Introduction: Doña Agustinaâs Son
Years ago, in 2008, I visited Doña Agustina in a village in the north of Chile. A humble woman in her late fifties, the widow of one of the desaparecidos of Augusto Pinochetâs military regime, she never recovered from the disappearance of her husband (how could one recover from such an event?). When I asked Doña Agustina about her experience in the days that followed the 1973 military coup, she stood in silence and after a while started weeping. At that moment, Doña Agustinaâs son, who was in his mid-thirties, came into the room and asked her if she was all right. He looked at me in a slightly disapproving way. The woman told me that her son did not approve of her giving interviews because they open a wound which she could not easily close afterwards. âThe interview finishes,â he protested, âbut the sorrow remains.â
As a result of this interview, ethical issues concerning the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee in contexts of political violence came up: how should we ask questions about desaparecidos? How should we listen to them, and what should we do with this knowledge? But it was the figure of the sonâwhose name I never askedâas the witness to and fellow of his widowed mother that has haunted me to the threshold of this book. His irruption on the interview pointed to the scope of political violence over time and its effects across generations.
When studying the polarization and social division that led to violence in El Salvador during the civil war period (1979â1992), Ignacio MartĂn-BarĂł stressedâagainst the prevailing wisdomâthe idea that war, or periods of generalized violence, affects not only the direct victims but the whole society, even those individuals who for various reasons do not themselves feel the effects of violence or even those who support it (1998). Considering this, to what extent has Pinochetâs regime truly ended for Doña Agustinaâs son, if his fatherâs corpse has never been found? To what extent is the sonâs experience of state violence similar to his motherâs? The analytical lens through which Doña Agustinaâs son can be seen is in some way uncertain. Indeed, Pinochet died in 2006, but the memory of the loss of his desaparecido father indubitably remains a presence for the son, complicating notions such as transition or reconciliation that are traditionally used in post-conflict societies. How does he mourn his fatherâs death: as an activist, as a son, as a witness of his motherâs grief? Does being the descendant of a victim of state violence impose certain duties on him? And if it does, what kind of duties?
A great deal has been said about the experience of the victims of the dictatorship in the 40 years since the military coup. During the last two decades, testimonial work has fostered a space for dialogue and acknowledgement within society and an official memory framework for remembering state violence has been created in Chile. However, this state-sponsored reflection on recent history has also had a paradoxical effect: it has partly eclipsed other forms of remembering state violence which we might call the grey zones of memory and which still haunt society. The latter deviate from the official memory of past atrocities, springing instead from complex experiences of ambivalence. These are neither militant nor victimized memories; rather than articulating forms of martyrdom or heroicism, they reveal the effect of violence on subjective and intersubjective life. These grey zones of memories 1 gainsay assumptions that official remembrance itself will lead societies directly to the construction of justice, and as such, posit new dilemmas for the post-transitional era.
This book is a critical exploration of one of these forms of the grey zones of memories: what it has meant to grow up during the dictatorship, focusing on the children of political militants in Chile in the early 1970s and how their remembrance of the military dictatorship is both a representation of a lived experience, a family and a cultural memory. 2 Although this bookâs case study is focused on Chile, it also speaks to other post-conflict societies in Latin America: Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, and El Salvador, to name a few. What these local histories have in common is that in the last few years new forms of witnessing have emerged in the twilight zone where the private and public memories are blurred: they are narrated by the adults who, as children, lived through past atrocities in the region. Narratives such as Princesa Montonera in Argentina (PĂ©rez 2012) and Finding Oscar: Memory, Massacre and Justice (Rotella and Arana 2012) in Guatemala are two pieces which deal with a generation that has inherited and inhabited a violenced world. Looking at multiple individual and generational responses to the dictatorial period in this book, I bring together heterogeneous experiences lived by the children of an event that has marked previous generations and spurred the crystallization of social violence. These experiences give the concept of individual, family, and cultural memory both embodied and affective underpinnings. This reflection has put me in fruitful dialogue with the Latin American literature on memory and the post-Holocaust American and European traditions of memory studies.
In a way, to explore the meanings of growing up in the aftermath of violence (after the military coup in this case) and the ongoing process of coming to terms with this past is also a reflection on what Judith Butler calls âthe tasks that follow political violenceâ (2003) and which Macarena GĂłmez-Barris has called its afterlife: âthe continuing and persistent symbolic and material effects of the original event of violence on peopleâs daily life, their social and psychic identities and their ongoing wrestling with the past in the presentâ (2009, p. 6). I echo here the statement of the anthropologist Veena Das in her introduction to Life and Words: â[M]y interest [âŠ] is not in describing these moments of horror but rather in describing what happens to the subject and world when the memory of such events is folded into ongoing relationshipsâ (2007, p. 8). It is in the double movement between the life which continues and the past which haunts the present, being part of it, that the aftermath and afterlife of violence takes place. Distancing the argument from the language of trauma, 3 for it does not convey the agency of witnessing, inhabiting, embodying, and remembering political violence, I draw attention to the everyday life strategies to cope with the legacies of state terror. 4 These are the modes by which violence was inhabited, normalized, and now rememberedâor forgotten.
During my fieldwork, it was striking that what I conceptualized as violent (not only physical, but also political and symbolic violence) was often not acknowledged as violence or was experienced as such but not named. For instance, the stigma of being the children of persecuted families still persists in small villages where the children, now grown, live. In a first approach to my interviewees the idea that âthe past is pastâ was dominant in rural areas, even today, when the state politics of memory has condemned those acts of state terror. However, as I interviewed people and talked in depth about past events, it became clearer to me that the past was much more present than usually described. Where mechanisms of intergenerational transvaluation have operated, experiences of family stigmatization in the past translate today into diffuse feelings of personal shame, of having a stain. But lingering malaise is not limited to the countryside; it also permeates urban contexts. Even decades after the return to democracy, I interviewed a successful executive who felt that he couldnât reveal at his company that he comes from a leftist background for fear that it could be detrimental to his career. These emotions are somehow frozen, muted, but also reproduced. This is something which was observed and reflected upon by MartĂn-BarĂł in El Salvador (1988, 1998). He describes what happens when falsehood becomes a way of life and people have to lead a double existence, or at least one where subjective experience is dissociated from social life. Or the continuous wilful ignorance that he found among peasants after lootings. No one knew, no one knows, no one remembered. These, for the social psychologist, were ways of surviving violence which have crystallized into social practices (1988). In both cases, the Chilean dictatorship and the guerrilla in El Salvador, a double standard was validated as a safe practice, protecting the subject from an authority whose power was threatening.
In the following section, I situate this book in its broader historical context in the region: the effects of the Cold War and the Dirty War in Latin America. Then, looking at the Chilean case, I track the political process from the post-dictatorial transition to the current context where the recognition and remembrance of human rights violations have become official. It is along this process where I locate the emergence of a new position in which history is both experienced and witnessed: the children of the dictatorship, who are today adults. Their voice has produced a new position through cultural memory, bringing with it a new ethic and new forms of intergenerational liaison. Then, I offer a theoretical discussion of the concept of âthe second generationâ by reviewing literature which comes from American, European, and Latin American scholars, reflecting on how this academic dialogue is relevant to understanding current challenges of the memory field in Latin America. I finish the section by describing the methods and the rationale of the book.
The Prelude to the Memory Division in Latin America
During the 1960s and 1990s, an intense process of social and political polarization took place in Latin America, which left thousands upon thousands dead, exiled, tortured, repressed, and imprisoned in the region. After the Cuban revolution (1953â1959), a wave of social upheaval, political awakening, and armed conflict spread through the region. Although the political conflicts had different local histories, they all had at their heart the structural problem of poverty and the unequal distribution of goods, particularly land.
In the 1960s, inspired by the Marxist doctrine and the Soviet revolution, guerrilla groups developed and fought against the state and the privileged elites it represented in various countries: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, to name some. In other countries, elected governments were overthrown and replaced by military dictatorships, encouraged by the USA and its national security doctrine: Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. In all of them, the armed forces assumed a new role in the region. They had a messianic discourse: they were supposed to bring order to societies experiencing multiple social pressures, defined by them as social chaos and even as a âMarxist cancerâ that had to be exterminated (Lira 1993; Stern 2006b). In other countries, Western political interests intersected with ethnic conflicts, such as the cases of Guatemala and Peru.
By the mid-1980s, Argentina and Uruguayâjoined soon by Chileâstarted a transitional process to end their military dictatorships. In the 1990s, followed by political transitions in Colombia transitions, the concept of memory has become an important battleground in the debates over and search for justice. Throughout the region, the political conflict which brought decades of terror and social division has triggered a long-term crisis of memory, brought on by opposing memory frames competing to give meaning to past events and to the sources of conflict (Constable and Valenzuela 1993; Lazzara 2006; Lazzara 2007; Stern 2006a). This has made testimony and memory, as well as the mechanisms of transitional justice, important devices in the process of coming to terms with violent pasts, which has proven complex. Museums and sites of memory have increasingly become part of local and state initiatives seeking to respond to demands for recognition by victims of violence: these have taken place in Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, and Chile, among others. In most of these countries, this crisis is now also being narrated by a new voice: that of the children or the descendants of victims who were the first-hand protagonists of these conflicts.
Coming to Terms with the Dictatorship in Chile: The Transition (1990â2006)
The Chilean transition to democracy after the 17-year-long dictatorship was a two-faced political process. Although it has been criticized for paving the way to neoliberalism, at the same time it has been recognized for effectively creating the conditions for the beginning of justice and the triumph of the memory of human rights violations during the dictatorship. An example of the former critique is TomĂĄs Moulianâs widely readâand considered by many as the most important piece of the periodâChile actual. AnatomĂa de un mito (2002). Influenced by the language of psychoanalysis, the theory of the collective denial of mourning was taken up by Moulian in order to describe how neoliberal ideology succeeded in defining subjectivity in terms of materialistic concerns and individualistic desires (2002). The book argues that the democratic transition was characterized by a forgetting about the past, a collective amnesia provoked by the neoliberal project, and the disciplining of Chileans as âcredit cards citizensâ. From a similar perspective, the cultural theorist Idelber Avelar stated: âThe Chilean dictatorial state operated culturally through the imposition of a veritable passion for consumerism, the absolute privatization of public life, the obsession with individual success and aversion to politics and collective initiativesâ (1999, p. 66). 5 Describing the transformations that followed the military coup, he shows the extent to which they surpassed the economi...