Systematic human rights violations, whether state-sponsored or not, rarely leave behind a paper trail accounting for the unfolding of atrocities. Denial, silence and impunity are often the norm. However, what happened in Chile during and after the brutal military regime led by General Pinochet (1973–1990) reveals a different experience.
When political violence erupted in Chile, following the military offensive against the Popular Unity government of 1970–1973, and against Chile’s civilian population, people from poor neighbourhoods the length and breadth of the country turned to local churches and faith communities for protection. The Catholic Church hierarchy joined forces with leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran, Methodist, Methodist Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Baptist and Orthodox churches, and representatives of the Chilean Jewish community, to assist victims of repression and make public the dire testimonies they began to accumulate as a result. This interfaith effort gave rise to the Comité de Cooperación para la Paz en Chile (Committee for Cooperation for Peace in Chile; henceforth, ‘Comité Pro Paz’ or ‘Comité’), an organisation which started operating on 9 October 1973, less than a month after the coup d’état. In January 1976, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity, henceforth ‘Vicaría’) resumed the Comité’s work, just days after the former had been forced to close under direct pressure from General Pinochet. The Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas—FASIC (Christian Churches’ Social Assistance Foundation), was another ecumenical effort, founded in 1975. Other organisations also emerged to defend human rights, including the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos—AFDD (Association of Relatives of the Disappeared), which began meeting at the Comité Pro Paz offices in late 1974. In 1978, the (non-state) Comisión Chilena de Derechos Humanos (Chilean Human Rights Commission) was created by a group of lawyers. The Fundación para la Protección de la Infancia Dañada por los Estados de Emergencia—PIDEE (Foundation for the Protection of Childhood Harmed by States of Emergency) was established in 1979; the Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo—CODEPU (Corporation for the Promotion and Defence of the Rights of the People) was created in 1980; and the Centro de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos—CINTRAS (Centre for Mental Health and Human Rights) began providing medical and psychological care to victims in 1985. Three years later, in 1988, the Instituto Latinoamericano de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos—ILAS (Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights) was founded by a team of psychologists and psychiatrists who had previously worked at FASIC.
Under the watchful eye of the dictatorial regime, these organisations provided moral, legal, medical, psychological, social, economic and educational support to victims of repression. Their tasks included arranging for exile, political asylum, or forced migration for people who were in need of these. They visited prisoners in jails, concentration camps and prisons, and took testimony. They also searched persistently for victims of enforced disappearance. With help from survivors, they uncovered clandestine places of detention, classified forms of repression, identified perpetrators, and discovered a repertoire of torture practices. They made use of a range of legal devices in the defence of persecuted people, restituting this fundamental right. They generated statistics and published reports and books about the repressive situations they encountered; compiled press cuttings and photographic archives; and published magazines and pamphlets that informed people about social, economic and political realities. The organisations were keenly aware from the outset of the importance of registry for day-to-day management as well as for the country’s future. Accordingly, they systematically compiled and classified evidence of military abuses. As we will see over the course of this book, staff successfully protected, preserved and added to the documentary collections during the entire dictatorship period, despite great risk.
Thus a form of collective assistance, denunciation and resistance germinated within days of state violence being unleashed, and persisted throughout the 17 long subsequent years of dictatorial rule. This experience was unique or at least unusual, certainly in relation to Chile’s own past and perhaps also when compared to experiences of oppression elsewhere. All of these actions went against the tide imposed by fear, isolation and persecution, steadily building a network of solidarity and support under extremely menacing and dangerous circumstances.
The documentation of atrocity was at the heart of this humanitarian endeavour. By resisting the distorted explanations offered by dictatorship authorities during the regime, documentation contributed to understanding of the characteristics and magnitude of the repressive practices perpetrated by the state, consequently bolstering national and international repudiation of the government. Once the dictatorship was replaced at the polls in 1990, a number of the organisations that had formerly provided these services undertook the systematisation, preservation and digitalization of their archives, opening them to public access. Such was the case of the Fundación de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad—FUNVISOL (Documentation and Archival Foundation of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad), which contains the records of both the Comité and the Vicaría. These were the origins of what have since become known as Chile’s ‘resistance archives’, or ‘human rights archives’ (da Silva and Jelin 2002; Caswell 2014). This extensive compendium of documents registers abuses of power committed against citizens (Rivas 2016); shows how the repressive apparatus functioned; and, in some cases, identifies perpetrators. In the post-dictatorship period, the documentation gathered in Chilean human rights archives has served as a source, and as evidence, for official truth commissions (in 1991, 1996, 2004, and 2011); reparations programmes (beginning in 1991), judicial prosecutions (especially from 1998 onwards); the definition of a public and private human rights institutional apparatus; the constitution of memory practices, and the carrying out of sociohistorical research.
Thus the case of Chile is paradigmatic in the field of documentation of political violence. The inscription of this social, political and moral catastrophe through different registry devices and documentary processes has been a vital element for Chile’s coming to terms with its turbulent past. It has fostered dialogue and discussion about what happened, contributing to public and social recognition of horror; efforts at justice, and the exercise of the collective right to truth and memory.
By examining how violence was registered and documented, this book reveals the role that processes and procedures which are often taken for granted have had in shaping our knowledge of atrocity, and about concomitant actions of assistance, resistance, justice, truth and memory, from the beginning of the repressive regime to the present day. It demonstrates the current status of this documentation as a source of information and evidence, and also treats it as a repertoire of enunciability, by which we refer to an ingrained mode of thinking and acting about atrocity, that enabled state crimes to become known, denounced and combatted.
A central purpose of the book is therefore to draw attention to the performative potential of documentary work by human rights organisations. It argues that the action of registering human rights violations prevents repression from becoming untraceable, and thereby prone to impunity and oblivion. The book also underscores the undeniable fact that the ways in which human rights violations are registered have significant implications for a society’s capacity to confront atrocities in the future. Human rights documentation processes and procedures are closely associated with, if not a precondition for, a series of legal, political, humanitarian, scientific and artistic actions, that have occurred in Chile and overseas during the past four decades. Moreover, the book’s diachronic nature shows that the work carried out in Chile predated and, at a certain point in time, adopted and embedded international human rights semantics (Bernasconi et al. 2019).
The Chilean case attests that it is impossible to visualize a shared future unless what happened is made public. The testimony of people who suffered plays a particularly prominent role. Registries, documentation and archives, when preserved, are powerful tools for countering intentions to induce forgetting, historical negationism and revisionism, oblivion or impunity. More widely, the development and effects of this case show that documenting human rights violations is part and parcel of the creation of the political space of human rights advocacy (Kelly 2013).
In these ways, the book underscores the emancipatory potential of research that elucidates different forms and contexts of speaking, reporting and acting concerning human rights violations. This potential is particularly visible in what has been called the ‘era of the witness’, ushered in with the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (Wieviorka 1998; Arendt 1998). The book’s researchers and co-authors believe that such critical exploration of past experiences is a condition for identifying challenges likely to be faced by societies currently suffering the impact of human rights atrocities.
Calling State Terror by Its Name
This book argues that the purpose of compilation of registries during the Chilean dictatorship was not limited to documenting assistance provided to victims. Crucially, it also made violence visible, knowable and traceable. Throughout the chapters that follow, the book aims to showing how a repertoire of enunciability of this catastrophe emerged (Foucault 1968; Hacking 2004; Desrosières 1998). This repertoire came about through the naming, description and classification of repressive practices committed by the military regime against fellow citizens. Maps contribute to claiming and sustaining national territories (Leuenberger and Schnell 2010). We propose that, in an analogous way, the registration and documentation of mass violence in Chile inscribed and corroborated state terror, in defiance of state intentions to erase all traces of its actions.
During military rule, this human rights repertoire was fundamental for comprehending political violence, and for resisting the distorted explanations offered by dictatorship authorities. The sheer volume of denunciations revealed a reality that dramatically contrasted with the regime’s explanations. It laid bare the existence of a systematic policy of human rights violations, perpetrated by the state against the population. In this way, we argue, civil society organisations were able to provoke a practical ontology of state terror: an alternative reality on the basis of which to act in defence of the repressed. The book ...