CIAO DATE: 05/2011
Volume: 11, Issue: 0
June 2011
Remembering the Past and Struggling for Justice: The Contested Legacy of Authoritarian Rule in Chile (PDF)
Rebecca Evans
Chile holds special significance for scholars. Not only was it the first country to democratically elect a Marxist president who sought to lead a peaceful transition to socialism, it was also a prominent example of democratic breakdown and brutal military rule. The Chilean dictatorship not only practiced the terrible techniques that became part of Latin American “dirty war” campaigns, it also took a lead role in planning assassinations and coordinating intelligence operations with security agencies from other military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. In the early 1990s, Chile exemplified a more general trend to accept immunity as the price of social peace. By the end of the decade, however, Chile signaled another trend: a new willingness to push for legal accountability by holding regime officials criminally liable for human rights abuses committed under their rule. With Pinochet’s arrest in London in October 1998, Chile offered another first: the first legal ruling against a former head of state for violating international human rights law. Chile therefore serves as an important case of democratic breakdown, redemocratization, and transitional justice.
Steven J. Stern
In Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988, Stern analyzes the evolution and contestation of different memory frameworks under military rule. Ultimately, he argues that Chile’s democratization was made possible by a shift in collective attitudes that gave the political opposition the momentum it needed to negotiate a successful transition to democracy. This shift, in turn, depended on overcoming the fear that prevented Chileans from challenging authoritarian rule. From this perspective, Chile’s transition to democracy was a contingent process that depended less on objective conditions than on subjective assessments of power and legitimacy. While such an approach offers valuable insight into the role of societal actors in democratic transitions, it tends to underplay the conditioning influence of socioeconomic structures and political institutions as well as the contingent choices made by political elites (Karl 1990: 6)
Steven J. Stern
Although Pinochet was forced to step down as president, the terms of the transition stipulated that he would remain commander-in-chief for the next eight years and become a senator for life thereafter. Together with the system of appointed seats in the Senate and the binomial electoral system, this allowed conservative elements to block legislation that they opposed. Meanwhile, continuity in judicial appointments ensured that the courts would not initiate legal action against regime officials. Although “documenting and coming to terms with human rights violations under military rule played an important role in the political legitimacy of the ruling Center-Left coalition that steered Chile’s democratic transition,” post-transition Chile remained deeply divided over truth and justice issues (Stern 2004: 128). The rival memory camps that characterized Chile under military rule remained, as Stern illustrates through interviews conducted in the mid to late- 1990s with Chileans from different social strata and ideological perspectives. Chile’s “moral schizophrenia” resulted in an impasse, in which efforts to take “the logical 'next steps' along the road of truth and justice” were “exceedingly slow and arduous,” with frequent setbacks along the way (Stern 2004: xxix)
The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (PDF)
Naomi Roht-Arriaza
In his study of the construction and evolution of contrasting memory frameworks in Chile from 1973-1988, Stern explores the impasse that eventually emerged between memory and forgetting, accountability and immunity. For Roht-Arriaza, Pinochet’s arrest in 1998 and the transnational judicial investigations that preceded and followed it broke through the impasse. They did this by prompting investigations and prosecutions at the national level, jump-starting the stalled process of accountability, and triggering public debate. This, in turn, offers the “best starting point for real reconciliation” (Roht-Arriaza: 224). Though the competing memory camps that divided Chile from 1973-1988 have faded, they still exist. Angry differences erupted following Pinochet’s death in December 2006, as rival crowds gathered to mourn and to celebrate, with “a joyous throng chanting and singing for a loathed dictator at last dead, against inconsolable tears and fury that the hospital’s flag hadn’t been lowered to half-mast” (Vogler 2006). The government’s decision not to grant the general a state funeral met with protests from die-hard Pinochet supporters, while its decision to allow him to be buried with military honors triggered criticisms from Pinochet’s opponents. In December 2008, following a ceremony initiating the construction of a new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, critics on the right voiced concern that the museum will present a biased view of history and will fail to acknowledge errors on the left that led to the 1973 coup. Meanwhile, critics on the left denounced any move to establish shared responsibilities for the coup and expressed their concern that the museum would downplay the suffering and resistance of victims of the dictatorship in the name of reconciliation and national unity (Estrada 2008)