Changing Interpretations of the Pinochet Dictatorship and Its Victims in Chilean Memorial Inscriptions Since the End of the Cold War

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Chapter 4 Changing Interpretations of the Pinochet Dictatorship and its Victims in Chilean Memorial Inscriptions Since the End of the Cold War

Peter Read

The events of 11 September 1973 in Chile began seventeen distinctly hot years of the Cold War in South America. No one imagined that Pinochet’s coup was merely a civil war between young idealists and old conservatives, for the political ideologies of east and west had confronted each other in the continent for decades. While the Soviet Union may not have been as generous towards Chile as it was towards Cuba, Pinochet was in no doubt that his mission was to extirpate the “communist cancer” from Chilean public life and to return the country to the values of an earlier era.1 While debate continues on whether the US provided direct support for Pinochet’s coup, the CIA had a long history of engaging in covert actions in Chile by providing funds in support of electoral candidates, running anti-Allende propaganda campaigns, and had discussed the merits of supporting a military coup in 1970.2 Strong evidence indicates high-level collaboration between the two governments in eliminating previous officials of the Allende regime including, as we shall see, assassinating former US Ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976. In 1989, Chileans voted to end the Pinochet dictatorship and the first free elections in seventeen years were held. Early in 1990, Patricio Aylwin, head- ing a centre-left coalition, known as the Concertación, was elected President. The crimes of the Chilean recent past, a particularly malign chapter in Cold War history, could at last be judged, the survivors compensated, the guilty pun- ished and the dead memorialised. Yet it would be a long wait for recognition and commemoration of the victims of the dictatorship: the more than 3,000 Chileans who, on political grounds, had been executed or disappeared and the nearly 30,000 people who had been tortured or imprisoned.

1 “The Bloody Night of the General,” The Guardian, 9 September 1986. 2 United States of America, Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The Allende Years and the Pinochet Coup, 1969–1973,” accessed 23 August 2017, https://history.state.gov/ milestones/1969-1976/allende.

Aylwin at once dampened popular optimism by declaring that his presi- dency did not signify the “return” to democracy but constituted no more than a “transition” towards it. In his view, Salvador Allende had enjoyed no man- date to convert Chile into a socialist state and the intervention of Pinochet had only further divided an already-riven country. Nor was it only the political right, he asserted, that Allende had alienated, implying perhaps that some of those on the left had also become disillusioned with Allende and might them- selves therefore carry some of the blame for bringing about Pinochet’s coup.3 Aylwin made it clear that the members of his government would take no part in prosecutions. These were a matter for the Chilean courts.4 Paradoxically, perhaps, he initiated the first of two national investigations. In 1991, the Rettig Report examined state murder and disappearance.5 Although it made deci- sive judgements on the evils of the Pinochet regime, the final report, whose official records were sealed for 50 years, named no perpetrators but recom- mended various measures to memorialise the victims rather than undertake any further investigations.6 In the same year, Aylwin allowed the exhumation and identification of several hundred human remains in the infamous Patio (Precinct) 29 of the National Cemetery, into which had been cast, in the first month after the coup, hundreds of unidentified bodies. Since no perpetrator could be prosecuted, or even named, it was a compromise that suited the government and the immediate needs of many families who wished to recover the bodies of their loved ones in order to provide a proper burial. The military was assuaged and, thus protected from judicial procedures, could afford to appear conciliatory. The over-enthusiasm and the inexperience of the government’s forensic scientists, however, turned the project of bodily recuperation into a fiasco where maladministration and the misidentification of the skeletal remains were rife.7

3 Azócar Patricio Aylwin, “El desafio de mirar al futuro,” in Las Voces de la Reconciliación, ed. Hernán Larraín and Richard Nuñez (Santiago: Instituto de la Sociedad, 2013), 35–36. 4 Chile has jailed more perpetrators of violence committed in the name of the state than any other nation in South America, but it is the victims who have proceeded against them, not the state itself. 5 “Report of the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation” [“Rettig Report”], 1991, accessed 23 August 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rettig_Report. 6 The so-called Rettig Commission named 979 detained-disappeared (including illegal execu- tions and death from torture) and 1,319 politically executed. Amnesty International’s calcula- tions in 1996 totalled 3,107 victims of all forms of disappearance and death. 7 Marivic Wyndham and Peter Read, “‘From State Terrorism to State Errorism’: Post Pinochet Chile’s Long Search for Truth and Justice,” in “Where Are the Bodies? A Transnational