Popular Communication

The International Journal of Media and Culture

ISSN: 1540-5702 (Print) 1540-5710 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hppc20

Women, torture, & spectacle on Chilean television

Hillary Hiner & Daniela Castro

To cite this article: Hillary Hiner & Daniela Castro (2018) Women, torture, &
spectacle on Chilean television, Popular Communication, 16:2, 106-118, DOI:
10.1080/15405702.2017.1378890

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1378890

Published online: 28 Feb 2018.

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POPULAR COMMUNICATION
2018, VOL. 16, NO. 2, 106–118
https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1378890

Women, torture, & spectacle on Chilean television

Hillary Hiner and Daniela Castro
Universidad Diego Portales

ABSTRACT
In the years since the fall of the civil–military dictatorships in the
Southern Cone, considerable attention has been paid to first-person
testimonies of human rights victims. A great number of these have been
by women who narrated sexual political violence. However, while there
has been work done on the relation between terror, trauma, and spec-
tacle in postdictatorial television shows, rarely has this also included a
gendered perspective. In this article we seek to open this area of
discussion by evaluating the manner in which women’s televised testi-
monies of political sexual violence have been constructed on late night
talk shows in Chile, using recent history and memory theory, as well as
feminist theory on the representation of sexual violence in mass media.

As discussed at length in other publications (Agger & Jensen, 1997; Bunster-Burotto, 1985;
Hiner, 2009, 2015, 2016), the Chilean dictatorship’s use of torture was gendered and
sexualized. Women were detained and tortured for being political militants (or relatives of
political militants), but they were also tortured for transgressing prevailing gender norms.
As “Marxists” dedicated to political action, they were not, and could not be, “good” stay-
at-home, apolitical wives and mothers. According to truth commission reports, 198
women were executed or disappeared and 4979 women were victims of political prison
and torture during the dictatorship in Chile; many of those who survived political
persecution were subsequently forced into exile abroad.1 However, for many years in
Chile, the gendered and sexualized nature of torture was not publicly talked about and its
discussion was constrained to relatively small feminist networks. The release of the Valech
Report in 2004, which specifically mentions “sexual violence,” and the 40th anniversary of
the coup in 2013 have meant that women’s testimonies of torture have begun to circulate
more (Hiner, 2013). We believe that this has also been promoted by interviews aired on
the late-night talk show Mentiras Verdaderas, which we analyze in this article, as they
opened up spaces for much needed discussion on sexual political violence.

Theorizations of rape in media

The manner in which gender violence is portrayed in mass media has been hotly debated
by feminist academics. Early scholars who wrote on rape, like Susan Brownmiller, largely
focused on the sensationalization of rape by the mass media—“rape dressed up to fit the

CONTACT Hillary Hiner hillaryhiner@hotmail.com; hillary.hiner@udp.cl Escuela de Historia, Universidad Diego

Portales, Ejército 333, 1o piso, Santiago 8370127, Chile.
1
Figures come from Rettig, CNRR, Valech, and Valech II commissions.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
 POPULAR COMMUNICATION 107

male fantasy, lurid, and ‘sexy’” (Brownmiller 1975, p. 335)—as well as how cinematic
depictions of rapists were presented with a relatively blasé attitude or even glorified,
associated with what she termed the “myth of the heroic rapist” (Brownmiller 1975, p.
283). By the 1980s, radical feminist scholars, such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea
Dworkin, gradually broadened out this early work in order to posit their now well-known
arguments linking pornography to heteronormativity and violence against women. Jane
Caputi also did research in this vein on the portrayal of rape and gynocide in mass media,
concluding that “sexual murder is the ultimate expression of sexuality as a form of power”
(Caputi, 1989, p. 439).
Talk shows have been particularly concerned with women’s issues (Carpignano,
Andersen, Aronowitz, & Difazio, 1990; Chaneton, 2000; Moorti, 1998). When referring to
the presentation of rape survivor testimony in this genre, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray
remind us of the paradoxically “empowering and disempowering” effects of “speaking out”:

On the one hand, the speaking out of survivors has been sensationalized and exploited by the
media, and used for its shock value to pander to a sadistic voyeurism among viewers . . .
[however] the exclusion and dismissal of survivors’ stories is a testament to their radical
potential. If they were not so threatening to the system of male supremacy they would not
have to be so aggressively repudiated and silenced. (Alcoff & Gray, 1992, p. 10)

Like other, larger, shifts in feminist and gender theory during the 1990s, a poststructural
turn also emerged regarding the representation of violence and gender, seen in work done
by Wendy Brown, Sharon Marcus, and Kristin Bumiller. Here a good amount of criticism is
directed at the notion of women as inherent victims and their portrayal in this manner by
the media and feminist groups. Brown points to the eroding of the privileged “moral
ground” of victims who speak out on the violence they have suffered (Brown, 1995, p. 48).
Bumiller problematizes the mass production of rape iconography that “allows everyone to
be a consumer who participates vicariously in the horror of being a survivor . . . but without
the necessary explanation to make these painful sights intelligible” (Bumiller, 2008, p. 17).
Marcus’s work on sexual violence, which questions the passive narrations of women who
merely “endure” rape and which seeks to propose more active self-defense strategies, refers
to “rape scripts,” which “inscribe on men’s and women’s embodied selves and psyches the
misogynist inequalities which enable rape to occur” (Marcus, 1992, p. 391, emphasis in
original).
While we agree with Carine Madorossian that Marcus’s insistence on women’s active
resistance to rape is problematic, as “female passivity is neither a constant nor a cause of rape”
(2014, p. 52), we want to underscore the positive aspects that questioning traditional “rape
scripts” may bring. As Marcus puts forth: “New cultural productions and reinscriptions of our
bodies and our geographies can help us begin to revise the grammar of violence and to
represent ourselves in militant new ways” (Marcus, 1992, p. 400). This idea, in conjunction
with Teresa de Lauretis’s oft-quoted assertion that “violence is engendered in representation”
(De Lauretis, 1987, p. 33), has also been taken up by feminist scholars who have worked on the
representation of sexual political violence and “sexualized spectacles” in the former Yugoslavia
(Hesford, 1999; Kesic, 1994; Marciniak, 2010). As we seek to make clear, while never being
able to break completely with the pitfalls associated with “sexualized spectacles,” feminist
theory condemns the patriarchal nature of political sexual violence and highlights female
108 H. HINER AND D. CASTRO

survivor resistance. This is similar to the positive aspects of feminists who become “theorists of
their own experience” while “speaking out,” as Alcoff and Gray portend (1992, p. 12).

Depictions of women and torture in Chile (or why it has been so difficult for
female survivors to speak publicly about sexual political violence)
In the case of Latin American television and particularly those expressions of the medium
related to recent history and memory, there has been relatively little written, and that
which has been written is usually in relation to fictional genres, in particular the popular
telenovela format (Atencio, 2011; Schneider & Atencio, 2016). In the case of Argentina, the
groundbreaking work of Claudia Feld (2000, 2002, 2016) has been an exception. Although
she has not written about political sexual violence from a feminist perspective, Feld has
written quite extensively on the manner in which nonfictional televised human rights
programs have turned into “spectacles” that drive up “ratings” through the use (and
abuse) of nunca más memory politics. While this has led to more human rights television
programs being seen by the public, Feld questions the ability of these programs to fully
inform and generate dialogue about the historic past. However, Feld does not discount,
out of hand, the possibility that TV programs could contribute to greater societal and
intergenerational dialogues, calling it a “window of opportunity for advancing the
demands of the human rights organizations” (Feld, 2016, p. 32).
In the case of Chile, while Sergio Durán (2012) has done important work on the
dictatorship and television, only Marian Schlotterbeck (2014) has engaged specifically
with television and memory politics, through her study of two popular Chilean
fictional television shows—Los 80 (Canal 13, 2008–2014) and Los Archivos del
Cardenal (TVN, 2011, 2014). Her analysis largely follows that of Atencio’s on “memory
merchandising” (2011), in the sense that she advances the argument that the media
market has opened new spaces for the consumption of the recent Chilean past
(Schlotterbeck, 2014, p. 153). While she discusses intergenerational memory transfers,
there is no mention of gender, although both of these programs featured strong
gendered storylines, through their “daughters”: “Laura” and “Claudia.” Both of these
characters are active in human rights causes and have romantic attachments to men in
far-left groups; as a result, both are tortured and sexual political violence is portrayed.
However, the voices of the real Chilean female survivors, on which fictionalized
characters like “Laura” and “Claudia” were based, had, up until 2013, been largely
absent in Chilean media.
In fact, the majority of high-profile female testimonies on sexual political violence
present in the media were, up until the early 2000s, based on two well-known
“collaborators.” Both Luz Arce and Marcia Merino (“La Flaca Alejandra”) published
autobiographies (El infierno, 1993, and Mi verdad, 1993, respectively) and the latter had
a documentary film about her made by another famous female member of the MIR,
Carmen Castillo (La Flaca Alejandra, 1993). Arce and Merino have been highly
problematic public figures, participating in human rights trials as witnesses, but also
being roundly denounced by members of human rights groups as having acted as active
perpetrators, and not only forced observers or participants, in torture sessions, which
both women vehemently deny. The complex nature of these testimonies has meant that
 POPULAR COMMUNICATION 109

there has been a considerable amount written and theorized about them (Lazzara, 2008;
Llanos, 2010; Richard, 1998).
At the same time, it is also worth noting that there was a very public case of a
female survivor presenting her testimony of sexual political violence and then facing
severe public and judicial consequences for doing so. In 1999, Odette Alegría went on
record accusing then director of the criminal investigations police, Nelson Mery, of
sexual political violence. In July 2003, when President Lagos was gearing up to launch
the Valech Commission, Alegría repeated these accusations on a television program.
Seeking to protect Mery, Alegría was challenged not only by the right, but also by the
center-left; some media outlets even went so far as to associate her with far-right
paramilitary groups and living a “loose,” sexually permissive lifestyle (“Odette en la
Escuela y los vínculos que sí ocultó,” El Mostrador, July 28, 2003). Although Mery was
eventually forced to resign as director in late September 2003, he sued Alegría in court
for libel and in April 2004 he won. A Santiago judge found that Alegría was not able
to sufficiently “prove” her case of sexual political violence, and she was sentenced to a
60-day suspended sentence and ordered to pay Mery 2 million pesos. Taken as a
whole, then, the Alegría case, in conjunction with the precedent set by Merino y Arce,
would seem to send the same message to former political prisoners: talk publicly about
sexual political violence at your own peril.

Three interviews with survivors of sexual political violence on mentiras

verdaderas2
The late night talk show Mentiras Verdaderas (True Lies, MV) first appeared on the
smaller network channel, La Red, in 2011. La Red is the smallest Chilean “open channel”
and is typified by low production values and a high turnover in its programming.3 MV has
become one of its most successful and longest lasting programs. Airing in the primetime,
post-evening-news slot, at 10:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, MV’s subject matter can
vary wildly, and it was with host Jean Philippe Cretton in 2013 that the show finally settled
into its more recognizable late-night talk-show format. That same year MV was one of the
few Chilean television shows to exhibit a sustained interest in the 40th anniversary of the
civil–military coup, airing a series of interviews with historians and human rights victims
during August and September of that year. Following the ratings success of these

2
All quotes and photos in this section are taken from the following YouTube sites: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=s61ImTrXFb0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB9hRMKhjHc, and https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVNLThnnM64. We have obtained due authorization for use of screen-
shot images through the TV channel La Red.
3
In Santiago, there are four major “network channels”—TVN, Canal 13, Chilevisión, and Mega—and two
smaller open channels: UCVTV and La Red. MV airs on La Red, which was founded in 1991 and has
been typified by a continual changing of owners due to low earnings and economic crises. It is
currently owned by the Mexican telecommunications group Albavisión. As one anonymous review
rightly pointed out, however, La Red has in recent years also been associated with more “serious,”
niche primetime news programming. We would agree with this analysis, and add that this develop-
ment of a “niche” market has largely been built precisely around the MV program, which began airing
in 2011.
110 H. HINER AND D. CASTRO

Figure 1. Gloria Laso, MV Interview, September 3, 2013.

programs related to human rights, MV continued to invite figures related to the dictator-
ship years.
In this section, we analyze three interviews with women who were political prisoners
that aired on MV, chosen because they are the only ones that focused primarily on sexual
political violence. The interviews are as follows: (1) interview with Gloria Laso, on
September 3, 2013, detained in the José Domingo Cañas torture center; (2) interview
with Coca Rudolphy, on February 13, 2014, detained in the Buin military barracks in
Santiago; and (3) interview with Beatriz Bataszew and Beatriz Miranda, on May 22, 2014,
detained, respectively, in the Venda Sexy torture center and the Villa Grimaldi torture
center. Bataszew is also a visible feminist and human rights activist with the Venda Sexy
memory site group and the feminist group Mujeres Sobrevivientes Siempre Resistentes
(Women Survivors, Always Resisting). All three of these interviews touched upon similar
topics related to political prison, human rights violations, and sexual political violence, but
there are also key differences among the three. For this reason, we analyze each interview
in detail, and briefly sketch out some public response to each episode through Twitter
comments.4
The first interview, with Gloria Laso, was part of the cycle of interviews aired in August
and September 2013, related to the 40th anniversary of the civil–military coup on
September 11, 1973. Laso is an actress who was a leftist sympathizer detained in
September 1974 by the DINA. Upon her release, she was exiled in Europe, and her
experiences of political prison and torture were used by Jorge Diaz to write the play
“Toda esta larga noche” (“All this long night,” 1976). In the early 1980s, she returned to
Chile and resumed working as an actress. In this interview, Cretton asked Laso relatively
broad questions, with a special emphasis on the Allende years and how she was able to
resume her life after political prison. The actress responded in a calm and serene manner,
sometimes laughing when remembering particularly happy moments, such as those with
her theatre compañeros during the Allende years. In general, the interview’s atmosphere is
relaxed for the majority of this long interview, clocking in at one hour and fifty minutes
and occupying the entirety of the MV programming block, and both she and Cretton
appear quite comfortable in their body language. This was also reproduced in the camera
movement, with few close-ups, as the actress at no point broke down into tears or
expressed strong emotion, and fairly general captions in the lower third, such as “Gloria

4
This article does not pretend to be a definitive or thorough study of media reception. We analyze
Twitter response through the hashtags that MV formulated for each episode only to give a very
general idea of what opinion the public had regarding the episodes and the topics covered. Twitter
comments were chosen intentionally (the sample is not exhaustive nor random).
 POPULAR COMMUNICATION 111

Laso remembers her years before 1973 coup” or “Actress remembers hard times during
detention.”
At the same time, this lack of strong emotion on the part of the actress was possibly
due to the aforementioned lack of specificity on the part of the interviewer. Within this
narrative framing, Laso focused more on descriptions of whom she was with while
detained, both perpetrators and victims. She mentions seeing, for example, Marcia
Merino (“La Flaca Alejandra”), who had turned her in, as well as Osvaldo Romo,
one of her torturers. As she continued with her description, Laso also mentions that
she was with Muriel Dockendorff, whom she remembers as an important source of
friendship and support while she was detained and who remains “disappeared” at
present. This is the emotional climax of the interview, as Laso’s voice begins to falter
and crack and her eyes to water. For a late-night show dependent upon ratings and
sensationalistic coverage, this would be the core moment, with attendant close-ups and
prying questions, but Cretton, perhaps unaccustomed to such weighty testimonies,
instead opts to shore up his guest’s emotions, reading out to her supportive Tweets,
such as “Gloria Laso is a great woman!.”
However, Cretton does manage to ask her some final questions, about female political
prisoners and specifically whether there was sexual abuse in torture centers, to which Laso
responded: “Yes, there was. Well, in general in this country men are machista so there is
something that is very strong there. There has always been sexual torture, since the
beginning of time, but it . . . yes, it is abusive, and they touched you as much as they
wanted and when they wanted. That is what I lived through, and it is not pleasant.” In this
manner, Laso avoids discussing whatever sexual violence she herself might have lived
through, while concentrating the majority of her narrative on happier memories of times
during Allende and the solidarity and friendship she felt between herself and other female
political prisoners, and also denouncing, in rather general terms, the political persecution
she faced and its perpetrators.
This episode of MV had a relatively large audience and the hashtag #GloriaLasoMV was
a “trending topic” on Twitter. There were many messages of explicit support for Laso and
her character, such as “So clear, dignified, humane, serious” and “it would be great if all of
those fascist, blind people would listen to Gloria Laso’s words.” However, there were also
various comments that directly attacked her and her work, while making her out to be
some kind of political party shill for the center-left Concertación: “she’s been out of work
for a while, she reappears right before the presidential elections and with a dramatic story
after 40 years!!?” and “a pretty grotesque way to campaign before the elections.”

Figure 2. Coca Rudolphy, MV Interview, February 13, 2014.

112 H. HINER AND D. CASTRO

The second interview we analyze was between Cretton and another actress, Coca
Rudolphy, who was affiliated with the far-left armed group MIR prior to the 1973 coup.
Rudolphy was detained in November 1973 and tortured in the Buin Regiment for a week
before being transferred to the women’s jail, where she remained until being forced into
exile in England in January 1975. Rudolphy worked in British theatre for 10 years before
returning to Chile and resuming her career. Rudolphy was selected for this interview
because Sebastián Piñera named Carolina Echeverría to be undersecretary of the armed
forces and her father, retired colonel Víctor Echeverría, was head of the Buin Regiment’s
military intelligence. It was in this capacity, as a female survivor of Echeverría’s torture, that
Rudolphy sat down for an interview with Cretton on February 13, 2014.
Similar to his interview with Laso, Cretton adopted a relatively unassuming posture during
the interview, asking general questions about her detention and Victor Echeverría’s treatment
of her, as well as more pointed follow-up questions, but allowing for Rudolphy herself to
dictate the pace and tone of the interview. Also like the Laso interview, the use of black and
white and color stock video footage and photos of the Allende years and the 1973 coup mark
the program and the places and faces of those associated with her torture. This has the effect of
amplifying the historic and “true” nature of what they are narrating. However, Rudolphy’s
interview runs for 1 hour and 19 minutes, about half an hour less than Laso’s.
Rudolphy’s interview is also quite different from Laso’s in the sense that it is evident
that she has had comparably less experience narrating the torture that she experienced.
This is seen in Rudolphy’s nervous demeanor, her timid voice, and her shaking hands. Her
voice also trembles from time to time and she explicitly informs Cretton at the beginning
of the interview that she is very nervous. Perhaps due to this nervous energy, Cretton also
is a little bit stiff at times. Like the Laso interview, however, Cretton is also capable of
expressing warmth and empathy, closing with effusive thanks and words about how
interviews of this kind help to “heal” and contribute to greater “truth.” On the production
side, we observe that Rudolphy’s nervousness is seen as an invitation to melodrama. The
camera frequently zooms in to close-ups of Rudolphy’s face in the most dramatic parts of
her story or when she is physically struggling to convey her past trauma, and the
producers insert dramatic sounds and music in order to incite suspense and underscore
surprise. This is an example of what Judy Chaneton refers to as an example of “melodra-
matic imagination” (Chaneton, 2000, p. 167). Rudolphy’s testimony on how her experi-
ence of sexual political violence in the Buin Regiment began is narrated by her in this
manner and with a shaky voice:

There might have been five men, I would calculate, and they said to me, “take your clothes
off” [image cuts to black and white photo of detained men walking with hands behind head]
and I took off the sweater I was wearing. And they said, “take off your pants” and I was so
nervous that I took my pants and my underwear off [gesturing toward underwear] at the
same time and I was naked! . . . and they tell me to lay down and there is a cot and then they
open my legs and they begin to tie my legs and my arms . . . and then some abuses begin . . .
touching my vagina and asking questions like, “and what do you have there?” I didn’t know
that they did that to you in order to break you, to make you think that you are different . . .
and right away they said to me, “just so you know bleeping bleep we aren’t going to rape you,
we won’t let you enjoy that.”

Following this horrific memory of how they began to torture her sexually, physically,
and psychologically, Rudolphy goes on to narrate how they tortured her with electricity on
 POPULAR COMMUNICATION 113

the parrilla (barbeque grill), as the metal cot that she was tied to was called. She speaks of
how her entire body would literally jump off the cot when touched by the picana (cattle
prod) and how electricity was applied to the most sensitive, erogenous areas of the body.
She also talks about how her mind raced and how she thought about how to talk “without
implicating anyone else” since her torturers would be happy if she named anyone, even
people completely unrelated. At one point, she speaks of how electricity was applied to her
temples and her mouth, while touching her face, and when saying “mouth” the edges of
her mouth are drawn back suddenly, as though the memory itself has overtaken her and
provoked reenactment. While struggling to convey how the parrilla felt to her, it is clear
that words themselves become insufficient:
I felt like a cartoon character, that sticks its finger in the socket [makes gesture of sticking
fingers in socket] and [makes gestures with hands, stretching them out to her sides and lifting
them up so as to form a “U” shape, and shaking them, and then making gesture as if sparks
flying out of her head], the arrows [camera shot of Cretton as he asks, “like lightening?”],
[Rudolphy slightly nods] lightning bolts that came out of my head [camera close up of her
hands, which are held out from her body and almost intertwined, stretched upward, as she
searches for words, continued close up on her hands, alternating with close-ups of her face]
And . . . in one moment, it seems as though I passed out maybe twice and at some point I felt
[close up on hands has they move toward head] that my head was leaving me, it was floating
away and I could see myself down there.

The constant close-ups of Rudolphy’s face and hands, accentuated by red nail polish on
her fingers and tasteful makeup on her face, are used to great melodramatic effect by the
production. She literally uses her entire body to convey her memories of torture, and at
certain points, when words themselves fail, it is the body, through gestures and expres-
sions, that must try to convey the memory of the horror of torture. While Laso’s interview
was of someone who has already worked through many emotions and traumas and who
can now express with relative calm the events of the past, only “breaking” into emotion
when recalling particularly painful memories, Rudolphy’s is that of the survivor who is
still “working through” her trauma (LaCapra, 2006). She is nervous and unsure and her
voice is high-pitched; at times, she seems to almost be working through her trauma on air
at that particular moment. As to be expected, while there were supportive Tweets of a
nature similar to those for Laso’s interview, those that criticized her did so on the basis of
the perception of her as an “unstable” and therefore “unreliable” witness: “it seems to me
that Coca Rudolphy is always acting” or “from what psychiatric hospital did you get this
actress?” As in the case with centuries of misogynistic beliefs about “sick” women and
violence, the inability to express in a “rational” manner the violence suffered feeds into the
perception of the woman as “hysterical” and “crazy,” and, as such, not to be trusted.

Figure 3. Beatriz Bataszew, MV Interview with Beatriz Miranda, May 22, 2014.
114 H. HINER AND D. CASTRO

Finally, the third and final interview was between Cretton, Beatriz Miranda, and Beatriz
Bataszew and aired on May 22, 2014, a few days after the filing in court of a lawsuit for
sexual violence as a form of torture. The women included in the lawsuit, Nieves Ayress,
Alejandra Holzapfel, Soledad Castillo, and Nora Brito, did not appear on MV, but, instead,
Miranda and Bataszew were invited. This is perhaps not surprising given the public,
activist profile that Bataszew has assumed in Chile, speaking out often and vocally about
sexual political violence in the mass media. She is also very active in social movement
contexts, as part of the group Mujeres Sobrevivientes Siempre Resistentes and as part of a
group that is trying to transform the torture center Venda Sexy into a memory site. Both
Bataszew and Miranda were members of the MIR when they were detained; Bataszew was
brought to Venda Sexy in December 1974 and Miranda to Villa Grimaldi in January 1975.
In terms of the format of this interview, there are quite a few differences in comparison
with those of Laso and Rudolphy. While these last two were MV “events” that took up the
entirety or great majority of the block of its programming, and were introduced as the
“prime” topic of the show, this was not the case for the Bataszew/Miranda interview.
Rather, their interview is shorter, lasting only around forty-five minutes, and located in
the second block of programming. However, while shorter, the Bataszew/Miranda inter-
view has the advantage, from our point of view, of explicitly covering solely the topic of
sexual political violence, due to the recent lawsuit and the guests’ own expertise in this
area. Cretton’s questions, while similarly trying to maintain a comfortable and warm
atmosphere, are also much more directly pointed towards the gendered and sexualized
nature of the torture that they experienced. The title of the program is “Shocking cases of
sexual abuse during the dictatorship,” and the program’s hashtag is
#AbusoSexualEnDictaduraMV. Jean Philippe Cretton also explicitly introduces his guests,
Bataszew and Miranda, saying: “Our program is a sort of public plaza in which we discuss
diverse topics and one of those that we pay special attention to is that of human rights.”
This interview is also different because before beginning, the production runs a short
2½-minute video clip of Bataszew talking about her detention on the street outside of
what was once the torture center Venda Sexy. This is spliced with video images of stock
footage of the coup and images of Miranda and Bataszew walking through Villa Grimaldi.
After about a minute, the image also includes a small box in the lower right hand of the
screen, which alternately shows the faces of Bataszew or Miranda as they watch the clip in
studio. The clip closes with Bataszew making the case for transforming the former Venda
Sexy into a memory site, a human rights struggle that continues up until the moment of
this publication. When transitioning to the in-studio interview with Bataszew and
Miranda, Cretton repeats the importance of talking about human rights, stressing that it
goes beyond any “political colors” and underscoring the need for greater “truth.”
During the roughly 38 minutes of the Bataszew/Miranda interview the tone and style
of the interview are established from the beginning as strikingly different from those
done with Laso and Rudolphy. While both of these women were also former political
prisoners and survivors of torture, they largely spoke from their personal experiences as
survivors. The Bataszew/Miranda interview breaks with this to a certain extent, as both
women, but particularly Bataszew, talk pointedly about the gendered and sexualized
nature of their torture from a feminist standpoint. The first question from Cretton,
answered by Bataszew, is a repetition of the topic presented at the opening of the show:
“How common was rape during the dictatorship?” Bataszew responds, without
 POPULAR COMMUNICATION 115

hesitation or signs of nervousness, that it was very common, and launches into a
feminist analysis of sexual political violence. In that sense, they are also much more
political and activist in their interpretation of the past. Missing is the light humorous
commentary of Laso or the dramatic emotional close-up of Rudolphy. Rather, from the
very beginning, the invited women present themselves as empowered subjects who have
a political message to convey. At times, they appear to almost assume a pedagogical
role, informing Cretton, as well as the greater public, as to the events of the past. For
example, when Cretton asks Bataszew about the conditions of sexual torture in Venda
Sexy, she responds at once, noting that there were abuses of all kinds, from inap-
propriate touching to rape, and that there was a trained dog that raped women under
the tutelage of a female repressor, Ingrid Olderock. All of this horrific information is
conveyed in an entirely matter-of-fact manner, although Bataszew is also quite ener-
getic in her delivery, which would not be out of place in a college auditorium or
women’s group activity. Clearly, she knows what she is talking about and feels
comfortable conveying her message. Beatriz Miranda is also quite comfortable talking
about her experiences in Villa Grimaldi, and while she narrates them, in split screen
there are a series of images shown, such as photos of herself when young and video of
her walking around Villa Grimaldi. In fact, and perhaps due to the video clip that
opened the show, it is Miranda who speaks most to her personal memory of political
prison, while Bataszew primarily puts forth a feminist argument for understanding that
political prison and its attendant sexual political violence. For example, following
Miranda’s description of her time in Villa Grimaldi, and, answering Cretton’s question
about what it meant to be a young woman in political prison, Bataszew states:

I think it meant a lot, for the following reason . . . These guys, at least in Venda Sexy right?
they deeply hated you. Why? Because you were part of a world that at that time was
considered to be totally masculine, OK? Women were not supposed to be in politics,
women were not supposed to be in the public world, because of “public women” [which is
a term in Spanish that alludes to prostitutes]. Right? What are they? We women that were
in the public world, that were young women, pretty liberal if I say so, we didn’t enter into
that stereotype that the dictatorship wanted to force on women: the mother-woman, the
wife-woman, in the mother’s centers and all quiet, right? So I felt that, you felt the
irritability that it caused them [Cretton: you felt a special anger?] An anger, yes like
they said to you . . . Well, their reactions toward us were puta, maraca culiá . . . perra
(prostitute, slut, bitch).

This a clearly feminist argument, one that other feminist historians as well as
ourselves have espoused: that the military dictatorship used torture against female
political prisoners in order to extract information and punish them as leftist militants,
but also to discipline them as women. For that reason, we speak of the gendered and
sexualized nature of torture and of sexual political violence. However, outside of
feminist circles this interpretation is still questioned, by the typical right-wing pinoche-
tistas, but also by some circles of the center-left that do not “see gender” in human
rights abuses. Perhaps for this same reason, the Bataszew/Miranda episode was the
most controversial of the three MV interviews analyzed here. Its hashtag was a Twitter
trending topic for 14 hours following the airing of the program, and while there were
Tweets of support for the women, similar to those of the other two interviews, there
were also a great number of Tweets that completely condemned them and their
116 H. HINER AND D. CASTRO

feminist message. Examples of the misogynist hate directed toward them are “Who is
going to want to abuse this communists?,” “It’s incredible the hate and thirst for
vengeance on the part of these communists that is backed by TV channels,” “I don’t
believe them,” “These old coots just want money,” and “Stories and more stories . . .
sure, after 41 years I suddenly remembered.”

A few final reflections

The interviews that we have presented here, with torture survivors Gloria Laso, Coca
Rudolphy, Beatriz Miranda, and Beatriz Bataszew, have characteristics in common but
also exhibit differences among themselves. On the one hand, all of the interviewed women
risked public ridicule, rejection, and even possible legal action, if we remember the Alegría
case, in order to inform the Chilean public about sexual political violence. The relatively
flexible and informal context of the late night talk show, an amenable young host who
stressed the importance of “human rights” and “truth,” and the program’s heterogeneous
public meant that all of these women were able to convey relatively complex, and some-
times feminist, messages about sexual political violence to a public that was perhaps only
partially informed, or even completely ignorant, about the subject. The impact of televised
human rights interviews on greater society, especially on younger publics, as Feld (2016)
and Schlotterbeck (2014) have noted, is particularly important and should be more fully
incorporated into analysis of postdictatorial societies, feminism, and human rights.
However, there were also some aspects of these televised interviews that are worrisome
and should be analyzed in more depth in future publications. For example, as seen in the
Rudolphy interview and Twitter comments, the temptation to sensationalize women’s
testimonies, through production decisions such as “close-ups” on the face and hands and
the use of canned music and sounds, can create melodramatic elements that turn sexual
political violence into spectacle and banalize women’s testimonies. We echo the already-
mentioned criticisms of the paradoxes of “sexualized spectacle” (Marciniak, 2010), as well
as Sujata Moorti’s concerns on rape-as-titillation and spectacle (1998, p. 99). In the end,
however, we feel strongly that through the “speaking out” in Chilean mass media of
feminist activists, such as Beatriz Bataszew, who have become “theorists of their own
experience” (Alcoff & Gray, 1992, p. 12), through these embodied and empowered
testimonies, we can more fully question both universalist, ungendered representations of
past political violence, and the promotion of televised “rape scripts” and the reduction of
survivors of sexual political violence to being merely “victims.”
In that sense, we would hope to see more feminist activists who are also survivors of
sexual political violence be able to receive media training through human rights or
feminist groups. We would like to see them take control of the televised contexts of
their testimonies, and be able to express clearly and forcefully, as Bataszew herself did, a
feminist perspective on gendered state violence. Accordingly, journalists, television pro-
ducers, and other media personalities who wish to interview female survivors of torture
and sexual political violence should also previously meet and/or speak with the on-air
interviewees in order to establish interview parameters. They should respect those para-
meters when televising what survivors wish to speak about (and not), privileging this over
whatever ratings boost more sensationalistic or lurid representations of “sexual spectacle”
may afford them. We would also recommend the elimination of sensationalistic
 POPULAR COMMUNICATION 117

production elements that sometimes accompany these interviews, such as multiple

extreme close-ups on the face (many times in tears), the use of music to heighten
melodrama, and the use of dramatic and explicit lower third captions and hashtags.
Additionally, when reviewing these programs’ Internet comments we began to think
more deeply about the nature of human rights in Chile and how ideas are expressed
online. While it is true that Internet trolls, and even “gendertrolls” (Mantilla, 2013), have
become commonplace in online discussions of all types and thus have promoted largely
right-wing, patriarchal discourse, it is also the case that Chile remains a deeply politically
divided country. Perhaps more distressing, even, than the idea of someone purposefully
trolling a female survivor of sexual political violence is someone who does not believe that
this violence ever took place and/or that the topic of human rights in Chile is simply
trotted out in order to win elections or in order for victims to make money off of their
“stories.” This latter option, if true, would represent, perhaps, one of the most significant
failings of the supposedly “successful” transition to democracy in Chile and its human
rights discourse.

Funding
This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico
(Fondecyt de Inicio11130088).

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