Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006
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Vol. 8, No. 2, Winter 2011, 342-356 www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente Review/ Reseña Steve J. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Charting the Emergence of a “Culture of Human Rights”: The Chilean Transition and the “Memory Question” Michael J. Lazzara University of California—Davis Steve Stern’s trilogy, The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile, has taught us that the “memory question” has been one of the most contentious issues on the Chilean politicocultural scene for nearly four decades. How to construct a narrative of the individual and social traumas that plagued Chile after September 11, 1973; how to build convivencia (the ability to live together civilly and peacefully, leaving aside the enmity solidified by the experience of a 17-year dictatorship); how to strive for justice, offer reparations to victims, and achieve some semblance of “reconciliation”: in Charting the Emergence of a “Culture of Human Rights” 343 short, how to construct a “culture of human rights” rooted in a genuine, non-evasive coming to terms with the past, have been key issues that Chilean society has dealt with, gradually, fitfully, painfully, since 1973. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (2004), Stern’s first volume, laid the theoretical groundwork for his two subsequent volumes by giving us a vocabulary for talking about memory in the Chilean case. In that volume, he identified four major emblematic memory scripts that Chileans used to discuss their recent past prior to Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London: 1) memory as salvation (the military’s well worn line that Pinochet saved Chile from the throes of Marxism and the brink of civil war); 2) memory as unresolved rupture (stories that view the coup as a cataclysmic catastrophe from which victims have never fully recovered); 3) memory as persecution and awakening (narratives that give a positive spin to the idea of unresolved rupture by emphasizing the nonconformist spirit of struggle that helped pave the way for democratic transition); and 4) memory as a closed box (a script proffered by many military regime supporters and even some Concertación politicians who felt it would be better for Chileans to forgive and forget). In book one, Stern showed how individual “loose” memories interfaced with the four aforementioned memory scripts, which proved capacious and flexible enough to accommodate variegated individual experiences. From there, volume two, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973-1988 (2006), painted a very detailed picture of two Chiles—that of the 1970s and that of the 1980s—in which certain dissident “voices in the wilderness” (the Catholic Church, emerging human rights organizations, victims and their families, etc.), shackled by a culture of fear, violence, and censorship, evolved into a more massive counterofficial political movement that would eventually oust the dictatorship in an October 1988 plebiscite. In book two, readers understood that memory (as a political and ethical imperative) didn’t appear out of nowhere in the 1990s, but was already being promoted by a number of valiant civil society actors since the very first days after the coup. Book three, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006, moves us forward in time to examine the tensions, frustrations, and negotiations that Lazzara 344 characterized the state of “memory” during Chile’s transition to democracy. The story, as Stern tells it, is one of slow but steady progress, of impasse and the unraveling of impasse, whereby Chileans, by 2006 (if not earlier) embraced as “cultural common sense” the idea that “memory mattered— that it brought forth fundamental issues of truth, justice, and morality” (6). Memory impasse, as Stern effectively shows, was never permanent. Standoffs occurred among actors along the way, but every small gain acted as a “wedge” (as Stern puts it) in the politico-cultural fabric that opened new space for a stronger culture of memory and human rights to emerge. Stern’s latest volume walks readers through Chile’s transition years chronologically, identifying key junctures in which memory ebbed and flowed and highlighting the intricate and often conflictive interplay among civil society and state actors around the “memory question.” The initial chapters pay attention to the “top-down” dynamics that set the climate for memory in the early 1990s, particularly the struggles of Patricio Aylwin’s government (1990-1994) to achieve truth and justice “en la medida de lo posible” amid an atmosphere of military saber rattling, Pinochetista judges, and authoritarian shackles on the polity. In that context, the memory issue proved divisive, contentious, and even explosive. However, it was an issue that wouldn’t just go away. Indeed the very moral and ethical foundations of an emerging democratic culture depended on how Chileans would confront their past, write history, tend to the victims, and reckon with the dead—and that moral imperative, at least in the beginning, implied a heavy involvement of political elites. The memory question, as Aylwin knew, was profoundly political insofar as the very existence of the ruling Concertación as a political coalition depended on its commitment to memory and human rights. The state, consequently, had to set the tone for a culture of truth, justice, and reconciliation. Yet in the long run, doing so would prove difficult and dangerous, thus resulting in an impulse to turn away from memory both for the post-Rettig Report Aylwin administration and its successor administration, the Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle government (1994- 2000). In moments of waning elite commitment, “bottom-up” pressures from civil society actors—despite periods of frustration, retreat, and ambivalence—helped to push memory forward and, on occasion, even Charting the Emergence of a “Culture of Human Rights” 345 sparked renewed interest in memory among the ruling class. Understanding this push and pull from above and below is crucial to Stern’s narrative and to the overall picture he paints of the Chilean transition. In the author’s words, his book “builds a historicized analysis of frictional synergies among civil society and state actors aligned (at least ostensibly) with human rights memory—the ups and downs and limits of collaboration, the deteriorations that moved tension among partners from the ‘frictional’ to the openly ‘conflictive,’ the exclusions and limitations that fed into sensibilities of frustration and disappointment, the shifting map of social actors as judges, youths, and prisoner-survivors took on distinct roles in the reckonings of the late 1990s and early 2000s” (9). Reckoning with Pinochet directly challenges two facile commonplaces that have often cropped up in analyses of Chile’s transition to democracy. The first commonplace is that Chile, throughout its transition, was a culture of amnesia. Reading Stern’s trilogy proves that this clearly was not the case. Although there were political actors and groups who actively promoted forgetting the past—like the military or big business interests married to Pinochet’s neoliberal project—the past was never really forgotten. Memory erupted in many decisive moments that were both official and unofficial in nature: for example, the publication of the Rettig Report; the discovery of bodies at Lonquén; the imprisonment of Manuel Contreras, former head of DINA (or the subsequent imprisonments of other military officers); Pinochet’s detention in London; the Dialogue Table; the public “outing” of torturers (or funas); the creation of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park; the Valech Commission on torture; and the death of Pinochet, to name just a few. Instead of being viewed as a culture of amnesia, Stern argues that Chile’s transition might better be characterized as a period of “contradiction and ambivalence” (361). Particularly for the human-rights oriented memory camp, post-1990 society “yielded not an absence of gains, but a dynamic of hard-fought limited gains—always inadequate, always at risk of becoming the last gain, yet also a potential stepping stone” (361). Memory did not follow a linear path, but by the 2000s even the armed forces and most actors on the political right had changed their tune about Pinochet. Significantly, the script of memory as Lazzara 346 salvation that was so prevalent up until 1998 ceased to hold sway in the Chile of the new millennium. A second commonplace that Stern challenges is the widely accepted idea that the Chilean transition was “pacted,” that is, that it was a transition forged out of accords and consensus-based politics among political adversaries. The notion of a pacted transition gained traction among political scientists in the early 1990s and quickly spread to other disciplines in which reflection on post-authoritarian transitions was happening. The idea had staying power, so much in fact that it is difficult to find studies on Chile that do not invoke it when characterizing the political dynamics of the post-1990 moment. Stern does not reject the idea outright, but rather seeks to “move beyond” the core insight in order to refine it (365). He wants to consider more precisely “the boundaries of pacts, their necessary frictions, and their consequences over time, when placed alongside other social dynamics” (365). Indeed, pacts are part of the founding logic of Chile’s transition, but Stern’s book proves that historical research