REFLEC TIONS: MEMORY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Memory
The Curious History of a Cultural Code Word

Steve J. Stern

The Code Word

Memory is a cultural code word of our times. The word has resonance as an
imperative not to forget — not to forget the people destroyed by twentieth-­century
regimes of mass cruelty and violence, not to forget the survivors and their rights to
repair in the present, not to forget that the architects of state atrocity compounded
the harm through denial and cover-­up, not to forget truth and accountability for
human rights crimes. Above all, memory matters because regimes of atrocity are
also regimes of euphemism and misinformation. Misinformation encourages indif-
ference and forgetting; it undermines accountability.
In short, “memory” evokes the moral lesson of human rights and the asso-
ciated idea of “never again.” It expresses a consciousness of struggle against state
terror and extermination projects or, more positively, an awakening into values. In
some cases — for example, the Peruvian civil war of the 1980s and 1990s, in which
the state wielded cruel violence against civilians, but the Shining Path insurgents
nonetheless accounted for a majority of murders — memory also evokes an impera-
tive to remember and reject the murderous projects of nonstate actors. An under-
side of modern history is the rise of social and political purification projects whose
effective reach and systematic organization, as well as violent cruelty and ideological
demonization, are so extreme they seem to exceed the limits of the imaginable. That

Radical History Review

Issue 124 (January 2016)  doi 10.1215/01636545-3160006
© 2016 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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underside has also produced as its corollary a painful awakening, at least by some
social actors. The key moral lesson is that human rights are inviolable and their vio-
lation unforgettable. The state cannot use social or political emergency as a pretext
to destroy the physical and psychic integrity of the person through acts of extreme
violent cruelty, such as torture, summary murder, kidnapping leading to permanent
disappearance, sexual assault, or simulated execution. Nor can insurgents. Context
cannot justify a set-­aside of fundamental human rights, not even those of citizens
redefined into the alleged internal enemy. Nor can it justify setting aside memory
and accountability after the fact.1
Such associations have become commonplace in world culture, albeit with
uneven intensity by region and over time. They have been important among influ-
ential countries in Latin America and Africa, such as Chile and South Africa, and in
the Global North, such as Germany and, in an earlier (pre-­9 /11) period, the United
States. What such countries have in common is that they underwent at some point
a politically conflictive and culturally searing reckoning with responsibility or com-
plicity in a twentieth-­century regime of atrocity. Equally important, such associa-
tions have also emerged among social actors at the supranational level: transnational
advocacy networks and nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty Interna-
tional, Human Rights Watch, and the International Center for Transitional Justice.
They have also emerged, perhaps to a lesser degree, among formal interstate enti-
ties such as United Nations human rights committees, the International Criminal
Court, and the Inter-­American Court of Human Rights. In such organizations, the
identity is cosmopolitan and the mission invokes transcendent values. Those values
may require action by supranational “citizens of the world,” whether to shame and
constrain an offending state, or to track and hold accountable perpetrators who have
escaped justice, or to help state and civil society actors achieve a legitimate and sus-
tainable postatrocity transition.2
These developments mean that although the Holocaust has been a key focus
in the cultural politics of memory since the late twentieth century, the value attached
to memory is no longer confined to reflections on the Holocaust. We take for granted
that “memory” is a moral imperative in a wider arena of pasts within the present and
that it is strategic for the building of human rights and democracy after state terror.
This is the case even though scholars observe that the battle to remember is not
reducible only to a dichotomous conflict between memory and oblivion, nor does
memory of persecution always align with the promotion of human rights. The strug-
gle is not only about establishing the critical facts denied by official truth but also
about their meaning. What do we learn from a catastrophic experience? The battle
is between distinct memory frameworks, each focused selectively on what must be
remembered and why. Notwithstanding such scholarly caveats, however, the associ-
ation of “memory” with the struggle for human rights and democracy — and with the
battle against oblivion — endures among social actors and is legitimate. Given the
 Stern | Memory  119

denial and misinformation by the dictatorship regimes that swept South America by
the 1970s, and their deployment of mystery kidnappings that permanently “disap-
peared” victims into persons without a trace, the idea of “memory” as a sacred value
came to hold an especially powerful influence in the camps that pressed for human
rights and democratic transition.3
The hold of memory as an evocative code word for truth and justice, and
more generally a culture of human rights without which democracy lacked a founda-
tion, was evident during Chile’s slow and difficult transition after Augusto Pinochet’s
dictatorship of 1973 – 90. Consider three markers. In 1990, as the newly elected civil-
ian president, Patricio Aylwin (president, 1990 – 94), announced the formation of a
truth commission, the cultural hunger to document the hidden truth of state vio-
lence showed up in best-­seller lists. The best-­seller title about the history of the
Vicariate for Solidarity, a central player in the struggle for human rights under mili-
tary rule, was Chile: La memoria prohibida (Chile: Forbidden Memory). Memory
was the “forbidden” truth we had not been allowed to hear for so long.4
Seven years later, many political leaders of the ruling Center-­Left coalition
seemed intimidated both by the continuing power of Pinochet and his social base
and by the intractable divisiveness of human rights. They had lost the will to push
for new truth-­and-­justice initiatives. A moving film by Patricio Guzmán, Chile: La
memoria obstinada (Chile: Obstinate Memory; 1997), about the fate of coup sur-
vivors and the postdictatorship youth generation in the forgetful new Chile of the
1990s, caused a small sensation. For many civil society activists and skeptics disil-
lusioned by the retreat from human rights and the sense that cultural taboo had
reemerged to suffocate discussion of the past within the present, the film docu-
mented the wound of a transition gone astray. It also announced that amnesia would
prove fruitless. Chile: La memoria obstinada suggested that memory — whether the
dream of equality that inspired Salvador Allende’s base or the savage violence to
destroy the dreamers — was an experience too “obstinate” to be wished away. Mem-
ories of the 1970s era were persistent and stubborn: too foundational and traumatic
to be denied forever. They were the deep truth just beneath the placid surface.5
By 2003, a more open and insistent memory environment had reemerged
in Chile. This was in part a consequence of Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London on
charges of crimes against humanity, in part a result of new initiatives and social
mobilizations around human rights inside Chile, in part a response to the approach-
ing thirty-­year anniversary of the September 11, 1973, coup. In August, Socialist
president Ricardo Lagos (president 2000 – 2006) announced a new truth commis-
sion initiative. The earlier 1990 – 91 truth commission had focused on execution and
disappearances. It did not focus on torture, except in cases that culminated in a
victim’s death. Now a new commission (known as the Valech Commission, named
after its president, the retired bishop Monsignor Sergio Valech, who had been the
last head of the Vicariate of Solidarity) would focus on political imprisonment and
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torture as such. The scale of torture in Pinochet’s Chile was huge; the caseload of
victims willing and able to testify would amount to tens of thousands. Significantly,
by this point the power of memory as a cultural code word had worked its way into
the phrasing of a state initiative. Lagos invoked memory in the title of his initiative,
“No hay mañana sin ayer” (“There Is No Tomorrow without Yesterday”). In 2004 his
speech to the nation summarizing the report and his response to it invoked a similar
idea: “To never again live it, never again deny it.”6
The potency of memory as a cultural code word persisted — both as a ral-
lying cry among civil society activists protesting the inadequacy of state policy on
human rights, and as a state discourse to address the wound of human rights viola-
tions. In 2005, for example, a grassroots collective delivered a critique of the Valech
Commission’s report on torture. Significantly, the group named itself the Historical
Memory Collective. (The full name, after a notorious torture center recovered as a
memory site to promote human rights work, was Colectivo de Memoria Histórica
Corporación José Domingo Cañas.) The group thought the Valech Commission’s
mandate too narrow. It investigated the history and consequences of the military
raids (allanamientos) that came down on working-­class neighborhoods and shanty-
towns (poblaciones). Military and police forces occupied the communities, rounded
up massive numbers of prisoners, kept them in public spaces converted into holding
pens for a few days, and inflicted physical and mental cruelties so extreme that the
group argued they amounted to torture. The group researched press sources and
human rights archives, supplemented the documentary research with fieldwork, and
drew into its universe 359 allanamientos in 113 poblaciones. The estimated victim
population was enormous. In just sixteen poblaciones where all males over fifteen
years old were violently rounded up and held for a day or two, and for which coter-
minous census data were reliable, the directly affected victims amounted to about
ninety-­eight thousand people.7
By 2010, when Socialist Michelle Bachelet (president 2006 – 10, 2014 – present)
inaugurated Latin America’s most impressive and well-­attended human rights
museum as a signature legacy of her (first) presidency, the power of memory as a
code word was obvious. The name Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Huma-
nos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) underscored the point. Human rights
were a fundamental value, but memory was their precondition.8
All of the above examples, however, do not address a historical mystery. They
show that struggle for memory mattered during the democratic transition, and that
the language of memory proved so strong and resonant that it eventually became
institutionalized in the state’s work of memorialization. Memory and human rights
were very closely associated, and human rights served as a fundamental point of
departure — a key contrast with the dictatorship — for the building of a legitimate
democratic state. What the above examples do not show is when a language of mem-
ory struggle against oblivion, and its close association with human rights, first began
 Stern | Memory  121

to gain traction. After all, other languages of association existed — notably, “truth”

and “justice” as twin quests that were consistently denied by the dictatorship’s
make-­believe world and fabricated narratives. These were terms of moral value that
held great resonance. In a real sense, during the democratic transition memory as
code word came to stand for all three ideas — human rights, truth, and justice — and
linked them to struggles against oblivion, that is, forgetfulness by design.

The Mystery: Memory Struggle before Memory?

The mystery deepens if we consider Salvador Allende, particularly his improvised
but eloquent last radio address to the nation on September 11, 1973, the day the
Chilean air force bombed the presidential palace. Allende understood that the coup
would spark a struggle over how to remember the facts and meanings of what hap-
pened. His speech became part of that struggle. But the key referent — the language
available to him — was History, not memory. Faced with the treason of the top mili-
tary and police commanders, he stated, “I am not going to resign.” He explained:
“Placed at a historical turning point, I will pay with my life the loyalty of the
pueblo. . . . I am certain that the seed we offer to the dignified conscience of thou-
sands upon thousands of Chileans cannot be definitively destroyed. They have the
force, they can crush us, but social processes cannot be stopped, not by crime, not
by force. History is ours, and it is made by the people [los pueblos].”9
As Allende said good-­bye to his social base, the struggle over memory con-
tinued to take the form of a claim before History. Allende thanked the workers
who placed their confidence “in a man who was simply an interpreter of great
longings for justice.” He also thanked the women who as peasants, workers, and
mothers supported him; the patriotic sector of middle-­class professionals who did
not succumb to vitriolic defense of capitalist privilege; and the youths who “sang,
who offered their joy and spirit of struggle.” He had kept his word to respect the
law and the Constitution. Many Chileans would now suffer persecution, but those
who had fomented fascism and terror would not escape a reckoning. “History will
judge them.”
Significantly, when Allende mentioned memory as such, he did so personally
in the commonsense meaning of the word. Memory was not yet a transcendent con-
cept, a rallying cry, or a code word. “I will always be with you, at least my memory
will be that of a dignified man who was loyal to the loyalty of the workers.”
The language of memory as such did not exist as a political or cultural code
word in the Chile of 1973. Allende drew on the languages of his time. The social cat-
egory of the “worker” was iconic — culturally familiar and politically indispensable — 
and figured prominently in the speech. During his presidency, a time of tumultuous
struggle to promote or turn back worker and peasant control of factories and landed
estates, respectively, class and class conflict also resonated as a language of experi-
ence. But although a fierce battle developed over how to remember an extraordinary
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time that might end catastrophically, the language of memory struggle as a great
consequential experience and value had not yet materialized.
We might say, then, that a struggle over memory materialized and played
an important role within a deadly serious social conflict — even though the cultural
language of “memory” had not yet materialized. To understand this paradox, it may
be helpful to recall a somewhat analogous problem analyzed by E. P. Thompson, the
great historian of the English working class. When considering class, plebeian cul-
ture, and the continuing cognitive grip of paternalism notwithstanding an eroding
gentry-­plebeian nexus in eighteenth-­century England, before full consolidation of
free labor and capitalist industrial revolution as an experiential process in the nine-
teenth century, Thompson wrestled with what comes first. Could relationships of
“class struggle” unfold forcefully, he wondered, yet remain encased within the men-
tal conceits and social mediations of a dying regime? Thompson thought that some-
thing like this happened in eighteenth-­century England, a society that seemed to
embody “class struggle without class.” He argued that it is the experience of struggle
that produces new cognitive possibilities. “Far too much theoretical attention . . . has
been paid to ‘class’ and far too little to ‘class-­struggle.’ Indeed, class struggle is the
prior, as well as the more universal, concept.”10
Allende, in this vein, understood the language of class and class struggle.
What had not yet emerged, even amid a sharpening struggle over how to remember,
was memory as a language of experience.

Memory as Discovery
It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that memory began to emerge as a
cultural code word in Chile. Significantly, olvido (oblivion) crystallized first as a
strategic word, and later memory as its antithesis. The social actors who pioneered
the new language were themselves victim-­survivors. Relatives of the disappeared,
mainly but not exclusively women, learned that their own family tragedy — t heir
own search for a missing loved one — belonged to a larger pattern of mysterious
detentions. The detentions turned into a vanishing, with denial of state knowledge
or responsibility. In response to this reality, the relatives organized themselves
into a community of support and activism known as the Agrupación de Famili-
ares de Detenidos-­Desaparecidos (Association of Relatives of the Detained-­a nd-­
Disappeared; AFDD). Membership in the Santiago AFDD, the most influential
branch, exceeded three hundred by the end of 1975 and swelled again when the
secret police targeted Communists in a new wave of repression in 1976. Along with
other human rights groups, including the Vicariate of Solidarity of the Santiago
Catholic Church, the AFDD activists insisted on finding out the truth about their
missing relatives and insisted that the state deliver truthful information regarding
their fate.11
For the AFDD activists and their supporters, “memory” was a discovery, not
 Stern | Memory  123

a self-­evident point of departure. It testified to a learning process, at once political

and cultural, during times of ordeal. The shift in the strategies and lexicon of strug-
gle began in 1977 – 78. Frustrated by the state’s wall of denial, which included not
only the executive branch but also the judiciary, the relatives thought the time had
come for more aggressive action in the public sphere. The earlier approach — judi-
cial petitions carefully prepared and documented, confidential bulletins of hidden
truth circulated by the Vicariate of Solidarity to a restricted network, an alternative
news magazine of solidarity also backed by the Vicariate — did not alone suffice. The
search for new strategies, in dialogue but also in some tension with the Vicariate of
Solidarity and the Catholic Church, had begun late in 1976. By 1977 – 78, the deter-
mination to push harder in the public domain took dramatic form: street protests,
hunger strikes, direct-­action appeals to the United Nations.
The new actions provoked consternation — a nd new languages of appeal
and mobilization. Here we begin to find the word olvido crystallizing as a way to
encode what the struggle was about. But as we shall see, that crystallization did
not happen all at once. On June 14, 1977, twenty-­six relatives of the disappeared
occupied the Chilean offices of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America
and launched a hunger strike. Thirty-­one of their thirty-­four missing relatives had
been seized fairly recently, in 1976. If found in time, they might still be alive! The
gendered imagery of this desperate struggle was striking. Eight-­tenths of the miss-
ing relatives were men; nine-­tenths of the hunger strikers were women. This was a
struggle of mothers, wives, and sisters to find their loved ones. Publicity and pres-
sure were substantial: a giant solidarity mass in Santiago, sympathy hunger strikes
in Europe, negotiations between UN secretary-­general Kurt Waldheim and Chil-
ean ambassador Alfredo Canales Márquez. The relatives agreed to suspend the
strike in exchange for a promised report to the UN with reliable information on
the disappeared persons. In a follow-­up public letter to Pinochet on July 20, 1977,
the relatives explained that “we have exhausted” all normal channels of redress.
Administrative-­legal procedures and writs of habeas corpus had failed to destroy
“the ring of silence” surrounding their loved ones. They feared that “there exists a
deliberate covering up of a dramatic reality with a cloak of olvido.”12
A cloak of olvido. The theme of oblivion did not fade. Hunger strikes and
other actions by a variety of actors placed mounting pressure on human rights
themes in 1978. For Pinochet and the junta, the pressures converged with other
strains, including a struggle for power between Pinochet and his junta rival, air
force commander General Gustavo Leigh; a near-­war crisis with Argentina that
required emergency mediation by Pope John Paul II; and acute tension with the
United States over an official letters rogatory, cosigned by Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance and Attorney General Griffin Bell as well as district judge William B. Bryant,
to extradite witnesses from Chile to testify under oath in the unfolding investiga-
tion and prosecution of the 1976 murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen
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Moffitt. The murders had taken place in Washington, DC. Letelier was Allende’s
former ambassador to the United States; Moffitt, his colleague at the Institute for
Policy Studies, was a US citizen. The Chilean secret police (Dirección de Inteligen-
cia Nacional [National Intelligence Directorate]; DINA) had organized the assassi-
nation, and its feared chief, Manuel Contreras, reported directly to Pinochet.
Pinochet survived the 1978 crisis in part by creating a civilian-­military cabi-
net in April and purging Leigh from the junta in July. On April 19, 1978, the civilian
leader of the new cabinet, Interior Minister Sergio Fernández, announced a fresh
start for Chile via amnesty. The times of “war” had passed and the country was now
on the road to institutionalization. Decree Law No. 2191 would provide amnesty
(with exceptions for some common crimes and in the Letelier case) for criminal acts
between September 11, 1973, and March 10, 1978. The decree amounted to self-­
amnesty for officers who feared criminal liability in the face of mounting human
rights pressure and the precedent set by the Letelier case. Fernández presented
the amnesty as generous humanitarianism, now that the difficult times had passed.
It would presumably include political prisoners. The government “does not harbor
grudges and knows that pardon and olvido must open new paths to the reunified
country [patria].” Forgetting was a positive good.13
This was precisely what relatives of the disappeared feared: a policy that
locked in the vanishing of people forever. Forgetting meant cover-­up. As they put it
in a letter to Fernández a week later, “Our relatives cannot be lost in olvido.” Equally
important, in May they launched an even more dramatic hunger strike. Sixty-­five
relatives — a ll but six were women — occupied three churches and the office of the
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Solidarity hunger strikes broke out not
only in Europe, Canada, and the United States but also in Chile — not only in San-
tiago but also in Valparaíso and Concepción. The strikers included religious persons
of conscience, among them Catholic priests and lay community members.14
The struggle against willful forgetting backed by official decree and amnesty
did not produce the information the relatives sought. Nor did it bring down Pino-
chet. The regime continued to insist that the emergency of the 1970s was giving way
to orderly institutionalization, and it followed up with a new constitution in 1980.
What the struggle did produce was shifting strategies of struggle and reflection and
an evolving lexicon of key words for the human rights camp. That lexicon would
now include not only terms such as truth, justice, and human rights; it also began to
include olvido and memory, a strategic antithesis within a long-­term struggle.
Again, the AFDD relatives were major social actors, especially in the early
phase of developing a new lexicon. The transnational dimension of their story was
significant. The relatives forged a language of experience not only inside Chile but
also in dialogue with sister groups abroad. Victim-­survivors searching for their rela-
tives and the truth faced similar agony elsewhere in Latin America. In 1981 the Chil-
ean AFDD met with sister organizations in Paris, San José (Costa Rica), and Cara-
 Stern | Memory  125

cas to experience a wider solidarity, to reflect and debate the future, and to build a
stronger voice and strategy. They cofounded a transnational federation, Federacíon
Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-­Desaparecidos (Latin
American Federation of Relatives of the Detained-­and-­Disappeared; FEDEFAM).
The meetings marked a new phase in the dialectics of social action and reflective
analysis — and in the development of a language of experience.
Memory as such began to come to the fore as a value of great consequence
for human rights and struggle against dictatorship. Latin America had given rise to a
new kind of military dictatorship — a kind of dictatorship committed not to stepping
in with short-­term repression to restore order but rather to creating an altogether
new order. The new scheme meant obliterating forever both the social demands of
popular sectors of society and the political ideas linked to those demands. Mystery
detentions of people who disappeared without a trace, as if they had never existed,
was a critical technique in the project of reeducation and erasure. Repression and
fear served as the immediate instruments of domination. In the long run, however,
the point was to control memory. The new dictatorships “coordinated two funda-
mental axes: state terror, threat on a tactical level; and the erasing of all historical
memory on a strategic level, wiping the slate clean of the past, seeking to plunge an
entire people into the forgetting of itself.”15
In a real sense, the AFDD relatives and others in the human rights camp,
within and beyond Chile, discovered memory. It lies beyond the scope of this essay,
however, to trace how, beyond the moment of crisis and rethinking of the late 1970s
and early 1980s, memory took root as a wider cultural phenomenon. Suffice it to say
that struggles over how to remember crucial facts and their larger meaning con-
verged with the upheavals of mass protest against the dictatorship in the 1980s.
By the 1988 plebiscite to extend Pinochet’s rule, the regime’s self-­ratification exer-
cise backfired and forced the military regime to negotiate a transition; by this time,
the language of memory against olvido had acquired firm symbolic resonance. On
August 29, 1988, just before the official announcement that Pinochet would stand
as the “Yes” candidate in the plebiscite, one thousand activists from Mujeres por la
Vida (Women for Life), divided into forty teams of twenty-­five persons each, sud-
denly converged with mystery packages on ten pedestrian streets of downtown San-
tiago during the lunch hour. They unwrapped life-­size silhouettes, each represent-
ing a person and the urgency of the memory question. They placed the giant black
silhouettes against walls, doors, and street benches before melding back into the
urban landscape. On each figure there appeared, in large letters in white, the name
of a specific victim. The absent-­but-­present person asked a question: “DID YOU
FORGET ME?” Underneath the question was a choice: “YES-­NO.” It paralleled
the choice to be given on the plebiscite ballot.16
126  Radical History Review

Conclusion
We have here, then, a curious history. A struggle over how to remember had already
taken off during the 1973 crisis. Salvador Allende understood this on September
11, the day he said good-­bye and the military bombed the presidential palace in the
heart of downtown Santiago. But the language of memory as a rallying cry, as an
experience and a cherished value, had not yet arrived. Memory struggle preceded
memory. The code word that proved influential, obstinate, and contentious during
the democratic transition of the 1990s and 2000s did not crystallize until the late
1970s and early 1980s. But that was a phase of origin, a certain gelling within the
beleaguered human rights camp. The code word did not gain much traction until
the times of mass street protest and civil disobedience actions that shook the regime
during 1983 – 88 and finally forced a transition in 1990. Ironically, memory as a code
word — as a language of experience and continuing struggle — d id not turn into a
widely recognizable, commonsense notion until the transition itself.
The historicity of memory as a code word matters for several reasons. First, it
shows that finding language to describe and confront atrocity was a learning experi-
ence, a discovery forged in the crucible of life-­and-­death struggles and their unfin-
ished legacy. The process was dynamic, experiential, and experimental. More than
the application of available cultural language to a new situation, the code word con-
densed the dialectics of street struggle and cognitive struggle.
Second, precisely because state terror inflicts not only violence but also
denial and euphemism — a n “official story” — t he struggle for a new language of
truth testifies to the value of holistic analysis of politics and culture. How a new
social climate and a new vocabulary of truth arise and become influential is not a
matter reducible to state design or action. It is in the interplays of cultural action
and political action, by civil society actors as well as state actors, that we may trace
the rise of a new language of experience.
In the Chilean case, state actors always had a keen interest in shaping the
memory of 1973. The junta and its supporters began by describing the 1973 crisis
as a salvation story worth remembering: the rescue of the Chilean people from eco-
nomic chaos and imminent bloodbath by the Left. When the emerging human rights
camp of relatives, survivors, activists, persons of conscience, and other supporters
pushed the denied reality of massive atrocity to the fore, and when their push coin-
cided with other strains, the question of memory — what and how to remember, and
why — turned explosive. The junta decreed its 1978 amnesty and moved toward a
language of olvido — w illful forgetting — as a positive good. The past was the past,
and the time had arrived to look ahead. But as we have seen, the regime failed to
create a seamless language of olvido. On the contrary, the policy of willful forgetting
provoked a new phase of crisis and direct action, reflection and networking, strategy
and language development by relatives of the disappeared and their allies. What the
regime got in the long run was not a hegemonic language of olvido but a language of
antithesis: memory versus olvido.
 Stern | Memory  127

Although memory as a code word would emerge most powerfully during

the democratic transition after 1990, that journey was also not a linear unfolding by
state design. Civil society critics important for the moral and political legitimacy of
the ruling Center-­Left coalition denounced the retreat from human rights initiatives
after the early years of transition and pressed against the boundaries on the state
initiatives that did take place. The dialectics of state and civil society, buttressed by
transnational initiatives including Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998, ended up
producing new initiatives and language. Over time, “memory” and “human rights”
became inseparable, a cultural reality enshrined in the very name of the state’s
Museum of Memory and Human Rights, inaugurated in 2010.
That “memory” has a history, rather than a meaning that is self-­evident or
transhistorical, matters for a third reason too. Memory is in part a story of genera-
tional politics and culture. As long as memory remains a bone of contention — a word
to insist on, an experience too formative and traumatic to be forgotten, a shout that
the past within the present is still unjust and still requires remedy — each generation
of social activists puts its own stamp on the code word. Otherwise, memory ossifies
into nostalgia and ends up in the trash bin of culture and politics. In recent years,
indigenous Mapuche protests over the timber export industry’s impact on land and
water in the south, and university student protests over privatized education and
crushing debt, have rocked Chile. With these struggles, a certain resignification of
memory has taken place. Mapuche activists have stretched the relevant timelines
backward and forward to include not only the Pinochet dictatorship’s atrocities but
also the dispossessions that reshaped the south since the late nineteenth century
and the continuities of violent abuse and injustice in the postdictatorship era. Stu-
dents have redefined the legacy of the Pinochet regime that requires urgent redress
in the present to include not only violent atrocity against body and mind but also the
restructuring of education under the dictatorship. The new system bears down hard
on socioeconomic opportunity while enshrining the profit principle. In this shifting
generational context, the meaning of September 11, 1973, its memory, has drawn
new claims and new social actors. The Chilean 9/11 exerts a continuing cultural
energy.

Notes
1. For Shining Path and its cultural processing, see Carlos Iván Degregori, How Difficult It
Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980 – 1999 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2012); and Cynthia Milton, ed., Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and
Truth-­Telling in Post – Shining Path Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
For modernity and atrocity, see Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide,
and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Jean Franco, Cruel
Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
2. For world trends and multiscaled analysis, see Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade:
How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (New York: Norton, 2011);
Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
128  Radical History Review

International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Alexandra Huneeus,
“International Criminal Law by Other Means: The Quasi-­criminal Jurisdiction of the
Human Rights Courts,” American Journal of International Law 107, no. 1 (2013): 1 – 44.
3. On competing memory frameworks, see Elizabeth Jelin, Los trabajos de la memoria
(Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2002); Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of
London 1998, bk. 1 of The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004); and Tzvetan Todorov, Memoria del mal, tentación del bien: Indagación sobre
el siglo XX (Barcelona: Península, 2002).
4. Eugenio Ahumada et al., Chile: La memoria prohibida; Las violaciones a los derechos
humanos, 1973 – 1983, 3 vols. (Santiago: Pehuén, 1989). On best sellers, see Steve J. Stern,
Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989 – 2006, bk. 3 of
The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 13 – 16,
398 – 99n5.
5. Chile: La memoria obstinada, directed by Patricio Guzmán (1997; New York: Icarus Films,
1998), DVD.
6. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet, 288 – 99, 325 – 26; quotations on 288, 326.
7. Colectivo de Memoria Histórica Corporación José Domingo Cañas, Tortura en poblaciones
del Gran Santiago (1973 – 1990) (Santiago: Corporación José Domingo Cañas, 2005).
8. For comparative analysis, see Peter Winn et al., No hay mañana sin ayer: Batallas por
la memoria histórica en el Cono Sur (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2013), esp.
346 – 59.
9. Salvador Allende Gossens, “Último discurso” (“Final Speech”), September 11, 1973,
transcript and audio, La Nación (Santiago), www.lanacion.cl/lea-­y-­escucha-­el-­ultimo
-­discurso-­de-­a llende/noticias/2013-­09-­10/184948.html (accessed February 20, 2015). All
translations in this article, including from this speech, are mine.
10. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-­Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?”
Social History 3, no. 2 (1978): 149.
11. For AFDD history in context, see Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory
Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973 – 1988, bk. 2 of The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 81 – 230.
12. AFDD to Pinochet, July 20, 1977, “Informe Confidencial, Julio 1977,” Fundación de
Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad, Arzobispado de Santiago
(hereafter FAV).
13. El Mercurio (Santiago), April 20, 1978. For transnational secret police operations, see
John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three
Continents (New York: New Press, 2004).
14. AFDD to Fernández, April 26, 1978, caja (file box) A. T. 26, Detenidos-­desaparecidos,
Huelga de Hambre, SELADOC Boletín, no. 7 (1978): 44 – 46, FAV.
15. Desaparecidos, “Acta Final” del I Congreso Latinoamericano de Familiares de
Desaparecidos, San José, Costa Rica, January 20 – 23, 1981, 2 – 4, caja 1, leg. 2, Archivo
Sergio Insunza. After 2010, the Insunza Archive moved from the Salvador Allende
Foundation to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights.
16. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 375 – 77, which includes photos of the silhouettes.
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