Related Papers
Pinochet’s Chile: The United States, Human Rights, and International Terrorism
Todd Landman
Revista Política
A Most Unlikely Case: Chile, Pinochet and the Advance of Human Rights
2013 •
Todd Landman
H-Diplo Article Review of Alfonso Salgado, “Communism and Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The 1977 Hunger Strike against Forced Disappearance,” Cold War History 18:2 (2018).
Paul Ryan Katz
Hispanic American Historical Review
State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights
2008 •
Karen Robert
The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism
Patrick William Kelly
The 1973 Chilean coup gave rise to an unprecedented growth in a global human rights consciousness. In its aftermath, transnational activists from a diverse array of political and ideological backgrounds found common cause–indeed, a common language of human rights–in campaigns to ameliorate the repressive acts of the Chilean military junta. This article focuses on two models of activism in particular: Amnesty International, whose 1973 investigative mission set the terms of the global debate about human rights in Chile; and transnational solidarity activists, especially Chilean exiles from leftist parties, whose vision of social activism narrowed as their interest in human rights surged. These campaigns–while not without tensions over the role of politics in the moral appeal to human rights–both articulated a transnational discourse of human rights and created new activist techniques to foment moral outrage by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.
A Contracorriente
Charting the Emergence of a “Culture of Human Rights”: The Chilean Transition and the “Memory Question.” A Review of Steve J. Stern's Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010)
2011 •
Michael Lazzara
Genocide Studies and Prevention. An International Journal
El Mocito: A Study of Cruelty at the Intersection of Chile’s Military and Civil Society
2018 •
Ana Ros Matturro
Twenty-five years after the end of the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990), the redemocratization process still has not drawn to a close. The persistent tensions in civil-military relations have sparked the concern of national and international human rights organizations and have even begun to occupy a space in the country’s cultural production. In this article, I will focus on El mocito (Marcela Said and Jacques de Certau, 2011). This film tackles Chile’s dictatorial past through the perspective of a civilian who was closely connected to the Armed Forces. It addresses the case of an individual living on the border between worlds often perceived as mutually exclusive. He is a civilian, but he was also a member of the DINA—Chile’s secret police under Pinochet— though not as a member of the Armed Forces, but rather in the role of a butler. Although, as far as the public knows, he never participated in torture or assassinations, through this position, he was aware of what was taking place, bore witness to events related to state repression, and by fulfilling the tasks of his work, in many ways sustained the framework of the authoritarian system. By focusing on an atypical actor who is simultaneously an outsider and an insider in both the Armed Forces and the civil society, the documentary presents a unique perspective on these two groups and their intersections. In so doing, the film poses questions about responsibility for, and complicity with, the cruelty that took place during the military regime and beyond that all members of Chilean society must consider. How far can we extend responsibility for what happened? How do we measure the guilt or innocence of those who did not commit or order the perpetration of crimes, but were nevertheless part of the system that condoned such acts? Can victims exist within the group typically thought of as victimizers? What forms does cruelty take in civil society in non-authoritarian contexts? These queries imply a questioning of the military institution in its present form and challenge both the concept of the citizen shaped within democracy and the possibilities of nunca más/never again in Chile today.
Memory and the Pinochet Legacy: Civil-Military Relations in Modern-day Chile
Anthony Navarrete
Tortured bodies': The biopolitics of torture and truth in Chile
2012 •
Teresa Macías
In the same way that torture has become a common and privileged instrument of war and political repression, and a regular occurrence of our time, so, too, has the question of how to speak and account for torture and its legacies become a concern and anunavoidable issue for nations either transitioning from periods of torture or investedin separating themselves from regimes of torture. In Chile, the democratic transitionthat ended the authoritarian regime in 1990 gave way to demands for the recognitionof torture and other human rights violations. In 2003, Chile instituted the TortureCommission, its second truth and reconciliation commission. This article uses theFoucaultian concept of biopower to analyse the strategies and practices used by theTorture Commission to produce a national truth about torture by critically looking at the implications and challenges of organising national processes of accounting for practices such as torture
Journal of Latin American Studies
The Pinochet case and human rights progress in Chile: Was Europe a catalyst, cause or inconsequential?
2004 •
David Pion-Berlin
This article assesses the impact, if any, of Spanish and British Court rulings on the Pinochet case on human rights progress in Chilean courts. Chilean judges chafe at the notion that foreign courts exerted any influence on them, arguing that, based solely on Chilean law and the evidence already before them, they were empowered to strip Pinochet of his immunity, and proceeded to do so. Human rights critics allege that the courts had been thoroughly immobilised by the authoritarian legacy to which they were enjoined. No progress at all would have occurred were it not for the dramatic verdicts handed down in British courts. The author contends that change was underfoot in Chile prior to Pinochet’s arrest in London, but that Europe set Chile on a faster and steeper trajectory toward justice than would have been possible otherwise. It did so by shaming the Chilean Government into pressuring its own high courts to deliver a modicum of justice to the victims of Pinochet.
