The Reality of Fiction in Post-Pinochet Chile: Los Archivos del Cardenal

I have been traveling to and from Chile for various reasons at various times since 2005, acquiring a deep appreciation for the country and its cultural subtleties and social mores—to say nothing of a Spanish accent steeped in Chilean slang.  But if I have learned anything since my initial days, it is that one must exercise sensitivity when approaching the dictatorial past.  On my most recent flight here, for example, I found myself especially mum when engaged by a well-dressed, middle-aged Chilean woman about my upcoming adventures.  Instead of revealing my true intentions—a year’s worth of historical research related to human rights and memory—I reverted to the tourist line: surfing, senderismo (trekking), and sun.  And we continued our conversation concerning Chile’s naturally beautiful landscape, not its unattractive past, maintaining the unspoken but readily recognizable veneer aimed at keeping the dictatorial past contained to the quiet corners of private, personal conversations rather than something to be discussed openly with strangers on airplanes, public transport, or other places where class and political lines may cross.  
  

That is why I was particularly pleased with the recent release of a new mini-series—Los Archivos del Cardenal—on Chile’s national broadcast channel, Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN).  The series, consisting of 12 "chapters," takes cases collected by the Vicaría de la Solidaridad under Cardinal Raul Silva Henríquez during the dictatorship and reproduces them for public consumption.  For those not in the know, the Vicaría, an organization of religious and lay Catholics, as well as non-believers, was arguably Latin America’s most active, if not high-profile, human rights organization during the 1970s and 80s.  It worked to protect Chileans suffering from Augusto Pinochet’s persecution by offering legal, medical, moral, and financial help, as well as establishing numerous national and international networks of support.  It is no secret, then, that the Vicaría is intimately linked to human rights activism and, moreover, that it has created an archive that documents crimes against humanity. 

Neither is it a secret that Los Archivos is a fictitious account of the past, however based in and inspired by the actual Vicaría.  Nicolás Acuña, director of the show, has taken the sensitive subject of dictatorship and exposed it through the commonplace medium of public television—to the chagrin of some and championing of others.  In a conversation with Acuña, I learned that among those who supported the creation of the show—a group that includes former Vicaría social workers and Chile’s first transitional president, Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994)—are historians and other academics who helped with the series’ stories.  Acuña, born in Chile in 1972 and raised in exile in Sweden after the coup, wanted to create an “historical document that pays tribute to Vicaría workers,” something that he feels fell through the cracks during the center-left Concertación governments between 1990 and 2010.  

The careful avoidance of Chile's tumultuous past has made itself felt in both opposition to the show and the creators' caution in approaching stories of resistance.  Senator Carlos Larraín voiced the conservative response when he said, “The series takes events that occurred exactly 40 years ago, but with an obvious political connotation: the left as victim, and this is what gives fans the fire to act politically with a certain amount of superiority” (author's translation).  Moreover, Acuña told me that to attract more viewers (or put fewer off), the team “couldn’t play too much with the theme of human rights.”  This, then, is why the series is also laced with racy scenes of love and has, well, a fictitious feel of a “police-investigative series.”  
  
But in an interview on Chile’s popular 24hrs, Acuña and actor Francisco Melos also spoke of the responsibility to show, despite the hardships of dictatorship, that people still lived, loved, drank whiskey, and laughed.  Thus, the debate that is circulating in op-eds, public discourse, the political circus, and my circle of friends, revolves not only around the usefulness of fiction versus history, but the reality of present and past politics, to say nothing of the demands of TV as a dramatic form.  Meanwhile, for the first time on public television, open references that damn the dictator(ship) are flashing across millions of Chilean screens.  

However, even if the (political) line between the Vicaría’s history and the fiction of Los Archivos is unclear, what is clear are the paralyzing scenes of torture, daylight disappearances, and the discovery of human remains in hidden graves.  Too, the series is not short on uncovering moral motives and struggles.  In one particularly moving scene, Chileans are invited to muse on the moral compass of a torturer of the country’s infamous National Center of Intelligence (CNI) as he returns home from work to stroke the cheek of his sleeping son.  As a viewer, I find that these images send shivers down my spine, a response that combines the emotive, the moral and the political. Moreover, and especially important, I think, is that for the interested and/or skeptical, follow-ups and fact-checking of each “chapter” can be cross-referenced to the “real” or “archived” case vis-à-vis a project directed by the Universidad Diego Portales.  There is also the option of visiting the Vicaría’s successor organization, La Fundación de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad (pictured above), to continue the historical inquiry.  

Approaching the past in post-dictatorship Chile is no easy task. From fictional crash-course lessons on public television to more established forms of memory-making through museums and memorials, any entranceway into Chile’s painful past is significant—and controversial, given the national and international public attention and debate that Los Archivos has generated in interviews, articles, and reviews.  As historian Steve Stern recently suggested while speaking at the “Memories in Construction” seminar at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Los Archivos is another step in the "materialization of memory in the physical-cultural landscape of a new generation of Chileans too young to have a direct remembrance of the dictatorship."
  
Los Archivos, like other films and television based on history, raises the question: when (or) is it useful to fictionalize the past?  Or can fictionalized history serve a special purpose when approaching sensitive issues such as crimes against humanity?  Whatever your answer, in Chile, for better or worse, the “materialization of memory” of such crimes for today’s generation is taking root in the form of Acuña’s “historic document”—a collaborative but careful effort that is more loyal to the past than it is faithful.  Yet, despite this reality of fiction, I look forward to what I hope is a not-too-distant future when my airplane conversations can focus on Chile’s physical-cultural landscape, not just its natural beauty. 

~ Zachary McKiernan

Human Rights Lessons: The Letelier-Moffitt Monument and an International Terrorist Attack

On September 21, 1976, former and now deceased Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet brought international terrorism to the U.S. capital. As part of a plot to eliminate opponents of the military regime which took power in a bloody U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973, Pinochet’s crosshairs targeted Orlando Letelier, Chile’s one-time ambassador to the US under President Salvador Allende from 1970-1973. Working in exile after the coup at the Institute for Policy Studies, Letelier, with recently married colleagues Ronni and Michael Moffitt, shared a car ride to work that fateful September day in DC. When the automobile made its routine route to Sheridan Circle via Massachusetts Ave., it exploded. Mr. Moffitt was thrown from the car, but Letelier and Mrs. Moffitt were less fortunate, and were pronounced dead within an hour of the attack.

More than 30 years later, I sat on the sidewalk next to the explosion site to sketch the modest monument memorializing the tragic event. A few people passed me, staring, perhaps wondering (or perhaps knowing) what the monument marked. I, meanwhile, wondered how it came to be--who was responsible for memorializing, in 1981, this place of tragedy and terror. I later learned that the creation of the memorial was connected to the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, which was established in the immediate aftermath of the attack. After the annual conferment of this important award, ceremony attendees would assemble in homage at Sheridan Circle. Peter Kornbluh, now a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and then a GWU graduate student who helped spearhead the award and memorial initiatives, recently explained that after the first few awards ceremonies there was a need among the victims’ families and friends for something at the site much more concrete: an approximately three-foot high monument with a granite base, crowned by a bronze plaque with the profiles of Letelier and Moffitt that matched the commemorative coin handed out with the award. The inscription reads “Justice, Peace, Dignity,” followed by the victims’ names, birthdates, and Sept. 21, 1976.

It is curious though that although peace has since returned to Chile, justice and dignity are still watchwords for many victims—and their allies—of Pinochet’s terror. In fact, in Chile, many of these actors and the organizations they have formed turn to memorialization to achieve a justice and dignity that has been far from forthcoming despite two official truth commissions (Rettig, 1991 and Valech, 2004), modest economic reparations, and a few nominal convictions of Pinochet’s perpetrators. A 2007 conference report, Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action, suggests memorialization is second in import only to economic reparations for victims of state sponsored violence. As such, Chile in the post-dictatorship era has seen almost unparalleled activity in memorialization and commemoration events, with many, if not all, formulated under the language of human rights.

But back in the US human rights language isn’t normally associated with memorial making—though, importantly, the Letelier-Moffitt monument is. It was fascinating for me to learn of the relationship between the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award and accompanying monument. This is undoubtedly an indicator of the vibrant human rights movement which was ignited on exactly the same day Pinochet took power in Chile in 1973. As Edward Cleary writes in the opening pages of Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America (2007), “The watershed event in the contemporary human rights period for most observers of Latin America from the United States and Europe was the bloody coup that occurred on the ‘other September 11th.’” Thus, while Pinochet flexed his power, so too did the families and friends of Letelier and Moffitt. By establishing a human rights award in conjunction with a human rights memorial, these activists responded with powerful practical and symbolic tools to reproach Pinochet’s crimes against humanity, insisting on the political meanings of this sacralized ground. In fact, in a delayed way, the memorialization efforts in DC in 1981 can be considered a precursor to the many human rights memorials that stand today in Chile. And this is of no small significance because, according to the “Memorialization and Democracy” report, Chile “has made exciting progress in reconstructing the memory of gross human rights abuses” and “serves as an example for other countries.”

Yet like Chile today and DC yesterday, marking sites of tragedy and terror is hardly a seamless process. In DC, Kornbluh and company met opposition from the political right, including conservative pundits who labeled the monument “communist.” Moreover, between its construction and inauguration, the monument was defaced with red paint on more than a couple of occasions by, it is suspected, Pinochet’s embassy officials. This forced Kornbluh, after many hours cleaning and much elbow grease, to buy a tarp and chain to protect the monument. As for Chile, memorializing sites of tragedy and terror, of detention and torture, comes with an impossibly long list of complications that include, but are not limited to, state stonewalling, schisms among human rights organizations, and site specific contingencies. Yet, a closer reading of these complications reveals more than the controversies that they provoke: an engagement by civil society to confront directly—and publicly!—the atrocities of the past. In Chile, alone, there are close to 150 permanent human rights memorials, with 12 of those deemed National Historic Monuments.

Today the Letelier-Moffitt monument no longer generates the controversy it once did; nor, do I suspect, does it receive more than modest attention beyond the insiders who know the story of Orlander Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. Kornbluh, though, would like to see an addendum added (next) to the monument that specifically cites the terrorist attack to better inform those passerbies wondering what it marks. Because as much as it memorializes Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, so too does it begin to shed light on the influence of an international human rights movement sparked by Chile’s military coup--and, of course, how this movement has turned towards memorializing sites of tragedy, torture, and terror in an effort to achieve justice and dignity.

~ Zachary McKiernan

Image credits: Peter Kornbluh (monument), Zachary McKiernan (sketch)

Chile's complicated commemoration of 1973

This September Chile celebrated its 200th birthday. And not unlike other nations that have marked this monumental milestone, the Southern Cone country rolled out the proverbial red carpet to celebrate the event. Throughout the long, thin country festive festivities flourished: fiestas patrias, national dances and dishes, declarations and speeches.

In addition to the bicentennial celebrations, Chile also put together a laundry list of public works projects to polish the occasion: Santiago’s 690 kilometer intra/intercity bike path, the river-walk park Gran Parque Mapocho, Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, and the renovation of the nation’s National Stadium, among many others.

This September also marked the 37th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Marxist president Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. But for the commemorators remembering ‘la via chilena al socialismo’ (the Chilean path to socialism) and Allende’s Popular Unity government, mixing the bicentennial euphoria with the memories of a socialist dream crushed by the harsh realities of dictatorship brought about a bitter-sweet taste.

Perhaps this was no more apparent than at the September 11th memorial act hosted by the human rights organization Agrupación Metropolitana de ex Presas y Presos Políticos at the National Stadium. As many may or may not know, the National Stadium was converted into a concentration camp for 58 days following the bloody U.S.-backed coup. There, countless thousands of Chileans and hundreds of foreigners passed through the portals and into hell: tension, torture, terror; detention, disappearance, death.

I had followed an invitation by the Agrupación’s president and director, Ms. Wally Kunstmann, to participate in the inauguration ceremony not of the newly remodeled stadium (something reserved for the following day) but of a small section of stadium seating that had been left untouched during the bicentennial renovation. Assigned “special protection” status in 2003 when the stadium was declared a National Historic Monument (thanks in large part to the Agrupación’s initiative), the wooden bleachers and entranceway just beneath, known as “Escotilla 8,” were saved in memory of the stadium’s one-time prisoners.

The handbills distributed at the evening event by aging members and younger allies of the Agrupación informed me and hundreds more that “For the first time, the National Stadium opens its doors on this emblematic date to pay tribute to President Allende, to the comrades that were detained in this site of prison and torture” and that the stadium’s “stands after 37 years recover their dignity.”

Today’s visitor to the stadium will at once notice the marked difference between Escotilla 8 and the newly polished stadium dressed in state-of-the-art seating and a world-class track and field. Escotilla 8’s splintered row-benches and uneven concrete stand in stark contrast to the clean, straight lines of the stadium’s new multi-million dollar improvements. The disparity between the historically saved section of seats and the stadium’s upgraded aesthetics is at once drastic, and impossible to ignore, generating an emotive, if not eerie, sensation for the unsuspecting visitor.

Memorializing the figurative and physical starting point of seventeen years of state-sponsored terror has proved a daunting task. Even with the 2003 National Historic Monument designation, constructing mediations at the site has resulted in a laundry list of problems: competing memorialization projects, state and political stonewalling, and schisms between human rights organizations. It is ironic then that the bicentennial renovation contributed to revealing the stadium’s not-so-secret secret. By revamping the sporting complex, so too was the stadium’s scar exposed.

The inauguration of Escotilla 8 proved to be historically important for human rights actors and activists commemorating a complicated past. The large banner I helped hang with Agrupación members above Escotilla 8 read “Contra la Tortura y la Impunidad” (Against Torture and Impunity), an assertion that seems especially urgent given September 12th’s official bicentennial inauguration of the newly renovated National Stadium. This event was presided over by recently elected right-wing president Sebastian Piñera (whose party faithful make no bones about their pro-Pinochet sympathies) in an effort to move the country forward to an uncomplicated future. In Chile, then, the official mantra appears to be: in with the new and out with the old—leaving human rights commemorators with the difficult task of “reconstructing memory” in the face of impunity.

But I have a feeling that the future, like the present and past, will indeed be complicated. In many ways Escotilla 8 and its nod to 1973 stand out as a bitter black-eye, not only in the newly polished National Stadium but also in the sea of Chile’s bicentennial sweetness—and, of course, in the annals of human rights and history.

~ Zachary McKiernan

Guest blogger Zachary McKiernan is a graduate study in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.