Chilean exiles in East Germany

I was really interested by this half-hour documentary on Chileans behind the Berlin Wall which I found via Memoria documental.

Chile: Andrés Cruzat's photomontages of Santiago coup

Photomontages of old and new images which remind us "how things were" have become a bit of a fad recently.

See, for example, this photo slideshow of Cologne, Germany, on Youtube. The clip was extremely popular, but some people, including in the Youtube comments, express concern that it is somehow an overly patriotic view of history - something which is, from the German point of view, highly problematic. There are all sorts of questions surrounding the appropriateness of mourning Germany's loss of architectural heritage and nostalgia for "what could have been".

See also these images of the Second World War in Google Street View. The "montage" in this case is not subtle - it's just a photo pasted on top of the Google image - but the idea of the continuity of place and memory is there.

Now we come to Chile.

Andrés Cruzat's images of modern-day Santiago combined with original photos of the September 11 coup do not to me seem "suspect" in the same way that some Germans felt the Cologne ones did. Rather, they take the contemporary environment, where it is often easy to forget the past, and say "Look what happened here!". One comparison which often comes up in these montages is that of ghosts - but despite the colour, it seems to me that the modern figures here as just as "ghost-like" as the 1973 ones. You can't really decide which side is more "real", it's just a layering of memory and history - the urban palimpsest in an image, as it were.

Lots more photos to see at the link below, or look at Twitter account  @fotomemoria.


"La Persistencia de la Memoria" el fotomontaje de Andrés Cruzat (cooperativa.cl)

Update on Chilean archives piece

I recently wrote a piece for NACLA on Londres 38 and the "No más archivos secretos" campaign. Well, there has been a development since I wrote that: the Colonia Dignidad files handed to memory organisations by Chilevisión may now be viewed online (in PDF form). There are thousands of pages here and huge PDFs may not be not the easiest way of accessing them, but the documents have only been out in the open for a very short time and it was apparently a priority to get them on the web asap. It's really amazing to see that an archive which was completely hidden at the beginning of the year can now be read by anyone with an internet connection and Adobe reader.

Chile: Lifting the Sentence of Secrecy

I've been doing a little writing elsewhere and have a piece up at Nacla on Chile's secret archives and recent moves to open them up. Read the full thing here.

Chile: Priest involved in irregular adoptions

While Argentina is well known for the stolen babies during its dictatorship, there have been allegations of irregular adoptions in other countries, such as Spain and now Chile.

The Catholic Church in Chile has confirmed that priest Gerardo Joannon was involved in the adoption of two babies without the knowledge of their mothers in the 1970s or 1980s, and also that he had an "inappropriate relationship" with one of the women. He apparently even conducted masses for "dead" babies whom he in fact knew to be alive.

The pattern seems to be that single pregnant women were pressured to give up their children for adoption, and if they refused, they were told that they had died during childbirth and the children were given up anyway.

The Church wanted Joannon to go to Spain on retreat but Chile has now said he cannot leave the country while police investigations are ongoing (good!).

The situation in Argentina was even more brutal and also less ambiguously linked to the military junta. There, "subversive" prisoners who were found to be pregnant were deliberately kept alive in detention centres until they gave birth and then murdered, while their babies were sold or given away, usually to families regarded as "good" or with military connections.

In Chile, it remains to be seen whether the practice of taking babies from women deemed "inappropriate" mothers was widespread; I think this certainly can't be ruled out. I'm sure it would be more convenient for the Church and the State if Joannon turned out to have been acting more or less alone, but this may not be the full story. Even without an organised "baby-stealing" plan, it is also possible that the atmosphere in Chile at the time - conservative, authoritarian - made it extremely difficult for vulnerable people to question or stand up to representatives of the Church, who judged that they had the intervene in the children's future.

Investigación por adopciones irregulares confirma participación de Gerardo Joannon en dos casos (La Tercera)
Chile's Catholic Church Says Priest Stole Babies for Adoption (Newsweek)
Chilean priest probed after 'stolen babies' scandal (BBC)

Guardian special report on transitional justice

I thought it was worth linking to this special report from the Guardian newspaper on how various countries, including Chile and Colombia, have dealt with their traumatic pasts. The article is necessarily an overview so it doesn't reveal much to someone who is already well-read about a particular country - but I'd be surprised if anyone was well-read about all those countries, and the transcontinental comparison is really interesting.

[Colombian] President Juan Manuel Santos, re-elected in June to a second term, denies impunity is on the table, but says demanding full punishment would derail peace. "If you ask a victim today he would lean towards having more justice," said Santos. "If you ask a future victim, he will lean more towards peace."

Special report: Truth, justice and reconciliation (Guardian)

Chile: The Year I was Born

A couple of years ago, I wrote briefly about Lola Arias' play My Life After (Mi vida despues) in which the Argentine characters discuss their parents and their involvement in the dictatorship. Now, Arias has turned to Chile with a piece called The Year I was Born (El Año en que nací), which also uses material like photos, letters and old clothing in the performance.

As the name suggests, the cast were all born during the Pinochet dictatorship.

"To be part of this show was a big decision for all of those involved and not always an easy one," explains Arias. "Those whose family history includes relatives who were killed or suffered badly under Pinochet stand side by side on stage with those whose family members worked for the regime. Some come from families who chose to stay and resist, and others from those who went into exile."
[...]
While Viviana Hernandez was researching her history for the show, she discovered that the father she had been told was dead is serving a prison sentence for his part in the murder of two opponents of the Pinochet regime.

Pinochet generation draw on real-life tensions to play out Chile's dark days (Guardian)

For more on Hernandez' amazing story, see: The Father I Never Knew

Chile: "Nazi" school causes outrage

This is one of those stories where you wonder whether you should give it the publicity, but for interest's sake, here goes.

A self-proclaimed advocate of Nazism from Chiloé, Godofredo Rodríguez, plans to open a school called the "Escuela de Arte Nazi Presidente General Augusto Pinochet" in Ancud. The school uses a swastika as its logo and has, not surprisingly, provoked a certain amount of indignation in the area. Various politicians have protested and today it was reported that Rodríguez has been arrested on an open charge of theft.

Rodríguez does appear to be crazy; the conflation of "Nazism" and Pinochet, and the claiming that "others do the same with Salvador Allende, and he was a Jew and a freemason" are pretty hard to take seriously. But of course, this is not to say that the people of Ancud want to see posters with swastikas around the place and it does raise questions about people's right to propagate their own view of history. In Germany, use of Nazi imagery would not be allowed and if Rodríguez tried denying the Holocaust, that would not be allowed either. There is nothing to stop anyone in Chile denying the disappearances and tortures that happened under Pinochet.


Amplio rechazo a “Escuela de arte Nazi Augusto Pinochet” en Chiloé (Diario U Chile)
Ex diputado Ascencio pide a intendente de Los Lagos prohibir "escuela Nazi" en Ancud (La Tercera)

A Nazi School in Chiloé (ilovechile.cl)

PDI detiene a creador de escuela nazi de Chiloé (El Mostrador)

Book review: Carmen Castillo's Un día de octubre en Santiago

 

Carmen Castillo, Santiago de Chile: Ein Tag im Oktober (Rowohlt, 1981, trans. from the French by Anna Kamp) (out of print in German but used copies available; Spanish edition available for Kindle - no English translation, as far as I can tell)

I was walking home a few weeks ago when I passed a house with various old books laid out on the windowsill. It's quite common here to put unwanted items outside for people to help themselves if they want them, so of course I took a look at the rather bashed-up offerings and this caught my eye.

I initially thought it was a novel, but when I started reading I realised it was a memoir of a Chilean militant who went underground after the 1973 coup and eventually went into exile in France. Carmen Castillo was a member of the leftist Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) and married to its co-founder, Andrés Pascal Allende (nephew of Salvador Allende). She went underground with another MIR leader, Miguel Enríquez, who was killed by the DINA (secret police) on 5 October 1974. This is the "day in October" referred to in the title of the book. Castillo, who was pregnant, was wounded in the attack that brought down Enríquez. She was detained for some time but eventually allowed to leave the country. Her baby was born in England but only lived for a few weeks. She wrote the book while living in Paris.

Castillo describes her life in hiding, the torture undergone by her comrades, and what various people were doing on the 5 October, the momentous day when Miguel was killed. The book is only about 150 pages long and her prose is sparse, but not unfeeling. The passages about the torture suffered by the militants are difficult to read, but the admiration Castillo feels for the bonds of loyalty between her comrades is very clear. A more ambiguous character is "la flaca Alejandra", an MIR militant who works for the DINA following her capture. Castillo does not merely condemn this treachery, she describes Alejandra's physical condition and her explanation that, when the DINA take her out on the street to point out MIR members, her uncontrollable trembling alerts her captors to the fact that she has recognised someone.

The book is interesting for several reasons: Castillo knew many important figures in the MIR and describes them as personal friends, not just as historic personalities; for the same reason, it can be somewhat confusing for the reader even with the translator's notes. She is also writing from the perspective of exile and grapples with the question of returning to dictatorship-era Chile (which, in the end, she did not). I had never previously really considered the practicalities of guerrilla movements in the pre-digital age: the assigned meeting points and back-up meeting points, the secret messages, the struggle to secure a safe house, the need to be able to rely on one's comrades. In a note to them at the end of the text, Castillo writes that "this is not a political book, but it does tell a political story". She sums it up well.

Castillo later became a documentary filmmaker; I haven't seen any of her work, but I will now seek it out.

Chilean human rights abusers continue to receive military benefits

Chilean online paper Cambio 21 reports on calls for former high-ranking military officers to be demoted to prevent them from receiving military pensions and benefits.

Jailed human rights abusers including former DINA head Manuel Contreras apparently continue to receive pensions - in the case of Contreras, amounting to 3,000,000 pesos a month. Human rights groups want them to be stripped of such benefits, as well as the right to use ranks, uniforms, etc. A proposal for demotion was made by deputy Gabriel Ascencio in 2010, but has yet to be carried out. Lawyer Nelson Caucoto says that the problem would be making the decision retroactive, ie, applying to those perpetators already jailed and not just those affected by future trials.

Pedirán degradar a Manuel Contreras para que no siga recibiendo un sueldo cercano a los tres millones de pesos mientras está preso (cambio21.cl)

Places of memory in Chile: Casa de los derechos humanos, Punta Arenas

This is the Casa de los derechos humanos, situated on Avenida Colón 636, Punta Arenas. The plaque next to the door states that it was a detention and torture centre during the dictatorship.

As far as the history of the site is concerned, memoriacolectiva.com informs us that the building was the principal site of interrogation and torture in the province of Magallanes and that "hundreds" of prisoners passed through there. It was known as "Palacio de las Sonrisas" (Palace of Smiles) and had previously functioned as a naval hospital. The building is three storeys high and, according to memoriaviva.com, contained both offices and rooms used for torture, including electric shocks.

It's worth noting that this building in right in the centre of Punta Arenas, just off the main shopping street. It's not hidden or in an isolated position at all.

This place was closed up when I went past, but it is apparently used for human rights-related activities such as this one and these. I did a little research and it seems that last year there was talk of the Chilean ministry of national assets taking back the building and changing its use. This was met with protests and as far as I can tell, it was resolved that the building would continue to be used for community activites and even become the site of a memory museum. At the end of 2012, Patagonian paper El Pinguino described the building's future as "uncertain", but this June it reported in brief on the approval of a museum project. Good news, if accurate.

EL PALACIO DE LAS SONRISAS (memoriacolectiva.com)
Antiguo Hospital Naval, Punta Arenas (memoriaviva.com)

Places of memory in Chile: Parque Cultural de Valparaiso

Valparaiso has an unusual cultural park situated in a former prison, which operated from 1906 to 1999.

The site is still very obviously an ex-jail. At one point, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer was controversially commissioned to change it into a fully-fledged cultural centre, but the plan was eventually dropped. Instead, the park was designed by Jonathan Holmes, Martin Labbé, Carolina Portugueis and Osvaldo Spichiger - the Architectural Review has a lot more detail on this.

This message, drawing to the jail as a detention and torture centre during the dictatorship, was sprayed onto the pavement outside the site.

La Tercera has an article about a photographic exhibition which took place in the park this year, which unfortunately I didn't get the chance to see, but it featured works by Nelson Muñoz Mera taken just after the prison stopped working. Very interesting images, check them out. 

Someone in Valparaiso remarked to me that it was a bit odd to go to a concert in a former prison, but as regular readers of this blog know, I am a fan of using sites of memory and not locking them away or preserving them in aspic, so I don't really have a problem with it. Whether former prisoners would want to go back and see it now is of course another matter, but the city is not sweeping its past under the carpet here, it's making use of it, and I like that.

Places of memory in Chile: Memorial in Valparaíso

This is the monument for the detained-disappeared and persons executed for political reasons of the region of Valparaíso (Monumento a los Detenidos Desaparecidos y Ejecutados políticos de la Dictadura Militar de la Región de Valparaíso), Chile's second city and major port. And, as you can see here, it also acts as a convenient seat for students of the nearby university.

The memorial was designed by a team formed of sculptor Eliana Herrera, architect Hernán Bustamante and anthropologist Javiera Bustamante, who won a public competition. 

The stone base of the memorial contains the names of 177 victims of the dictatorship between 11 September 1973 and 10 March 1990.

The top part of the memoria resembles a wave and is formed of 86 iron sheets of varying heights. The designers said that it represented the sea as a source of life and symbolised a fragment of the history of Chile. The names of the men and women were "engraved there forever to defeat forgetting". 

Memorial por desaparecidos y ejecutados (El Mercurio de Valparaíso)
Emplazado en Avda. Brasil y Rodríguez:VALPARAÍSO INAUGURA MEMORIAL EN HOMENAJE A SUS 177 VÍCTIMAS DE DERECHOS HUMANOS (ddhh.gov.cl)

Places of memory in Santiago: Monument to the disappeared

Municipal workers in Chile were striking during my visit and there was a notice on the entrance to the main cemetery in Santiago saying that it was only open for funeral services, but the guards weren't stopping people going in, so I managed a quick visit to the monument to disappeared people and executed political prisoners.

Its full name is the Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido y del Ejecutado Político (memorial for detained-disappeared people and those executed for political reasons).

At the side of the monument itself are niches, some of them empty and some with victims' names and flowers.

The main monument itself is a large, stone wall with a list of victims carved into it. As with other such walls, the effect is largely due to the sheer number of names. In the very centre is president Salvador Allende.

The memorial is topped with a quotation from Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, who you can hear reading here.

 

I always really like seeing a memorial used, actually part of the fabric of life. In this case, at the bottom of the memorial are many notes, photos, little plaques, flowers, and so on. It's a sombre site but then, it is in a graveyard. The important thing is these victims did not previously have anywhere where their families could go to mourn them and to mark their lives, and now they do, and they are acknowledged in the chief cemetery of the capital city as being part of the country's history.

Places of memory in Santiago: La Moneda

Chile's presidential palace, November 2013 (image mine):

Chile's presidential palace, September 1973 (image from here):

Places of memory in Santiago: Londres 38

I

In a pleasant, tree-lined street in the barrio París-Londres is Londres 38, a former detention and torture centre. It was approproated by the military regime following the coup, having previously belonged to the socialist party. It was used by the DINA (secret police) as a torture and holding centre for regime opponents, at least 98 of whom died there or afterwards. In front of the building, victims' named are embedded among the cobble stones (similar to the Stolpersteine in Germany).

 Visitors are free to walk around and take photographs; they receive a plan of the building with some information or can take a guided tour.

I was initially a little surprised at the condition of the walls, but of course it makes far more sense to see it like this than artificially spruced up. You certainly get more of a sense for the suffering that took place there; although it's also really amazing to think how central the location is. Ilovechile.cl writes that the building was known for the loud classical music coming from it - pretty chilling when you realise what that music was covering up.

 Upstairs during my visit there was a small exhibition of photographs.

The building is not huge and although very interesting, it doesn't provide a great deal of background. If you're unsure of the history, think about joining a tour or read up beforehand. The site is free to enter but please consider making a donation if you visit.

Londres 38 (derechoschile.com - info from the Rettig report, in English)
Londres 38 (ilovechile.cl)

Places of memory in Santiago: Memory museum

Where better to start a tour of memory places in Chile than at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos? It's a large and striking site:

Alright, so in one sense it's a green, glass box but I don't mean that as a criticism at all. You walk down towards the entrance and it's impressive.

 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights features on an external wall:

The museum declares that it is "a school" and one positive thing I noticed while I was there was the many school groups. The first one I saw, the kids were quite young (pre-teens) and the teacher made them all sit on the floor and dictated a long lecture to them, telling them off when they asked her to repeat difficult words. They were perhaps too young, at least for that kind of visit. But there were groups of older teenagers who seemed very engaged.

There was also an external exhibition comparing the situation in many different countries:

Sadly you're not allowed to take photographs inside, which is a real shame, because the most striking feature for me is the huge wall of photographs of the disappeared reaching up across the entire space. There is also a point where you can stand and look out at it and locate individual names and faces.

On the ground floor various terminals show footage of the 1973 coup and its aftermath. As you move upstairs, different areas cover aspects like exiles and international solidarity, media coverage, and torture - including, chillingly, an electric shock device (made by General Electric - not suggesting they intended it to be used for that purpose!). There are also items made by prisoners and photographs of memorial sites throughout Chile.

The museum was quite busy when I was there on a Friday morning, which is really not always the case in Latin American museums. It was fascinating to see people engaging with the material. One guy was so absorbed in the video of the return to democracy and the "No" campaign (roughly the period covered in the recent film "No" starring Gael García Bernal), he was watching it when I started looking round the floor and still there when I had finished.

The memory museum is free to enter and it is a large, slick site which must have been extremely expensive to build. While this is laudable, when I discussed the museum with Steven in Santiago, he expressed the opinion that it could be a bit more forthright in asking for donations and I completely agree. Many visitors could afford to give something and it is not mentioned or even really obvious how to do this (there's a slot in the front desk, or you can buy a catalogue for CLP 10,000 and this includes a donation; there should be catalogues in the shop but I had to ask for one to be brought up for me). It's one thing making your museum accessible and it's another not even gently directing people to the opportunity to support it.

Anyway, I think Chile really sets a standard here to which it will be interesting to compare, for example, the Lugar de la Memoria in Peru. One thing to note is that this is explicitly not a space where you will get some sort of pseudo-neutrality or weighing up of the pro- and anti-Pinochet factions as equal. As it states in the catalogue,

the task of building a memory must be guided by a moral compass; we must build a reading of the collective trauma that goes above and beyond what is evident, a history of victims and criminals, guilty and innocent. The goal in the museum's construction of memory is to become a space that assists the culture of human rights and democratic values in becoming the share ethical basis of our present and future coexistence. Only in this way can we empower our claim of NEVER AGAIN.

Memoria Chilena (5)

Exiled Chileans, 1973.

Image credit: Exiliados chilenos . Disponible en Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-70719.html .

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Memoria Chilena (4)

This is the cover of APSI after the victory of the "no" campaign in the 1988 referendum. 

Image credit: APSI: n° 272, octubre de 1988 . Disponible en Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-81480.html .

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Memoria Chilena (3)

Poet Pablo Neruda at a Communist Party event, around 1970. 

Image credit: Neruda en un acto del Partido Comunista, hacia 1970 . Disponible en Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-72668.html .

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