Pablo Leighton, Fernando Lopez (Eds.) - 40 Years Are Nothing - History and Memory of The 1973 Coups D'etat in Uruguay and C

40 Years are Nothing
40 Years are Nothing:
History and memory

of the 1973 coups d’état
in Uruguay and Chile
Edited by
Pablo Leighton and Fernando López

40 Years are Nothing:
History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile
Edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando López
This book first published 2015
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2015 by Pablo Leighton, Fernando López and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-7642-9

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7642-1
CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................ ix
Pablo Leighton and Fernando López
Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii

J Patrice McSherry
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Regional Cooperation and State Terrorism in South America
Fernando López
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17

On History and Memory: Some Reflections on the Process of Transitional
Justice from the Experience of Uruguay (1985-2005)
Pedro Teixeirense
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 33

The Gelman Case and the Legacy of Impunity in Uruguay
Debbie Sharnak
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57

The Celebration: Violence and Consent in the First Anniversary
of the Chilean Coup
Pablo Leighton
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 77

ASIS and ASIO in Chile: Transparency and Double Standards Four
Decades after the Coup
Florencia Melgar and Pablo Leighton
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93

Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile: The Struggle
for Memorials in the 21st Century
Nicolás del Valle
vi Contents
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 111

Moving Memories: Marches Remembering and Embodying the Chilean
and Uruguayan Dictatorships
Yael Zaliasnik
Contributors ............................................................................................. 125

INTRODUCTION
PABLO LEIGHTON AND FERNANDO LÓPEZ
Volver
con la frente marchita
las nieves del tiempo
platearon mi sien.
Sentir
que es un soplo la vida
que veinte años no es nada
que febril la mirada
errante en las sombras
te busca y te nombra.
(Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera, 1935)
The 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile presented a number of

significant qualitative differences from other military coups in Latin
America. In just three months, these dictatorial regimes marked the
beginning of a new era in the subcontinent. There had been other
significant coups in South America in the early and mid-20th century, such
as the overthrowing of President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, or the 1964 and
1966 military takeovers in Brazil and Argentina, which reshaped the
political role of the armed forces across the continent. However, the coups
d’état that took place in 1973 were notably different from previous
dictatorial experiments. The new regimes in Uruguay and Chile became
staunch bearers of a National Security State doctrine and introduced
radical new economic policies. The events that took place in Montevideo
and Santiago in June and September 1973 respectively became decisive
battlefields of the Cold War in Latin America. More tellingly, they gave
birth to extreme models of society built on the foundations of what can
arguably be considered ideological genocides. These regimes relied on
both rudimentary and sophisticated methods of repression and
authoritarianism to establish neoliberal paths that have lasted until today.
viii Introduction
The year 2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of democratic
rule in those countries. This book is inspired in the strong memories that
these coups still create. As iconic Argentinean-Uruguayan tango musician,
Carlos Gardel, sang in 1935, “because twenty years are nothing”, the
people of Latin America and elsewhere remain holding strong feelings and
opinions about these events four decades later, crossing more than two
generations. The 40th anniversary led to the organisation of numerous
commemorative events in Uruguay, Chile and around the globe. Surviving
victims, relatives of the disappeared, human rights organisations and
groups of various backgrounds and interests gathered throughout the year
to remember, and among other ends, to keep the pursuit of justice. Despite
the four decades and what can be described as some timid ad hoc efforts to
address the issue, the Uruguayan and Chilean democracies and judiciaries
continue to show deficiencies in bringing the perpetrators of severe human
rights violations, both military personnel and civilian collaborators, to face
justice.
The anniversary also gave scholars from all over the world an
opportunity to reflect upon the significance of these coups. This translated
into numerous seminars, conferences, debates and events at universities in
the Americas, Europe and Australia. In this context, the editors of this
book, with the support of the School of Humanities and Languages,
University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, organised
a seminar in October 2013 to discuss the significance and legacies of the
27 June and 11 September 1973 coups in Uruguay and Chile. Titled Forty
years are nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in
Uruguay and Chile, the event attracted researchers from Uruguay, Chile,
Brazil, Colombia, United States (US) and Australia who presented on a
wide range of topics linked to the anniversary. The event served as a
platform to launch a number of projects including the subsequent founding
of Latitudes—the Latin American Research Group Australia
(www.latitudesgroup.info)— and this book, which is a compilation of
papers presented at the seminar by specialists on Latin American studies.
The range of topics addressed in the different chapters (and the numerous
debates and conferences held around the world) demonstrate that the 1973
coups continue to be a key point of interest for researchers and that the
study of this topic is far from exhausted.
Chapter One of the book gives an overview of the significant
contribution made by the Uruguayan and Chilean regimes towards the
formalisation of what would become the infamous transnational network
of state terrorism known as Operation Condor. Fernando López discusses
the endogenous and exogenous political and economic challenges faced by
40 Years are Nothing ix
these dictatorships and the strategies adopted to break the international

isolation that ensued as a consequence of the numerous human rights
violations conducted by the security forces and their accomplices, as well
as the international campaigns conducted by exiles and their supporters.
Chapter Two explores the way in which Uruguay has struggled to
implement the different mechanisms of Transitional Justice since the
return to democratic rule in 1985. Despite strong criticisms from regional
and international bodies, such as the Organization of American States
(OAS) and the United Nations (UN), Uruguay maintains an amnesty law
that limits the powers and faculties of the judiciary to investigate crimes
committed by members of the armed forces during the dictatorship. Pedro
Teixeirense provides an interesting background to the field of Transitional
Justice and its implementation in Latin America. It also follows Uruguay’s
approaches to the application of these mechanisms throughout three
distinct periods in the country’s recent history, as well as the subsequent
political challenges that emerged with the implementation of these
mechanisms.
Chapter Three also focuses on Uruguay’s struggle with Transitional
Justice, though from a different perspective. It contrasts with some of the
ideas offered by Pedro Teixeirense and generates an interesting debate by
evaluating the significant contribution made by the Inter-American Court
of Human Rights’ historic ruling against Uruguay in the Gelman v
Uruguay case. Debbie Sharnak uses this case to delineate the evolution of
human rights policy in Uruguay since the return to democracy in 1985.
Most importantly it clearly identifies the slow changes that have taken
place in the past decade and the clash between international human rights
law and local legislation. The chapter concludes by making a clear case for
a shift in the analytical frameworks used in the studies of Transitional
Justice.
Chapter Four examines the cultural power of the Chilean junta led by
Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) during its first years, with an emphasis on
the mass event of the first anniversary of the coup d’état, on 11 September
1974, broadcast live on national television. Pablo Leighton scrutinises how
the violent Chilean dictatorship from the very beginning also developed
culture and discourse to hold and justify its power. The chapter points to
the rarely acknowledged sense of ceremony and spectacle of the Chilean
regime through a televised simulcast event, which showed hundreds of
thousands of people celebrating the first anniversary of the coup in
Santiago. The author brings to light that the first year of the dictatorship
was not only the most violent year but also one of the most hegemonic as
well.
x Introduction
Chapter Five explores the unrecognised role of Australia’s intelligence

agencies in undermining Salvador Allende’s government (1970–1973) and
supporting the more well-known actions of the United States’ Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Chile. Florencia Melgar and Pablo Leighton
show the difficulties in making that role transparent more than four
decades after the coup. The actions of Australia in Chile have involved
forms of censorship over the revelations in the years after the coup. A
1977 investigation by an Australian Royal Commission headed by Justice
Robert Hope still has its section on Chile blacked out. The chapter reveals
the internal conflicts between Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1972–
1975); the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Bill
Robertson; and Labor Minister, Clyde Cameron, about the withdrawal of
agents from Chile. Finally, the authors show the haunting consequences of
the relationships between Australia and Pinochet’s regime through
intelligence surveillance over the Chilean exiled community and the
current extradition process of a Chilean human rights violator who also
found refuge in Australia.
Chapter Six focuses on the legacy of the Chilean dictatorship through
the memorial sites and practices of memory. Nicolás del Valle argues
against a “museification” of memory, particularly when many of the
crimes of the civil-military regime still go unpunished and the symbols of
the dictatorship are still disputed. Specifically, the chapter examines the
Chilean state policies over memorials and the struggle over memory sites
by victims and relatives of victims who have marked former torture and
detention centres and burial locations, among others. The author proposes
a critique of a regime of memory and the governance of human rights in
Chile.
Chapter Seven, finally, analyses the different theatrical elements present
in three marches commemorating the dictatorships in Uruguay and Chile.
Yael Zaliasnik explores performative strategies to acknowledge the vital
characteristics of memories, such as kinetics, participation and the routes
of these events. Specifically, the chapter studies the Uruguayan Marcha
del Silencio (March of Silence) and in Chile the funeral procession of
December 2009 for musician and man of theatre, Víctor Jara, as well as
the August 2012 march from Villa Grimaldi to Simón Bolívar, two former
torture and extermination camps. These marches sought to encourage
citizens to act critically and to take a stand in the locations where they took
place, defamiliarising our way of looking in order to confront facts, places
and attitudes.
Forty years are nothing is aimed at a broad audience which includes
specialists in Latin American Studies, the political, cultural and economic
40 Years are Nothing xi
history of Uruguay and/or Chile, memory, Transitional Justice, state

terrorism, and those in the general public with an interest in these topics.
The editors would like to thank all the contributors for their valuable
work in furthering the field of Latin American studies and for making this
book possible. We also thank Blanche Hampton for her generous copy-
editing work and Jorge Hernández for logistics. Pablo Leighton wishes to
thank Bryoni Trezise and Bela Leighton Trezise for everything.
PREFACE
J PATRICE MCSHERRY
The Cold War was not cold in Latin America, where bloody military
coups took place in one country after another in the 1960s and 70s.
Counterinsurgency-trained armed forces were convinced of their mission
to eliminate “internal enemies”, driven by a national security doctrine that
exalted a “war against subversion” and justified harsh and illegal methods.
The internal enemy could be anyone: not only communists or guerrillas,
but dissidents, intellectuals, activists, party leaders, musicians, students,
constitutionalist military officers, unionists, artists, priests and nuns. The
result was a tidal wave of death and destruction in Latin America as
hundreds of thousands of civilians were “disappeared”, tortured, and
killed. Hundreds of thousands more were forced into exile.
The transnational system known as Operation Condor extended the
dirty wars across borders, as far as Europe and the United States. Exiles
and refugees who had escaped their own countries were targeted and
pursued, seized, tortured, and illegally transferred to their home countries,
where the great majority of them were killed. The secret Condor apparatus
also assassinated key opposition leaders around the world. The Condor
covert network included the US-backed anticommunist military regimes in
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, later joined by
Ecuador and Peru in less central roles. The United States provided military
aid as well as covert support.
The legacies and consequences of this era of state terror continue to
reverberate in Latin American societies, which were deeply scarred by
atrocity, grief, and fear, and continue to shape state-society relations to this
day. This book comes at an opportune moment, as some four decades have
now passed since the coups that abruptly altered the lives of millions of
Latin Americans. The trauma of the coups and the ensuing years of
repressive dictatorship implanted a culture of silence and fear, whose
echoes linger to this day. This volume, focused on Chile and Uruguay,
brings us new perspectives and insights with which to understand this
recent history, especially the struggles to remember and commemorate
xiv Preface
those who were lost, as well as to hold accountable those responsible for
crimes against humanity.
Clearly, the Latin American national security states did not operate in a
vacuum. During this period anticommunism was the overriding priority in
US foreign policy, usually outweighing concerns for human rights. US
military and intelligence forces helped to set up, and then worked closely
with, Latin American intelligence agencies such as the Chilean Directorate
of National Intelligence (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA) and
the Uruguayan National Directorate of Information and Intelligence
(Dirección Nacional de Informaciones e Inteligencia, DNII). One of the
key organizers of Operation Condor was DINA commander Manuel
Contreras. In 2000 the CIA acknowledged that Contreras had been a paid
asset between 1974 and 1977, a period when the Condor network was
planning and carrying out assassinations in Europe, Latin America, and the
United States (CIA 2000).
Washington, obsessed with the communist threat, interpreted Latin
American social and political conflicts, or nationalist government policies,
as indications of communist subversion instigated by Moscow. Of course,
US security strategists also feared that economic, political, and military
interests in the region were under threat by militant and organized political
and social movements. In Chile and Uruguay, broad popular movements
were fighting to transform exclusionary economic structures, demand
basic rights, and democratise the state. Significantly, the Unidad Popular
(Popular Unity) in Chile—the coalition of six left parties that supported
presidential candidate Salvador Allende in 1970—was working through
the constitutional system to develop a socialist project. Similarly, the
newly formed Frente Amplio (Broad Front) in Uruguay in 1970 sought to
make radical change through the ballot box. In other words, the prospect
of elected leftist leaders—not only small guerrilla movements such as the
Tupamaros in Uruguay—was considered dangerous and intolerable by
powerful local elites as well as by Washington.
The system of state terror was international, sustained by arms,
technology, finances, and other forms of support from Washington and the
collusion of Latin American military regimes, united in the inter-American
military system as well as the covert Operation Condor. US-backed
counterinsurgents built what I have termed a parallel apparatus, a set of
invisible structures and forces of the state, in order to eliminate political
opposition while ensuring deniability. In both Chile and Uruguay, the
United States intervened covertly to establish such parallel structures and
forces and shape political outcomes. US covert operations to prevent
Allende’s election, then to prevent his taking office, and finally to provoke
40 Years are Nothing xv
a coup have been well-documented. In my work on Uruguay I have shown

the tight interconnections among US military and police training programs
in that country, inter-American counterinsurgency strategies, the emergence
of right-wing death squads, and finally a Uruguayan Condor unit that
operated in Buenos Aires and elsewhere.
Despite the heavy hand of the United States it is crucial to point out, as
do several authors in this volume, that the Cold War was not only a
conflict between that country and the Soviet Union and their respective
allies. The post-World War II period was also a time of major anti-colonial
and independence movements in Africa and Asia, protests against
dependency, inequality, and social marginalization in Latin America, and
demands for national control of resources, self-determination, and
development across the so-called Third World. For some time much of the
scholarly literature focused on the bipolar nature of the Cold War and
tended to downplay the interests and roles of other states and national
actors, such as economic elites, militaries, and civil societies in the
developing world, where most of the Cold War’s destruction took place.
This period was much more complex that the traditional binary model
allows. This book opens windows into the experiences of two countries in
Latin America that, in fact, had long histories of constitutional government
and democratic (if narrowly so) politics before the two coups of 1973.
This work brings us new perspectives and histories of the dictatorships
and the ensuing struggles against impunity in Chile and Uruguay, after the
dirty war years, when the transition to civilian government had begun
(1990 in Chile and 1985 in Uruguay). The contributions of these scholars
encompass a number of vital themes: the functioning of Operation Condor;
the history of civilian government resistance to accountability in both
countries; the Pinochet regime’s use of media and spectacle to establish
hegemony (in the Gramscian sense) during the dictatorship; the role of
social movements seeking truth and justice and the original forms of
protest they have created; the inconsistent role of the Australian
government vis-à-vis the Chilean coup; the importance of memory and the
ways in which memory continues to be a contested terrain in the region;
and ways to keep remembrance and memorial sites alive and engaging,
without becoming ossified. Each of the authors gives us fresh approaches,
to see and interpret recent history.
In the course of decades of research on the Cold War in Latin America
I have spoken to a number of survivors of the dirty wars and studied
numerous testimonies. To hear of abductions in the middle of the night,
barbaric tortures, and squalid secret prisons makes a profound impact.
State campaigns of terror, protected by the armour of impunity, were
xvi Preface
utterly calculated pillars of social and political control. As E.V. Walter

(1969:9) once argued, states that employ terror consciously design a
pattern of violence to produce the social behaviour they demand —not
only in the present, but into the future. To “forget” state terror or “turn the
page” creates a grave risk of repetition and excuses criminal acts.
Moreover, crimes against humanity are, by definition, of concern to the
entire international community, for they are crimes that shock the
conscience and that cause enormous human tragedy. In Latin America, a
vast need for justice exists. Whole societies as well as individuals and
families were wounded, and a process of truth and justice is needed to
address the crimes committed, reinstate the values of justice and the rule
of law, and move forward.
Latin America may be the leading region in the world today in terms of
recognising the importance of justice. Indeed, a number of trials have
taken place, especially in Argentina. In 2013 in Buenos Aires a landmark
trial began to investigate the crimes of Operation Condor for the first time.
Twenty-five officials of the military regimes and of the Condor system—
most of them Argentine, with one Uruguayan—were charged with crimes
against 106 victims (Lessa 2014). Of those 106, 22 were Chileans and 48
Uruguayans, among other neighbouring countries, illustrating the scope of
the trial. In Argentina the march of justice has advanced further than
elsewhere in the region; as this volume shows, Chile and Uruguay have
not progressed as far.
Understanding the causes and consequences of the state’s use of torture
and murder as policy is not only a scholarly imperative, but also a moral
one. This book will enlighten its readers and contribute to such
understanding. In the final analysis, that understanding has a social and
political purpose as well: to use the lessons of the past to press for change
in the present, so that crimes against humanity are never again justified in
the name of national security.
References
CIA. 2000. “CIA Activities in Chile”. [18/09/2000]. Accessed January
2015. www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile.
Walter, Eugene Victor. 1969. Terror and resistance: A study of political
violence with case studies of some primitive African communities. Vol.
1. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lessa, Francesca. 2014. “Operation Condor: Justice for Transnational
Crimes in South America”. The Argentina Independent. 8 October.
www.argentinaindependent.com/tag/operation-condor.
CHAPTER ONE
REGIONAL COOPERATION AND STATE

TERRORISM IN SOUTH AMERICA
FERNANDO LÓPEZ
The 1973 coups d’états in Uruguay and Chile began an era of dramatic
changes for these countries, including the introduction of neoliberalism
and the subsequent weakening of the labour and student movements,
reforms of these countries’ education systems and strong cultural
censorship. After four decades Uruguay and Chile continue to experience
the effects of these legacies, especially on the economic and educational
fronts. The transnationalisation of state terrorism in the form of Operation
Condor in 1975 is yet another legacy of these military coups. The
governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia and Paraguay, with
support from the Brazilian junta and the United States (US) government,
formalised the Condor alliance to target opponents abroad, especially high
profile exiles involved in the denunciation of human rights violations. It is
unlikely that Condor would have been implemented on such scale without
the cooperation between the security forces of the five countries that
launched this plan.
Since their inceptions in 1973, the Uruguayan and Chilean regimes
actively promoted cooperation between South American countries to
secure their survival and that of other anticommunist governments in the
region. Although these calls for mutual assistance were not new, its
materialisation had been hindered or delayed by numerous factors
including geopolitical ambitions and historical antagonisms. Since the
mid-60s, the US and Brazil had frequently called for more cooperation
with limited success. The Bordaberry and Pinochet regimes also worked
intensively to formalise and expand this cooperation. Their efforts,
however, were more successful than previous attempts from Washington
and Brasilia. The work conducted by the Uruguayan and Chilean
2 Chapter One
governments, combined with the international political situation1, enticed

the armed forces in the Southern Cone to set aside old military and
geopolitical rivalries and cooperate with each other during this particular
time. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the relationships between South
American armed forces had been marked by feelings of distrust and
animosity. Such feelings evolved from bitter historical conflicts such as
the Triple Alliance War, the Pacific War and the Chaco War, as well as
from geopolitical ambitions and old territorial disputes. The rivalries and
distrust between armed forces continued despite the evident cooperation
that ensued in the early-to-mid-1970s. For instance, Brazil continued to
distrust its neighbours, especially Argentina. Chile distrusted Bolivia and
even developed biological weapons to use against Argentina in the event
of a war between these two nations. Uruguay feared the expansionist
ambitions of Brazil and Paraguay dreaded a new “Triple Alliance” (see
Child 1983, Keen and Haynes 2004). Despite these issues, however, these
South American regimes understood that cooperation was essential to
facilitate the transnationalisation of state terrorism.
Studies on Condor have focused predominantly on two main issues:
the role of the US in the gestation of the Condor alliance and its
connections to the Inter-American Defence System (Calloni 1999, Calloni
2001, McSherry 2005) or the role of the leftist guerrillas in prompting this
multilateral response (Dinges 2004). These standpoints partially answer
the question of why this multilateral network was formalised in the mid-
1970s. Two important factors hold the key to filling the gap left by these
partial answers: the internal situation in each of the five Condor founding
member states.2 and the activities of the South American exiles in
denouncing the regimes’ human rights violations. The influence exerted by
the US over political developments in these countries since the beginning
of the Cold War, and its close links with the Latin American armed forces
for that matter, have been well documented and analysed by scholars
(Aldrighi 2007, Weiner 2008, Ferreira 2010). However, the analysis of the
1
The politics of détente between the US and the USSR, and the global campaigns
of solidarity with South American exiles generated a complex international
political environment for the Condor regimes. Détente produced a number of
outcomes from 1972 onwards, including the SALT-I treaty to limit nuclear
arsenals, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (all
of them signed in 1972), and the Helsinki Accord in 1975. The US engagement
with the USSR angered the South American anticommunist regimes who felt
betrayed by their number one ally in the Cold War. The solidarity campaigns with
the exiles and the latter’s denunciations of human rights violations isolated the
regimes from their allies and transformed them into international pariahs.
2
Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.
Regional Cooperation and State Terrorism in South America 3
internal situation of each country and the activities of the exile community
reveal that the formalisation of the Condor alliance involved much more
than protecting US geopolitical and economic interests in the region. In
fact, some US documents and other anticommunist sources suggest that
the South American military governments, especially the Uruguayan and
Chilean juntas, were not entirely subordinated to the US during this critical
period. Hence, these regimes formalised the Condor alliance predominantly
to protect their own interests and those of their local supporters.
By the mid-70s, all the future Condor partners encountered similar
economic and political difficulties. Even Paraguay, whose economic situation
appeared to be less problematic than that of its neighbours, experienced
hardships. By then the Stroessner regime was already benefiting from the
hydroelectric boom. The building of the Itaipú, Yaceritá and Corpus Cristi
dams with Brazil and Argentina injected important quantities of capital
into Paraguay’s economy and generated a considerable number of jobs
(see Hanratty and Meditz 1988, Lewis 1980). Although these funds
allowed the Stronato to improve the country’s infrastructure and build a
number of projects, the benefits of the hydroelectric boom did not reach
the most disadvantaged sectors. While the regime did not face any major
economic problems, this did not necessary mean that the government was
free from challenges. Stroessner’s major threats at the time were the
Agrarian Leagues and their calls for land reforms. Their demands
threatened to unsettle the power of the land-owning oligarchy, one of the
main pillars supporting the dictator (Nickson 1982, Bareiro Saguier 1988,
Hanratty and Meditz 1988).
Economic difficulties further eroded the legitimacy of the Uruguayan
government during 1974 and 1975. In early 1974 US Ambassador to
Montevideo, Ernest Siracusa, stated that Uruguay’s prospects for that year
would be quite pessimistic and that inflation was becoming a major
problem for the regime’s economic team. The US diplomat’s statement
was significant. Siracusa, a fervent supporter of President Bordaberry and
the Uruguayan armed forces, frequently downplayed the regime’s human
right violations and dismissed international accusations as a communist
plot to discredit the Uruguayan government. Until then, his reports had
emphasised the positive features of the economic team and the alleged
advances made by the civic/military regime. Although the government
granted a general wage increase of 33 per cent to avoid clashes with
workers and trade unions, the US embassy argued that this was not enough
to “catch up with price hikes” and, subsequently, “real income took a
further drop” (US Embassy Montevideo 1974a). Siracusa also reported
internal divisions within the regime as a consequence of these economic
4 Chapter One
problems. Hardliners within the military believed that, “if the population
was going to blame them for all these problems, they should get rid of the
president and take complete control over the country’s policy-making”
(Ibid). After a surplus of more than US$60 million in 1973, the following
year Uruguay faced a balance of payment deficit of US$150–160 million.
The US ambassador maintained that this deficit was caused, in great part
by the increase in the prices of oil imports and the government’s inability
to “place traditional exports due to the European Common Market beef
import restrictions […]” (US Embassy Montevideo 1974b).
The problem, however, was far deeper than that. These were the
recurrent symptoms of an acute structural crisis that had begun in the
1950s and the traditional political forces in Uruguay had been unable to
resolve. Germán Wettstein states that by the early 1970s the Uruguayan
economy had entered a stage of “acute financial dependency [on regional
and international creditors] and, between 1970 and 1973 the […]
repayments to service the foreign debt was equivalent to 50% of
[Uruguay’s] annual exportable production” (Wettstein 1975, 33). This
scenario was aggravated by the consistent stream of capital leaving the
country since the mid-1950s, which averaged US$60 million annually. In
May 1974 inflation averaged 30 per cent and the US embassy forecasted
that by the end of the year it would reach 80–90per cent. The government
received substantial loans from the German Federal Republic (FRG),
Argentina and Brazil. Yet, these would “provide only modest support for
the balance of payments” (US Embassy Montevideo 1974b). All these
problems, argued the US ambassador, generated “widespread
discouragement within the [Uruguayan government] and in the private
sector” (US Embassy Montevideo 1974b.). While Siracusa remained
optimistic, this situation changed little throughout the following year.
The Chilean junta experienced similar problems. Since 11 September
1973 the Pinochet regime set out to eliminate all traces of Allende’s
socialist experiment. It also targeted other political parties from the right,
particularly, the Christian Democrats (PDC). Even though the latter had
supported the coup, Pinochet and other hardliners blamed the Frei
administration for creating the conditions, or “paving the way” for
Allende’s victory in 1970. The junta believed that a new election would
lead to a victory for the PDC, which, in time, would result in a new
Marxist government. Thus, to break this cycle, Pinochet banned the
Marxist parties and declared all other parties in recess (Correa and
Subercaseaux 1990, 69). By 1975, Chile was in a serious economic
recession. Like its Uruguayan counterpart, the Chilean junta had
implemented a set of strict austerity measures to correct the situation as
recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World

Bank.
There were, however, different views on how quickly Chile should
evolve into a market economy. The two well-defined camps within the
regime (i.e. the corporatists and the neoliberals) maintained heated debates
regarding the depth of the austerity plan. The corporatists included senior
officers and civilian technocrats in the ministerial cabinet who wanted to
implement similar economic policies to those introduced by the Brazilian
regime and other neighbouring countries. General Leigh and Raúl Saez
were the strongest advocates for this alternative. The neoliberals, on the
other hand called for a strict free market economy with very little
government participation. This camp included a number of technocrats
influenced by the economic theories of Milton Friedman and a group of
economists from the Chicago University known as the “Chicago Boys”.
Peter Winn argues that these economists were close to the anti-Allende
camp and the military even before the September coup. According to this
author, 10 economists, most of them neoliberals, had been asked in late
1972 to prepare a plan for a post-coup economic policy for the navy,
which was initially in charge of the economy for the junta. Coordinated by
Roberto Kelly, a retired navy officer who would become head of ODEPLAN,
the planning ministry, they created a promarket strategy known by its code
name El Ladrillo, (The Brick) (Winn 2004, 62). Even earlier, during 1971-
1972 and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), another group
of economists organised a post-Allende program for the Sociedad de
Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA) (Society for Industrial Development) Chile’s
manufacturers’ association. Most of these economists, including the key
Chicago Boys, had a direct role in shaping the economic policies
implemented by the junta (Ibid.).
Immediately after the coup, the IMF rewarded the regime for the
implementation of a strict austerity plan, granting new loans and lines of
credits to the value of US$95 million (Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
1973a). Friendly governments and international institutions granted Chile
almost US$470 million in foreign loans between 11 September 1973 and
1974, including US$49 million from the US to purchase corn and wheat.
The Brazilian junta granted US$62 million, of which US$12 million was
to be used for the purchase of sugar from that country. Argentina provided
a further US$35 million to buy reproductive cattle (US$20 million) and
agricultural machinery (US$15 million) (Ibid.). The World Bank provided
US$18.25 million and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
contributed a further US$201 million (see Table 3, in (Petras and Morris
6 Chapter One
1975, 144). Chile’s creditors, meanwhile, allowed the regime to renegotiate

the foreign debt.
Despite all this support, Chile’s economy remained stagnant. The
austerity measures led to a dramatic increase in the cost of living and
inflation reached 750 per cent by the end of 1973. Members of the junta
recognised the unpopularity of the austerity plan and knew that it could
have dangerous political costs. Thus, the government launched an
aggressive media campaign to sell the plan and win support from the
Chilean people. The policies, however, did not work and the economic
stagnation continued. By late 1974, the country’s foreign debt reached
US$4 billion and the authorities continued to face numerous challenges.
The CIA predicted that it would take “… several years before Chile’s
balance-of-payments position improves significantly” (CIA 1973b, 12).
The military junta attempted to reduce imports and increase the exports of
its most profitable mineral resources. To reach these targets the
government had to increase the productivity of the mining sector, which
was not an easy task. Most mines lacked equipment and technicians, their
infrastructure was in poor condition and most of them had been
underperforming since the late 1960s (see Petras and Morris 1975, 106-
108). As the junta struggled to resolve these problems, it toughened
repressive measures to maintain its grip on power and to control the labour
movement, especially in the mines.
The repressive measures created new challenges on the international
front. In the aftermath of the 11 September coup, thousands of Chileans
fled the country. Many of these refugees began to denounce the human
rights violations conducted by the regime’s security forces. These
denunciations led to increased international pressures and isolation for the
regimes and the gradual loss of military and economic aid from 1974.
According to Thomas Wright, “two hundred thousand Chileans […] went
into exile for political reasons in [...] as many as 140 countries on all
continents” during the Pinochet era (2007, 68). The military expected
these exiles to remain quiet and avoid political activism against the junta.
Any activity carried out abroad could have serious consequences at home,
as the security forces frequently adopted punitive measures against exiles’
relatives and/or friends. However, as soon as they settled in their host
nations, many exiles began to provide testimonies, organise marches, carry
out activities to embarrass the regime, publish newsletters and reports,
lobby governments to discontinue diplomatic relations with the military
junta and promote economic boycotts to key Chilean exports like wine and
mineral products. While some activities were more successful than others,
as a whole, they caused the Chilean junta numerous headaches. When
discussing these activities, however, one must consider that it is unlikely

that the work of the Chilean exiles would have been as successful without
the existence and support of grass roots groups, human rights and labour
organisations, religion institutions and high-profile figures within the
international community. The CIA’s activities to sabotage Allende’s
government, Nixon’s support for General Pinochet and the subsequent
brutality displayed by the armed forces immediately after the coup sparked
international outrage and led thousands of people around the world to
mobilise and organise protests in support of the Chilean exiles.
By the late 1970s the Chilean expatriot activists had accomplished
significant outcomes including cuts of financial and military aid to the
Pinochet regime, particularly after President James Carter took office in
the US (Meyssan 2007).3 The exiles provided key evidence at US
Congressional hearings during 1973-1975, which led to the reduction of
aid through the Military Assistance Program (MAP) and, especially, the
decline of US government’s public displays of support for the regime. In
Canada, alongside unions and local grass roots groups, they lobbied the
Canadian government to discontinue diplomatic relations with the junta.
They successfully pressured companies to cancel contracts with the
Chilean Air Force (Shayne 2009, 40). In Britain, the exiles and local
supporters obtained the cancellation of defence contracts between the
British and Chilean governments and the cessation of military training
programs (Wilkinson 1992, 61-62). The Solidarity Campaigns in Australia
included achievements such as the longest boycott of wheat ever imposed
on the Chilean junta and the cancelation of landing rights to LAN Chile in
Australia and New Zealand. Local trade unions refused to load or unload
products to and from Chile at Australian ports. They also travelled to Chile
to monitor the human rights situation of political prisoners and produced
reports for the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which helped to
expel Chile from the latter organisation in 1974 and further embarrass the
Chilean military government (Baird 2007).
3
Until then, and despite the intense work carried out by Congress throughout
1973-1976, the US government continued to privately support the South American
military regimes. This situation changed during the Carter administration. The new
president sought to “put an end to his predecessors’ practices … and … eliminate
Latin American authoritarian regimes” (Meyssan 2007). While its achievements
towards the latter goal were modest, the new administration was more sympathetic
than its predecessors to the issue of human rights. This allowed the Latin American
exiles and political refugees all over the world, particularly the Chileans and
Uruguayans, to engage more efficiently with the US government and obtain further
results.
8 Chapter One
Like most of their regional counterparts, the Uruguayan exiles merged

their campaigns with the global human rights movement. They worked
well with international human rights organisations like Amnesty
International (AI) and other NGOs. Prominent Uruguayan politicians like
Wilson Ferreira, Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, to name
only a few, promoted the Uruguayan exiles’ case in front of international
institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization of
American States (OAS) and the US Congress. Political organisations
linked to the student and labour movements, such as the Workers–Students
Revolution (ROE), University Students’ Federation (FEEUU), Artiguist
Liberation Union (UAL) and the National Labour Federation (CNT) also
organised activities to denounce the human rights violations committed in
Uruguay. The Uruguayan and Chilean exiles, together with representatives
from Bolivia and Brazil, participated at the 2nd Bertrand Russell Tribunal
in 1974. This tribunal evaluated the crimes committed by the military
regimes in those countries and passed its findings and symbolic sentences
to a myriad of international organisations, including the UN, UNESCO,
ILO, World Health Organisation, OAS, the Pontifical Justice and Peace
Commission, the World Council of Churches, the International
Confederation of Workers (CMT, Brussels), the World Federations of
Trade Unions (FMS, Prague) and the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions (CISL, Brussels) (Jerman 1975, 161).4
All these activities increased the regimes’ international isolation, which
subsequently enhanced the effects of the internal problems and threatened
their objective of holding power for a long period of time. In Chile, the
severe economic problems and the regime’s inability to stimulate the
economy despite the considerable influx of foreign aid and loans raised
questions about the junta’s economic credentials. The harsh austerity
measures generated discontent amongst the workers and even the middle
sectors, which in large part had supported the military coup. To divert
attention the regime resorted to the same tactics implemented by its
Paraguayan, Bolivian and Uruguayan counterparts, announcing the
discovery of Marxist plots seeking to destabilise the country. However,
even the CIA doubted the veracity of the junta’s claims (CIA 1975b).
In this environment the South American dictatorships, especially those
of Uruguay and Chile expanded the economic and military cooperation
4
The list also included Amnesty International, the International Association of
Democratic Jurists, the International Association of Catholic Jurists, the Permanent
Secretariat of the Organisation of Non-aligned States, international youth
organisations, leagues for the defence of human rights, all governments, and all
members of the Senate and House of Representatives of the USA.
that had begun in the early 1970s to overcome their internal challenges and
break the international isolation. Like Paraguay, Uruguay enjoyed benefits
from a number of binational hydroelectric projects, especially from 1974
onwards. The construction of the Salto Grande Dam, between the
governments of Uruguay and Argentina, began in April 1974 and
concluded in 1979. In May 1973 the Uruguayan government established a
commission to develop a new hydroelectric project on the Río Negro
(Black River), known as the Palmar Dam. However, the latter did not start
until 1976 when the government of Brazil provided large amounts of
capital and technology to complete its construction. Both projects allowed
Uruguay to further expand its electricity capabilities and generate much
needed jobs for its stagnant labour market (see Nohlen and Fernández
1981, 412–443). The Uruguayan regime also expanded economic ties with
its Bolivian counterpart. From 1974-1975 the Foreign Relations ministers
of the Bordaberry and Banzer administrations held a number of meetings
in the cities of Montevideo and La Paz. They sought to establish a
comisión mixta (joint task force) to deal with matters concerning regional
economic integration, as well as bilateral relations between the two
nations. The commission made recommendations on areas such as
reciprocal commerce, commercial and financial mechanisms and other
forms of joint economic activities, port facilities, air traffic, waterways
traffic, petroleum and oil derivatives, as well as technical assistance
(Departamento de Integración Económica 1975, 1–3).
The path followed by the Pinochet regime did not differ from the one
adopted by its Uruguayan counterpart. Between 1973 and 1975, Chile
resumed diplomatic relations with Bolivia, Pinochet visited Paraguay on a
number of occasions and maintained a friendly relationship with the
government of Alfredo Stroessner. The junta also expanded economic and
diplomatic ties with Uruguay. Both governments presented a unified voice
and political front to oppose Cuba and the international human rights
campaigns against these regimes at several OAS meetings during 1973–
1975 (CIA 1974). The Chilean government benefited greatly from its
economic ties with Brazil. For instance, in November 1974 alone, the
Brazilian junta granted US$40 million in credits and loans, which it
extended during the following years (elmostrador.país 2013).
The areas in which these countries achieved the greatest levels of
multilateral cooperation were those concerning security, reaching
unprecedented levels by the mid-1970s. As Stella Calloni (1999, 2001),
John Dinges (2004), Patrice McSherry (2005) and José Luis Méndez
Méndez (2006) have demonstrated, security collaboration between these
armed forces gained momentum in the 1960s and, especially during the
10 Chapter One
early 1970s. In those years the security apparatuses of the future Condor
regimes held numerous conferences and work meetings and their
intelligence services even conducted a number of joint clandestine
counterinsurgency operations (McSherry 2002). In early October 1975,
President Bordaberry visited numerous countries in the Southern Cone
urging his counterparts to work together and unite. He met with General
Alfredo Stroessner, Ernesto Geisel, Colonel Hugo Banzer and General
Augusto Pinochet. The tour across South America took place just before
the Eleventh Conference of American Armies (CEA), in Montevideo later
that month. It is true, as John Dinges (2004) argues, that the Chileans were
among the most active in urging other intelligence services to share
information and work together. Yet Bordaberry’s trip in October allowed
the Uruguayan dictator to meet with his counterparts, deepen political,
economic, military and diplomatic ties with them and exchange
suggestions and feedback. These contacts set the foundations for the secret
meeting that took place in Santiago the following month, which formalised
the Condor alliance. According to the CIA, Bordaberry
… [hoped] to find allies to counter what he [viewed] was a world-wide

Marxist campaign to discredit the […] anti-communist regimes. [He also
saw] an urgent need to upgrade the region’s economic infrastructure, and
he [hoped] to achieve that objective by creating a strong network of
bilateral agreements. [Early that year] Bordaberry signed accords with
neighbouring governments to promote trade, transportation systems, and
inter-connecting hydroelectric projects (CIA 1975a, 23).
The intelligence agency confirmed that the Chileans were the most receptive
and appreciative of Bordaberry’s call for cooperation (CIA 1975a, 23).
The Eleventh Conference of American Armies held in Montevideo in
late October 1975, addressed two important topics: the wide range of
threats present in the continent and security cooperation as a response to
such challenges. High-ranking military officers from 15 American nations,
including the US5, discussed “the subversive activities and the communist
infiltration in the region …” (Villaverde 1975a). At the opening of the
conference the Commander-in-Chief of the Uruguayan Army, Lieutenant
General Julio César Vadora, “strongly attacked Marxism, and particularly
the Communist Parties, accusing them of ‘bombarding’ the Americas with
a defamation campaign” (Villaverde 1975b). The defamation campaigns
alluded to by Vadora referred to the South American exiles’ activities
mentioned earlier in this chapter. These campaigns posed a much higher
5
US Army Lieutenant General Gordon Sumners presided over the Inter-American
Defence Board (IADB) at the time.
threat to these regimes’ future plans than the guerrilla groups involved in
the Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria (JCR) (Revolutionary
Coordinating Junta).6 There was consensus amongst the participating
delegates about the need to increase cooperation on security matters to
stop the alleged Marxist threat.7 The Bordaberry and, especially, the
Pinochet regimes welcomed this development and took further measures
to consolidate this collaboration. The following month, at the secret
meeting of intelligence services in Santiago, the Chilean intelligence
agency DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) (National Intelligence
Directorate) fine-tuned the details with their South American counterparts
and launched Operation Condor, formalising an alliance that had been in
the making since the early 1970s.
Before concluding this chapter it is necessary to point out that Condor
must not be interpreted as a desperate response by a group of rogue
intelligence agencies. Such a view oversimplifies the complex
environment in which this alliance came into existence and pins the
responsibility for its creation and implementation on a reduced number of
actors. The transnationalisation of state terrorism beyond the Southern
Cone of Latin America would not have been possible without some degree
of support from non-military elements and the infrastructure provided by
them. In 2013, for example, ex-Chief of the Chilean DINA, Manuel
Contreras, estimated that up to 50,000 voluntary civilian informers in
Chile had helped this intelligence agency (CNN 2013). In the 1960s, the
Paraguayan Interior Minister, Edgar Insfran, established a wide network of
pyragües (spies and informants linked to the Colorado party) who worked
together with the Paraguayan Police’s intelligence services to keep the
government informed on suspicious communist activities. This network
6
Following the coup d’états in Uruguay and Chile, and the deterioration of the
security situation in Argentina, the leaders of the National Liberation Army (ELN)
from Bolivia, the Uruguayan National Liberation Movement–Tupamaros (MLN-
T), the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR) from Chile, and the Argentine
Workers’ Revolutionary Party–Peoples’ Revolutionary Army (PRT–ERP)
established the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR). The latter organisation
sought to launch a coordinated effort to resist the repression conducted by the
military governments in the Southern Cone. By mid-1975, however, these guerrilla
groups faced numerous challenges and were not a threat to any of the South
American military governments.
7
As mentioned in previous paragraphs, the issue of regional cooperation began to
be discussed amongst South American armies in the early 1970s and continued to
gain momentum during the following years. At the time these armed forces held
numerous meetings and conferences to discuss the necessary arrangements for the
implementation of security projects (See Mantorell 1999, chapters I and II).
12 Chapter One
covered the country and also infiltrated the Paraguayan exile community
in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Europe. The pyragües became a key
component of the regime’s repressive infrastructure and an effective
mechanism to spread fear amongst the Paraguayan population, as no one
knew who was targeted by pyragüe surveillance. This network became a
valuable asset when the regime joined Operation Condor in the mid-1970s
(Justicia 2008, Lewis 1980). The international isolation generated by the
solidarity campaigns conducted by the exiles and their supporters pushed
these military governments to set aside differences and cooperate with
each other. That isolation also led these regimes to develop ties with like-
minded anticommunist figures and groups across Latin America and the
rest of the world, including the Confederación Anticomunista
Latinoamericana (CAL) (Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation)
and the World Anticommunist League (WACL). These anticommunist
allies supported and encouraged the regimes to take a more radical stand
against the so-called global Marxist campaign (Anderson and Anderson
1986).
Thus, the South American dictatorships agreed in the early ’70s to
expand the regional economic and security cooperation that had begun in
the early 1960s. The work conducted by the Bordaberry and Pinochet
governments and a number of international developments like the politics
of détente between the US and the Soviet Union, the solidarity campaigns
to support the South American exiles and the ensuing international
isolation, enticed the armed forces in the Southern Cone to set aside old
military and geopolitical rivalries and cooperate with each other during
this particular time. Although the relations between South American
armed forces had been undermined by feelings of distrust and antagonisms
during the 19th and the 20th centuries, most military leaders understood
that mutual cooperation was an attractive alternative that could enable
them to overcome, or at least mitigate, the internal and external challenges
faced by the Condor partners.
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16 Chapter One
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CHAPTER TWO
ON HISTORY AND MEMORY:

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE PROCESS
OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE
FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF URUGUAY
(1985-2005)
PEDRO IVO TEIXEIRENSE
It is commonly held in current Transitional Justice literature that

societies and individuals are entitled to know the truth about past human
rights violations. Indeed, this concept of a society’s right to the truth has
engendered the idea that, in the process of transition to democracy, the
emerging regime has to confront its past and its relevant human rights
abuses. In the absence of this process, it would be impossible to institute
an authentic democratic order. While correct from a moral point of view,
these assumptions do not manage to establish any correlation with the
empirical reality of political communities who experienced the phenomena
mentioned.
This chapter presents an historical analysis of Transitional Justice
mechanisms that have been adopted in Uruguay since the last military
dictatorship. Even though it is a rapidly expanding subfield at the
intersection of jurisprudence, comparative politics and political theory,
“Transitional Justice” is essentially a reflection of the historical
possibilities facing political groups struggling for the control of the
transition to democracy. Accordingly, I propose to analyse the mentioned
mechanisms through the study of three distinct periods in Uruguay’s
history. Firstly, between 1985 and 1989, where the transition to democracy
was mainly characterised by faith in the new social setting, which would
be achieved by acknowledging the wrongdoings throughout the
dictatorship. Focusing on the same period, this chapter then analyses the
political clashes that caused a setback in the implementation of
18 Chapter Two
Transitional Justice mechanisms. Finally, I discuss the emergence of

political conditions that enable a return to public debates on Uruguay’s
recent past after 1989.
On transitional processes: theoretical approaches to Latin

American cases
The early years of the 1980s were marked by significant political
changes in Latin America. To a large extent, the changes observed
represented the passage from authoritarian to democratic regimes. At the
same time, in the case of countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador, the
observed changes occurred after a dramatic period of civil war. Although
changes in the structure of political regimes represent only a part of the
history of the subcontinent, the transitions appear to carry at their core the
explanatory key to the recent history of Latin American societies.
Recently, new thoughts on the transitional processes that took place in
Latin America have appeared quite frequently in academic papers (see
Kathryn and Walling 2007, 427-445, Brito 2009, 56-83, Jon 2004, Linz
and Stepan 1996, Olsen et al. 2009, 152-175). When the focus of those
analyses shifts to the countries in the southern subregion of the American
continent, the disputes over memory seem to intensify. In essence, this
phenomenon reflects the academic efforts of hundreds of researchers
seeking to map the situation of this group of countries at the present time.
These scholars try to determine how far Latin America’s societies have
advanced in recent decades, the limits to democracy and to the welfare of
the Latin American populations and how to understand the precarious
levels of human rights in the subcontinent. These questions, in general, are
the point of departure of such analysis. Throughout the last century, the
following have been deemed as the subregion’s main characteristics:
primarily, the fact that Latin America is home to countries that have
experienced some sort of authoritarian rule. Over the past decades, the
continent harboured military dictatorships, authoritarian civil governments
or simply a mix of these characteristics. These analyses present the
countries of the subregion as states possessing “democracies with serious
backlogs, particularly regarding human rights, poverty and economic
growth” (D’Araujo 2008, 321). This chapter is a study of the Transitional
Justice mechanisms that have been adopted in Uruguay since its last
military dictatorship.
This perspective leads to two separate inquiries that prompt some
reflection. The first considers whether researchers should adopt this
starting point in order to understand the social and political phenomena
On History and Memory 19
that marked the region. The answer is not to be found in the realm of
academic necessity. There is a political implication in the decision to
recognise the collapse of the dictatorships of the 1950s and 1970s as
central to the understanding of current issues related to poor indicators of
human rights. Thus, the theoretical and methodological choice is first and
foremost a political decision. Secondly, when one chooses to situate the
emergence of authoritarian regimes in Latin American countries as the
breaking point of their political history, there is a selection of a certain
historical timeframe. In essence, this decision is a significant political
statement. This analytical model was presented by historian Carlos Fico.
Reflecting on the Brazilian case, Fico identifies the existence of a
battle for memory that began during the dictatorship. This dispute divided
the two main parties that took a certain prominence in this process: on one
hand, left-wing militants who participated in the armed struggle against
the military dictatorship, while on the other, individuals who composed
both the ranks of the armed forces and clandestine governmental
organisations. According to Professor Fico, the prevalence of the theme of
repression of armed struggle as the period’s analytical key led the military
to consider that the Armed Forces had lost the “battle of images”. This
would be due both to the unjustified use of violence and to undeniable
evidence that the state could have defeated left-wing armed organisations
without resorting to illegal actions, torture and murder. The author
maintains that:
It seems clear that one cannot reduce the history of Brazil between 1964
and 1985 to the history of repression or simply to the confrontation
between left-wing armed organisations and the repression. This is far from
reality. That period is much more complex than that. Besides this version,
so to speak, in ‘Black and White’, there are some shady areas that we have
to illuminate (Fico 2012, 28).
This reflection helps us understand disputes over memory in the

preparation of discourses that ultimately seek to occupy a hegemonic
position in the task of narrating the past. Henry Rousso argues that
memory in this sense is a psychic and intellectual elaboration that
“actually entails a selective representation of the past” (Rousso 2006, 94).
This clearly separates the notion of a tale about memory and the memory
itself. One might define the narrative about memory in terms of a narrative
that at one point managed to occupy a hegemonic space. Rousso maintains
that these narratives are selective representations of the past, but above all,
of a past that does not represent the interaction of an isolated individual,
but an “individual who is part of a social context” (2006, 102).
20 Chapter Two
Rousso also questions whether it would be possible to capture the

history of national memory only through the reports of restricted groups
particularly touched by the past, or through the narratives of groups that
tend to propose hegemonic representations of the past, as the state does.
He argues that the differentiation between what he has called, on one hand,
the history of memory and, on the other, scholarly history, gains a visible
contour. As an example of the critical reflection on the claim that
historians are custodians of the truth, Rousso maintains that:
No history of memory can avoid being subjected to a historiographical

analysis, in other words, to be evaluated by scholarly history (produced by
historians) which is a component of collective memory: one of the
problems of the history of memory is precisely the discrepancy between
what this erudite history can tell about a past event and the perceptions
prevailing at the same time within a society (Rousso 2006, 97).
These disputes between the narratives constructed by academic history, or

“erudite history” in the words of Rousso, and the permanence of subjective
memories and personal insights, is key to understanding the disputes for
memories. This is what characterises the political struggles around the
process of structuring a hegemonic narrative that, in countries such as
those with an authoritarian tradition, tends to be assumed as being the
official narrative.
Some theoretical ideas on Transitional Justice

Recently, this struggle for memories within Latin America has
appeared in the political disputes surrounding the transitional processes,
including the procedures called Transitional Justice and the narratives
seeking to lend meaning to periods of political transition. This
phenomenon seems to be known in all countries of the region. Most of
these nations can be characterised as emerging democracies that not long
ago were dictatorships of some kind.
The idea of Transitional Justice here represents the process of
presenting solutions to political issues through a legal set of rules. Over
the centuries, the development of new political regimes and the emergence
of paradigmatic changes regarding concepts of justice have demanded the
use of Transitional Justice tools. In the last century, through the
observation of massive human rights violations perpetrated around the
globe throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a given contemporary notion of
Transitional Justice began to take shape. Currently, Transitional Justice
has occupied a prominent place in the political transitions that have
occurred in Eastern European countries, in Africa and, particularly, in

Latin America. It is important to note that institutional rearrangements
observed in countries which had arbitrary and dictatorial regimes, has been
achieved through the use of distinct mechanisms. The adoption of a given
model of Transitional Justice and the due performance of its mechanisms
are central to the debate on democratic transition within societies which
have experienced systematic violations of human rights.
The academic literature on Transitional Justice has displayed
significant growth since the end of World War II (Paige 2011, 76). After
this conflict, reports of massive human rights violations engendered a pool
of material for academic analysis on the humanitarian consequences of the
war. The picture of gross violations of individual rights that emerged from
these studies helped to establish the idea of criminal accountability for
human rights violations. Throughout this period, one can identify a range
of different paradigms that mark out the concepts that lend meaning to this
field. Historically, nation states have adopted three different models of
accountability for human rights violations in the past: the model of
impunity, the one of needed accountability and that of individual
responsibility (Sikkink 2011, 40).
The model of impunity prevailed before the outbreak of World War II.
In this sense, neither the states nor authorities could be held accountable
for human rights violations. With the closure of this conflict, a new
orthodoxy was opened up indicating the need for accountability of the
state. It is necessary to point out that the inclusion of human rights among
the competencies of the United Nations in matters related to peacekeeping
and therefore as an essential condition of the democratic order, would be a
result of sustained international diplomatic effort. As a result of this new
paradigm, the United Nations and its agencies would have theirs mandates
expanded (Soares 2004, 344). However, all these changes were not
sufficient to ensure the prevalence of human rights principles in the
internal affairs of the countries associated with the UN.
A new idea of responsibility emerged in the 1980s and 1990s,
combining state responsibility with the criminal responsibility of
individuals. Thus, the notion of legal responsibility was defined and in this
way the demand emerged that the official members of any nation would
have to comply with formal rules and be prepared to justify their actions in
those terms in judicial courts. (Grant and Keohane 2005, 104). The new
paradigm of criminal responsibility encompasses a subset of rights
traditionally identified as “rights of the person” or “core crimes” which
would include the prohibition of torture, summary executions, genocide,
war crimes and crimes against humanity, thus signalling a convergence of
22 Chapter Two
different branches of international law (Bobbio 1992, 25-47; Lafer 1991,

33-46).
In accordance with Sikkink (2011) this conceptual shift, promoted over
the past three decades through the convergence mentioned above,
represented a decisive impetus to the permanence of the idea of individual
criminal responsibility. This process can be observed not only in domestic
law, but also in the global consciousness; making it possible, therefore, to
speak of an “Age of Accountability”. Nevertheless, the scope of the idea
of accountability varies considerably, according to focused political
reality. For instance, in Latin America, a wide range of alternative
mechanisms of Transitional Justice and other projects have been used to
deal with past human rights violations and even criminal liability since the
process of democratisation in the mid-1980s, the most frequently used
being truth commissions, reparations, amnesties and public debates.
Such reflections, in greater or lesser scale, permeate modern day
debates on the political transition in societies that lived under dictatorships.
At the core of the debate are both the organisation of the state and the
application of justice. One can add to such controversy the rights and
duties of individuals and, especially, the reach of the norms related to
human rights that are heralded in the international context. At the same
time, especially for the people in Latin America, the matters which have
required more effective actions are the concrete result of a long
authoritarian period that began in the early 1960s. Among the pressing
matters from this past that refuses to fade is the issue of how to deal with a
history scarred by countless and horrendous infringements of human
rights.
Uruguayan transition: boundaries and possibilities

The process of transition to a democratic order in Uruguay presented a
number of innovative features linked to contemporary principles of
individual criminal accountability and protection of human rights.
However, there were also restrictions impeding the compliance with
international obligations that had been signed by this country (Burt et al
2013). Historically, Uruguay’s political transition represents a clear
example of what has been identified as transitional models by agreement.
There was a cautious stance by the new Uruguayan government regarding
the adoption “of Transitional Justice measures that could provoke the
previous military regime to take a new energetic action” that could, for
instance, reinstate an authoritarian order (Skaar 2011, 434).
Despite the establishment of two commissions of inquiry to deal with

cases of past human right violations, none of them submitted final reports.
This is a clear illustration of the political disputes that have taken place
beneath the Uruguayan transitional process. Several transformations were
set in motion at the end of the Uruguayan dictatorship. According to
Eugenia Allier Montaño (2010, 21) the transition to democracy at that time
was unable to ignore the recent past, scored by political violence, which
left a series of open wounds on the social face of the nation. One of the
effects of putting an end to the authoritarian regime was to break away
from the arbitrary logic that lay behind the political and ideological
division in the country.
There were links between the social issues presented during the
political transition and the structural aspects behind the traditional concept
of Transitional Justice, predominant in the 1990s. In essence, Transitional
Justice is understood as a rendering of accounts with the past after
authoritarian experiences. Such transition, in general and in keeping with a
large part of the specialised literature, presents four basic concepts: 1)
compensation, 2) the right to the truth and memories, 3) re-establishing a
democratic state and 4) restructuring state-run institutions that violated
human rights (Bickford 2004, 1045-1047).
Between 1985 and 1989 the Uruguayan government acknowledged and
compensated victims and/or their families for past human rights violations.
On its establishment on 1 March 1985, President Julio María Sanguinetti’s
government faced a number of serious challenges, such as the existence of
political prisoners, the violations of human rights committed during the
dictatorship and the relationship between the armed forces and civil
power. These characterised the shape and form of the political transition
and defined the legal transitional strategy adopted by the government.
Authoritarian governments using the prison system as a political tool to
deny any legitimacy of social claims is not, under any circumstances, new
to history in Latin America. Nevertheless, the way the Uruguayan
dictatorship used this tool warrants special attention as it represents one of
the most important mechanisms in political coercion. It is estimated that
close to 20 per cent of the Uruguayan population was incarcerated at some
stage during the dictatorship (Padrós 2012, 17). Uruguay became the
country with the highest number of political prisoners in proportion to its
population. This, to some degree, explains why the demands for political
amnesty are of such importance.
When the dictatorship fell in 1985, the country still had hundreds of
political prisoners. According to Romero (2006, 475) pro-amnesty
movements began to appear from 1983. Yet an agreement between the
24 Chapter Two
traditional political parties known as the Concertación Nacional

Programática (CONAPRO) (National Programmatic Coalition) deleted
this issue from the country’s political agenda in 1984 and 1985. This treaty
congregated the most prominent political parties in Uruguay. It was signed
by the Partido Colorado (Red Party), Partido Blanco (White Party),
Frente Amplio (Broad Front) and Unión Cívica (Civic Union).
In this agreement the Uruguayan political leaders pledged their
commitment to legal action against past violations of human rights.
However, CONAPRO underwent many changes. Subsequently, the topic
of amnesty, which had ignited intense political disputes, became a symbol
of the potential to form an official understandable narrative that could
explain Uruguay’s recent history. Thus, establishing the legal instrument
that would define the terms of amnesty would also be a tool to redefine
past events.
The result of such political disputes appears in the parliamentary
session of 8 March 1985, when the Parliament unanimously approved the
Ley de Pacificación Nacional No 15.373 or amnesty law. Despite previous
political promises and the efforts made by human rights groups, the new
law did not include some individuals accused of committing “blood
crimes” such as murder, especially members of the Tupamaros guerrillas.
The amnesty law also outlined the restitution of confiscated property and
the reimbursement of expenses incurred by prisoners to cover so-called
“prison costs” (i.e. legal fees, access to documents and the costs involved
in the prisoner’s trail). This is directly linked to the issue of economic
compensation, and seems to unequivocally mark the initial steps of the
legal structure of the transition.
The second period, between 1989 and 1994, shows changes in the
political possibilities of dealing with the past. It appears in the public
debate on the need to instigate legal action against the agents of the state
that committed human rights violations during Uruguay’s dictatorship.
Such debates culminated in the approval of Law No 15.848 on the expiry
of punitive claims against the state which established, among other things,
the adjournment of legal proceedings against military members and police
officers who committed human rights crimes prior to 1 March 1985 (Poder
Legislativo 1986). The expiry law gave rise to heated disputes concerning
representations of the past and led Uruguayan society to conduct its first
referendum after the military dictatorship. On 17 April 1989, 56.1 per cent
of Uruguayans voted to support the expiry law, while 43.9 per cent
rejected it (Bielous and Petito 2006, 331–357). For a short period, this
result halted public debate on aspects related to human rights crimes
committed during the military dictatorship. In this period, there was a
general decline in public policy on Transitional Justice in the Uruguayan

state. Essentially, the referendum highlighted the political limitations of
the transition to democracy.
A rather simple episode was responsible for opening up a new round of
debates over which kind of limitations would be acceptable when seeking
to cope with the recent past. The exchange of letters between the
Argentine poet, Juan Gelman, and the Uruguayan President, Julio María
Sanguinetti, immediately caught the attention of Uruguayan society in the
spring of 1999. It was the content of the correspondence, rather than the
nature of the authors’ activities, that ignited the debates throughout the
period. In the letters, both authors openly expressed their perceptions,
frustrations and ideas about the recent political transitional process in
Uruguay (Gelman 1999, Sanguinetti 1999). This disclosure served as an
invitation to discuss the country’s recent past and, to some extent, the
recent past of societies that have been forced to deal with problems
inherited from a past scarred by violence. The public confrontation,
prompted by this correspondence between Gelman and Sanguinetti, would
be later identified as the starting point for a deeper reflection on the
memory of the conflicts in the postdictatorship era (Allier Montaño 2010,
186).
On 10 October 1999, when Juan Gelman addressed his first letter to
President Sanguinetti, this marked the beginning of a new era in which
Uruguayan society resumed discussions about their recent past. The
history of the struggle waged by the Argentine poet, whose son was
murdered, acquired new dimensions. Gelman reminded Uruguayan society
that his pregnant daughter-in-law, has been abducted and “disappeared” as
a result of the actions of the security organs of the Uruguayan government.
Finally, some years later, Gelman’s continuing battle was rewarded with
the discovery of the truth and the location of his granddaughter, living in
Montevideo.
Over the 10-year period between 1995 and 2005, the appearance of
new political demands and the formation of new pressure groups were
responsible for a return to the debate on the grave violations of human
rights that had scarred the recent past. Within this re-establishment of
public debate, a set of phenomena warrants mention. These events took
place within a distinct historical context. On a global scale, due to the
genocide in Rwanda in 1994, there was an increase in the debate in
collegiate bodies, such as the United Nations’ General Assembly, on the
reach of human rights guidelines. Regionally, the return to negotiations on
Mercosur and, consequently, a joining of the bloc members, gave rise to a
kind of spillover from the Argentine transition, stretching beyond its
26 Chapter Two
borders and directly influencing the demands presented in Uruguay

(Marchesi 2012, 222). Internally, the new human rights groups were
responsible for injecting more enthusiasm into public debate. The new
demands, despite seeking solutions to those previously formulated, were
characterised by a new way of acting, namely the famous public
“dressings-down or humiliations”1 of individuals who had taken part in
human rights violations.
In answer to all this pressure, on 9 August 2000, President Jorge Batlle
signed a decree establishing the Peace Commission which sought
reconciliation for Uruguayans through a search for answers to demands
from human rights groups. The aim of the Commission, which held no
legal mandate, was mainly to obtain and analyse information related to the
forced disappearance of people (Allier Montaño 2010, 201).
The Commission’s final report, presented in 2003, sought to structure
an official version of the occurrences that were linked to the forced
disappearance of hundreds of Uruguayan citizens (Uruguay 2003). As a
consequence, demands for more effective mechanisms of Transitional
Justice have gained strength through social mobilisation since the
publication of this report. As a result, the political solution was a new
plebiscite on the limits and scope of the relevant Transitional Justice
legislation. It is important to point out that Uruguay is the only country
that democratically refused, twice, to review the content of the amnesty
law.
The first time this happened was in 1989. The referendum sought to
review the approval of the Ley de caducidad or forfeiture act, which had
been adopted in order to prevent criminal proceedings reaching the
military involved in human rights violations from 1973 to 1985. Two
decades later, in 2009, popular will blocked the attempt to amend the
Uruguayan constitution to repeal the amnesty law (Viñar 1993, 135).
The outcome of the referendum intensified discussions and debates.
With domestic judicial doors closed, the Uruguayan Institute for Social
and Legal Studies (IELSUR) in partnership with Americas Watch devoted
1
The phrase “dressing downs or humiliations” was used to translate the idea
behind the Spanish word escrache which entered the political language after the
last cycle of dictatorships in Latin America. This concept expresses a kind of
public manifestation in which a group of protesters confronts a person who is
identified as a former member of the security forces involved in past human rights
violations. Usually, this confrontation takes place in the neighborhood where
former torturers live. Besides, it is important to highlight that this phenomena
usually takes place as a result of a perceived lack of action in the realm of justice.
In a certain way it is an expression of frustration.
itself to bringing cases of human rights violations to the attention of the

Inter-American Court of Human Rights and to the United Nation’s
Committee of Human Rights. Both IELSUR and Americas Watch
maintained that the law of forfeiture, although maintained by popular will,
violated the American Convention on Human Rights, to which Uruguay
had joined in 1985 (Kordon, Edelman and Lagos 1997, 335–357).
A number of internal issues reignited the public debates. For instance,
with the inauguration of Tabaré Vásquez’s administration (2005-2010), at
least 45 cases were filed in court as crimes committed during the
dictatorship (Valdéz 2001). This political will was essential to a paradigm
shift. At the same time, the legal loophole that was used for the beginning
of court proceedings symbolises the existence of sectors of the judiciary
who advocated that the country should take steps to establish proceedings
against agents who committed crimes in the past. While the final outcome
of these lawsuits remains to be seen, this reflects the beginnings of a
permanence of a given notion of Transitional Justice. This idea is relatively
recent in the sphere of political and academic debates. Nevertheless, it has
acquired more precise contours, from the serious human rights violations
perpetrated by totalitarian regimes throughout the first half of the 20th
century. This idea established a clear link between democracy and human
rights and led to the thesis that, in order to build a representative
democratic system, it is essential to confront past human rights violations.
The idea behind the abovementioned thesis is to clearly delineate the
differences between the present and the past. It also maintains that the
impossibility of dealing with past abuses, particularly with respect to the
fundamental rights of individuals, is an obstacle to the formation of
authentic democratic regimes. Moreover, the aforementioned impossibility
would be responsible for extreme violence carried out by the forces of
public security and the permanence of torture as a method of police
investigation. These observations share strong connections with the debate
that had been opened with the publication by the epistolary exchange
between Gelman and Sanguinetti. Two aspects deserve more careful
consideration in this debate. The first one relates to the partitioning of the
Uruguayan society into two supposedly homogeneous blocks. The second
one is linked to the emergence of a specific language for discussing the
issue of human rights and their normative discussion in terms of domestic
law in confrontation with rules of international scope.
Disputes over memory that were expressively translated by taking a
position either among the “supporters” of the poet or among the
“supporters” of the president, engineered a dichotomous model of
analysis. This model exerted some influence in the production of
28 Chapter Two
Uruguayan history from then on. This division could be expressed in the
formula “those who advocate forgetfulness” (Sanguinetti) against “those
who defend remembrance” (Gelman). This feature appears as a fundamental
explanatory element resulting from the existence of a violated social body:
the process of democratisation was accompanied by the establishment of
an arena of confrontation between the polarised discourses of different
social groups.
The discussion mobilises two antagonistic forces. The first group is
represented by those who play the supporters of memory; the second by
those who represent the supporters of oblivion. The discussion gravitates
around the existence of a raped, tortured, excluded, persecuted and exiled
social body. The violation of human rights would be the predominant issue
in the public discussion after the end of the dictatorship. The adoption of
the universal language of human rights, which had been embraced a
decade earlier by a large number of grassroots groups, therefore led to the
adoption of a legal and ethical framework instrumental to regulating the
relations between men. However, conservative political forces managed to
lead the country towards a different path. With the end of the 1980s,
Uruguayan citizens witnessed the breakdown of these universalistic
pretensions. In a good measure, the supremacy of the universal foundations
of human rights seems to have been unable to overcome limitations
imposed by real political possibilities.
In this period, the definitions of “memory” and “forgetting” acquired a
sophisticated contribution from academia. The new social and political
environment, when compared with the previous one, required more
flexible use of certain theoretical concepts. For instance, that of “political
memory”, which usually appears associated to the goal of remembering
the past, adopts some aspects related to oblivion. Likewise, it is important
to realise that even among the promoters of political oblivion there is the
need to exercise some form of memory. As a result of both the silent
period and the blockade of the debates, there is the understanding that
memory is fundamentally linked to a political and social need (Jelin 2002,
248-249). In that fashion, one can argue that the construction of political
democracy, or of any other form of political organisation, could only be
developed through the discussion of issues that affect a given political
community.
There are still some questions that remain to be answered in an
appropriate fashion. The very concept of Transitional Justice still appears
to be in dispute. Nowadays it seems undeniable that the idea of
Transitional Justice is linked to the transitional process itself. This does
not deny the existence of a complex theoretical field of studies dedicated
to defining the conceptual boundaries of this idea. However, the definition

of such a complex concept has been connected to the outcome of specific
processes. In this sense, there are an unpredictable number of issues bound
to arise when dealing with Transitional Justice and the latter’s academic
definition should be deemed as an ideal concept which has been outlined
in order to point out some limited possibilities ahead of us. Although some
authors (see Roht-Arriaza 2011, 173-192) have illustrated the field of
Transitional Justice as a new challenge for advocates of human rights, it is
hard to sustain this idea in the face of broad historical evidence.
Indeed, human societies have been forced to deal with political
transitions over history. As stated above, both the rise of new political
regimes and the appearance of paradigmatic changes related to the
conceptions of justice have obliged political communities to present an
appropriate solution. If, on one hand, the solutions presented over the
centuries have shown a mammoth variety of forms, they have, on the other
hand, shared the use of the current moral standards at a given time. In
current debates about the concept of Transitional Justice, there has been
the notion that both society and individuals have the right to the truth
about human rights violations that occurred in the past. It can be attributed
to this conception the idea that in the process of transition to a
representative democracy, the nascent regime must confront its past
violations and abuses. Consequently, in the absence of such a process the
formation of a genuine democratic regime would be impossible.
In conclusion, although these claims may be considered correct from a
moral point of view, I believe that they do not establish any correlation
through the use of historical evidence in the field of social studies.
Demands for legal action against the events that resulted in the rupture of
legal and moral precepts are directly related to the historic needs to
attribute meaning to the past. Furthermore, historically, one can see that
such demands are put forth due to the political disputes that take place
within each society.
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História: memoria, trauma e reparação María Paula Araujo, Carlos
Fico and Monica Grin (eds). Río de Janeiro: Ponteio.
Padrós, Enrique Serra. 2012. “Enterrados vivos: a prisão política na
ditadura uruguaia e o caso dos reféns”. Revista Espaço Plural XIII(27):
13–38.
Payne, Leigh A, Paulo Abrão and Marcelo Torelly (eds). 2011. A anistia
na era da responsabilização: o Brasil em perspectiva internacional e
comparada. Oxford, UK: University of Oxford.
Poder Legislativo de la República Oriental del Uruguay. 1985. “Ley
15.737: Se aprueba la ley de amnistía”. 8 de Marzo. Montevideo.
Accessed March 2014.
www.parlamento.gub.uy/leyes/AccesoTextoLey.asp?Ley=15737andA
nchor=#(*).
—. 1986. “Ley No. 15.848: De la pretensión punitiva del Estado respecto a
los delitos cometidos hasta el 1º de Marzo de 1985”, 22 Diciembre,
Montevideo. Accessed May 2014.
www.parlamento.gub.uy/leyes/AccesoTextoLey.asp?Ley=15848.
Olsen, Tricia, Leigh Payne and Andrew Reiter. 2009. “Equilibrando
julgamentos e anistias na América Latina: perspectivas comparativa e
teórica”. Revista Anistia Política e Justiça de Transição.
2(July/December): 152–175.
Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. 2011. “La necesidad de la reconstrucción moral tras
violaciones de derechos humanos cometidas en el pasado: una
entrevista con José Zalaquett”. In Justicia transicional: manual para
América Latina, Félix Reátegui, (ed). Brasília: Comisión de Amnistía,
Ministério da Justiça.
Romero, Laura. 2006. “Incertidumbres en el territorio familiar”. In El
Uruguay del exilio: Gente, circunstancias, escenario Silvia Dutrénit,
(ed). Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce.
32 Chapter Two
Rousso, Henry. 1996. “A memória não é mais o que era”. In Usos e

Abusos da História Oral, Marieta Ferreira.. Río de Janeiro: Fundación
Getulio Vargas.
Sanguinetti, Julio María. 1999. “La carta del presidente uruguayo a Juan
Gelman”. Página 12, November 5. www.pagina12.com.ar/1999/99-
11/99-11-07/pag16.htm.
Skaar, Elin. 2011. “Impunidade versus responsabilidade no Uruguai: o
papel da Ley de Caducidad”. In A anistia na era da responsabilização:
o Brasil em perspectiva internacional e comparada, Leigh A Payne,
Paulo Abrão and Marcelo Torelly (eds). Brasília: Ministério da Justiça.
Soares, Guido Fernando. 2004. Curso de direito internacional público.
São Paulo: Atlas.
Valdéz, Patricia. 2001. “Tiempo óptimo” para la memoria”. In La
imposibilidade del olvido. Recorridos de la memoria en Argentina,
Chile y Uruguay, Bruno Groppo and Patricia Flier (eds). Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Al Margen-BDIC.
Viñar, Maren. 1993. Fracturas de la memoria: crónicas para una
memoria por venir. Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce.
CHAPTER THREE
THE GELMAN CASE AND THE LEGACY

OF IMPUNITY IN URUGUAY
DEBBIE SHARNAK
“What a paradox”, the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman exclaimed in

2012 when José Mujica, the president of Uruguay, acknowledged state
responsibility for the crimes committed during the nation’s dictatorship
from 1973-1985 (Fernández 2012). Mujica, who was elected president in
2009, had himself been a victim of the nation’s dictatorship. He spent 14
years in jail for his role as a Tupamaro, the urban guerrilla group, and
many of those years were spent in isolation. Just about 40 years after he
first entered prison, he stood before the Uruguayan legislature and
members of the press to apologise on behalf of the state for the terror that
was wrought not only on him, but on thousands of other families during
the nation’s military rule.
Such paradoxes though seem to characterise Uruguay’s fight against
impunity, perhaps no better exemplified than by Gelman’s own protracted
and complex battle.
Juan Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law were disappeared in 1976. The
military abducted Marcelo Gelman and María Claudia García
Iruretagoyena de Gelman in Buenos Aires, separating them shortly after.
Marcelo was sent to a detention centre in Buenos Aires where he was
tortured and killed. María Claudia suffered a different fate. As a result of
Operation Condor, wherein Southern Cone dictatorships coordinated their
repressive activities to eliminate dissidents, she was transferred to
Uruguay. In a Montevideo prison, her daughter, Macarena, was born
(McSherry 2005). María Claudia was never heard from again and her
remains have yet to be found. Her daughter, though, was left on the
doorsteps of an Uruguayan police office, whose family adopted the girl
(Lessa 2014, 80).
Macarena grew up unaware of her own history and her experience was
not an isolated incident. According to human rights groups, as many as
500 children in Argentina and Uruguay were taken from their imprisoned
34 Chapter Three
parents and given to childless military or police couples who the military
regimes favoured (Goldman 2012, 56). Juan Gelman spent agonising years
trying to learn about the fate of his family. It was only after a very long
search for his missing granddaughter, with the help of Las Abuelas de
Plaza de Mayo (The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), that he finally
found Macarena in 1999. When the connection was ultimately confirmed
by a DNA test in 2000, he began a new search, this one aimed at finding
justice for the crimes committed against his family.
The Uruguayan judiciary, though, proved unwilling to pursue his
claims, so Gelman appealed to the Inter-American system. His case
worked its way through Inter-American Commission and then to the
Court. Finally, 11 years after Gelman reunited with his granddaughter, the
Court rendered a decision. On 24 February 2011, the Inter-American Court
of Human Rights (IACtHR) issued its historic judgment on his case of
disappearance and illegal adoption. In Gelman v Uruguay, the IACtHR
issued its first ruling against Uruguay and held the nation responsible for
forced disappearances committed during the nation’s dictatorship.
The judgement stated that the amnesty law in Uruguay, which had
previously prevented many prosecutions from going forward at a national
level, was incompatible with international law (Gelman v Uruguay 2011).1
Therefore, the Court ruled that investigations had to be pursued with a
view to locating María Claudia’s remains and bringing the perpetrators of
her disappearance to justice. The Court also ordered that a series of
reparations be instituted, along with a public apology by the government,
which resulted in Mujica’s acknowledgment of state responsibility.
The far-reaching nature of the IACtHR ruling was immediately lauded
around the world for breaking a wall of silence that had long enveloped
Uruguayan society about the crimes of the dictatorship and had only begun
to crack in the last decade. As Liliana Tojo, a program director for the
organisation that had helped litigate the case, the Centre for Justice and
International Law (CEJIL), said, “The Court has finally dictated that
Uruguay cannot continue to seek excuses for maintaining impunity for the
victims of torture and other horrendous crimes” (2011).
1
Under international law, amnesties are impermissible if they 1) prevent
prosecution of individuals who may be criminally responsible for genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity, or gross violations of human rights; 2) interfere
with victims’ right to an effective remedy; or 3) restrict victims’ or societies’ right
to know the truth about violations of human rights and humanitarian law. The
court’s decision cited both the American Convention and a large body of
precedence which found that there was a non-compatibility of amnesties with
serious human rights violations (Gelman v Uruguay 2011, 69).
The Gelman Case and the Legacy of Impunity in Uruguay 35
In subsequent years though, implementation has proven to be a slow

and difficult process. Despite a gradual loosening of the strictures around
discussing the crimes of the dictatorship, there is a powerful force within
the population that wants to “turn the page” on this part of the nation’s
history. The 40th anniversary of the coup which brought the military
dictatorship to power witnessed a dizzying year of advances and setbacks
in the latest struggle against impunity where the fight over the Gelman
case and its recommendations often took centre stage.
This chapter analyses this struggle against impunity, utilising the
Gelman case as a vehicle to understanding the most recent battles. First, it
will lay out a brief history of Transitional Justice (TJ) in Uruguay.2 This
section takes note of the entrenched silence for the first 15 years after the
transition and the moderate strides in the beginning of the 21st century,
paying particular attention to the role Gelman’s plight played in the
reopening process. Second, it will examine the groundbreaking Gelman
ruling and detail the recommendations that the Court made. Here, the
chapter explains how the Court intervened in contentious domestic debates
that favoured a deeper grappling with the crimes of the dictatorship. The
third part will examine the struggle over implementation with an emphasis
on the way the 40th anniversary was invoked in 2013 when the battle
reached a critical juncture. Lastly, this paper will take an analytical view
of how these struggles shed light on both the effects of second generational
advocacy efforts and illuminate the problems with understanding
Transitional Justice as a technical process. It will, in the end, argue that
Uruguay’s decades-long process with Transitional Justice warrants a shift
in the analytical framework for TJ, which could better be understood as a
long-term goal that is political and oftentimes follows a non-teleological
course.
History of Transitional Justice in Uruguay

When Uruguay finally held elections and transitioned back to democratic
rule in 1985, many Uruguayans hoped they would follow in Argentina’s
2
A simple definition of Transitional Justice explains TJ as “a set of responses to
systematic or widespread violations of human rights that seeks recognition for
victims and to promote possibilities for peace, reconciliation and democracy
through a set of holistic, accountability-based mechanisms such as reparations,
truth-telling, memorialisation, and prosecution. Among other claims, Transitional
Justice argues that in the aftermath of authoritarianism, atrocity or civil war, its
process can help build a stronger democracy and human rights culture, recognizes
victims, and promotes civic trust” (ICTJ 2010).
36 Chapter Three
footsteps and hold the military accountable for the crimes committed
during the 13 years of the dictatorship. Groups like the Las Madres y
Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos y Desaparecidos (The Mothers and
Families of Uruguayans Detained and Disappeared) and the Instituto de
Estudios Legales y Sociales (The Institute of Social and Legal Studies
IELSUR) began to file suits in the national court against the military.
However, unlike Argentina’s “ruptured” transition, where the military fell
from power after failed economic reform and the disaster in the Falklands,
Uruguay underwent a long “pacted” transition (Sikkink 2011).3 The
military and new civilian government struck a deal that included a series
of political compromises, such as giving the military shared power with
the new government and, just as the trials were about the begin, the new
government passed an amnesty law, Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión
Punitiva del Estado, that protected all members of the military from
prosecution for human rights violations that were committed between the
years 1973 and 1985.
Outraged at the law, it was less than 24 hours later that Uruguay’s two
murdered politicians’ widows, Elisa Dellepiane and Matilde Rodríguez,
and a grandmother of a desaparecido, María Ester Gatti, led the efforts of
activists to form a National Pro-Referendum Commission to place the Ley
de Caducidad on a national referendum.4 After the difficult process of
3
Interestingly, the Argentinian military had also passed a blanket self-amnesty law
when they were leaving office to shield them from prosecution by the new
democratic government. However, the military lacked the strength in Argentina to
compel the new government to uphold the amnesty and it was subsequently
repealed when Alfonsín’s government took office and replaced with efforts for
justice accountability (Mallinder 2009). In Uruguay, conversely, many politicians
across the political spectrum supported the amnesty law.
4
Their husbands were Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Ruíz Rodríguez, respectively.
In addition, referendums have a long and complex history in Uruguay as part of the
nation’s strong democratic roots, where many public issues have been submitted to
votes. The 1934 constitution introduced direct democracy in which voters could
directly voice their opinion on issues of national importance and the referendum
process was revised and expanded in both 1942 and 1967. Since the return to
democratic rule in 1985 until 2010, direct-democratic procedures were used 17
times in Uruguay, including the two referendums on the Ley de Caducidad
(Barczak 2001). This process, however, runs into problems when issues placed
before the people conflict with the obligation to respect the rights of minorities,
which are endowed in international law (Donovan and Bowler1998). In this
particular case, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (ICHR) would
eventually rule that in “cases of serious violations of nonrevocable norms of
International Law, the protection of human rights constitutes an impassable limit to
the rule of the majority” (Gelman v Uruguay 2011).
collecting signatures from 25 per cent of the population, the vote to sustain
the law went before the people early in 1989 (Lessa 2013, 138). If
overturned, the referendum could have established the primacy of human
rights and promise of rule of law in the renewed democracy by reopening
the trials that had been shut down. It was therefore devastating to those
who had worked on this initiative when, with a 56 per cent majority,
Uruguayans upheld the law and a culture of impunity. The reaffirmation of
the amnesty and the protection of officers from prosecution felt like, as
one activist explained, “the ultimate defeat” (Michelini 2012) or as another
pointed out, that “justice [came] to a standstill … that we [were] no longer
equal under the law” (‘Justice of Amnesty’ 1989). For many Uruguayans,
the referendum results “sealed the issue of past human rights violations
legally and politically” for several decades (Burt, Lessa and Fried
Amilivia 2013, 313). As Elin Skaar notes, the victims of human rights
groups and their families “went into a state of inertia for several years”
(2013, 489). A silence came to envelope Uruguayan society regarding the
crimes committed during the dictatorship as the door seemed to be closing
on the possibility of Transitional Justice mechanisms being employed in
Uruguay. It became clear that, for the time being, there would be no
government accountability for what occurred.
This silence lasted during the 1990s, through two terms of Julio María
Sanguinetti’s presidency, as well as Luis Alberto Lacalle’s term. They
represented the two historically dominant political parties in the country,
the Colorados (Reds) and Blancos (Whites), both of which embraced a
position of persistent resistance to the issue of human rights. A new
possibility for reopening the conversation emerged in 1995 after there
were two confessions from former military officials in Argentina about the
systematic nature of their repression (Lessa 2013, 143). However, even as
the human rights groups began to fight for space to discuss the crimes of
the dictatorship and demand justice, Sanguinetti, now in his second term in
office, remained unwilling to reopen cases from the time of the
dictatorship.5 Instead, he began to stonewall attempts to restart the judicial
proceedings.
5
Sanguinetti had a unique capacity to open cases based on Article 4 of the Ley de
Caducidad which transfers power from the judiciary to the executive to investigate
crimes if there is political will from that office. Sanguinetti and Lacalle used this
provision to halt any pending cases throughout their terms in office. Batlle, in
2000, used presidential decree to allow limited investigations to move forward.
Tabaré Vasquez, who took over the presidency in 2005, used his presidential
mandate to allow 45 cases to proceed, signalling a significant change from the
previous presidents. During his presidency, two former presidents along with other
38 Chapter Three
Juan Gelman’s plight to find his granddaughter was emblematic of the

wider intransigence that the Uruguayan government showed towards these
reemerging human rights cases. Gelman, in his search for his
granddaughter, appealed directly to Sanguinetti in 1999. Gelman (1999)
asked for help and information about her whereabouts. While a
representative from Sanguinetti’s office originally promised they would
look into the matter, months went by without a response (Rodríguez 2006,
38). After years of agonising searching, Gelman thought he had finally
located the woman who might be his granddaughter but Sanguinetti’s
government failed to open an official investigation or compel a DNA test
that might confirm Gelman’s suspicions.
Gelman, a world renowned poet, responded to Sanguinetti’s negligence
by waging a public campaign to pressure Sanguinetti to investigate her
whereabouts. In October 1999, Gelman published a letter in La República
newspaper, asking Sanguinetti to use his position in the presidency to help
find his missing granddaughter. It was a turning point. As Mauricio
Rodríguez writes, before the letter, Uruguayans knew Gelman as a famous
writer and poet. However, on the day the letter was published in the paper,
his name became forever associated with the persistent search for truth in
the nation (2006, 37).
Gelman quickly gained celebrity for his plight as his public campaign
took off and won extraordinary attention both in the country and around
the world. First, La Asociación de Madres y Familiares de los Desaparecidos
(The Association of Mothers and Families of the Disappeared) wrote a letter
in solidarity to Sanguinetti, requesting that he look into the matter and
asking, “Aren’t you [Sanguinetti] afraid of being remembered as the
champion of impunity?” (Madres Carta a Sanguinetti 1999). A day later,
the president of the progressive coalition of political parties, the Encuentro
Progresista-Frente Amplio (EP-FA) (Broad Front-Progressive Encounter)
and Uruguay’s most famous writer, Eduardo Galeano, also wrote public
letters asking Sanguinetti to investigate the case (1999).
These well-known organisations and people shifted the international
spotlight to Gelman’s dilemma and within a week, the campaign attracted
the attention of an incredible number of groups and activists. The initial
petitions were joined by another famous Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti,
and numerous human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Cipfe,
Cotidiano Mujer (Everyday Woman), HIJOS, IELSUR, Instituto del
Tercer Mundo (Institute of the Third World), Mundo Afro (Afro World),
members of the military were formally accused and many of them were convicted,
including Juan María Bordaberry and his former minister of foreign affairs, Juan
Carlos Blanco (Skaar 2013).
PIT-CNT, SEDHU, SERPAJ and Sersoc. Following the organisational

support were letters from numerous Nobel Prize writers from around the
world and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Argentinian human rights
activist, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. By early November, within a month of the
kickoff of Gelman’s public crusade, Sanguinetti had received letters from
over 320 writers from both within Uruguay and around Latin America,
letters which were covered in news outlets both in Uruguay and around the
region (Cronología 2000).
When Sanguinetti finally responded on 6 November 1999, he chastised
Gelman for trying to paint him as indifferent to humanitarian claims. He
wrote how difficult it would be to try to find evidence of events from 24
years ago, particularly since both governments in Argentina and Uruguay
had undergone substantial transitions where the military and their records
were no longer accessible. He further accused Gelman of using this issue
to try and interfere with the impending elections which were slated for
later that month.
Gelman disputed this claim, saying how months ago he had written in
private to the government without any response. He believed Sanguinetti
had not thoroughly investigated the matter and continued to press him for
a more full investigation. As their exchange went public, attention only
continued to grow. Letters poured in from more than 50 countries. Los
HIJOS (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and
Silence), also staged a march before the Servicio de Información de
Defensa (SID) (Service of Information and Defence), a detention centre in
Montevideo which was the last known place María Claudia had been seen.
Then in the largest petition yet, 20,000 Germans signed a letter in support
of Gelman that was sent to Sanguinetti.
By the end of January, Sanguinetti felt compelled to respond again to
the mounting pressure. He replied to a letter sent by Nobel Prize winning
author, Gunter Grass, saying emphatically that: “there are no children of
the disappeared in Uruguay” and that “nobody has the miraculous capacity
of giving the answer to the author [Gelman] as long as there is no new
evidence; the events took place in Argentina and were carried out by
Argentinians” (2000). The letter was met with outrage by the public, but as
Sanguinetti’s days in office wound down, it was clear that there would be
no state-sponsored investigation under his presidency. Sanguinetti’s
obstinacy to Gelman’s plight was symbolic of the government’s approach
towards justice throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. The government
proved fundamentally unwilling to grapple with the legacy of human
rights violations from the nation’s military rule.
40 Chapter Three
On 1 March 2000, Sanguinetti left the presidency and a fellow

Colorado party member, Jorge Batlle assumed office. Despite being from
the same party, their politics regarding the human rights issues differed
substantially. With Batlle, the first real hope for confronting the military’s
crimes began to surface. While the first two post-transition presidents,
Julio María Sanguinetti and Luis Alberto Lacalle, actively blocked any
possibilities for trials or public reckoning, Batlle proved more willing to
reopen the conversation. Within the first few weeks, he ordered the
military chief to investigate Gelman’s case. In under a month, he was able
to confirm with DNA evidence that Gelman’s granddaughter was 23 and
living in Uruguay.6
The discovery set off a host of other petitions about children of the
disappeared. As more requests began to flow in, Batlle struck a deal with a
leader from the Frente Amplio, Gonzalo Fernández, and members of
human rights groups such as Madres and SERPAJ, to establish an
investigatory body which would search for the truth about the fate of the
disappeared and their children. The body, called La Comisión para la Paz
(the Peace Commission), became the state’s first government-backed
national truth-seeking effort.7 While it did not hold punitive powers, its
role was important in that it gave the state power to seek answers which
had been road blocked, quite publicly, during the previous 15 years.
Human rights groups applauded the effort for attempting to tackle the
grave problem and breaking from past administrations’ negligence on the
issue (SERPAJ 2000, 98).
The report was released in 2003 and despite being hailed for the first
time that the state acknowledged the crimes of the dictatorship, the report
received widespread criticism from human rights and victim groups. First,
especially in comparison to other truth commissions that had emerged
from the region, the Peace Commission’s powers and resources were
scarce at best. From the beginning, they lacked access to the state archives
6
The public nature of this campaign meant that it was splashed across international
and national papers, most consistently in La República which was available at the
newspaper’s online archive: www.lr21.com.uy. The paper was additionally
brought into the maelstrom when the nation’s Electoral Court morally sanctioned
the newspaper for its coverage of the situation. SERPAJ also published a
chronology of the public events around this event in “Informe de Derechos
Humanos en Uruguay” (SERPAJ 2000).
7
The Service for Peace and Justice (SERPAJ) had written a community organised
truth commission report in the late 1980s, Nunca Más (Never Again), modelled
after Argentina’s truth commission. However it lacked the same state
acknowledgment of their part in the crimes committed, or the power of state
resources.
and could only seek voluntary testimonies (Hayner 2010, 251). The report
therefore focused on the disappeared, but without full access to recover the
information, it could only acknowledge 26 of the 38 people who
disappeared in Uruguay. This left almost a third of the cases unaddressed
(Allier 2006). Many human rights groups felt though that even the cases
the truth commission did explore were not done thoroughly enough. The
report explained that most of the bodies of the disappeared, in both
Argentina and Uruguay, would be impossible to find since they had been
cremated or disposed of during the “death flights”, when members of the
Argentinian military loaded desaparecidos onto flights, undressed them
and threw their bodies into the Río de la Plata (Silver River) (Feitlowitz
1999, 68-9). This finding was widely rejected by human rights groups and
instead seen as a way for the government to try and close the conversation.
Lastly, the commission did not attempt to address the voluminous cases of
torture or prolonged imprisonment which had characterised the
overwhelming nature of Uruguay’s repression. If the commission was
supposed to have acted as a truth-telling exercise to fully investigate the
terror of the dictatorship, it had failed (Lessa 2013). The commission only
brushed the surface in its exploration of the nature of the military
dictatorship’s crimes, seeming to reaffirm a culture of impunity by
neglecting to investigate and denounce the most widespread crime of the
dictatorship. In the end, human rights groups painted the commission as
another attempt by the executive to provide some truth and close the books
on the issue rather than an honest attempt to address the nation’s difficult
history.
The disappointment with the report was only exacerbated when no
trials followed. Batlle’s Transitional Justice efforts largely ended with the
commission’s report. Gelman’s search for his granddaughter, which had
initiated the truth-telling exercise, had resulted in a report that fell short of
expectations and, as it was increasingly becoming clear, a case which
would not see its day in a Uruguayan court any time soon.
The Gelman Case

After two unsuccessful attempts to utilise the Uruguayan legal system
to pursue his claims, in 2002 and 2005, Gelman began to appeal to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2006 (Peralta 2011,
203). Juan and Macarena had several goals in pursuing the case. First of
all, they hoped to discover what had happened to María Claudia and to
know the truth about the circumstances surrounding the birth of Macarena.
Second, they wanted to see justice for those who had committed the
42 Chapter Three
crimes. A third and larger goal, however, rested on the hope that if this
case could be successfully pursued, it would promote truth and justice for
all the human rights cases which were protected by the amnesty law. While
the commission spent the next four years submitting recommendations to the
state to address Gelman’s claims, the Uruguayan government failed to
implement any of them (Inter-American Commission 2010). As a result, in
late 2010, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights agreed to hear
arguments pertaining to the case (CEJIL 2013).
The trial took place in Quito, Ecuador. Gelman, represented by CEJIL
and José Luis González, provided testimony and was joined by other
witnesses and experts who had worked on the case and could testify about
María Claudia’s disappearance. Conversely, Uruguay did not present any
witnesses or experts during the trial (Peralta 2011, 208). Juan Gelman
articulated the stakes in the case when he explained that the pact of silence
between the civilian government and the military misrepresented and
concealed the truth, denying Macarena the ability to grow up with her
biological family and know her true identity. Macarena added during her
own testimony that knowing the truth completely changed her life and she
was now dedicated to finding out about the fate of her mother and the
circumstances of her birth (Peralta 2011, 209).
A few months after hearing the cases by Gelman and the state, in
February 2011, the Inter-American Court issued its ruling. The IACtHR
held Uruguay responsible for forced disappearances committed during its
dictatorship for the very first time. As Ariela Peralta, one of the lawyers in
the case, noted, the decision “changed the history of the country” (Peralta
2014). The Court found that the amnesty law was inconsistent with
international human rights obligations in the American Convention which
states that serious human rights violations must allow victims a right to
pursue truth, to have an effective remedy and allow for prosecution even
when an amnesty law “has been approved in a referendum or by another
similar type of consultation process” (Gelman v Uruguay 2011). The
IACtHR directed Uruguay to begin to comply with instituting
accountability efforts in three key areas to reverse the trend of impunity.
First, it ordered Uruguay to guarantee that the amnesty law did not present
further obstacles to the identification and, if applicable, punishment of the
responsible parties for crimes against humanity. Second, it directed
Uruguay to institute reparations for violations suffered; and lastly, the
ruling stated that the small Southern Cone nation needed to make an
official apology. Ultimately, the Court was very clear that even though the
Ley de Caducidad had been approved by a democratic regime and ratified
on two occasions by the citizens, it was not legitimate under international

law (Peralta 2011, 213).8
Despite these clear mandates, from the beginning it was questionable
as to how much Uruguay might comply with the ruling. Part of this
difficulty is based on the ad hoc relationship between member states and
the Inter-American Court. While the IACtHR generally has a high rate of
compliance, the Court has no enforcement authority for its decisions (Tan
2005). Nations therefore have the discretion to determine the extent to
which they will comply with these recommendations. While Uruguay
signed and ratified the American Convention on Human Rights in 1985,
the Gelman case was the first from Uruguay to reach the Court to date.
Therefore, there was not much jurisprudential precedent to predict how
closely the nation would follow the Court’s recommendations.
Uruguay, though, took important steps to carry out these measures in
the first few years after the ruling, even though some commentators
criticised the nation for dragging its feet and taking the absolute maximum
amount of time in their compliance efforts. First, the nation instituted an
economic reparations program for victims of the dictatorship’s crimes.
Reparations are traditionally understood as an important step for a state to
both acknowledge and address the harms suffered. An earlier reparations
law from 2009, law 18.598, recognised the right of victims to receive
reparations, but included an article which prevented a victim who has
agreed to receive any form of a reparation from seeking legal remedy
(Sivolobova 2011). The law had been largely repudiated as the
government attempting to strike a bargain for limited justice. Therefore,
when the government of Uruguay agreed to pay Macarena Gelman
US$513,000 in reparations, it signalled a change from a reparations
program based on trading silence for justice to one that acknowledged that
reparations and justice could both sought under international law.
A few months later in March 2012, President José Mujica, who was, as
the beginning of this chapter noted, himself a victim of the military
government’s repression, made a dramatic public acknowledgement of
state responsibility for crimes committed during the dictatorship. In this
formal public apology, itself a form of symbolic reparation, he both
accepted the state’s role in the disappearance and promised to continue to
8
Since María Claudia’s forced disappearance qualified as a crime against
humanity under the American Convention of Human Rights, Uruguay was
required to provide access to a judicial remedy. The Ley de Caducidad had directly
violated this right, and domestic approval did not override the internationally
endowed right to access judicial remedy for crimes against humanity (Gelman v
Uruguay 2011).
44 Chapter Three
comply with the Inter-American Court’s ruling and look for María
Claudia’s remains. Macarena explained that to her, the apology was not
the end of the battle but rather, it was a measure upon which to build
something better for the many people that had yet to find out what had
happened to their loved ones (“Mujica asumió” 2012).
Perhaps most importantly though, is the case’s declaration that the
amnesty law was incompatible with the obligations of the state and the
order for any obstacles to be removed for further prosecutions. Despite the
fact that the Supreme Court had found the law unconstitutional as early as
2009 in the Sabalsagaray case, there had been various procedural
roadblocks which halted cases from moving forward (Skaar 2013).
Only after the Gelman decision, did the legislature finally pass Law
18.831 in October 2011 which legally eliminated the “expiry”. While
almost 90 cases were filed in the courts after the repeal, both politically
and legally it was still an uphill battle with the nation’s judicial
intransigence, which reached another apex as Uruguay began to approach
the 40th anniversary of the coup (Burt et al. 2013). The public fight took
centre stage in Uruguay, with much of the justification behind the
onslaught of cases having stemmed from the battle to implement the
Gelman decision.
2013: The 40th Anniversary

The year 2013 marked the military coup’s sombre 40th anniversary of
the year when Juan María Bordaberry shut down Congress and the
Supreme Court, banned unions and some political parties and began a
government-backed campaign for mass imprisonment and torture. During
this period, a dizzying array of advances and setbacks occurred on the
Transitional Justice landscape in Uruguay.
It began on 13 February 2013, when the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights (IACtHR) held a private hearing to monitor Uruguay’s
compliance with the Gelman v Uruguay judgment from 24 February 2011.
This hearing aimed to uncover the progress Uruguay had made in
instituting the directives for accountability that the IACtHR judges had
given in the decision.
At the private hearing, the government representative acknowledged
that Uruguay still had a way to go in its quest for truth and justice. He
admitted that the investigation clarifying where María Claudia’s remains
might be located and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance and
daughter’s adoption was still ongoing. The Centre for Justice and
International Law (CEJIL), which litigated the case for Gelman, argued at
the hearing that Uruguay still needed to remove the final obstacles for
prosecution domestically and that numerous constitutional challenges
needed to be ruled on by the Supreme Court before human rights trials
could resume.
The subsequent events of that year reinforced the continued challenges
Uruguay faces in its fight against impunity and certainly were not resolved
after the hearing. The first major battle occurred when Mariana Mota, a
judge who was one of the strongest champions of human rights trials in the
country, was transferred from her criminal post to a civilian jurisdiction
without any explanation. The transfer was handed down just as trials were
slated to begin from the suits that were filed after the amnesty law was
overturned in October 2011.
Mota’s judicial history proved her tenacity in fighting impunity on the
bench. She was an important member of the team that convicted
Bordaberry, the civilian head of state for the military dictatorship during
the first four years of their rule. Charges had been brought against him in
November 2006 for aggravated murder and upper court crimes against
humanity, charges which included the murders of two former senators,
Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz in Argentina. Mota argued
that the court could hear arguments for the case since he was a civilian and
therefore, not covered by the amnesty law which only protected the
military (Lutz and Reiger 2009). Bordaberry was successfully convicted in
November 2010 and sentenced to 30 years (Skaar 2013). Mota was the
judge to hand down the conviction.
In 2013, Mota alone had more than 50 cases under investigation on her
docket after the flood of suits began to reach the courts. Her transfer was
announced without an explanation, a practice that Uruguay had utilised in
the past when human rights issues reached the court system. For example,
in 1997, Alberto Reyes was a criminal judge in Montevideo who ordered
an investigation into the fate of 150 disappearances. After he handed down
the order though, he had been transferred to a civilian court without
explanation which meant that his order was never carried out. Similar
pressure was placed on Judge Estela Jubette after a ruling on a
controversial human rights case in 2000 and Judge Alejandro Recarey in
2003 (Lessa and Payne, 2012, 146).
What differed in 2013 from these earlier cases was the burst of outrage
by the human rights community in Uruguay and around the world. The
nullification of the amnesty law had given these groups hope that after
decades, their cases would finally be heard in court. The old stonewalling
tactics brought the battle against impunity onto the streets in Uruguay.
46 Chapter Three
Hundreds of people staged a protest outside the court to argue that

Mota’s transfer was another sign of the court’s weakening resolve to
prosecute criminals of state terrorism. Yet they vowed to continue the fight
against impunity in their country. Academics across the country connected
with their international counterparts, to write an open letter in La
República, the same paper Gelman had used as his platform to protest
against Sanguinetti. Now, they asked for an explanation for Mota’s
transfer in the most public forum possible (“Carta abierta” 2013). Two
men, Jorge Zabalza, a former Tupamaro, and Álvaro Jaume sought to
occupy the Supreme Court in protest as well. Local human rights groups
such as Madres y Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos y Desaparecidos
(Mothers and Families of Detained and Disappeared Uruguayans), la
Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios del Uruguay (FFEUU)
(Uruguay’s Student Federation), HIJOS Uruguay, Crysol and Federación
Uruguay Entero (Entire Uruguay Federation) received support from
international groups like the Washington Office on Latin America
(WOLA) and CEJIL in denouncing the transfer as well (WOLA 2013).
The battle over the transfer raged for the rest of the year. Instead of
silently accepting the move, at the annual March of Silence in May,
activists made a particular stop in front of the Supreme Court, protesting
the transfer and leaving a sign in front of the building which read, “the
wall of impunity will fall” (‘Miles’ 2013). Former Tupamaro Henry
Engler also expressed his sincere disappointment in her transfer, noting
that for him, she represented what the Supreme should embody. He
continued: “I hope that one day [the human rights violators] will be tried
for their abuse of power, for their arrogance, for their disrespect and
interference in the search for true justice” (Engler 2014). Mota and her
lawyers also presented a formal complaint to the Court, asking for an
annulment of her transfer. The decision remains pending as this chapter
goes to print.
The Mota case, however, was not the only setback in the search for
justice in 2013. Days after Mota’s transfer, the Uruguayan Supreme Court
ruled that the dictatorship’s crimes could not be considered crimes against
humanity and that therefore, the time within which to prosecute had
expired. The ruling effectively meant that the key provisions of the
amnesty law were brought, as Amnesty International said “back to life”
and that many gross human rights violations committed under the
dictatorship would go unpunished (2014). It was a clear signal from the
upper court that any cases that advanced at the lower levels of the judicial
system would continue to receive pushback from the Supreme Court.
There is little hope that the executive will override the decision since 2014
is an election year and traditionally hot button political issues recede into
the background as campaigning takes centre stage. Similarly, the court
composition will remain the same until at least 2015, which makes the
prospects of a reversal on this ruling appear particularly bleak.
The outrage over the transfer, compounded by the Supreme Court’s
ruling, provided a stage upon which to view the current state of the debate
over memory and accountability in the nation. Mota’s transfer was a huge
setback in the fight against impunity. For almost a decade, she had been at
the forefront of some of the most important trials to challenge the nation’s
intransigence on human rights issues. While Judge Beatriz Larrieu, who
took over Mota’s tribunal, rejected the petition to entirely close down
investigations for crimes committed during the dictatorship, of the 200
cases that were open for investigation in 2013, only five received
sentences. Larrieu valiantly tried to argue that crimes against humanity
were not subject to statute of limitations; however, only one of those five
trials even received a condemnatory verdict. The ruling by the Supreme
Court appeared to contradict the legislature’s official overturning of the
amnesty law in 2011 by de facto reinstating its central premise that trials
could not reach the courts and discouraging activist progressive judges
from breaking outside this framework lest they receive transfers like Mota
as well.
However, the shift from silent acceptance of these attempts to shut
down trials to public indignation, both in Uruguay and around the world,
indicated a change in the normative attitude towards accountability. The
country had been censured in the Inter-American Court in 2011, producing
a legal backing for the human rights groups’ activities, which, along with
the an international movement towards accountability, helped shift
attitudes in Uruguay toward issues of justice (Sikkink 2011).
A public outreach campaign of videos compelling Uruguayans to
continue to fight for the trials, ¿Nunca más, qué? (Never again, what?),
also galvanised hundreds of supporters and indicated the new media
techniques that activists were utilising 40 years after the coup as their
battle moved from the streets to the internet and computer screens as well
(N-Map and CEJIL Launch 2013). Combined with the strength of
traditionally strong human rights groups like Madres and HIJOS, there
was an emergence of new groups on the scene which also proved
unwilling to let impunity re-envelope the nation as after the defeat of 1989
plebiscite.
While Uruguay has been slower than many other nations in the region
to adopt international law principles into their domestic fabric, a new
generation of more progressive justices also appear more willing to use
48 Chapter Three
human rights conventions as part of their rulings and are more aware of
the international standards and how to apply them to a domestic setting
(Skaar 2013, 504-5). In 2013 particularly, the Gelman case’s regional
mandate was galvanising as both a rallying call and concrete example of
where justice could be achieved, illustrating the changed nature of the
battle against impunity 40 years after the coup.
The Concept of Transitional Justice in Uruguay

The dynamic state of accountability leads to several observations about
the legacy of violence and impunity in Uruguay. First, a particularly
poignant aspect in the pushback is the importance of the second and third
generations who are increasingly contributing to the advocacy efforts in
the search for truth in Uruguay. HIJOS, a group of sons and daughters of
the disappeared, begun in 1994 in Argentina and heavily influenced by
that group, emerged in Uruguay in 1996. From the very beginning, this
group played a role in reopening the conversation over the past in
Uruguay. However, new groups recently emerged onto the human rights
scene as well, adding a new cadre of activists and indicating a renewed
and continued interest in these issues among a larger populace. For
example, one organisation, Memoria en Libertad (Memory in Freedom), is
a group of children of the disappeared that work on collective memory
projects in Uruguay. Similarly, in 2007, Los Niños en Cautiverio Político
(Children in Political Captivity), formed as a result of their common
experience of having been detained with their mothers when they were
babies or small children (Levey 2010). All three groups utilise online
advocacy tools to provide another avenue for the challenge against
impunity. They also bring an amplifying array of voices to the struggle.
These groups add a revitalising presence and continue to grow the
movement. Valentin Enseñat a member of HIJOS Uruguay, made these
links to his generation clear at a public workshop in 2013. He explained
that while one important aspect to their battle is that the right to truth
exists, for the second and third generations, the construction of their own
identity remains unfinished without knowing the truth about their families.
He referred to this process as being in a constant state of
“transgenerational misunderstanding” because the stories of their parents
are intrinsically part of their own narrative, which remains unknown and
thus unfinished (Enseñat 2013). Those affected by impunity, therefore, are
not just the survivors but also their children and grandchildren who are
increasingly participating in the Transitional Justice battles and becoming
important motivators for keeping the fight alive (Levey 2010).
Perhaps though, the generational advocacy becomes so important

because the length of a transition and the process through which
Transitional Justice can be achieved is increasingly under debate.
Recently, Harvey Weinstein, a former editor-in-chief of the International
Journal of Transitional Justice asked whether it was hubris to believe that
Transitional Justice mechanisms could help society emerge from
unspeakable atrocities and achieve reconciliation only a few years after
peace by defining a transition in a short time frame (2010, 2). Some
scholars argue that the struggle for these values after the first few years
should be considered a “post-transitional justice” phase (Collins 2010,
Aguilar 2008). I suggest, however, that the very definition of a Transitional
Justice process should become more elastic. From the beginning, it should
be viewed as a decades-long process for societies to undergo in a struggle
for truth and justice. While the length of time will differ in each context,
the difficult processes of truth seeking and reconciliation are inherently
challenging endeavours which can take decades to occur, as evidenced in
the case of Uruguay.
There exists a careful balance, though, in how long the process can
take to occur. While modifying the length of a transition in Transitional
Justice is necessary, as Pablo de Greiff, United Nations Special Rapporteur
on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-
recurrence noted, justice also cannot be delayed too long since
Transitional Justice aims to allow victims to benefit from the clarification
of facts, which is threatened if victims pass away before this can occur
(United Nations Office 2013). In Uruguay, many victims are an advanced
age which requires that a careful balance be struck between assuming
Transitional Justice can be achieved in just a few years and then waiting
decades for victims to achieve the right to clarification and justice.
Any attempts to achieve this equilibrium needs to grapple with the fact
that Transitional Justice is sometimes assumed to be a technical process, or
that the set of TJ tools such as trials, truth commissions and reparations
exists above politics. Instead, it is more helpful to understand TJ squarely
within a political frame that must adapt and manoeuvre within extremely
sensitive environments. Particularly in cases like Uruguay that underwent
a pacted transition, political considerations often dominate battles against
impunity and the search for truth. Transitional justice is perhaps better
understood as an aspirational value for opening doors to a long and often
winding process that lacks a sense of completion or closure. Discussions
over a violent and painful past can never be full dealt with or closed. The
ongoing discussions become an important and continual part of the fabric
of society.
50 Chapter Three
In this sense, it is important to understand Transitional Justice as a

non-teleological process. Steve Stern explains the complications of this
progression by pushing scholars to rethink historical accountability within
an analytic framework of cumulative achievement against the odds. In the
case of Chile, Stern examines how individual moments in the struggle for
memory and human rights coexisted with the sense that each of these
moments, when analysed in isolation, failed to advance justice in a
meaningful way. The totality of the regime’s terror could not be repaired
by any one act, particularly in the non-linear and difficult pathway through
which justice progressed. In this respect, Stern identified how a longer
view became necessary in analysing the Chilean struggle over Pinochet’s
legacy. With the perspective of time, each moment of failure or
shortcoming became cracks to open up larger discussions and resistance to
impunity. They provided spaces for public reckonings and laid the
groundwork for establishing a more robust legal culture and determination
to build societies steeped in human rights (Stern 2010).
Uruguay’s “delayed justice” as some have framed it, appears to have
followed a similar path. So often in the long battle for justice, advances
were linked with severe setbacks and 2013 proved the most dramatic
example. Peralta noted that these recent events revealed just how difficult
this process is, explaining that it appeared that “Uruguay was at an
impasse … something needs to break or change in the country” for
accountability to advance (Peralta 2014, 214). Indeed, a powerful movement
domestically acknowledges that as difficult as the current moment is, the
search for justice is not impossible. Many are committed to fighting
against these setbacks. Past failures have spurred further actions,
organisation and discussion which continues, particularly from the second
and third generations.
An important dynamic to this resistance are the multiple venues in
which Uruguayans are committed to furthering their search for justice.
Gelman, when he struggled to advance his claims in court in Uruguay,
submitted his case to the Inter-American Commission. Similarly,
Uruguayans, unable to make much headway in the implementation of the
Gelman recommendations, have been intimately involved in submitting
their claims to the transnational trial on Operation Condor, which is
occurring now in Buenos Aires. Many Uruguayans, whose cases died or
were rejected in the Uruguayan courts, are advancing their justice claims
through the regional trial. Indeed, of the 106 victims filing in the trial, 48
of them are Uruguayans (Lessa and Le Goff 2013). This large proportion
of Uruguayan participation indicates the persistent desire for justice
among Uruguayans through whatever venue available after being denied

the opportunity in their own country.
The process to search for truth and justice in Uruguay has taken
decades to manifest in the national consciousness, but 2013 signalled that
the normative attitudes towards accepting silence had changed. These
setbacks are viewed as part of the non-teleological nature of the search for
justice and the fight is continually referred to as ongoing. No one final
decision or act is understood as the closure of the conversation.
Indeed, as the 40th anniversary of the coup came to an end in 2013 and
a new year of the struggle against impunity dawned, the election of a new
military chief highlighted the ongoing struggles. Juan Villagrán assumed
the top military post in February 2014. In his first public interview, he
stressed that he thought the country needed to move on from discussions
about the military dictatorship and instead insisted that he wanted to turn
the page and look to the future of the country (Ruggiero 2014).
Immediately, human rights groups responded with outrage over the
assertion. They shot back: “how can we turn the page if we haven’t read
the book?” (“Hijos de desaparecidos” 2014). What in many ways 2013
has shown though, is that the book still has many pages to be written.
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE CELEBRATION:
VIOLENCE AND CONSENT IN THE FIRST
ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHILEAN COUP
PABLO LEIGHTON
This chapter is part of a larger work exploring a feature of cultural

power developed during the Chilean dictatorship, particularly the ways by
which audiovisual mass media helped in the rise and stability of that
government and articulated its foundational discourses. This broader
research contemplates the building of hegemony in Chile; in other words,
the creation of politico-social consent by cultural forms of power, a notion
inspired by the works of Antonio Gramsci (1971, 1977, 1983, 2000),
Stuart Hall (1977a, b, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1985b, a, 1986, 1987, 1997),
Ernesto Laclau (1979, Laclau and Mouffe 1987) and others. The study
also conceives how the Chilean dictatorship remains, at the very least, a
historiographical dispute. Its legacy involves a form of popular support
which has been difficult to recognise—socially and academicallyʊeven
though it was no less significant than the government’s political and
economic despotism. Specifically, the research highlights the
manifestation of popular support for the Chilean dictatorship and its
dominance using nonrepressive means, at a singular period, 1973 to 1978,
more universally associated with violent coercion. In order to observe and
understand better that power equationʊthe will to govern by force without
completely discarding consentʊthe observation of one of its cultural
forms is crucial. An audiovisual culture both illustrates and assists in that
holding of power in the most evocative manner during the most repressive
stage of the dictatorship. A cultural history of a communication medium,
which has the exceptional capacity to reproduce and build events, can
reveal how the dictatorship from the very beginning uses both discourse
and force indiscriminately.
58 Chapter Four
One: Fascism
Hernán Valdés, author of an influential book about his survival from a
concentration and torture camp near Santiago, said in a 2003 interview:
Let me tell you … a short anecdote. In Hamburg, in 1974, I was invited to

give a talk [...] It was not, I said, only about the military, the right and the
Yankees: a great part of the middle class had supported them. It was a
scandal. ‘Provocateur!’, they yelled at me, ‘the Chilean people are not
fascist!’, and they didn’t let me speak. They picked up the microphone and
gave their own version by shouting [...] They tried to safeguard possible
allies in the future, a middle class that might do a new turn in their favour.
Seeing things today, maybe they were somewhat right (Hernán Valdés in
Cárdenas 2003).
The general lack of recognition and the disputes over the degreeʊalways
uncertain in any dictatorshipʊof popular support of the Chilean junta
since the day of the coup in 1973 immediately create a blind spot. Various
authors have pointed to the most common misunderstanding born since the
day of the coup: that it heralds the rise of a “fascist” dictatorship, a term
that is used so “prematurely and importunately” under Salvador Allende’s
presidency that by the time of the coup it is devoid of content (Valdés
1978, 208-209).
For years, the “fascist” judgement acts as a “veil”, says Tomás
Moulian (1997, 258). The meaning of the new regime is complex, in part
because of a scientistic definition of “fascism” which is regularly applied
to large political mass-mobilisations, or to a sole party regime. In absence
of the latter feature, particularly, the Chilean dictatorship is assigned the
“fascist” label automatically by the resistance and the hundreds of
thousands of exiles and foreign critics. It is a “name” that is reduced to
mean “malignant conspiracy” (Moulian 1983, 310). Whilst the term
initially works abroad as condemnation, even disrupting the weapons
supply for the dictatorship (see La Nación 2009, US Congress 1976,
1212), the strategic cost of that misinterpretation is high. According to
Moulian, the “fascist” label implies the omnipotence of the new regime
and pronounces a false death sentence on the dictatorship just for being an
“abject” government. More importantly, the terrorist repression is seen as
irrational, without purpose, Moulian suggests. For him, the “basic
error”ʊthe greatest of all misunderstandings in the endʊis to undervalue
the “organic” role of the dictatorship. The simplistic “liberal illusion” of
the left is incapable of considering terror as arising from a “complex
equation”; hence Moulian ultimately proposes discarding the notion of
“fascism” in the case of Chile (1997, 258-263, 1983, 310-311).
The Celebration 59
The “fascist” label is about an “enigma”, says Ernesto Laclau, an

intricate agglomeration of contradictions made too simplistic, a tag applied
equally to dictatorships from different continents and eras (1979, 82,88).
The “fascist” assignation, nonetheless, manages to travel across the world,
adapts itself and works in practice. Luz Arce, a Chilean left militant who
became a State agent after her imprisonment, quotes what her torturer said
to her to justify, describe and announce more of his horrendous violence:
“Now you’ll know what fascism is, but not foreign fascism; this is Chilean
fascism” (in Lazzara 2011, 98).
Far from South America, Umberto Eco argues that “fascism” is a
synecdoche, an interchangeable term for a political system devoid of an
essence, which can change a couple of features and still be fascist. But
“[l]ife is not that simple”, adds Eco (1995). Michel Foucault begins by
discarding the classic Marxist definition of fascism (the “terrorist
dictatorship of the most reactionary faction of the bourgeoisie”) and points
to the delegation of the role of repression and surveillance by the state to a
considerable section of the masses. This freedom to repress, “repulsive”
but “intoxicating”, denies liberty to the wider population, without
eliminating the circulation of power and making the word
“‘dictatorship’…real in general, and relatively false” (Foucault 1989,
128,130). Critically, that delegation of power and the articulation of
discourses make fascism another hegemonic or “popular-democratic”
interpellation, without which the term would be “incomprehensible”
(Laclau 1979, 111,125).
How modern despotism interpellates popularly can connect these ideas
to Chile and to its dictatorship. In Chile, most of the repressed half of the
population under dictatorship rationalises and emphasises only the
“authoritarian character” of fascism, denying any connotation of a “mass
regime”, as suggested by Laclau. This view focuses on brute force rather
than “mobilisation” or even “ideological distortions” (Laclau 1979, 88-
174), such as the fervent anticommunism and neo-liberalism also operative
in Chile. Ultimately, I emphasise the hegemonic desire of the dictatorship
and I rework another notion about fascism to examine the civil-military
regime in its early years. I refer to the chance that the government
concedes to the masses to express themselves or, in the words of
Benjamin, when an aesthetic is developed from politics (1978, 241).
Two: Violence and culture

If one only considers the numbers killed, the victims of the dictatorship
would mean “little” mathematically in Chilean history, suggests Alfredo
60 Chapter Four
Jocelyn-Holt. Nevertheless, such numbers would mean much more when

one includes torture victims (Jocelyn-Holt 2000, 239). Certainly, for these
surviving victims there is “the obscenity of interpretation” (Avelar 2001,
260). At the same time, the numbers of sufferers of this specific type of
violence, the most difficult to represent, raise various interpretations from
the Chilean State Truth reports. The total counted by the Chilean state, 38
years after the coup, was 38,254 victims of political imprisonment and
torture (Comisión Valech 2011, 6-51). From the 27,255 persons counted in
2004 more than 5,000 are detained in just two days: 11 to 13 September
1973. The great majority, 67 per cent (more than 18,000), become victims
between the coup and 31 December of the same year. The Valech Report’s
historiographical division, which it admits is “arbitrary”, establishes that
only 19 per cent of all victims are tortured in the 1974 to 1977 period and
13 per cent are from 1978 to the last day of the dictatorship, 10 March
1990. Such data confirms that the regime is initially a terrorist
dictatorship, within the 1973–78 phase universally identified with DINA
(Directorate of National Intelligence), the secret police. Nonetheless,
during this first stage, the institution that is responsible for the largest
number of detentions and torture cases is the Carabineros, the general
police. The Valech Report shows other figures that reveal a type of
subjectivity in the victims of this violent repression: almost a third of
tortured victims do not have any political affiliation; over 63 per cent are
militants who do not play any leading roles; and close to 58 per cent are
less than 30 years old at the time of detention. Lastly, more than a third of
all victims are tortured using electric shocks, a method that leaves no
evident marks on the bodies and that is used from the day of the coup and
throughout the whole of the dictatorship (Comisión Valech 2004, 208-478;
2011, 38-44). In the mid-80s, a Chilean judge who turns into a dissident as
he witnesses the occurrence of torture is uncertain about the marks left on
victims and about the symptoms they experience: “Electric shocks?”,
García wonders (1990, 57). Without evident traces and for the short term,
the “surplus of cruelty is a fundamental component of terror itself [...]
without being excessive, obscene, absurd, terror is simply not terror”, says
Avelar. In the longer term, “[t]he torturer’s great victory is to define the
language in which the atrocity will be named” (Avelar 2004, 28-49).
The undecipherable numbers of victims of state violence are still the
subject of struggles over meaning in Chile, including the circumstances of
their tabulation. The figures of 200,000 detainees and 400,000 exiled,
which necessarily imply a systematic dictatorial domination (Stern 2004,
xxi), have been officially reduced in the state counting. The number of
persons that have claimed to be victims of imprisonment and torture is
The Celebration 61
counted at 68,000 through the testimonies given before the state, but
almost 30,000 of them were not recognised or compensated (Comisión
Valech 2011, 1-51). Again, these accounts can become numberless and
escape an expeditious representation (see Agamben 2002). Amid those
included in the official accounts as victims, for example, are tortured
people who turned later into victimisers (see El Mostrador 2011).
Moreover, as Jocelyn-Holt points out, much of the impunity over these
crimes has been promoted by eminent former dissidents who later became
postdictatorship state authorities, even though many of them were tortured
or imprisoned by the military (2000, 164).
Among insightful evaluations of the dictatorship’s violence, Beasley-
Murray says it is a mistake to qualify the regime as “simply repressive”
instead of describing a government that would go beyond “persuasion” or
“censorship” to rely on daily habits (2010, 193,211). At the same time, the
long “peace” of the dictatorship between 1974 and 1983 (see Beasley-
Murray 2010, 194–195) is still bewildering. Tomás Moulian historically
categorises the repressive order and its tool, terror, as “the fundamental
weapon of a minority revolution at the initial stages”, suggesting that the
regime subsequently mutated. More importantly, he suggests the
dictatorship is terrorist when it cannot convince the population or when it
“persuades” people through the fear of violence. By supplementing the
terrorist modes of control, the dictatorship secures “absolute
governmentality” (Moulian 1997, 22,177). Despite all these perceptive
accounts, how that power equation is executed remains difficult to
visualise in academia and in Chile.
José Brunner implies that beyond its “precarious ideological
formulations” the dictatorship’s power equation is organic and that
discipline has “creative” effects in a multiple process of “knowledge and
information transmission”. He argues that culture manages to transform
“force into meanings of order” (Brunner 1977, 9,95). The complex power
equation of the dictatorship, applied firstly in a terrorist phase, soon
includes the normative exercises of the law, the “knowledge over minds”
and the power “over bodies” (Moulian 1997, 22). As a result and
manifestation of that power equation, the creation of a subjectivityʊa
symptom of a cultureʊhas been formulated to explain, for example, the
weak opposition to DINA by all military ranks, due to a fear that strong
opposition would damage “the image of Chile” (Comisión Rettig 1991,
40). In the broader population, the “self-perception of ‘appeasing and
tolerant’ citizens” erases or justifies violence, in a process that is parallel
to the first stage of “dobbing-in” fellow citizens (Brunner 1980, 16), in
other words, the “generalised practice of smear and collaboration”
62 Chapter Four
(Cavallo 2005). Crucially, this form of Chilean subjectivity is created by

images and visualised discourses that overestimate a leftist culture, to
which is attributed the act of “predicating” or “imagining” an armed
revolution during the Allende years. State terror, the first official Chilean
Truth Report implies, would be justified by a “civil propaganda, from one
side or another [which] had convinced the military (because it was so
endlessly iterated) that powerful and well-trained parallel armies were
ready to battle” prior to the coup (Comisión Rettig 1991, 40). The Valech
Report confirms that consensual elucidation, criticising both right and left
for using “a bellicose rhetoric that favoured the validity of the use of
violence”. Nonetheless, this report admits that the attempts to build a
“parallel popular army” never happened (Comisión Valech 2004, 164-
165).
In the end, the material enactment of the revolutionary discourse of
violence was carried out by the dictatorship and its visual representation
was later re-created by the same regime. The making of images of terror,
which belong to a vast organic dominance, was then (and still is today)
massively distributed. Those images have been scarcely questioned, much
less so than the modes of brute force or the neoliberal economic
revolution. In sum, the hegemonic desires of the Chilean despotic regime
can be seen with the assistance of one the most efficient, illustrative and
evocative discursive practices: audiovisual culture.
Three: The most beautiful spectacle

This research identifies a historical phase of the dictatorship (1973 to
1978) when the ruling method of coercion was supplemented by
propaganda practices. At the same time, the initial pattern of discourses of
the dictatorship, “impregnated with negativity” (Moulian 1997, 25), is
soon broken by a more constructive proposal to “remain a long time in
power”, based on a “multiple legitimisation strategy”: a new history, a
new legality and a new economy (Huneeus 2005, 213,625). The image of
Pinochet and an illustrated history of the Allende period are the first fully
developed scripts, drafted from different poles. Pinochet does not have a
history, so he receives pure positivity, and although Allende has a negative
history it is based on rich visual archives. Unlike the very evident
propaganda cover-ups of the state terror during this early period, these two
first scripts purposely exploit images while avoiding a direct reference of
the violent repression. These two sets of audiovisual practices are among
the most cultivated foundational discourses of the dictatorship, although
The Celebration 63
they still belong to the stage of “primitivism” of the Chilean state, when
cultural endeavours are roughly sketched (see Gramsci 1983, 263-264).
Once a more archaic and violent historical phase is left behind, the
dictatorship becomes convinced of a need for a systemic change in
conjunction with wider cultural strategies of national refoundation. In this
endeavour to completely reshape state, country and society, audiovisual
practices are mostly supportive, waiting for their greatest development and
prominence in a later cultural phase of the dictatorship in the 1980s.
However, during this propagandistic stage, the formats and techniques of
the television medium enhance the legalistic, ceremonial and mass events
of the refoundation. Their support for these state events, which
progressively turn into media events, begin with the accumulation of
qualified practices, such as the prominent figuration of Pinochet and the
constant reference to the pre-coup past. Markedly, a good amount of the
dictatorial refoundation exercises are events that, when televised, reach
full meaning, especially through universal simulcasts.
The initial deficiency of images and dictatorial discourse during the
first months, after the coup’s widespread use of violence, quite soon
demands a more persistent regenerative effort, an initiative that becomes
even more urgent than a new constitution or a radical economic system.
The dictatorship’s first refoundational endeavour is to see itself “being
born”; in other words, to commemorate in an epic, festive and cultural way
its date of birth, a fundamental discursive practice to reframe its violent
coming to life. The manufacture of this rebirth is ritualistic and systematic.
The birth of 11 September becomes an obsessive memory after 30 or 120
days, or after 6, 12 and 24 months from the original 11th and the last 11th
already celebrated. The rebirth practices vary from improvisations in
popular consent to rituals in spectacle format and journalistic routines.
These experiences obtain much of their meaning through audiovisual
mediation and are held much beyond this historical stage. The signs of the
dictatorship’s nativity would not be actually disputed until 11 May 1983,
in the first of many national protests, which are held on almost every 11th
of the month for at least three years (see Charlin 1984).
The first annual rebirth, 11 September 1974, is one of the biggest mass
events in the dictatorship’s 17-year history. As said earlier, the “fascist”
concept would be incompatible with the reluctance of the Chilean military
to politicise the masses. But there is something missing in this argument
which is that this same event involved a “technical feature” of
“propagandistic importance”, in the words of Benjamin. A blind spot for
Chilean memory and historiography comes from the reciprocity between
the media’s “[m]ass reproduction” and “the reproduction of masses”, as
64 Chapter Four
said by the same author. In these types of spectacle events and “monster
rallies”, when “captured by camera and sound recordings, the masses are
brought face to face with themselves”, Benjamin adds. Panoramic shots
better amplify the “[m]ass movements” than does “the naked eye”, so to
gather multitudes “particularly favours mechanical equipment” (Benjamin
1978, 251).
Chilean academia has rarely considered that the dictatorship “displayed
an acute awareness of ceremony and commemoration” (Stern 2006, 244).
In the afternoon of 11 September 1974, the dictatorship goes much further
than what is by then the common ritual: the “presidential” speech by
Augusto Pinochet in front of selected guests at the Diego Portales
building, the new government palace after the bombing of La Moneda (see
Novitski 1974, TVN 1974a). For the first anniversary, that limited
audience becomes the masses, with less discursive rigidity and more
hegemonic appeal than the official state ceremony.
Already on 27 August 1974, the dictatorship is promoting its first
anniversary in the shape of a mass event with hegemonic connotations. In
a televised and radio mandatory simulcast, the Minister of Interior,
General César Benavides, communicates that the government “will allow
‘spontaneous’ popular observance” of the anniversary, as the United States
(US) embassy ironically reports to the Department of State. The embassy
emphasises that this televised authorisation, a media event in itself, is “to
no one’s surprise”. The Minister of Interior remarks in the simulcast,
benevolently, that the “permission requested by various civic and private
organisations [was] granted by Chief of State Pinochet”. The “theme to be
stressed, according to [the] publicity, is [the] joy of people at being freed
from Marxist repression”, the US ambassador adds. He predicts: “There is
plenty of circumstantial evidence that government officials will be
working hard behind the scenes to insure massive attendance at rallies and
this [is] to present a picture of broad and enthusiastic support” (US
Embassy 1974b).
On the afternoon of 11 September 1974, the multitude, gathered as a
festive mass, enjoys a spectacle where they can see their own faces. In
Bustamante Park, which is the meaningful frontier between the wealthy
suburb of Providencia and dilapidated downtown Santiago, surrounded by
trees and modern buildings, at least 150,000 people congregate (Stern
2006, 70-71), or 570,000 according to the police (Cavallo, Salazar, and
Sepúlveda 1988, 48). The US embassy states that while other government
sources estimate 750,000 people, the attendance is “three hundred
thousand plus.” The embassy explains that it was not a holiday; the
government ended that working day by 3pm, while the official starting
The Celebration 65
time of the rally is 5pm. He notes that people begin to arrive much earlier
and explains that the government was “gambling in scheduling [such a]
large and potentially uncontrollable meeting [but] the gamble paid off”
(US Embassy 1974a).
All these numbers for a single mass event are the first disputed facts of
an occurrence that can be seen as an image, “proof” or the over-
representation of popular support for the dictatorship, a phenomenon that
is difficult to recognise and discern (see Joignant 2007, 35-36). More
importantly, the exact size of the crowd is less significant when any
percentage of the population that attends is taken as a universal
“audience”, thanks to a comprehensive televised simulcast. The
population/audience is recreated by a live transmission led by TVN, whose
developing “primitive” television technologies are not an obstacle for
promoting the idea of audiovisual denotation. Quite to the contrary, the
chaotic-looking multitude is integrated into a live montage, where
improvisation in the television directing and the use of numerous camera
angles (TVN 1974b) amplify the feelings of spontaneity and the
naturalness of the event.
The TVN program begins untitled, brusquely, without a central anchor.
The journalists on the field sporadically narrate the event also without a
written script, using their essential common sense and interviews to “let
people talk”. Reporter Enrique Inostroza initiates his storytelling standing
within the masses, asking for a first opinion from a Brazilian journalist,
who is useful for legitimising the Chilean dictatorship internationally. The
interviewed reporter gives the flattering feedback that now this “new
country” has “discipline”, reminding the interviewer that Brazil was the
first nation to recognise the Chilean government. This source, an
information specialist, is complemented with another unplanned interview
with three young women dressed in “a very special fashion”, according to
a second TVN reporter. Despite their evident upper-class accents, the
portrait accomplishes a connotation of widespread popularity. The TVN
journalist claims to be confused: he does not know if the women are part
of the spectacle “or if they [just] wanted to demonstrate their joy”. The
women laugh and reply that they only wanted to express how “happy”
they are. This prologue then opens up to people-made masses through
panoramic pans across buildings, with people flying Chilean flags and
throwing confetti into the street. The crowd listens to itself screaming:
“Chile is and will be a country of liberty!” The journalists certify that it is
a rainy day as proof of their festivity (TVN 1974b), a comment shared by
the US embassy. It is reported that “although [the] weather turned
miserable” this did not “dampen the spirits” and the rally becomes a
66 Chapter Four
“considerable success” thanks to a “holiday football-crowd atmosphere”.

Very importantly, the embassy also notes something that stamps the image
of hegemonic support for the dictatorship: there is quite a “low key
carabinero (national police) presence” and rather than being intimidating,
“two helicopters made numerous passes over [the] crowd, each time
drawing cheers and flag waving”. The embassy also reports on a new
national-popular culture: “Chilean flags were everywhere [...] Completely
lacking was the political sloganizing seen during Allende years” (US
Embassy 1974a).
The introduction of this broadcast is completed with an interview of
the organiser and presenter of this live event, Germán Becker. The film,
television and theatre director and producer, had designed the staging of
the junta’s first 11 September national simulcast in 1973; a new backdrop
for ceremonies at the Diego Portales auditorium; and the introduction of
the second paragraph of the Chilean national anthem praising the “brave
soldiers” (see Becker 2002, Canal 13 2008, Cavallo, Salazar and
Sepúlveda 1988). Becker, dressed in a poncho, details to the TVN
television reporter the entertainers about to perform. Becker announces
that Los Quincherosʊa traditional land-owner countryside music
bandʊand other singers would deliver “their art…in this doubly patriotic
month” (TVN 1974b). It is a reference to this first exploitation of the
anniversary of the coup coinciding with Chile’s Independence week (18
and 19 September). Later, the reporter asks Becker if the junta would
attend. Becker says he doesn’t know, but creates expectations as “it would
be very beautiful if they see that the people are with them”. He crucially
states that, even without the junta, “the most beautiful spectacle of all is
the presence of the people of Chile”. The question of the number of people
is inevitable. Becker replies again he doesn’t know, but his visual estimate
is “gigantic”. TVN’s cameras help to illustrate Becker’s guess through
various instant zooms that enlarge the multitude (TVN 1974b).
The mass event turns further into national-popular spectacle as the
presentation credits roll on. The iconic title, “SANTIAGO, SEPTEMBER
11” and a military march begin a celebration that exploits all meanings and
takes all possible shapes. It is a hegemonic culture that does not want
limits, transforming verbal content into visual emotion. While the first act
on the stage is the fabrication of a national dance, cueca, by two dancers
dressed according to the big landowner culture of the Chilean central
valley, a television announcement is equally important: the main reporter
soon announces that the junta is heading to the park, “led by its president
and head of State”. They will go up to the 14th floor of a building next to
the stage, above the “immense flag donated by Japan”. The broadcast cuts
The Celebration 67
to a dramatic low angle shot displaying a monumental Chilean flag

hanging down over many storeys of the building (TVN 1974b).
Four: Let him come out

Waiting for the main act, some routines further fix the
cowboy/landowner identity as Chilean culture. The comic duet Los Perlas,
dressed as rural peons, sing in a caricature of Chilean popular accent
(TVN 1974b). However, neither the effort to change Chile’s urban worker
identity into a “peasant physiognomy” (Joignant 2007, 39) nor the main
stage are central here. The broadcast is much more interested in the masses
as protagonists. TVN reporter Inostroza assures the viewing public that the
same act is being held throughout Chile “by all Chileans, who fought the
great battle against Marxism for three years”. This unseen image is
embellished with numerous telephoto shots over the Santiago crowd
obsessively saluting the camera, masses condensed by the lens’s depth of
field; a multitude that knows it is being watched and wants to gaze at itself
via television. Chilean common sense would say that the multitude, the
young men and women, looking directly to the camera, mostly belong to
the popular classes (TVN 1974b), an image that helps to create another
representation of the dictatorship. El Mercurio would claim the next day
that these multitudes of support “have nothing to do with social classes”
(in Joignant 2007, 37), an analysis taken further by the US embassy. The
ambassador reports that officers of the embassy note both in person and
“via television” the attendance of an eclectic “crowd”, which consists
mainly of segments of Chilean society which had opposed Allende and

were drawn from the middle and lower middle classes [...] students, white
collar workers, professional groups, government employees, small business
operators, craftsmen [while] many parents brought children (US Embassy
1974a).
The ambassador ends noting the attendance of “peasants”, concluding that

the “mood of [the] crowd was good natured and very festive” (US
Embassy 1974a). The climax of the rally is the “deliberately unscheduled”
visit of the junta members 45 minutes after the act began, a presence that
had been confirmed earlier by the press, says the US embassy. The
ambassador reports that “many at [the] rally [were] completely unaware of
[the] arrival” of the junta (US Embassy 1974a). Both the “spontaneous”
visit and the multitude unprepared for the arrival of the junta are exploited
by the televised broadcast, enhancing the hegemonic appeal. The cameras,
without any warning from the reporters, alert the viewers to the arrival of
68 Chapter Four
the junta on the 14th floor of the building next to the stage. The four
military chiefs cannot be seen with total clarity on television, unlike the
overexcited multitude that salutes them. Becker, the event presenter, does
not even acknowledge the junta at this point. He gives more sense of
spectacle to the event while showing some concern because of the rain and
potential out-of-control masses: “It is such the number of people
that…let’s avoid accidents in this day of joy, in this month of joy, in this
year of joy!” Without official speeches, the ceremony continues with the
intuitive mass singing of Libreʊa popular romantic song appropriated by
the dictatorship from 1973ʊby Los Quincheros and other performers
dressed as cowboys. The chanting inspires the broadcast to apply diverse
audiovisual effects, mostly image-dissolves that agglomerate singers,
masses and the giant flag into one image. Becker is exhilarated and creates
more expectation, prolonging the climax. Becker yells in order to
introduce a singer of forceful operatic voice, Gloria Simonetti, warning
finally that the mass is “in the presence of the honourable Government
Junta!” (TVN 1974b). Simonetti sings one of the many nationalistic army
anthems that come from an 1839 war against Perú and Bolivia (see
Ejército de Chile 2014).
Just before the political climax, the event completely aligns spectacle
and dictatorship. The presenter of the main opposition radio station to
Allende (see Cáceres 2008) is introduced by Becker: “Francisco ‘Gabito’
Hernández…famous Chilean announcer and a man of the greatest battles
for democracy and freedom”. Hernández proposes an act of politico-
cultural discipline, which “any Chilean man must do facing his
conscience”. In a close-up, the radio presenter formally demands: “People
of Chile: I ask you…a moment of silence to make this pledge…to the
world”. Hernández manages to silence the euphoric crowd. Many camera
angles and dissolving effects merge the announcer and the masses. He
recites:
Citizens, considering that the people of Chile, here reunited, want to

express before the world their firm will to belong to a free and sovereign
nation [...] that facing the moral and material destruction produced by
Marxism, which [caused] serious damage to our security, do you swear
before God, the fatherland, and justice to fight to preserve freedom, order
and social peace? To rebuild the nation and defend it from external and
internal enemies, even with [your] lives if necessary?! (TVN 1974b).
Over a perpetual image dissolve, a massive “Yes!” is heard. Hernández

concludes: “If you do so, God, the fatherland and justice will demand it”.
The national anthem climaxes at that moment and the dissolves are
The Celebration 69
extended over a multitude of wavering flags and handkerchiefs. The

camera is fixed on the face of an anonymous man who sings emotionally,
set against the giant hanging flag. At last, Becker turns around towards the
main building: “My General Pinochet, my General Pinochet! The people
want to hear you”. The television setup can only provide two lateral
camera angles and so is unable to offer a clear vision of Pinochet for many
minutes. But that difficulty is productive. The military chief’s speech is
alternately illustrated through many medium shots of women hailing him.
In the soundtrack, Pinochet vociferously certifies this hegemonic mass
event: “Never in the history of Chile has such a multitude gathered in such
a spontaneous and generous manner as you have done it to celebrate, with
your heart, the day of national liberation!” Pinochet, who abuses the
formal Spanish conjugation to construct solemnity, declares: “It is what
the fatherland asks from all of you!” The first frontal telephoto shot of the
junta arrives many minutes later, although still out of focus and unstable.
The passivity of the other three junta members and the lateness of the
cameras emphasises further the improvisational aspect of the speech by
Pinochet, in which nationalist and anticommunist epithets abound. His
address is adjourned by the transition from a nasal to a guttural voice
squealing: “Hail Chile!!!” (TVN 1974b).
The US ambassador concludes that this “impressive display of
support” for the government “exceeded [the] expectations of organizers
and most observers”, as an “assemblage enjoying only full mass carnival-
type gathering in [the] past year [...] it seemed quite spontaneous” (US
Embassy 1974a). Still, the closure of the event makes spectacle, hegemony
and discipline clash, elements jointly evoked in this act of dictatorial
rebirth. The junta leaves after Pinochet’s speech and does not come back
despite the fervent yelling of women that comfortably conflates a mass
cultural “idol” and a military chief: “Let him come out! Let him come
out!” The rain keeps falling and Becker, more calmly, openly jokes about
continuing the act until curfew, presenting that measure of mass discipline
as something normal. The presenter also goes onto convince everybody
that there is a hegemonic culture in the dictatorship. On the stage, he says,
are “the immense majority of Chilean artists…the most renowned names”,
such as the romantic singer José Fuentes, who provokes instant high-
pitched screaming. But with the junta gone, Becker announces much less
euphorically that a last song would close the spectacle and that people
must “slowly” leave the park to see the fireworks in the next block. That
would be their “last commitment of this evening”. Once the last singer is
finished, Becker is strict and impatient: “Good night, thanks a lot, OK, go
home then”. He says it anxiously, insisting they leave “in order”. The
70 Chapter Four
broadcast closes with fireworks accompanied by a military march from

another 19th century war (TVN 1974b).
Five: Sobriety
The balance of dominance and assent by a government that does not
manufacture elections until 1978 remains uneven after this 11 September
1974 event. Following this intoxicating and chaotic politico-cultural
spectacle, rebirth events are scripted more strictly. On his 11 September
1975 speech, Pinochet labels once again the Allende government as the
“most disastrous in our history” (in 1985, 14). The mass event that follows
replaces the improvisation of 1974 by a more ritualistic act. The lighting
of the “Flame of Liberty” attracts 300,000 people (Stern 2006, 70).
Joignant argues that the dictatorial state guarantees attendance through
social pressure (2007, 38). But more telling than the numbers is, again, the
climax of this nocturnal ceremony: four persons assigned as iconic
identities of Chilean societyʊa peasant, a construction worker, a student
and a housewifeʊlight torches, passing them to four military cadets and
the latter ceding them to the four members of the junta to light the flame
(Stern 2006, 70-71). The leaders are distinguished from the mass in
enormous panoramic shots that show them geometrically arranged around
a circle many metres in diameter. The “Flame of Liberty” is lit over a
pyramidal altar in front of La Moneda, surrounded by a mass of people
also carrying torches. The televised broadcast dramatises the ignition with
a fast cut to a panoramic shot, from which the blaze appears monumental.
Regardless of the effects, this political event of absolute aesthetics remains
too scripted, devoid of more fluent consent. Instead of an emphasis on the
“thousands of young people attending the ceremony, trusting in a future
splendour”, the event is mainly evoked in 1982 by the state reporter,
Ricardo Coya, as a rather rigid “symbol, which according to the words of
the head of the state, should remain lit ‘for centuries of centuries’” (TVN
1975/1982).
In 1976, occurs the last commemoration of this phase with openly
hegemonic intentions. The mass parade of 11 September, including
carnival floats, is televised for the first time in Chile from the air (TVN
1976). The three-hour march in front of the Diego Portales building comes
after an “invitation-only audience” speech by Pinochet (Dinges 1976).
From this point on, excessive solemnity diminishes the mass reunions,
eliminating most of the spectacle and making the dictatorship more literal.
The coup celebration recedes into mere memory, says Joignant. El
Mercurio reports that “following clear presidential instructions”, 11
The Celebration 71
September 1977, has to be “sober”. The next year, the celebration is

limited to a brief homage to Pinochet. He is, reports the same newspaper,
“[d]ressed in an impeccable gala suit, with the presidential sash across his
chest”, and he limits 11 September 1978 proceedings to a two-hour speech
in Diego Portales and to the “[s]pontaneous support” from a few
“thousands of people” in front of his private residence (in Joignant 2007,
42-61).
The cultural power of the dictatorship is adjusting to its forceful
ascendancy, still searching for ways to express hegemony. The rebirth
events are still accrued as useful experiences. The acts of legitimisation,
the spectacles on stage and the directed ceremonies would be fully
coordinated when the dictatorship can project itself, in order to mutate
from a terrorist/propagandistic stage to a constitutional/cultural one from
1978 and peaking in the 1980s.
Six: Epilogue
The most obsessive and extensive refoundational events that emerge in
this period are the celebratory and ritualistic rebirths of the coup, most of
them audiovisually supported. With them it becomes gradually more
difficult to separate the reflection and the televised manufacture of events
from what actually occurs. Many archives and memories barely
distinguish between this self-authored history and its portrayal. Thus, the
national refoundation of the dictatorship is also audiovisual.
The audiovisual culture described here illustrates and elaborates in
eloquent form the forging of consent from the beginning of the Chilean
dictatorship and throughout its most violent and disciplinarian phase.
Significantly, the government itself gives credit to that image,
communicating to everyone that it does not invest all its power in
repression. Chilean despotism wishes to look legalistic and popular.
Consequently, to define where exactly the coincidenceʊand the
intentionsʊbetween an audiovisual culture and Chilean despotism begins
and ends is problematic. In the words of Jean-Luc Godard: “[t]here is not
only the reality and then the mirror-camera” each as a perfectly distinct
field. The focus is instead on “the reality of reflection”, a never pristine
object, situated in between realities and images (in Youngblood 1998, 29).
I have proposed that by historicising a culture one can observe that the
paradigmatic Chilean dictatorship does not govern by pure force. Rather,
even in this violent phase, steps are taken towards a “hegemony protected
by the armour of coercion” (Gramsci 1983, 263). An audiovisual culture is
the best illustration and greatly helps to manufacture an organic equation
72 Chapter Four
of power, defined in its first stage by a propaganda that both represents

and reaffirms the effects of force. The new system is revolutionary
because it uses all means available. To propose that the terrorist phase is
also a propagandistic one is to understand that dictatorial domination in
Chile needed and also wanted to be cultural.
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CHAPTER FIVE
ASIS AND ASIO IN CHILE:

TRANSPARENCY AND DOUBLE STANDARDS
FOUR DECADES AFTER THE COUP
FLORENCIA MELGAR AND PABLO LEIGHTON
On 4 June 2014, the Opposition Shadow Attorney-General, Labor

Senator Mark Dreyfus, presented a petition to the Federal Parliament on
behalf of the Chilean community in Australia. Around 600 Chilean
expatriates, most of them Australian citizens, demanded the government
approve the extradition request of former intelligence agent Adriana Rivas,
who escaped from trial in Chile where she is accused of seven cases of
torture and aggravated kidnapping and disappearance (Dreyfus 2014:5619-
5621).
This petition followed what started a year earlier when Adriana Rivas
was found by investigative reporter Florencia Melgar living in one of
Sydney’s housing commission buildings. The Special Broadcasting
Services’ report of her declarations (see Melgar 2013a,c,d, 2014) triggered
the reaction of human rights movements and political activists in Chile and
Australia and the extradition request. These groups are manifestly against
the presence of Chilean violators of human rights living in the same land
where they, as refugees, were welcomed after Augusto Pinochet’s coup
d’état in 1973.
The fact that Adriana Rivas has been living for decades in Australia
might not be a mere coincidence or plain misfortune. According to author
Mark Aarons, there have been hundreds of war criminals hidden in
Australia since 1945 (see 2001, ABC 2009). Aarons has said that the war
criminals living in the country come from many places and organisations,
including Chile’s DINA, the Directorate of National Intelligence, the
dictatorship’s secret police between 1973 and 1977. These security
officers who found “sanctuary” in Australia, Aarons added, are guilty of
“torture and summary executions”. More tellingly, Aarons argued that a
number of those people were brought to Australia “as intelligence assets
78 Chapter Five
by our intelligence services and resettled here for purposes of ongoing

intelligence operations by our own services” (in ABC 2003).
The current presence of a former intelligence agent in Sydney might
show another aspect of the practices of support of the Australian secret
services to the same Chilean forces that unleashed the coup d’état and
sustained a violent dictatorship. As ambiguously revealed in Australia
during the years after the coup, the secret services of Australia worked in
Chilean territory to undermine the democratic government of Salvador
Allende (1970-1973). This chapter looks into how Australia’s involvement
in Chile’s coup four decades ago remains under a cloak of secrecy,
encouraged by the same secret services that seemed to have worked above
government and parliament powers. Together with the contentious issue of
transparency in today’s world, this four-decade old history is still
prominent and continues to haunt thousands of Chilean-former refugees
living in Australia and many others in Chile that were victims of DINA
and other secret services.
ASIS and ASIO in Chile

Four decades ago, Chile’s democratic government headed by Allende
was overthrown in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. His
regime executed some 2,300 people, imprisoned and tortured more than
38,000, and more than 1,000 victims are still missing (Comisión Rettig
1991, Comisión Valech 2004, 2011). The Chilean coup was not an
isolated episode in Latin America. It was part of a series of military
dictatorships that claimed to fight “the threat of communism”. At the same
time, while many other military dictatorships were previously installed in
the region, the year 1973 marks the beginning of particularly bloody
governments, acting against broad sections of their own populations. This
was also the beginning of a period called “the Condor years”, referring to
secret alliances and cooperation between governments of South America,
including Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia
and Peru (Dinges, 2005). Through “Operation Condor”, these South
American states shared intelligence and seized, exchanged, tortured and
executed political opponents in one another’s territory (McSherry, 2005).
The international outlooks of these military and fanatically anticommunist
political forces—which seemed to overcome their traditional nationalism
(see López, Chapter One)—went beyond South America.
It is no secret today that in setting the stage for the 1973 coup, the
United States (US) government, through the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), played a crucial role. More than 23,000 declassified documents
ASIS and ASIO in Chile 79
from the White House, the CIA, the National Security Council and the
Defense Intelligence Agency, among others, clearly reveal an instigation
of the Chilean coup (see US Department of State 2000, Kornbluh, 2003).
What is much less known is that the CIA had help from its counterpart in
Australia, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), followed by
an Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) mission in
Santiago. Officially, ASIS’s “primary goal is to obtain and distribute
secret intelligence…outside Australia”, while undertaking “counter-
intelligence” and engaging “other intelligence and security services
overseas” (ASIS 2014). On the other hand, ASIO’s role is presented as
internal, concerning “serious threats to Australia’s territorial and border
integrity, sabotage, politically motivated violence, the promotion of
communal violence, attacks on Australia’s defence system, and acts of
foreign interference” (ASIO 2014).
Significantly, both services played a role in the Chilean case. More
than one source has alleged that Australia was involved in the Chilean
coup, helping the CIA to destabilise Allende’s government (see Blum
2004, 245-246; Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant 1982, 82-85). In May
1977, former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam confirmed the
existence of this operation in the Australian Federal Parliament: “It has
been writtenʊand I cannot deny itʊthat when my Government took
office Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the
CIA in destabilising the government of Chile” (in Toohey and Pinwill
1990, 141).1
In November 1970, the CIA asked ASIS for support and Australia
agreed to send two operatives to Chile (Toohey and Pinwill 1990, 136).
1 Brian Toohey and William Pinwill’s book The story of The Australian Secret
Intelligence Service was published in 1990 after the Australian government agreed
on the version that was to be published. The book has a reliable record of Robert
Hope’s report on Chile’s case, which summarises the findings of the Royal
Commission on Security and Intelligence (1974-77). Nevertheless, the relevant
information about the operation in Chile (Fifth report, volumes 1 and 2) is blacked-
out. The book contains an authors’ note: “This book has been subject to censorship
by the government of the Commonwealth of Australia. After part of the unfinished
manuscript fell into the government´s hands in November 1988, the Minister for
Foreign Affairs and Trade took action in the Federal Court which effectively
prevented the publication by us of any material about ASIS which had not been
vetted by the government. While the concept of prior restraint is repugnant and
contrary to the democratic right of freedom of expression, we had no choice but to
accept the court´s decision and submit every word of the completed manuscript to
Canberra. We then negotiated the final text with officials of ASIS and the
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade” (Toohey and Pinwill 1990, xiii).
80 Chapter Five
According to former ASIS director, Bill Robertson, the Australian

intelligence station “in question”, referring to Chile, was opened in July
1971 during the Liberal government of William McMahon (Robertson
1975, 8).
When the Chilean coup took place on 11 September 1973, Australian
the station had been active for longer than a year. And by that time, Gough
Whitlam and the Labor party were in power. American investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh has described the involvement of Australia in
the US operation in Chile after the CIA’s men and activities were closely
monitored by Allende’s government. Hersh explained that the CIA then
“turned to its allies […] By 1972 the Australians had agreed to monitor
and control three agents on behalf of the CIA and to relay their
information to Washington” (Hersh 1983, 295-296). According to Toohey
and Pinwill, ASIS helped the CIA in Chile until 1973 and one of its senior
officers left Santiago in July of that year “for cover reasons”, while an
operational assistant stayed until October, a month after the coup (1990,
141). In parallel, ASIO intelligence agents remained behind according to
multiple statements by the Labor and Immigration minister under
Whitlam, Clyde Cameron, who openly recognised it in 1983. While it is
still not perfectly clear what the ASIO mission was doing in Santiago,
Cameron’s feelings about the operations in Chile have always been
certain:
I was appalled to think that my own department was involved in this sort of
work and that our intelligence agents in Chile were acting as the hyphen, if
you like, between the CIA, which weren’t able to operate in Chile at that
time…and the Pinochet junta (in Wilkinson 1983).
The uncertain nature of the work of the Australian spying agencies in

Chile also has something to do with the elusive role of Labor Prime
Minister Gough Whitlam at the time. The decision of the Liberal
government of McMahon to approve the Australian operation in Chile and
support the CIA was inherited by Whitlam. Even though it seems evident
that the Prime Minister attempted to stop the ASIS operation in Chile, the
timing and how the political decisions were made are not so. Robertson’s
1975 memorandum dealing with the termination of his appointment as
Director of ASIS by Whitlam shows that one of the topics that caused
frictions between him and the Prime Minister (see The Australian 2010)
was ASIS’s operation in Chile. According to Robertson, Whitlam was
informed of this operation in February 1973, but he did not want to stop it
immediately as he worried about how the US might react. Because it
seems Robertson foresaw that Whitlam was going to disagree with the
ASIS operation in Chile, he prepared a document ordering the closure of

the station and withdrawal of the staff, as he recalled in 2009 about his
own dismissal by Whitlam:
Mr Whitlam took the submission but declined to sign it at the time

expressing a concern that our intelligence allies might react adversely.
After a delay of several weeks the signed submission was returned […] the
Prime Minister had “agonised over it” for some time. The order to cease
operational activity… was sent to the ASIS station on 1st May [1973]. As
there were a number of hostile intelligence services active in the area at
that time…there was some delay in withdrawing the ASIS staff (Robertson
1975, 8).
Whitlam has a different recollection. In his memoirs, he stated that he

was notified in early 1973 and that the ASIS officials left in the first half
of that year. The former Prime Minister has affirmed that in early 1973
Robertson informed him that there were two spies in Chile assisting the
CIA and Whitlam thought they had no business there:
A month later I asked him what had been done about them and he told me
that they were still there. I…instructed him to tell the Americans to make
alternative arrangements as soon as possible. This time he was able to tell
me within a week that our men were no longer working for the Americans
and would be returning home (Whitlam 1985:172–173).
However, according to the official Royal Commission on Intelligence,

the last ASIS agent did not leave Chile until October 1973 (in Toohey and
Pinwill 1990, 141). And in that period, Allende’s government was
destabilised and the coup took place. The intelligence services of Australia
were present and active before and after the coup, when the new military
government assumed power illegitimately. In sum, contrary to Whitlam´s
instructions and memoirs, there were ASIS spies operating out of the
Australian embassy in Chile, under the direct orders of the CIA, during the
1973 removal of a democratic government (Coxsedge, Coldicutt and
Harant 1982, 24).
Whitlam remembers that after Allende was overthrown he asked about
the exact duties of the two ASIS operatives that he had previously
discharged in Chile. He was told they had been collecting or buying
information on the country’s economic situation from public servants and
congressmen, whom they would meet in the suburbs of Santiago
(Whitlam, 1985: 172–173). This might give another clue about the actions
of Australian agents in Chile. Still, most of the available evidence until
today shows that Australian secret intelligence was operating in Chile for
82 Chapter Five
much longer after the coup through ASIO, a service that in principle
operates within Australia. In this case, the role of Whitlam is even more
ambiguous.
Many official Prime Ministerial documents testify how Clyde Cameron
put forward various requests to Whitlam to get rid of ASIO officers
operating in Chile. In a letter to Whitlam of 27 November 1974, Cameron
wrote that the assurances he had received from ASIO about one officer
being in Chile for “only one occasion” since November 1972 and only
during “three days” in July 1973, “does not convince me one iota. I would
not expect ASIO to do other than deny any involvement with the CIA in
the affair”. Thus, Cameron demanded of Whitlam that the two agents be
“withdrawn forthwith”. He added:
the present checking of migrant applicants rests heavily on links which

ASIO establishes with foreign intelligence through the exchange of
intelligence information. I believe that this activity is quite
unacceptable…and probably a breach of the Crimes Act [...] I am certainly
not going to allow the Department of Labor and Immigration to be used as
cover for this sort of activity (in Department of the Prime Minister 1975).
Cameron also wrote to the Attorney General, Senator Lionel Murphy,

on 2 December 1974: “I am particularly disturbed to learn that ASIO
agents have been posing as migration officers in South America and I am
now convincedʊthough firm denials are to be expectedʊthat the reports
of ASIO collaboration with the CIA in bringing about the overthrow of the
Allende Government, is very close to the mark”. The response by Whitlam
was brief and vague: he decided there would be “no changes” until Justice
Robert Hope’s general report on Australian secret intelligence services
was finished. Cameron, in a follow-up letter to Whitlam of 5 February
1975, insisted that all ASIO officers from overseas should be withdrawn,
not agreeing with the need to wait for Hope’s report. He specifically
denounced that the making by ASIO of “political investigation[s]”,
“dossiers” and “screening” on migrants and overseas born “would be not
be tolerated in respect of persons born in Australia”. He vehemently
concluded:
The continued use of ASIO is, in my firm view, incompatible with the
whole philosophy of the Australian Labor Party. Moreover, it violates
every decent concept which is dear to a truly democratic society. It smacks
too much of the Police State for the liking of decent Australians” (in
Department of the Prime Minister 1975).
In the end, his complaints with the Attorney General were fruitful. In
same letter, Cameron informed he was pleased that Senator Murphy had
finally given “an immediate recall of the two ASIO agents…posing as
migration officers” in Chile, although 15 agents remained in other
overseas posts (in Department of the Prime Minister 1975). In 1983,
Cameron recalled the events:
Imagine my amazement when…I received a letter from the Prime Minister

saying that I was to take no further action in the matter, that I was not to
withdraw ASIO agents even from Santiago in Chile and that nothing was
to be done about it at all (in Wilkinson 1983).
Equally determinant, Hope’s report, which was the excuse given in

1974 by Whitlam, would not be finished until 1977. The Chilean case
became only a small part of that report and until today is heavily censored
(see Hope 1977). From the scarce evidence available, it can be said that
when ASIO agents were finally being recalled from Santiago in 1975,
ASIO Director Peter Barbour sent a letter to Cameron, reminding him it
was his own Immigration Department which in October 1970ʊthe same
month that Allende became president of Chileʊasked for an intelligence
officer for South America, who started operating in 1972. In February
1974, five months after the coup, ASIO informed that there were 19,000
migrant applications from Santiago (Department of the Prime Minister
1975), many of them presumably in danger of their lives. It follows that
the most probable hypothesis for the actions of ASIS and ASIO in Chile
under Allende was first the promotion of ‘brain drain’, the flight of human
capital; in this case, the emigration of professionals and technicians to
undermine the leftist government, as contended by Mártin-Montenegro
(1994:63–66). Mártin-Montenegro also points to the fact that ASIO
officials posed as migration agents in the embassy after the coup and the
notably different numbers of Chilean migrants to Australia per era. The
total number of migrants during Allende (around 4,800) surpassed the
entire number (around 3,000) following the coup and until the end of the
Whitlam administration in 1975 (Mártin-Montenegro 1994, 77-78),
precisely when asylum was most needed.
In July 2012, the director of ASIS, Nick Warner, said in a public
speech:
There have been a few times over the past 60 years when…ASIS and its
operations have received widespread publicity in the Australian media.
And mostly this has been when things have gone wrong [...] sometimes the
fault of ASIS and sometimes not [...] there was publicity in 1977 about
operations in Chile undertaken on behalf of our allies (Warner 2012).
84 Chapter Five
This publicity has not been substantial enough to resolve the historical,
political and moral consequences of the Australian intervention in Chilean
affairs. John Pilger argues that in the beginning of the 1970s, ASIS and
ASIO’s power derived from the strong alliance with the US, exemplified
with The Australia, New Zealand and United States Security Treaty of
1951 (ANZUS), which is still current (see US Department of State 2014).
Pilger suggests that Australia’s secret pact of loyalty to foreign
intelligence organisations was far reaching: “to many in the ASIO
bureaucracy, ‘headquarters’ was not in Canberra but in Langley, Virginia,
home of the CIA” (1992, 191). In the US, Victor Marchetti, former
executive assistant of Deputy Director of the CIA, explained in 1983 that
Australia should have evaluated better its participation in Chile if they
were going to be so politically sensitive about being part of CIA’s mission
to overthrow Allende. For that “kind of activity”, he said, there was “a
miscalculation on the part of the Australian officers” (in Wilkinson 1983).
Already in 1974, Whitlam spoke unmistakably to the United Nations
General Assembly against these operations that use “unconstitutional,
clandestine, corrupt methods, by assassination or terrorism” as a way to
achieve economic or political change (in Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant
1982, 26). More directly, the official 1977 Royal Commission on
Intelligence Activities Overseas might serve as the foundation of what the
Australian intervention in Chile implied: “to conduct espionage against
foreign countries [agents] must probably infringe the laws of those
countries [...] espionage is illegal…deceptive, covert, underhand” (Hope
1977).
Transparency and accountability four decades later

On 9 October 1974, Ian Frykberg published for the first time the link
between the Chilean coup and Australia, while reporting on Whitlam’s
official visit to the US. In his article “Australia Spied In Chile”, he wrote
Two former intelligence operatives…said…they had no doubt that the

Australian mission in Chile assisted the Central Intelligence Agency in its
operations against the Allende government [...] the Australian agents in
Chile probably would have included acting as the conduct for money
passing from the CIA to newspapers and individuals and leaking
propaganda information to newspapermen and other influential people
(Frykberg 1974).
The then editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Brian Johns, assigned
young journalist Hamish McDonald to investigate the details of this
operation in Chile. McDonald remembers that by that time he had already

identified the Australian chief officer operating in Chile:
I was told by our managing editor, Graham Wilkinson, that the deputy head
of ASIS had rang out and said ‘Please, call it off, this is not in the national
interest’ [...] I did call the ambassador who had been in Santiago at that
time…Deschamps, and asked him if he had any comment on the allegations
and his reply was simply ‘What on earth do you expect me to say’ (in
Melgar, personal interviews, 2013).
The Sydney Morning Herald agreed to cease the investigations. Today,

Professor Barry Carr from the Australian National University believes
there is no hope that Australia will disclose any information about what
happened in Chile in 1973 due to a culture of secrecy, which would be
much more restrictive here than in the US: “I'm not really holding my
breath over any Australian government whether it be Labor Party or the
Coalition, ever telling us exactly what those ASIS agents were doing” (in
Melgar 2013b). Even though the intervention started under Liberal Prime
Minister McMahon, Labor leaders “have been painfully anxious” to not
diminish the powers and secrecy of Australian intelligence services
(Coxsedge, Coldicutt and Harant 1982, 235). Very recently, for example,
it was under the Labor government of Kevin Rudd that one of the
intelligence agencies, the Australian Signals Directorate, spied on the
leaders of Indonesia (Brissenden 2013).
In Australia, intelligence documents dated as far back as 40 years ago
are excluded from the Freedom of Information Act (FOI). There are nine
categories of exemptions under the FOI Act, including “documents
affecting national security, defence or international relations” (OAIC
2014). Melgar’s recent investigation through various sources, including
Chile’s Foreign Affairs official records, identified two of the ASIS officers
working in Chile around the time of the coup (Ministerio RREE 1970-73).
Nevertheless, due to strict laws controlling information relating to
intelligence staff and operations, these names cannot be made public.
According to the Intelligence Services Act (Commonwealth Consolidated
Acts 2001) it is illegal in Australia to identify any current or former
intelligence officer unless the heads of those services give explicit
permission. At the time of writing this chapter, the Australian Senate with
the support of both Labor and Liberal parties, extended the penalty for this
offence from 1 to 10 years of imprisonment, together with other
restrictions on reporting on intelligence matters, within a new law that
gives more powers to these agencies (Woodley 2014). In the Chilean case,
ASIS Director, Nick Warner, rejected Melgar’s formal request to
86 Chapter Five
investigate these matters. Tim Begbie, Senior General Counsel of Dispute

Resolution of the Australian Government Solicitor (Melgar, personal
communications, 25 July 2013) warned Melgar that she risked legal
prosecution if some of the information was published. Whereas the
Australian Royal Commission on Intelligence concluded in 1977 that
“espionage is illegal and the clandestine service’s job is to break those
laws without being caught” (in Toohey and Pinwill 1990, 198), the
Australian government protects the officials who are in charge of carrying
out that illegal espionage, even after they have concluded their job, and
after their deaths.
The evident lack of transparency around this four-decade old Australian
intervention in Chile is not only an issue when compared to the relative
openness of the same country that has admitted its main role in the coup:
the US. The exemption of Australia’s intelligence agencies from the FOI
Act blocks the public knowledge of history and denies access to decisions
made in Australians’ names. Likewise, this lack of transparency and
accountability has had a real impact on the lives of thousands of Chilean
victims of the dictatorship, the largest Latin American community in the
country, who in their great majority have become Australian citizens.
Chilean-Australians
For several Chilean-Australians one of the most meaningful aspects of
the revelations around Australia’s secret agencies’ intervention in Chile is
the fact that it happened at least for a year under the Labor government of
Gough Whitlam. For Chilean refugee Vladimir Barcelli, for example, “it
sounds very strange that a country that helps you get out of the
dictatorship has cooperated with the dictatorship. It is illogical”. Mariana
Minguez, a former political prisoner in Chile, has expressed “shock” that
this happened under Labor’s administration, which would be more
surprising than Australia’s involvement in the coup. Victor Marillanca, a
Chilean refugee who arrived in Australia in 1975, has expressed the same
perplexity, given that he met during those years many Labor members of
parliament and authorities, including Whitlam himself. Tellingly, Hermiña
Vázquez, another Chilean refugee in Australia and a human rights activist,
has expressed anger and even second thoughts about a country reputed for
hosting Chilean exiles: “If I knew this, I never would have come to this
country. But on the other hand I realise that despite that, I was received
here very well [...] I feel a lot of conflict in my head” (in Melgar 2013c).
Although Whitlam reacted just a few days after the 11 September 1973
coup recalling his ambassador in Chile, Noel Deschamps, Australia was
among many Western countries that ended up recognising the new military
government less than a month after the coup (Mártin-Montenegro 1994,
60-69), increasing its international legitimacy. As indicated earlier, the
migration numbers that Australia offered to Chilean refugees during those
years are another contradictory issue that remains obscure. Other evidence
makes the relationship of the Australian government with the
internationally isolated and widely condemned Chilean dictatorship more
doubtful and duplicitous. While thousands of refugees and exiles were
arriving and settling in the country, ASIO spied on the Chilean
community. A surveillance video made by this agency shows a
demonstration in Melbourne against Augusto Pinochet marking the first
anniversary of the coup on 11 September 1974 (ASIO 1974). It is not clear
why Chilean exiles who were generously welcomed as refugees were also
considered “persons of interest” because of their political activities against
the dictatorship, a government openly condemned by the Australian
authorities.
The case of Adriana Rivas is also shrouded in secrecy. Already in the
1990s, many organisations reported to the Australian government that
people of Pinochet’s regime, some of whom were identified as torturers
and murderers, resided in the country. In September and November 1990,
the Australian-Chile Friendship Society of Canberra and the Pablo Neruda
Cultural Centre wrote letters to the Minister for Immigration, Local
Government and Ethnic Affairs, Gerry Hand, asking about this issue (see
ABC 2009, Hand 1990, Santana 1990). Only in 2013 has it been
confirmed that an agent of DINA accused of crimes against humanity has
lived in Australia for decades. Rivas was the secretary of DINA’s chief
Manuel Contreras’ assistant, Alejandro Burgos, during the early years of
the dictatorship (Ministerio del Interior 2007). Contreras has already
accumulated close to 400 years in imprisonment sentences for violations
of human rights, including kidnapping, forced disappearance and
assassinations (La Nación 2014a). Rivas is accused of being the co-author
of aggravated kidnapping in seven cases. She was imprisoned in 2007 but
was released on bail although not allowed to leave Chile. However, she
managed to escape in 2010 through Argentina and has been living in
Australia since then. She also pleads innocence to the accusations and
denies any involvement in the crimes committed by Contreras and his
men. More tellingly, she has justified torture: “They had to break the
people—it has happened all over the world, not only in Chile” (Melgar
2013e). Following this interview, a Chilean lawyer requested the
extradition of Adriana Rivas. The Chilean Supreme Court accepted two
88 Chapter Five
extradition requests in January and March 2014 (Corte Suprema 2014) and
now the case is being decided by the Australian government.
In practice, Adriana Rivas’ case amounts to the impunity of a
prosecuted human rights violator welcomed by Australia to start a new
life, instead of being sent back expeditiously to face justice. On 27 August
2014, federal Senator Kate Lundy repeated the call to the current
Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, who had received the
extradition request but not responded, after two months (La Nación
2014b). The resolution on the extradition request of Adriana Rivas to
Chile might clarify Australia’s commitment to the universal principals of
protection of human rights, which seemed evident during the years of
Pinochet’s dictatorship. The prosecution against Rivas in Chile could also
help to explain how a Chilean intelligence agent came to Australia in the
first place and dispel the doubts of secret agreements of cooperation
between the two governments or the respective defence departments and
national intelligence services in the 1970s. Australia is undoubtedly
responsible for participating in activities that supported and led to the
Chilean coup and the crimes that followed. Four decades later, time is up.
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the-senate/5770256.
CHAPTER SIX
POLITICS OF MEMORY
AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHILE:
THE STRUGGLE FOR MEMORIALS
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
NICOLÁS DEL VALLE
The coup of 1973 as a new historical frame of memory

With the coup of 1973 Chilean society started a collective process of
cultural transformation which changed the different ways of thinking
about national history. From the point of view of Memory and Human
Rights Studies (see Vermeulen et al. 2012), the coup created multiple
memories from the repression and unjustified violence against human
lives. In other words, with systematic violence infringing human rights,
the Chilean state produced a “damaged memory” that it still needs repair
and a struggle for justice and truth. Together with terror, the cultural
transformation brought about by the coup instigated a change of memory
regimes, that is, the interruption of procedures, forms and ways of making
memory for the installation of another set of rituals and forms of memory.
The violence of the dictatorship built a new historical framework and
regime of memory where struggles have appeared. Since the coup, the
Pinochet government defined a network of practices that established the
limits of the things one could remember, or things one had to silence or
forget in the ensuing process of democracy recovery. In this context,
“memory” and “human rights” have come together as fundamental
concepts of institutional agendas after the authoritarian regime and the
institutionalisation of international law (see Huyssen 2011).
The struggles for memory that started with the coup of 1973 had a new
political arena with the return to democracy. The process of neoliberal
modernisation cut across the 17 years of dictatorship and the subsequent
20 years of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Coalition of
94 Chapter Six
[Centre-Left] Parties for Democracy). It was marked by the permanent

dispute between the memories of the heirs of the dictatorship, who
appealed to the future by means of forgetting the catastrophic past, and the
memories of the victims of repression, who insisted on the importance of
not forgetting the past events so that barbarism would not occur again. In
the postdictatorship governments, a culture of human rights and the
memories of the victims grew slowly and then became the prevalent
discourse; both were promoted by civil society, political parties and
governments since 1990 until the return of the Right to government in
2010 (see Wilde 1999). This political memory presented itself against the
inherited memory of the dictatorship and asserted an ethics of
remembering developed by governments and human rights movements in
recent Chilean history. The aim of this ethic was to avoid the repetition of
the violence and to seek the realisation of justice. Nowadays, the social
struggle for memory appeals to the realisation of justice in several ways,
including judicial processes, social protest, cultural activities and political
discussion.
Memory is a construction that changes by virtue of the agonistic form
of its constitution: the struggle between memory and forgetfulness forges
the memory itself, but also memory is defined through the confrontation
with other memories. In this way, after the installation of the dictatorship,
the confrontation was not only between the memories that justified right-
wing authoritarianism and those of the socialist government of Allende;
but rather it was a permanent conflict between what and how events
should be remembered, forgotten or silenced within the memories of each
political side.
The postdictatorship governments tried to reconcile the struggles for
memory through an institutional acknowledgment of human rights claims.
The regime of memory was consolidated through juridical and political
devices, such as presidential pardons, truth and reconciliation commissions,
emblematic trials, policies of symbolic reparation, and the creation of
institutions that aimed to care for memory and human rights. The
Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (National Commission of
Truth and Reconciliation, known as the Rettig Commission) or the recent
creation of the National Institute of Human Rights in 2009, are some of
these devices. They embody the political and cultural growth of memory
and human rights and can be analysed as technologies through which the
struggles for memory are heard and silenced. In this way,
“memorialisation” can become “museumification” (Agamben 2005, 109;
Costa 2009). Chilean memorialisation has resulted in a reification of
memory, pushing subaltern memories into official memory. The recent
Politics of Memory and Human Rights in Chile 95
history of memorialising practice in the Chilean transition to democracy

coincides with this struggle between subaltern and official memories (see
Lazzara 2006). A culture of human rights has grown through remembering
but has also ended up petrifying memory.
In this chapter I argue that memory is not just about remembering, but
it is also about forgetting. The critical potential of forgetfulness has not
been considered by the contemporary struggles for truth and justice,
because the main identities behind these memories conceive all forms of
forgetfulness as a barbaric justification of dictatorial violence. Despite
these conceptions, my argument is to recover the importance of forgetting
for critical thinking and the politics of memory in contemporary Chile in
order to avoid an officialisation of memory from the remembrances of the
victims. Through forgetfulness it is also possible to look how different
groups and entities that promote memory and human rights dismiss a
critique of other forms of domination and violence behind institutional
solutions. Such is the dialectics of memory and forgetfulness which
constitutes collective memories. The questions are about what kind of
politics can keep the past alive without becoming its prisoners or how to
deal with the past without exposing ourselves to its repetition.
Commemoration: 40 years after the coup

To commemorate is to remember with others a past event.
Remembering together what the coup of 1973 meant has become a
frequent exercise in the Chilean public sphere. Emblematic places and
dates can be good examples for corroborating this fact. After the
commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the coup, the public debate was
marked by the discussion of national memory. Examples of this were the
controversies around the supposed historical deficit of the Museum of
Memory and Human Rights, an institution created under President
Michelle Bachelet (Rivera 2013; The Clinic 2013; Urquieta 2013); the
proposal to change the emblematic 11 de Septiembre street name in
Santiago (EMOL 2013; Montes 2013; Sierralta 2013); and the Day of the
Young Combatant every 29 March, which commemorates the death of the
Vergara Toledo brothers, fallen during the dictatorship (Raposo 2012). In
all these cases, the dispute was about how to produce a memory of the
infringement of human rights, or how to remember the recent past that is
common to all Chileans. The case of the Museum of Memory and Human
Rights produced a strong discussion on national history and the perception
of the coup. The right-wing government led by President Sebastián Piñera
criticised the museum’s pedagogical approach to the coup because it did
96 Chapter Six
not talk about the political causes and circumstances that led to it.
However, the overwhelming majority of social and political leaders argued
the opposite. They maintained that some situations like the coup do not
have causes, contexts or circumstances which would justify any violent
political action. This answer was a cultural perspective constructed by
many years of struggle in the democratic transition. In each of the
discussions or commemorations of the dictatorship’s repression there were
attempts to fix a political memory from a particular perspective. This was
done by means of discourses and narratives inscribed in certain social and
cultural practices such as declarations, tributes, monuments, books, songs,
plaques and movies. Still, more than a year on, it remains unsettled what
movements and displacements of memories occurred in the commemoration
of the 40 years of the coup. Furthermore, the exact situation of memory
and human rights in Chilean society and the precise meaning of all the
commemorations of 2013 are unclear.
The 40th anniversary of the coup witnessed the production of many
activities and initiatives in the public sphere about the violation of human
rights. These included reports, documentaries and television series; books,
seminars and academic conferences in which national and international
guests participated; theatre performances and music concerts; and
declarations from all political parties and authorities. New generations in
the right-wing political elite openly stated a doctrinal renovation with the
purpose of leaving behind the dictatorial legacy that prevented them from
being competitive in democracy (González 2014; Toro 2014). The
rejection of the dictatorship in the opinion of citizens has spread to all
political domains as reflected in different surveys taken at a national level
(CERC 2013). These facts showed a certain cultural advance in matters of
human rights, but also made explicit the absence of a politics of memory
with strategic perspectives, which can respond to unresolved problems.
The electoral promise of the Bachelet government (2006-2010) of putting
forward a National Plan of Human Rights in consultation with civil society
remains unfulfilled and the lack of an evaluation process of public policies
on memory implemented in the democratic transition simply confirms the
lack of a political strategy.
Memory inscribes itself in space and time; it materialises in
emblematic places or dates, summoning and addressing subjectivities,
inciting strategies for promoting the acts of remembering, forgetting and
silencing some events. During the process of transition to democracy, for
example, the policy of memorialisation called No hay mañana sin ayer
(There is no tomorrow without yesterday) promoted by President Ricardo
Lagos (see 2003) consisted, firstly, in the creation of sites of memory to
respond to the claims of communities of memory and civil organisations.

Its principal aim was to offer victims a form of symbolic reparation,
following the conclusions of the 1991 Rettig Report, as well as
underlining the importance of historical memory as a claim for justice to
come. Moreover, whereas in 2013 President Sebastián Piñera participated
in the debate of the 40 years without great engagement (Toro 2013; Volk
2013), 10 years earlier President Lagos led the debate by closing down
some authoritarian enclaves built into the 1980 Constitution and,
particularly, by opening up the Presidential Palace of La Moneda through
the reconstruction of a door in 80 Morandé Street, one of the most
important memory places for Chilean politics. Just as Lagos’ constitutional
reforms was his way of dealing with the demands for a new Constitution
ʊstill unfulfilled as of 2015ʊ, he has been remembered for the opening
of the symbolic door of La Moneda, destroyed and closed since the coup,
to commemorate the fall of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
The political significance of that door comes from the beginnings of the
20th century, when it was used informally by presidents and ministers to
have a close contact with the people and the press. During the coup,
President Allende and the first victims of the dictatorship came out of La
Moneda through that door (Ensignia 1999; Stern 2006, 175-176; Ottone
2012). In 2003, President Lagos liturgically closed a process of
memorialisation through a very formal and official act, a reopening that
made the subaltern memory of 80 Morandé Street’s door an official
memory (see Ensignia 1999, 2011; Hite 2003). By being incorporated into
the official memory through the act of 11 September 2003, the memory of
the door was deactivated as counter-institutional memory.
Commemorations are moments where the struggles for memory appear
in the public sphere, but they are also strategies for pacifying these
struggles. The 30th commemoration of the coup served to absorb the
counter-memory of the closed door and to bring back the official idea of a
republic. Anticipating the 40th anniversary of the coup, under the
Presidency of Sebastian Piñera, the first right-wing leader after the end of
the dictatorship, there was intense questioning of the pedagogical function
of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. In June 2012, Magdalena
Krebs, the Director of Libraries, Archives and Museums assigned by the
Piñera government, attacked the museum for its lack of “background” and
“historical context” (in Rivera, 2013; Urqueta 2013). According to Krebs,
the Museum would deliver a message that was not easy to understand
because of an “incomplete view” of history. This polemical statement
which attempted to justify the coup generated a wide debate around the
role of the state in the promotion of memory and human rights in Chile,
98 Chapter Six
previewing the struggles for memory fully expressed a year later with the
40th anniversary of the coup.
A vigorous discussion about memory took place then within civil
society between groups, NGOs and other organisations that during the
dictatorship were in the trenches defending human rights. This public
discussion also reached Chilean academia with conferences titled, for
example, “Uses and abuses of the history”.1 After the establishment of
Truth and Justice commissions, the institutional agenda of human rights
was strengthened in recent years with the creation of a Program of Human
Rights at the Ministry of Interior, the National Institute of Human Rights,
the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the very recent
Undersecretariat of Human Rights by the Piñera government. The human
rights discourse, proper to every modern democracy, has consolidated
these institutions in the last two decades, making possible a profound
social debate about the past. However, this new regime raises the question
on the real capacity of governmental institutions for promoting a culture of
human rights and taking care of the democratic deficits in Chilean society.
The struggles of social organisations for defining and redefining the
meaning of past events have materialised in their role in creating and
consolidating sites of memory and helping in the formulation of public
policies. These groups have dealt with the creation of a government policy
offering memorials as a way of reparations for crimes against humanity. In
their view this policy does not fully respond to the demands of many
groups of political prisoners, torture victims and families of executed and
disappeared people. For them, memorials seem just precarious aid, lacking
other forms of support to promote memory. In fact, in Chile there are only
two state-funded memorial sites: Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38. There are
many others not supported, such as the Corporación Paine, Nido 20, Casa
de Memoria José Domingo Cañas, Casa de Derechos Humanos de
Magallanes, coordinated globally through the Red de Sitios de Memoria
(www.sitiosdememoria.cl) and the International Coalition of Sites of
Conscience (www.sitesofconscience.org). These memorials do not have
budgets for managing cultural and pedagogical activities with local,
national and international visitors. That is why several memorials and
communities manifest the absence of a political strategy to assume the
importance of the sites for the development of human rights culture
(Londres 38 et. al., 2013).
1
See www.acuarentaanosdelgolpe.wordpress.com and
www.especiala40anosdelgolpe.udp.cl.
Memorials and communities of memory

According to Theodor Adorno, suffering is a human affect that is
inaccessible to human language. As he expressed the point polemically,
after Auschwitz no poetry could be written (Adorno 1998, 15-30; 1984,
248). If a brutal act as the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany could be
described, that description would be incapable of exposing the whole
extent of the barbarism (Richard 2008, 19). Adorno tries to determine how
to express an atrocity like Auschwitz, if the matter in question is an event
that overwhelms every possible representation. Adorno did not give any
answers to these issues in his texts about the Holocaust, but he did address
them in his posthumous work “Aesthetic Theory” (1997). The language of
suffering is a way to represent the non-representable in the aesthetic
dimension of sensitivity and of pictorial thought, more than in
representational thought (see Lemm 2009; Richard 2007). Following
Adorno’s philosophical approach, the way of doing justice to the lost
memories of the victims of genocide is through art. By recalling Adorno’s
critique of suffering we can reconsider the importance of places of
memory such as museums, monuments or memorials, among others.
Indeed, these places of memory have as purpose the symbolic exposition
of suffering caused by the infringement of human rights.
For the aim of justice, trials, Truth commissions and economic
reparations are not enough; this is the reason for existence of museums and
memorials. They make justice through a symbolic sense. The Truth reports
and the trials of those who committed criminal acts during the dictatorship
have tried to offer reparations for the damage done. However, a damaged
life cannot be redeemed only through the politics of reparation, truth and
justice, implemented since the return to democracy (Brett et al. 2007; Klep
2012). In fact, justice as the recovery of lost lives is impossible. The act of
reparation is infinite. This is precisely what justifies the construction of
places of memory alongside policies of reparation. Justice must not only
apply from the present towards the future, but it should also be possible to
do justice for past victims through the aesthetic representation of memory.
Justice, then, should be conceived in a wider scope, including different
modalities of reparations, ranging from economic reparations through
sentencing of the perpetrators, to the honouring of the memory of victims.
In the Chilean case, the communities of memory that represent their
suffering symbolically in memorials share a traumatic past. This can be
seen in the books Memoriales en Chile (Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales
2007) and Geografía de la Memoria by the Program of Human Rights
(Ministerio del Interior 2010). In both, the politics of memory of the most
100 Chapter Six
recent governments of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia

are formally dedicated to the construction of memorials around the country
to serve the initiatives of social organisations. As early as 1991, the Rettig
Report declared the obligation that state authorities have with the victims
of human rights violations “to provide…in the most reasonable
time…measures and the necessary resources [for] cultural and symbolic
projects” for the memory of victims, “establishing a new basis for social
life” (Comisión Rettig 1991).
According to the geography of memory traced over 32 memorials,
built with the support of the Program of Human Rights and the
Architecture Office of the Chilean Ministry of Public Works, these “sites
of memory” presuppose communities of memory that took the first
initiative of building the memorials. These communities, private law
corporations, collectives, commissions and cultural centres, have founded
their selves on their remembering of what happened (Jones 2000, 393;
Rosenberg 2000). They lie on the “identity substrate of social memory”,
which Nelly Richard has detected in “images, symbols, narratives and
scenes whose figurative languages, in a postdictatorial landscape, hover
around the traces and gaps of what is missing” (2010: 14). Memory, and
especially the memory of repression, presents itself by means of marks and
places moving between the missing and the traces of those who are no
longer here, the executed and the disappeared. In other words, the
“common” of the community of memory does not get reduced in the
presence of marks and places, but above all, it consists of the enduring
grief about who is missing, the absence of spouses, daughters, sons and
friends.
The abundant literature on the relations between space and memory
starts with Pierre Nora’s famous work Les Liex de mémoire (Places of
memory) where he defines the place of memory as constructions
designated to “detain time, block the work of forgetfulness, fix a state of
affairs, immortalize death, materialize the immaterial to keep the most of
meanings in the minimum of signs” (2009: 33). For Steve Stern, the places
of memory can be understood as “memory knots”, or as concrete referents
that tie up lost memories appealing to the subject, manifesting the tension
between memory and body (2000). The “place of memory” is a space that
is symbolically built and that tries to define the meaning of the collective
past by remembering what must not be forgotten, and such a place can
take the form of a street, a building, a monument, a museum, a park, a
stadium or an animita (Latin American informal altars that remember
tragic deaths). According to Jelin and Langland (2003), the “places of
memory” are a type of “territorial mark” that goes beyond a site.
Memories are settled in marks that correspond to the past through

inscriptions, allowing the act of remembering to circulate, to be
reproduced or modified. The “site” is a physical or geographical space that
when “important events come out” it “transforms itself into a place with
particular meanings, charged of senses and feelings for the subjects that
lived it” (Jelin & Langland, 2003: 3). The concept of place of memory is a
kind of territorial mark of remembering, which includes a direct relation
with subjects, with their feelings, sufferings and hopes. Such are places
that after brutal events like coups or acts of genocide take a collective
meaning expressing the suffering of many people. These places of
memory are meaningful for many people because of their symbolic and
politically restorative function. This close relation between the diverse
places of memory and the communities of memory exposes the need for a
liturgical and collective dimension of commemoration. This has been the
principal driving force behind Chilean public policies and funding of
memorials, but also shows how these policies need to advance further to
respond to community engagements, including economic support.
Memorials are a result of state and civil society initiatives. The
commemorations of violations of human rights had been associated with
specific landmarks in the Chilean geography, due to their functions of
cultural resistance. This form of memory became an imperative part of the
institutional acknowledgment during the political transition to democracy.
Furthermore, these sites of memory were included in an official memory
that reproduces a national discourse about the common past. During the
dictatorship, a “subaltern memory” was systematically denied. However,
after the government of Pinochet this memory has been progressively
incorporated in the official discourse about the recent political past. After
being a silenced memory, the inclusion of the victims’ memory into a
national memory made the former lose in some cases their potency against
traditional ways of remembering.
All places of memory are a technology that records in that territory the
non-visible horrors of the past. Actually, many of the memorials have
become real cultural centres that cultivate the memory of repression,
managing diplomas, documentaries, oral and photographic archives,
cultural activities and social research. Also, the relationship between
community and sites of memory is not univocal. The sites of memory
reproduce both remembering and forgetting and it generates a struggle
about the reconstruction of the past or the “making of memory”. These
places of memory do not only suppose a community, but recreate and
reaffirm their bonds by expressing suffering and opening up the possibility
of talking about what happened. Following Nelly Richard, every place of
102 Chapter Six
memory associated to the task of promoting and defending human rights

has the mission of recovering and conserving the marks of that traumatic
past. This task consists of giving a testimony of what was experienced in
those places for the public acknowledgement of the suffering and the
creation of a collective history through the technologies of archives,
documents and testimonies (Richard, 2010: 233). In the end, memorials
encapsulate many elements of the discussion of the politics of memory and
human rights in Chile:
Memorials in post-conflict societies are all about process—what should the

memorial be about, what groups are involved in the memorial’s impetus
and design, who build it, who funds it, who controls the memorial once
established and to what degree, and how lasting in time does the memorial
prove to be? (Collins and Hite, 2009: 382).
These questions, necessary for any evaluation of the social and

political impact of memorials, are about the initiatives behind their
creation, that is, the communities and the struggles for memory. Everyone
who participates in these communities has something in common: the loss
of a relative or friend. In Chile, the forming of these communities has been
permanently characterised by the struggle for memory itself: first, for
defining the meaning of what happened or how we remember the past
violence; and secondly, to be acknowledged as subjects worthy of respect
and justice. There have been three axes of the struggles and politics of
memory: the truth about the past events has to be known; those responsible
for crimes have to be found and sentenced; and the reparation of the
victims’ damages is an infinite task. The fact that these discourses have
entered into the official memory through public policies, programs and
institutions, is a result of these struggles.
Sites of memory: between political struggle

and public policy
The public responsibility for truth, justice and reparation in a culture of
human rights must acknowledge that these issues are an interminable task.
For that reason, if the state focuses on the construction of monuments and
memorials it should not forget the protagonists and the heirs of memory.
The communities of memory that maintain and manage the sites of
memory must be supported. After public policies have concentrated their
efforts on sites, one of the recent discoveries is the urgency to study and
consolidate communities of memory to promote a democratic culture (Del
Valle and Galvez 2014). This is corroborated by the experiences of spaces
without community support, which have not had the expected impact and
have become “monuments” or desolate sites. Some memorials have turned
into ruins. The places of memory cannot be understood as independent of
the communities of memories not only because the sites were mostly built
by these communities. The management and maintenance of the
memorials require an active participation of the communities involved.
The human, technical and economic resources necessary for the
maintenance of a site of memory should be included in the analysis of
public policies. The strategies of the communities for getting together the
minimum resources to administer a memorial or how many communities
have failed in their efforts to manage a site should be considered.
In 2012, the Institute of Public Policy in Human Rights of the South
American MERCOSUR (Common Market of the South) elaborated a
document that responds to the task of evaluating public policy on memory
and human rights (MERCOSUR 2012). MERCOSUR member countries
and partners must aim for the institution of a culture of human rights at a
normative and operative level to corroborate the commitment with these
principles rising from international law. The Latin American agenda in
matters of memory and human rights is characterised by the evaluation of
government policies implemented since the end of dictatorships in the
region (see chapters by Teixeirense and Sharnak). In Chile, the
involvement of communities with sites of memory and, particularly, the
symbolic aims of memorials have not been fully evaluated.
A very large part of the memorials built during the postdictatorial
governments were promoted by organisations of civil society known as
Agrupaciones de Familiares (Associations of Families) and by human
rights organisations. Their efforts are a public exercise of memory through
diverse activities, such as cultural workshops, visits to the memorials,
human rights education, reunions, artistic events and social studies. These
features can be verified in every site of memory that is closely managed by
a community. The promotion of memory and human rights is always a
public action. In other words, when we consider the communities in public
policies their organisational capacities within the public sphere must be
incorporated. The promotion of human rights implies a public exercise to
gain a wider influence beyond the frontiers of memorials, reaching local
governments and civil society. Sites of memory that lack an effective bond
with the environment are geographical spaces that do not accomplish their
purpose.
Theoretically, public policies respond to public problems and seek to
understand them, generating a social impact, thereby creating a public
good. The impact in the case of a place of memory is given by the
104 Chapter Six
preservation and effective promotion of memory and human rights from

the triad site/community/environment. However, in Chile this does not
happen. There is a need to know the impact that public policies have had
in locally and nationally and in the assertion of a culture of human rights
after of the acknowledgement of their violation.
On 11 October 2013, a group of sites and communities of memory sent
a letter to all Presidential candidates (Londres 38 et al. 2013). This
document confirms the difficult situation of the sites of memory in Chile
and their agenda in the public debate. The partial funding by the state is
one of the first problems. If it is true that there are some sites of memory
that contemplate direct funding, such as Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38,
this measure has meant greater awareness of the inequality with respect to
smaller sites that cannot afford the minimum activities for the
management, preservation and promotion of memory. Most sites of
memory become a heavy load for communities because they do not have
the resources. In addition, the private sector does not have incentives to
promote social responsibility in terms of human rights, like other countries
in the region. That is why the struggle for memory has become a heritage
for older people but not for other generations. Thus, without resources, the
struggle for memory is increasingly difficult.
This general diagnosis shows that Chilean public policy in matters of
memory and human rights has been characterised by a lack of a strategy to
coordinate the different institutions of civil society and the state. Several
organisations and political parties share this point of view. The issue is
about the general line of a memory and human rights policy. In their letter
to the presidential candidates, the communities of memory requested an
acknowledgment of claimed sites by communities of memory; support in
the management and functioning of the sites based in the autonomy of the
communities; assurances that they will receive stable funding; promotion
of research and production of knowledge in these matters; visits to
memorials within the human rights curriculum in school education; and a
definition of a policy that promotes complete public access in the entire
country (Londres 38 et al. 2013). These proposals by communities behind
the sites of memory are a new political strategy about the collective past,
not only related to the memorials but to the coordination of sites, social
organisations and public institutions for the development of a democratic
culture of memory and human rights.
Conclusions
The Chilean state has formulated memory and human rights policies to
acknowledge the victims’ memories by society, but it has not given a
response to claims about the importance of promoting a culture of memory
and human rights. The memory of the victims has become “museumified”
by the state, that is, fixed and undynamic. Public policies such as the
search for truth, economic reparations, judicial process and symbolic
events had been made to address political demands and human rights
conventions (Ruderer 2010). However, a lack of coordination among the
different policies reveals the need of a public effort with sound political
strategy. These public policies have been isolated measures to respond to
certain social struggles, but they were not designed as part of an overall
strategy. Chile has policies of memory and human rights without the
politics. The political deficit is demonstrated by the absence of an
evaluation of the symbolic in public policies and the social and political
impacts. Currently, these sites of memory built by the state have not
productively related memory and human rights governance with social
organisations. For these memorials to promote and develop a democratic
culture based in memory and human rights, the government should
strengthen that same relation.
Meanwhile, as several organisations and communities who manage the
sites of memory have argued, behind memory and human rights
governance it is possible to find other forms of discrimination and
symbolic violence. For instance, the repetition of national narratives by
public institutions and discourses can solidify the memories keeping only
one way of remembering. This goes against the changing nature of
memory and also establishes inequalities between victims, communities
and sites of memory. Chilean official memory through public discourses
has been characterised as a narrative of “victims” that defines the political
identities of subjects and social actors. Subjects only become victims, not
martyrs, fighters, heroes or militants. Nowadays, some sites and
communities of memory like Londres 38 have protested against this
univocal official memory arguing that their own memory is not about
victims but is rather a militant memory. This other way of remembering, a
more active memory, does not expect to be acknowledged just by the state,
but it actually struggles against the official devices of memory. Secondly,
official policies prioritise some memories, sites and victims over others,
often reinforcing rivalries between them. These inequalities are mostly
about economic support and the symbolic promotion by the state and
governments. Crucially, if the memories of the disappeared, tortured,
106 Chapter Six
executed and exiled have all the same relevance within national memory,
why then are some memorials more important than others? Why are urban
memories more important than their rural counterparts? In this context, the
main task is to contribute to a critique of the regime of memory and the
governance of human rights in Chile. This critique should be against
hidden forms of domination and violence and in favour of certain
subjugated memories. This critique of memory is not against the policies
of memory themselves, but against all forms of symbolic domination
expressed in oblivion, silence or petrified remembering.
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Lagos, Ricardo. 2003. “No hay mañana sin ayer: propuesta del Presidente
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110 Chapter Six
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CHAPTER SEVEN
MOVING MEMORIES:
MARCHES REMEMBERING AND EMBODYING
THE CHILEAN AND URUGUAYAN
DICTATORSHIPS
YAEL ZALIASNIK
When we think about memories, we generally relate them with fixed

and immutable places or monuments. Here, I want to focus on another
concept associated with memories, which refers to one of their
unavoidable and vital characteristics: their dynamism, their movement.
With “moving memories” I particularly refer to this feature of memories,
but also to their link to emotions. All these characteristics are embodied by
different “expressions of theatricality”, which I have defined as “artistic
and/or public manifestations that consciously or unconsciously use diverse
strategies related with theatrical elements to be performative, to affect
reality in one way or another” (Zaliasnik 2012, 22). I also prefer to speak
of memories as plural to be aware of their permanent pluralism. There is
no unique way of remembering events so one memory or many memories
change depending on whom, when, or how someone or a group
remembers.
Within these expressions, a recurrent verb that embodies the dynamic
characteristics of memories is the verb “to march”. Different marches have
been able to put in movement memories about the dictatorships of the
Southern Cone of Latin America and stage their dynamism and emotions
through bodies that get together and move along the streets, using different
theatrical elements. Some of these expressions have become a type of
memory ritual, occurring every year at the same date. Nevertheless,
similar to the definition of “performance”, each time they are a little
different (Schechner 2002, 30). This is the case, for instance, of the
Marcha del Silencio (March of Silence), which “happens” every May in
Uruguay. Its core topic or leitmotif relates to the “disappeared”, a
112 Chapter Seven
synecdoche of all human rights violations occurred during the South

American dictatorships. As emphasised by historian Eugenia Allier, the
“disappeared” became an emblem of the theme of state terrorism of the
last Uruguayan dictatorship, on which other motifs related to human rights
violations have become dependent (2010, 91). I also consciously put that
term between quotes for the readers not to forget that the enforced
disappearance of the bodies of victims is a situation that must never be
accepted as natural.
Marcha del Silencio (MDS) takes place each 20 May mainly in
Montevideo and also in other Uruguayan departments, like Florida,
Maldonado and Paysandú.1 The date evokes the murder in Buenos Aires in
1976 of Zelmar Michelini, founder of the leftist coalition Frente Amplio
(Broad Front); Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, member of the Partido Nacional
(National Party) and head of the Chamber of Deputies until the dissolution
of parliament in 1973; and former Tupamaros William Whitelaw Blanco
and his wife Rosario Barredo, within the framework of Operation Condor
(see Calloni 2006; McSherry 2009). Even though the date—which also
coincides with Michelini’s birthday—remembers these murdered
politicians, it has been reappropriated to call attention to the theme of the
“disappeared”, a symbol of different topics associated with the repression
and human rights violations that took place during the last dictatorship
(Allier 2010).
Other marches related to the memories of the dictatorship “happen”
only once, even though the marches that occur again year after year, like
MDS, are ephemeral and unique performances as well, and their existence
is always in the present. They resist being stored or archived, because if
they were they would not be performances any more (see Phelan 2006 and
Taylor 2003). This is particularly the case of one of the most important
postdictatorship commemorative Chilean marches, a massive “pilgrimage”
that took place on 5 December 2009 through the streets of Santiago, Chile.
The marchers escorted the corpse of Víctor Jara, a famous Chilean
musician and man of theatre who was brutally murdered just after the coup
at the Chile Stadium, later renamed after him. More than 36 years after his
assassination, scores of marchers accompanied his family and friends to
the General Cemetery where his body, which had been recently exhumed
due to a judiciary order, would be buried. The mass farewell was in stark
1
It has also been accompanied by demonstrations in other countries. For example,
in 2000 hundreds of Uruguayans and activists of human rights organisations met in
the Bastille Square in Paris, France and in Stockholm, Sweden. There, they
collected signatures for a letter demanding justice to President Jorge Batlle (Brecha
2000).
Moving Memories 113
contrast to the first burial of Jara on 18 September 1973, when his widow,
Joan Turner, had put her husband in the same coffin, but inside a nicho, a
small and modest place to put caskets sharing a common wall, popular in
Latin American cemeteries. In 1973 Turner was only accompanied by a
friend and the young employee of the State Registry who notified her
when he recognised the identity of Jara’s body in the morgue (see Díaz
2013).
The massive 2009 mourning for Victor Jara, a very popular and loved
character among the Chilean people, also became a symbol of other
arbitrary deaths as products of state violence. Jara’s popularity and the
sense of identification that his figure, life and death provokeʊrepresenting
commitment, effort, idealism and coherenceʊmade this march and the
whole funeral rite a deeply emotional event. Jaraʊof a humble, peasant
origin, who made popular, political and emotional songsʊhad a horrific
death: he was tortured and shot at least 44 times after a military lieutenant
played Russian roulette with him (Cuevas 2009). For all these reasons he
became a multifaceted character to whom a great number of Chileans feel
very close. This was evidenced by the substantial and active participation
in his belated funeral ceremony. Elements of carnival were blended with
sorrow, staging a mixture of feelings through music, dances and chants.
Another recent Chilean march that also took place only once occurred
on 25 August 2012 in Santiago. The participants marched from Villa
Grimaldi to the Simón Bolívar barracks, two torture and extermination
centres managed by the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), the
Chilean secret police. Villa Grimaldi was a detention camp between 1974
and 1978, from where 211 of the more than 4500 persons that went
through this place are still “disappeared”, while another 18 were executed
and their bodies returned (see Escalante et al. 2013, 157). The Simón
Bolívar barracks, on the other hand, was a very secretive camp, where
prisoners were taken, mainly from Villa Grimaldi, to be tortured and then
all murdered. For this reason, only the testimony of a civil employee of the
dictatorship’s repressive apparatus (see Said and De Certeau 2011,
Rebolledo 2012), made it possible to find this location in the streets of
Santiago.
In 2012, along the trail heading to the former Simón Bolívar barracks
and through the leafy streets of two residential neighbourhoods (Peñalolén
and La Reina), eight young men and women made a theatrical
representation of this “road of death”. They surrounded a red van and
some of the performers represented DINA agents transporting blindfolded
prisoners. During the route, other young men and women pasted the names
of the “disappeared” on the street signs. The idea was to “mark” this place,
114 Chapter Seven
as well as the city and the country. The goal was to catch the attention of
the people, making this death path visible to the neighbours and Chilean
people in general. Furthermore, the performers and marchers also tried to
reclaim the Simón Bolívar barrack itself and mark this place of violence as
a site of memory, which is today a gated condominium of 12 houses at
same street number 8800.
Theatricality in the marches

What do all these marches perform in relation to the memories they
move and recall? Which elements of theatricality do they use to encourage
changes in the wider “stage” in which they originate and develop? To
understand how different elements of theatricality impact the particular
“scripts” of these marches related to the memories of the dictatorships in
Chile and Uruguay, I will address, among others, aspects of kinetics,
participation, characterisation, space travelled and soundscape. Through
the participants’ actions these events seek to provoke changes where they
take place, a space much wider than the marchers occupy. They
“defamiliarise” our view and perception of certain events, facts and places
where time and routine seem to have become naturalised, redirecting our
senses as well as our emotions and thoughts.
Theatricality refers to the liminalʊthat which is in the borderʊ
because it works by defamiliarising. The theatricality of these marches
suspends the common representational structures of a society, revealing its
politics. Diana Taylor argues that “theatricality is not simply what we see
but a way of controlling vision, of making the invisible visible, and the
visible invisible” (1991: 4). Like memory, theatricality involves a
framework process, placing certain elements in parentheses. Framing
something compels us to look at it, producing a feeling of strangeness
(Brecht 2002), similar to the concept of ostranenie, used by Russian
formalism to define the nature of artistic activity (Shklovski 2005).
In this way, the Uruguayan MDS seeks to raise awareness of the
practice of “disappearances” or enforced detentions, and with this, of the
state terrorism perpetrated during the dictatorship, aiming to break with
what has become “naturalised”. MDS aims to focus our attention on the
inhumanity and all that is “unnatural” in the practices of “disappearances”.
Also, MDS proposes that we should continue making these events visible,
condemning and investigating the perpetrators for the mental health not
only of the victims’ relatives (“We are all relatives” indicated some flyers
with pictures of the “disappeared” distributed during the march) but of
people in general. The silence of this event speaks of fractures, of a time
Moving Memories 115
and situation in which words cannot name reality because there is a

mismatch that has to do with all of us.
This feeling of discomfort was also present in the procession for Víctor
Jara, in terms of the injustice and the need for reparation. As said earlier,
the march for Jara enhanced an immense sense of identification in many of
his fellow citizens. For them, the Spanish term deudos (those grieving) is
very appropriate because deuda also refers to an emotion shared by most
of the participants, who felt that they were “in debt” to Jara. This kind of
ceremony has in this way a reparatory and symbolic meaning, which was
pointed out by Chile’s president at that time, Michelle Bachelet. In her
improvised speech outside Galpón Víctor Jara, a cultural space in
Santiago, after greeting the family of the musician on the morning of
Friday 4 December 2009, she said:
Our country has taken 36 years to restore our Víctor Jara [to] Chile and his
family. I believe that this is our best possible tribute for him; it is a tribute
to him in all his magnitude. I think that finally, after 36 years, we can rest
in peace, but there are also many other families that want to rest in peace.
For this reason it is important that we continue progressing in truth, in
justice, so Chile can rest in peace. Víctor Jara presente! (in Víctor Jara
Foundation 2009).
In the case of the Chilean march to 8800 Simón Bolívar street, the
“shouting” of names spoke for the absence of truth and justice regarding
the “disappeared” and the human rights violations that took place during
the dictatorship. The presence of the participants was also a way to “mark”
a place once associated with torture and death, today a real home for
several families. The marchers managed to put a plaque outside the site
where the event ended, after some speeches and the lighting of candles
that were placed on top of the fence outside the housing complex. Velas
(candles) are clearly symbols of memory, evocation and hope. Fire, it
might be said, can burn as well as purify, illuminate and provide heat and
energy. It does not come as a surprise that candles have become
universally internalised as a form of tribute and memory. Many other
rituals related to the memories of the dictatorship in Chile, not only
marches, use this symbol, like the velatones, which is the Chilean term for
these social gatherings and specific memory performances where the
lighting of candles evokes victims and events. One of the most ritualistic
velatones in Chile is the act held every year in the month of March, in a
street of Providencia, Santiago, remembering the kidnapping of three
civilians in 1985 by agents of DICOMCAR (Directorate of Police
Communications), a case known as degollados because of their beheading.
116 Chapter Seven
Similar events also take place each Wednesday evening, outside Casa
Memoria José Domingo Cañas, another DINA place of detention and
torture, and each 4 September at dusk, at the emblematic población (city
slum) La Victoria to remember the anniversary of the death of French
priest André Jarlan, killed by the police in 1984.
Kinetics and space travelled

All these acts embody the dynamic features of memories, “marking”
different scenarios; acting in the public space and resignifying places and
events, showing in the process itself that memory can be constructed
collectively and through different practices. During these marches, the
space of the street becomes a “practiced place” (De Certeau 1996). For a
place to become a space monuments can be built, places can be marked
(literally), and ruins can be respected and conserved. However, a place can
also become a space through performative practices that are rituals of
memories, enacted by different “social actors”, in every sense of the term,
like the Argentinian Madres of Plaza de Mayo, who “marked” such a
place with their presence each Thursday since 1977 in a round that
continues until today (see Asociación Madres Plaza de Mayo 2014).
In all these marches movement is crucial. The moving of people
together in the same road and within the same direction stages a kinetic of
solidarity. This solidarity implies subversion of what is expected in an
individualist order like neoliberalism, imposed during many of these
dictatorships. This subversion implies a solidarity and reciprocity more
than a domination or maintaining a certain order and power asymmetry. It
is a road that embraces the different verbal tenses. It brings together past,
present and future through individual bodies that unify to move together.
With their movement and presence shared collectively, they shout and
communicate. This is what happens in every one of the marches alluded
to, each with its own particularities.
Participation, symbols and settings

Víctor Jara’s burial ceremonies, including his body’s exhumation,
performed a certain “wandering mourning”. By putting mourning as well
as memory in movement, a symbol was constructed: the idea of a justice
eluded until then and marked as present through the many victims (and
their relatives) of the South American dictatorships. These acts express
that the facts alluded to are not finished and that citizens need to put them
in movement by combining processes of death and violence with a more
Moving Memories 117
tangible wandering, a physical long trip, in order to discuss and do

something with them. The truth is also that the events of state violence
remain as unfinished processes so there is a necessity to stage this
transhumance and increase social consciousness. The latter is especially
evident with the specific issue of the “disappeared”.
Formally, Chilean sociologist Antonia García Castro defines the
“disappeared” as
an individual that, having being arrested by state agents, is kept secret in

the long-term with an absence of recognition of that arrest by the
authorities involved. Murdered during his imprisonment, his remains are
hidden and his family is not notified of his death (García Castro 2011, 47).
At the same time, even though these victims are absent, the
“disappeared” are present in the silence and through the mere walking,
made visible in the static posters and photos carried by the participants of
marches such as the MDS. These images have a clear message: they give
information using the victims, faces, traits and names. But they are also
symbols of the “missing” ones, of their stories, lives, memories, and of
demands for obtaining information about them. For the same reason, they
connote a more universal message. For Victoria Langland the fact that
New York City became covered with pictures of the people missing after
the attack of 2001 demonstrates that personal photographs of the beloved
used in the public sphere have become “part of our universal symbolic
language” (2005, 88). As indicated by Beatriz Sarlo, the pictures of
victims have become part of a collective visual text that she calls
“iconographic discourse of the absence” (2002, 44). Most Chileans and
many around the world saw on national television newscasts one of the
mothers of the trapped miners of San José mine in the north of Chile in
2010 carrying a picture of her “disappeared” son in a white dove made of
paperboard placed over her chest, quite similar to the political symbolism
described here.
Black and white pictures show sadness, mourning, loss and absence,
and embody the struggle to stay fully present against the threat of oblivion,
which evokes Barthes’ “stadium”. The searching for the “disappeared” is
in itself a cultural presence that has become part of our universal symbolic
language. Individual photographs make the private break into the public
sphere, as indicated by Barthes. In fact, the gazes of the photographed
subjectsʊwho constitute the “punctum” mentioned by the same author,
leaving the scene to prick the viewer (Barthes 1989, 150)ʊare particularly
significant to us because many onlookers might know who they were and
what they represent. And even though the images are static they need to be
118 Chapter Seven
completed over and over again, together with their stories, lives and
presence. For this reason they are a loud call for memory. They are not
meant to be frozen in that specific moment when the shutter was pressed
or when the silver salts were fixed because memory is not something
petrified. Memories are alive and, for the same reason, they are always in
movement, as we are reminded repeatedly by these marches.
The “pilgrimage” with Jara’s body through different streets of
Santiago, meaning public spaces that belong to, include and integrate
everyone, symbolises the long, painful and in many cases unfinished trip
of numerous victims who were murdered and their bodies hidden. To this
day, relatives search for them, seeking not only their bodies or bones, but
also their truths and the details of their lives, deaths, movements and paths.
Víctor Jara’s march enacted the mourning of people who had not been able
to do it before, because the absence of mourning for the survivors remains
as the constant death of a beloved person. Something similar is evoked by
the MDS. While it might sound paradoxical, the MDS is able to defy any
possible silence around the theme of the “disappeared” and, with this, of
the memories of the dictatorship in Uruguay. The MDS “shouts”, in its
particular and symbolic way, for these issues to be seen, discussed and
transmitted by and to everyone. Going out and marching in the streets is
something that unites and empowers citizenship, staging solidarity,
enacting the social bonds that remain unbroken, unforgotten and that are
made present again in each of these acts, despite the attempts to put a
closure on them, an oblivion and indifference that characterised many of
the Southern Cone postdictatorial periods.
We can see that together with these dynamic features of memory, the
aforementioned expressions also display the values of solidarity, life and
social bonds. In opposition to the first association that Chilean people tend
to make with the word “march”, linked to military parades or the
maintenance of a specific order, these “marches” relate more to carnival
(Da Matta 2002, 67-68), a space and time that suspends the established
order. Contrary to a procession that looks to upset that order, military
parades are always seen from the outside by spectators who can only
participate as such. Instead, in the marches I discuss, participants are
active protagonists, enacting their leading roles as social actors and agents
of change and new constructions. The actors of these marches do not wear
special clothing or uniforms, achieving a deeper feeling of empathy,
participation, engagement and commitment. There is no hierarchy since
anyone can participate. Nevertheless, in all of these marches some people
stay as spectators, looking at participants without getting involved, or they
get involved at different levels. Some bystanders ask about the purpose of
Moving Memories 119
the march, others watch in silence and a few dare to express their
displeasure. The “innocent bystanders” who watch in silence can be also
associated with a Chilean expression which became very common
recently: cómplices pasivos. This notion was popularised through the
remorse of right-wing President Sebastián Piñera a few days before the
40th anniversary of the coup d’etat, accusing many Chileans of being
“passive accomplices” of the dictatorship (in Torrealba and Turner 2013).
Soundscapes and gestures

Finally, there are other distinct elements that help marches to display
solidarity, like soundscape and gestures. In MDS, which is paradoxically
characterised by the lack of sound, silence subjugates, unites and generates
complicity among the thousands of people that participate each year,
walking together with no words or flags, under one slogan carrying
pictures of the “disappeared”.
During the Chilean march to the cemetery in 2009, the soundscape was
made up of Jara’s music and songs, which motivated the participants to
move and dance. This was also a way of performing resistance, since
Víctor Jara’s songs remain very popular until today. They are sung by
members of different generations, despite the attempts to silence them
through the dictatorship’s censorship and by the same act of murdering
their author and singer. For a long time these songs were part of what
James Scott calls a “hidden discourse” (2000, 21), which helped to
maintain resistance in Chile. There were also “sound images” created
directly by the actors and participants, and constructed through the chants
during the march. Many of them had to do with the already described
feeling of identification such as: “Compañero Víctor Jara: presente….!”
(interpreted as saying “You are present”, or as Jara himself answering
“Present”); “Víctor, amigo, el pueblo está contigo!” (Victor, friend, the
people are with you!). Other chants asked for justice: “Ahora, ahora,
resulta indispensable que la justicia actúe y juzgue a los culpables!”
(“Now, now, it is necessary that justice acts and judges the guilty”); and
“Justicia, verdad, no a la impunidad!” (“Justice, truth, no to impunity”).
Current issues also become present in these memory events through
chanting, mixed with very traditional slogans from the dictatorship. The
chants “El que no salta es Pinochet!” or “…es momio!” (“If you don’t
jump you are Pinochet or…a right-winger) were mixed with contemporary
environmental and human rights demands, like the resistance to a foreign
mining project in the north of Chile and the fight of the indigenous
Mapuche. One chant addressed directly the public event itself, calling for
120 Chapter Seven
participation, commitment and defying the need to request permission to

be in the street: “En la calle y sin permiso, encontrar el compromiso!”.
A very final element to be noted from these marches is part of a
particular semiotic of memory, also encouraging solidarity. Physical
gestures such as holding or lifting hands symbolise togetherness, force,
work and dreams. In the case of the young people’s hands that carried and
escorted Víctor Jara´s coffin, they formed a “human chain”, enacting a
physical solidarity.
Open conclusions
These moving marches and memory events are expressions that aim to
include all participants equally, with no distance or asymmetry,
demonstrating solidarity. In these rituals there are almost no differences
between actors and spectators, contrary to traditional theatre, and closer to
the concept of Guy Debord of “livers” (1957) and the ideas of Augusto
Boal, who argues that the spectator is also an actor, because he/she
assumes the responsibility and the risks of seeing and acting over what
was shown and experienced (1982, 17).
Through these different expression and elements of theatricality,
memories are constituted as “exemplary”, as Todorov conceptualises
(2000, 32). In other words, these are memories that can be used as models
for facing new situations, in opposition to the “literal” memories that only
refer to themselves. With moving memories, different elements combine
to constitute visual landscape, soundscape, kinesis and participation to
encourage emotional and eidetic imagination. These performances are
expressions full of symbols, concepts and emotions. Their elements trigger
a wide range of synaesthesias where one sensorial stimulus leads to a
perception in a different sensorial mode, expanding and enriching
experiences.
By means of participation or pathia, each of the actors involved in
these marches has an active and important role within an exercise that only
makes sense if it is collective. Participation allows the feeling of
identification, which reminds us that memories have a very important
emotional dimension, shared by many people. The different elements of
theatricality analysed in this paper allude to an emotional memory that
Marianne Hirsch calls “heteropathic”, a memory that makes “feeling and
suffering with the other” possible, creating a collective empathy (1999, 9).
Uruguayan conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer said to me in an interview
in 2010 that rather than with memories, he works with empathy.
Nevertheless, the existence of such a memory substrate (together with an
Moving Memories 121
alternative reading of Camnitzer’s ideas) shows that memory and empathy

are not exclusive. On the contrary, they can and should complement each
other. Their interaction is clear in the experience of the active participants
of the marches, opening the framework of their perceptions (including an
aesthetic experience), activating their emotions and encouraging empathy
with forms and themes. On the other hand, as Émile Durkheim states,
human feelings intensify when they are collectively affirmed, when
“sadness as well as happiness are exalted, amplified; when they reflect
from one conscience to another, and they end up expressing externally in
exuberant and violent movements” (1992, 373).
In all of these expressions, which frequently leave aside the exhaustive
compilation and giving of information on the victims, the memories of
participants try to approach emotions together with reflection, within the
active and necessarily heteropathic practice of memory. “Memoriar”, a
Spanish neologism I argue for, emphasises the dynamic feature of
memories, implicit in the Greek concept of anamnesis, which refers to
memories as praxis, a search in opposition to the concept of mneme or
memories as passive remembrance (see RAE 2001, Rojas Mix 2006, 129).
Memoriar implies, in its practice, the production of new elements that did
not exist before, in contrast with memorizar (memorising), which only
refers to the repetition of the same thing without considering
performativity or necessary reflection. The marches discussed here are
precisely effective in displaying, moving and displacing the exercise of
memoriar, in bodies that go out to the streets and unite, struggling not only
against silence, but also against the reification of memories, a very
traditional repercussion of public rituals and monuments.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Nicolás del Valle (nicolasdelvalle.o@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate in

Philosophy at Leiden University (Netherlands) and Universidad Diego
Portales (Chile), and has a Master of Arts in Contemporary Thought and a
Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He is a visiting researcher at the
Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, Germany, and a researcher at the
Centre for Political Analysis and Research (CAIP) in Chile. He is also a
visiting fellow at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of
New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His current research areas are in
philosophy, the social sciences, media under democracy, the politics of
human rights, critical theory and biopolitics. The chapter in the present
book was written as part of his research activities in the doctoral program
in Philosophy at the Institute of Humanities, Universidad Diego Portales,
Chile.
Pablo Leighton (pabloleighton@gmail.com) researches the notion and

practices of propaganda in XX century and current media, and specifically
on the history of audio-visual culture in Chile and Latin America since the
1970s until today. He has taught at universities in Australia, United States,
Chile and Honduras, and has worked as film director, screenwriter and
editor in various fiction and documentary productions. He holds a PhD in
Latin American studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile, and in
Media and Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney. He also
has a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of
Art (Boston, US). He is co-director of the Latin American Research Group
Australia (www.latitudesgroup.info) with Fernando López.
Fernando López (f.lopez@unswalumni.com) holds a PhD in History

from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts with
Honours in History from the same institution. Together with Dr Pablo
Leighton, he co-directs Latitudes: Latin American Research Group
Australia. His areas of research focus on contemporary Latin American
History, the Cold War in Latin America and, especially, on how the
military regimes of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia
agreed to formally launch Operation Condor in November 1975.
126 Contributors
J Patrice McSherry (pmcsherr@liu.edu) is a professor of political

science at Long Island University and author of numerous books and
articles on Latin America. Her works include: “Cross-border terrorism:
Operation Condor”, NACLA Report on the Americas 32(6): 34-35 (1999);
“Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System”, Social Justice
26(4): 144-174 (1999); “Operation Condor: New pieces of the puzzle”,
NACLA Report on the Americas 34(6): 26 (2001); “Tracking the origins of
a State Terror network: Operation Condor”, Latin American Perspectives
29(1): 38-60 (2002); “Predatory states: Operation Condor and covert war
in Latin America”, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
(2005); “Death squads as parallel forces: Uruguay, Operation Condor and
the United States”, Journal of Third World Studies 24(1): 13 (2007); and
“Introduction to 'Shadows of State Terrorism: Impunity in Latin America”
(with Raúl Molina Mejía), Social Justice 26(4): 1-12 (2007). Her most
recent book is “Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s-
1973”, Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2015). She has been
currently teaching at Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile.
Florencia Melgar (florenciamelgar@gmail.com) is an investigative

journalist and independent researcher. She produced “No Toquen Nada”,
once the highest rating current affairs radio show in Uruguay. She co-
authored the books “Las palabras que llegaron’ in 2009 and “Sabotaje a la
verdad” in 2006. She has worked for SBS Radio and Online, the ABC,
Instituto Cervantes and the website Latinhub.com.au that she directs and
was finalist as Best Use of Online in New South Wales (NSW) Premier’s
multicultural Media Awards 2014. Melgar was awarded the best
investigative story of the year in NSW multicultural media for the
multimedia report “The Other 9/11”. In 2011, she was nominated Latin
Woman of the Year in Australia for the contribution of Latinhub.com.au to
the Latin American community in Australia. She is a PhD candidate at
RMIT University in Melbourne and the title of her thesis is: “The
exemption of Australia´s intelligence agencies from the FOI Act and its
impact in journalism and democracy”.
Debbie Sharnak (sharnak@wisc.edu) is a PhD candidate at the University

of Wisconsin-Madison (US) studying the history of human rights,
transnational networks, and international relations. Her dissertation,
"Uruguay and the Contested International History of Human
Rights", examines the origins and evolution of human rights discourse in
Uruguay, particularly during its transition back to democratic rule. The
work addresses issues of transitional justice, the rise of the transnational
40 Years are Nothing 127
human rights movement, and the shifting terrain of human rights in the
1970s and 1980s. Her publications include: "Uruguay and the Re-
conceptualization of Transitional Justice," in Transitional Justice and
Legacies of State Violence in Latin America, Marcia Esparza and Nina
Schneider, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. (2015) (forthcoming);
"Sovereignty and human rights: re-examining Carter’s foreign policy
Towards the Third World," Diplomacy & Statecraft, 25(2): 303-330
(2014); “Moral Responsibility and the ICC: Child Soldiers in the
DRC,” Eyes on the International Criminal Court, 4(1) (2007).
Pedro Teixeirense (pedroteixeirense@gmail.com) is at PhD candidate at

the University of Río de Janeiro. In 2014, Pedro worked as a researcher for
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), serving as a
Research Analyst with the Brazilian National Truth Commission (CNV)
that investigated the human rights violations committed during the last
dictatorship (1964-1985). His works include: “Justiça de transição e
processos de transição: alguns aspectos históricos a partir da experiência
uruguaia”, Revista Ars Historica, 8ª Edição: 23-40 (2014); “O que resta da
ditadura, o que havia de nós: história e memória nos mecanismos de
justiça de transição no Brasil”, Revista Cantareira (Dossiê Os legados das
ditaduras Civis-militares), 20ª Edição (Jan-Jun): 6-15 (2014).
Yael Zaliasnik (yzaliasnik@gmail.com) is a journalist and Master in

Literature from Universidad Católica de Chile, and has a PhD in Latin
American Studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Some of her
areas of academic interest are Cultural Studies, Theatricality, Art and
Politics, and Memory. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the
Universidad de Santiago de Chile. She has published, among others, the
articles “40 años de performances e intervenciones urbanas de Clemente
Padín” (2010) and “Memoria en construcción: el debate sobre la Esma”
(2011), e-misférica issues 7.2 and 8.1, The Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics, New York University.

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40 Years are Nothing

40 Years are Nothing:

History and memory

Pablo Leighton and Fernando López

Edited by Pablo Leighton and Fernando López

This book first published 2015

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2015 by Pablo Leighton, Fernando López and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-7642-9

Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 33

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 77

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 111

Contributors ............................................................................................. 125

PABLO LEIGHTON AND FERNANDO LÓPEZ

(Carlos Gardel and Alfredo Le Pera, 1935)

The 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile presented a number of

these dictatorships and the strategies adopted to break the international

Chapter Five explores the unrecognised role of Australia’s intelligence

history of Uruguay and/or Chile, memory, Transitional Justice, state

a coup have been well-documented. In my work on Uruguay I have shown

utterly calculated pillars of social and political control. As E.V. Walter

REGIONAL COOPERATION AND STATE

governments, combined with the international political situation1, enticed

recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World

1975, 144). Chile’s creditors, meanwhile, allowed the regime to renegotiate

discussing these activities, however, one must consider that it is unlikely

Like most of their regional counterparts, the Uruguayan exiles merged

… [hoped] to find allies to counter what he [viewed] was a world-wide

Aldrighi, Clara. 2007. La intervención de Estados Unidos en Uruguay

Child, Jack. 1983. “The American Southern Cone: geopolitics and

McSherry, J. Patrice. 2002. “Tracking the origins of a state terror network:

Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe/European review of Latin

ON HISTORY AND MEMORY:

PEDRO IVO TEIXEIRENSE

It is commonly held in current Transitional Justice literature that

Transitional Justice mechanisms. Finally, I discuss the emergence of

On transitional processes: theoretical approaches to Latin

This reflection helps us understand disputes over memory in the

Rousso also questions whether it would be possible to capture the

No history of memory can avoid being subjected to a historiographical

These disputes between the narratives constructed by academic history, or

Some theoretical ideas on Transitional Justice

occurred in Eastern European countries, in Africa and, particularly, in

different branches of international law (Bobbio 1992, 25-47; Lafer 1991,

Uruguayan transition: boundaries and possibilities

Despite the establishment of two commissions of inquiry to deal with

traditional political parties known as the Concertación Nacional

general decline in public policy on Transitional Justice in the Uruguayan

borders and directly influencing the demands presented in Uruguay

itself to bringing cases of human rights violations to the attention of the

to defining the conceptual boundaries of this idea. However, the definition

Bickford, Louis. 2004. “Transitional Justice”. In The encyclopaedia of

Rousso, Henry. 1996. “A memória não é mais o que era”. In Usos e

THE GELMAN CASE AND THE LEGACY

“What a paradox”, the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman exclaimed in

In subsequent years though, implementation has proven to be a slow