adults, who remember together the day of their parents’ deten-
tion, the emotions during the time they were in prison, and how they managed to leave
the country afterwards. The aunt and other interviewees also speak on how they mana-
ged to build a new life, and the solidarity needed for this to happen. The high point of the
story is when, years later, they met with the man who was their guard while they were in
prison. They recognized El Papudo, the person who had carried out messages for them
during their imprisonment. El Papudo, to some extent, made their days in prison easier, as
they happened to know each other before. The couple remembers him as an acquain-
tance who somehow protected them during their imprisonment, not as their victimizer.
However, intertwined with the family’s story is El Papudo’s own story: Andrés
Valenzuela, his real name, had been a member of the Air Force who worked for the
Comando Conjunto, a special group in charge of the annihilation of Communist leaders
during the first years of the military regime. In 1984, Valenzuela defected from the
institution and, in his desperation, confessed to his participation in crimes and torture
at the offices of the opposition magazine, Cauce. Throughout a voluntary interview,
Valenzuela named people who ordered the crimes, described practices of state terror in
detail and identified some of the victims of the regime. The material, entitled Yo Confieso (I
confess) was first published in Venezuela, until it could be published in Chile. It was the
first time that the accusations of state terrorism were confirmed by one of the state
agents, providing important information for human right activists, as it revealed the fate
of missing people and provided resources for lawsuits.
Goycoolea builds the script around relationships and encounters with the perpetrator (El
Papudo), shedding light on his humanity. When he was asked why he decided to leave the
Air Force, Valenzuela says: ‘I didn’t see enemies’ (in the tortured individuals) and describes
that period of his life as a moment in which he felt burdened ‘with the smell of death’. In
other records, journalist Mónica González mentions that Valenzuela confessed because he
was not able to continue looking into his children’s eyes. Goycoolea proposes a history of
reconciliation between a victim and a perpetrator who feels regret. El Papudo is somehow
a fantasy of reconciliation, one where victims and perpetrators could inhabit the same moral
community, as they are bonded by common worldviews, and where sorrow, forgiveness
and regret are cultural emotions regulating reciprocity within the group.
However, El Papudo is an exceptional case in a local context in which the perpetrator
does not feel regret but rather pride of in what they render as their role of salvation. What
seems to be most interesting is to meet Vergara and also to humanize the trajectory of
a deserter, who ended up solitary in a domain in which there was no sympathy to him.
According to Goycooleas’ approach, Vergara is humanized through the idea of repen-
tance, but dilemmas of repentance are also shown alongside this. His past as a perpetrator
is too loaded to belong to a new community again.
A few years later, two documentary films under the perspective of the children of
perpetrators or the second generation, were released: El Colour del Camaleón (Andrés
Lübbert 2017) and El Pacto de Adriana (Lissete Orozco 2017). Similar to the children of
victims, who in biographical documentaries such as Venían a Buscarme (Alvaro de la Barra
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 11

2018) or Mi Abuelo Allende (Marcia Tambutti 2015), Lübbert and Orozco explore the
connections between family stories and social and political history, drawing attention
to their father/aunt lives. In contrast to the first generation’s accounts of perpetrators in
books or memoirs such as Augusto Pinochet´s Camino Recorrido. Memorias de un soldado
(1990) or Miguel Krassnof´s Prisionero por servir a Chile (2008), that deny the memory of
state violence and rewrite the military politics of internal war in terms of martyrdom and
salvation, this second generation of perpetrators remembers the past from the perspec-
tive of human right violations.
El Color del Camaleón was the first film made by the child of a collaborator of the
dictatorship, destabilizing at the same time its meaning. Having been born in Belgium
during his father’s exile, Lübbert explores his father’s story, first in an attempt to better
understand his silence and reclusive behaviour. He explains how the process of asking
questions was a way for him to reconstruct the narrative of his own life. He realized that
his father was not a left-wing activist as he had always imagined, but in fact, he had
escaped from the intelligence agencies who were forcing him to be a collaborator.
Lübbert started to explore this hidden family story, looking for historical archives and
family memories and documents, and found out about the traumas that his father had
been silencing throughout his life.
The father and son travel together to Chile in order to discover the truth and explore
the places in which the events took place. Throughout this journey to recover familial,
individual and historical memory, Lübbert learns how his father was induced, kidnapped
and forced to participate in situations of torture, was shocked by the dehumanization to
which his father was exposed to for months. During the fragmented and painful mem-
ories, his father describes the tactics his captors used to break him and transform him into
an undercover agent of the secret police. In the course of the trip, he tries to heal his
father by offering to listen empathically to the impossible experience that haunts him and
that has been passed down to Lübbert as an intergenerational trauma, a concept he
articulates throughout the film and in his post-exhibition talks. He aims to vindicate his
father’s experience as a victim of the dictatorship. This is the message that the filmmaker
emphasizes in conversations, interviews and talks about his work: the film seeks to
critically explore the broader effects of the regime, showing how society still needs to
come to terms with painful stories of subjection and violence, and heal other victims
whose stories have remained unspoken so far, but also need recognition.
The same year Lissette Orozco released El Pacto de Adriana, exhibited in several festivals.
The film tells the story of her aunt Chany, a role model for Orozco during her childhood, who
had lived in Australia for years. After a visit to Chile, Chany is detained at the airport after being
denounced for her participation in torture during the years she worked as secretary for Manuel
Contreras, also her friends. In an instant and right before her eyes, Orozco’s aunt Chany
becomes Adriana Rivas, a former agent of repression, who was arrested to face justice.
In El Pacto de Adriana the encounter with the perpetrator shows the difficulties
involved in facing a toxic past, even decades after the event. The film’s name comes
from the gesture of covering up the past: it refers to a pact of silence. In its political use, it
refers to what has been denounced as an agreement between participants and collabora-
tors of regimes of fear. In Chile’s case, it was an agreement between former members of
the armed forces and collaborators of the secret police not to speak at trials. It was
a promise of loyalty, based on circles of protection that exercised social control within the
12 D. JARA

group, under the threat of death. Nonetheless, its meaning could also be extrapolated to
the agreement of the Concertation Coalition, a group of right-wing parties and military
personnel during the 1990 s and 2000 s, for a ‘pacted transition’ which included the
acceptance of the political model imposed during dictatorship, including the constitution,
the economic model and the Amnesty Law.
The film allows us to see the intimate dynamics of the circle of silence. We listen to
Chany’s conversations with her former colleagues and friends. It is perhaps one of the
most intimate portraits that has been produced in the Chilean post-dictatorship of how
the private lives of those who were perpetrators are framed in what comes after the
violence, how they make their connections, how they dissociate their past from their
present and the way we can explain why the victimization of perpetrators has been
a growing strategy, clearly placing it as a response to judicial prosecutions.
When Orozco confronts her aunt, Adriana accuses her of treason. Throughout dialogues
through Skype, the film traces everyday forms of denial, showing the effects of dissociation
between individuals and their families or private lives. It expands our understanding of the
process of denial which operates through various social mechanisms, including family
loyalty, avoidance of conflict, protection of family members and group identity. In this
case, Orozco’s exploration causes tension in terms of family loyalties and values. In fact, in
a personal conversation the filmmaker describes the pressure as a social sanction that some
close relatives exerted on her after the documentary was exhibited. This points to the
affective and identity-related dimension of politics: her work reveals a painful search to the
audience that manages to link together family affects, judicial and journalistic investigation,
and the development of her own moral response to her family’s past.
El Pacto de Adriana causes tension and distances itself from one of the characteristics of
the memorialization of the second generation in the Southern Cone. As I suggested in the
previous section, one of the characteristics of many of these expressions is that they have
been elaborated by the second or third generations (often the children or grandchildren
of political actors or of activists of the 70 s and 80 s) who locate themselves at the
intersection of public and private memories (Lazzara 2009). For Orozco, the niece of an
agent of the regime, it is no use resorting to the fundamentals of her aunt’s memory as
a subjective biographical space, because there is no testimony there but rather the denial
of violence. For this reason, she must instead seek out historical sources (legal archives,
journalistic research) and triangulate her sources in order to reconstruct the context.

Conclusions
The main focus of the official politics of memory in Chile, with landmarks such as the
implementation of truth commissions (1991, 2004 and 2010) and the inauguration of the
Museum of Memory in 2010, has been to recognize and give voice to the experiences of
the victims of the dictatorship from 1973–1990. These efforts have provided official status
and recognition to victims in a still divided society. However, the figure of the perpetrator
of state violence and human rights violations has been much more difficult to capture
reflect on, and overall, judge. To date, only a small number of individuals have been
sentenced for human right crimes during the dictatorship and even less of them have
actually served time in prison, contributing to the sense of impunity from human right
activists and organizations. For many sectors of society, the official narratives and
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 13

accounts of evil and terror revealed during the truth commissions have not been met with
subsequent practices of justice in postdictadorial Chile.
Throughout this article, I have traced the shifting representations of perpetrators in Chile
and the importance of cultural works such as documentary films in influencing and
constructing these representations depending on the contexts they are produced in.
Noticing that the very category of perpetrators requires an ethic and political approach to
the past, I have described the conflicts around the social identity of perpetrators. I have
shown the limitations of the reduction of the perpetrator to monstrous figures such as
Romo and Contreras. I have suggested that documentary films such as those produced by
Castillo and Girard (1994), Comiti and d’Arthus (1997) and later Salgado and Teleki (2007)
were pioneers in providing a language to explore fissures in the social identity of perpe-
trators. This language would open up new dialogues regarding the narratives of evil and
therefore allow a broader reflection on how societies take part in atrocities and are torn
apart. While La Flaca destabilizes the distinction between victims and perpetrators by
exploring the life story of a collaborator and traitor, Mi Vecino and Circunstancias shed
light into the aftermath of a society with divided memories.
Additionally, I have drawn attention to the contemporary work of a new generation of
cultural producers from 2010 onwards, arguing that new generation of filmmakers have
readdressed the representation of perpetrator with new lens. I have noted how returning
to these questions has articulated a social judgement of responsibility in state terror,
suggesting that this has provided a more nuanced way to come to terms with the past.
The representation of perpetrators in contemporary documentary film has explored the
lives of individuals with diverse trajectories. Through an emphasis on the humanization of
perpetrators through the exploration of their subjectivities, these films have gone beyond
the radical image of evil in order to provide a closer exploration of the drama of divided
societies. These films aim to follow encounters with perpetrators, and to tackle how one
becomes the subject of massive crimes and reveal who were the actors, examining their
different trajectories as well. They also explore the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind the persistent
pact of silence and in what circumstances it can be broken.
Through the different works analysed here, I have explored diverse forms of participa-
tion in the machinery of state violence. We have seen two civilian accomplices to the
regime and two deserters. One deserter having belonged to the Air Force (El Papudo),
while the second was a forced collaborator who managed to escape from his captors (El
Camaleón). The testimonies of the two deserters, explore the process of dehumanization
of state terror, focusing on those resources that have allowed both deserters to find moral
resistance to their collaboration in terror. In them, they spoke on their personal injuries
and traumatic implication with the regime and in both life stories we see traces of shame
and guilt. Jorgelino Vergara (El Mocito) and Adriana Rivas (Chany), instead, shows how
complicity with the regime had to do with acquiring status, belonging and access to
power. They were both functional to power and got benefits from their collaboration.
Exploring these life stories represented in the corpus complicates the postdictatorial
memory framework in which the perpetrators seemed to have a fix, unified memory,
previously destabilized by Carmen Castillo’s work. In fact, it is only Chany who would
remember the past through the memory frameworks of salvationist memory. Particularly,
Papudo and Camaleón remember it instead through experiences of isolation, fragmentation,
suffering and exile. Both protagonists paid high personal costs: for both the moral coming
14 D. JARA

to terms with their role in history was particularly painful, as they both feel shame, finding
redemption in solitude. Throughout these films, we see perhaps that although perpetrator is
a legal category, which holds a debt to justice, its social and cultural history is more
complicated. Thus, documentary films of perpetrators, in order to represent their life stories,
choices and circumstances, have humanized them and therefore demythologized them.
This has not been done to normalize their responsibility in state terror, but to better
understand how intimacy, life stories and everyday life becomes part of its machinery.

Notes
1. See Fernando Canet’s introduction to this special issue.
2. In regards to other current work, for several years the documentary filmmaker Pepe Rovano
has been working on a documentary film about the legacy of his perpetrator father, recon-
structing the story of his father’s victims and creating a personal and healing relationship with
them. In 2017, the film Los Perros, by Marcela Said, and in 2019, Araña, by Andrés Wood, were
released, both exploring the frameworks of memory and experiences of the regime’s colla-
borators and right-wing activists. In literature, the works of Alejandro Zambra and particularly
those of Nona Fernández are also part of this memory boom, narrating the experiences of
regime collaborators or supporters’ children. Also worth mentioning is the journalistic
research work done by Javier Rebolledo (in El Despertar de los Cuervos, 2013; Camaleón,
2017), and dramatic works such as Cordillera by Francisca Maldonado and Felipe Carmona
(2015). In these works, a new way of considering the question of historical memory and of the
perpetrator is established: together with other recent productions, they situate the repre-
sentation of the perpetrator as a problem, shifting the focus from the victim to the perpe-
trator without renouncing the problem of his or her responsibility.

Acknowledgments
I thank to FONDECYT postdoctoral grant research 3160565; the Center for Social Conflict and
Cohesion Studies, COES, sponsored by FONDAP (15130009) and CEI-TESYS, the Center for Social
Theory and Subjectivity, Universidad de Valparaíso.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Daniela Jara is Associate Professor at the School of Sociology, Universidad de Valparaiso. Her work
focuses on social and cultural memory in Chile, and the intersubjective legacies of transitional justice.
Among her publications are: Children and the Afterlife of State Violence. Memories of Dictatorship
(Palgrave McMillan, 2016); ‘Tracing Mapuche Exclusion in Post-dictatorial Truth Commissions in Chile:
Official and Grass-roots Initiatives’ published in International Journal of Transitional Justice (2018) and
‘Ética, estética y política del duelo: el Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos en Chile’
published in A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos (2018).
 CONTINUUM: JOURNAL OF MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES 15

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