The Political is Personal: 50 Years After the Coup d'Etat in Chile
I am four months older than the Chilean president Gabriel Boric (2022-), and about the same age as half of his cabinet. We were all born under the civic-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), but we were young enough not to remember most of it. Instead, we carry second-generation memories, or postmemories: the experiences of our parents, and grandparents during those years.
In my case that means the loss of my uncle, Alejandro Rozas, a young militant of MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement). To this day, we do not know for certain what happened to him, nor do we have a body or a place to put him to rest. It is believed that he was tortured at a clandestine detention center called “Venda Sexy” (Sexy Blindfold) by agents of the DINA, the secret police of the regime. A gruesome name that hints at the sexual tortures practiced there. There are also testimonies of survivors who saw him at Villa Grimaldi, another torture and killing center—this is where he was last seen. My uncle disappeared four days before Christmas in 1974. He was 22 years old and worked as a photographer. He was the oldest of five siblings: three sisters and a younger brother, my father. Had he gotten out, he would be 71 now, retired, and probably suffering from the long-term physical and mental effects of torture.
That “the personal is political” is widely accepted thanks to the feminist movement, but that “the political is personal” seems entangled with difficult questions of witnessing, memory, history, and generational trauma. This article is about the latter: the political that is also personal, and the fear of outgrowing the timeframe of memory. Today Chile commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the American-backed coup d’état that ended the democratically elected government of the Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973). The number of years — fifty — matters, because it marks the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of a generation of first-hand witnesses and victims.
Three Urban Targets
On September 11, 1973, the Chilean Air Force deployed six Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft to bomb the Presidential Palace, La Moneda, in the center of Santiago, as well as Allende’s private residence, in the suburb of Las Condes. The battle that ensued within La Moneda Palace took most members of the presidential guard, and ended with the heroic death of Allende, once he realized that he was surrounded by enemy forces. The dramatic images of this inaugural act of force reveal that beyond putting an end to Allende’s government, the military used violence to orchestrate an aesthetic coup on the city of Santiago, and on some of its most symbolic buildings (Figure 1). As the exhibition Golpes (2023) of photographer Alexis Díaz Belmar reveals, still today, small bullets and bomb debris can be found lodged in between the stones, bricks, and concrete of the buildings surrounding the presidential palace.
Figure 1. Coup of September 11, 1973. Bombing of La Moneda (presidential palace). Source: Biblioteca del Congreso de Chile. Creative Commons 3.0 Chile.
Not only was the presidential palace reduced to a blackened ruin for years, but, in its place, the military junta, led by Augusto Pinochet, occupied one of the most iconic buildings of the Allende period (Figure 2). As if to wipe out any trace of socialist internationalist utopia, the military ruled the nation from one of Allende’s most visible achievements: the modernist tower, now known as Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, that had been built in a record time — 275 days — for the 1972 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III). The building was more than a modern conference center: it was a cultural hub for the working class with a dining hall, public art, exhibition spaces, lounge areas, and theater, right in the center of Santiago. It was built as part of a redistributive urban renewal program that sought to place multistory housing and amenities for the working class in well-located central areas.
Figure 2. UNCTAD III, main entry, 1972. Photograph by Miguel Lawner. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral Archive.
In a further blow to the Allende legacy, the day after bombing the presidential palace, the military started using Chile’s main soccer stadium as a prison and camp for torture and killing (Figure 3). This was not a hidden operation; it occurred in plain sight, under broad daylight, followed by cameras from all over the world. Although the stadium was built in 1938, long before Allende came to power, it had become a center stage for Chilean politics. As the middle and working classes grew in the second half of the twentieth century, it became the preferred location to host not only sports events, but concerts, tournaments, and political rallies, including the visit of Fidel Castro, and the return of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda.
Figure 3. Visit to the National Stadium, August 2023. Courtesy of Felipe Poga.
The Palace, the cultural center, and the stadium — three iconic buildings of the Chilean capital — were all targets of a coup against not only the socialist president and democracy, but the kind of city Allende was building: modern, decentralized, communal, integrated, diverse, and, above all, just. Pinochet’s goal was to “pacify” the city alongside its inhabitants, and like the many of the forty thousand victims of the military regime, much of that communal socialist city was never recovered. The structures themselves survived and, now remodeled and purified of evil, have been reincorporated into the life of the city, although not without losing some of their earlier meaning.
“Allende was building a modern, decentralized, communal, integrated, diverse, and, above all, just city.”
Three Commemorations
These three buildings are the cornerstones of this year’s commemorations. The Estadio Nacional-Memorial Nacional, the human rights organization in charge of the National Stadium, has been hosting guided tours, talks, and other events, and is preparing for a big candlelight vigil on the night of September 11 (Figure 4). The Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center has special programming including seminars, plays, movies, and book launches. The presidential is hosting a central event, although the details have not yet been disclosed. Beyond these iconic buildings, nearly every public and private institution has something planned for the commemoration. Santiago changed eleven street names to honor victims of the dictatorship, this year’s Open House Festival is dedicated to memories of Santiago, popular radio stations are interviewing witnesses, and a public archive has collected every newspaper article leading up to the coup. All of this alongside countless other podcasts, exhibitions, books, talks, roundtables, and art installations.
Figure 4. Visit to the National Stadium, August 2023. Courtesy of Felipe Poga.
This commemoration craze might appear to be the sign of a healthy democracy. Yet underneath this flourishing memorial landscape, voices of denial, revisionism, and cultural revenge are gaining traction. In the last few weeks, right and far-right politicians have attempted to separate the coup from the terrorist dictatorship that followed, vindicating the use of force to end Allende’s government. Others have questioned the status of the detenidos desaparecidos as victims, blaming their political activism for their deaths. A conservative congresswoman called sexual political torture a hoax, while a communist congresswoman was attacked inside the Chamber of Deputies for wearing a photograph of her late husband on her lapel. A few days later, the Chamber agreed to read aloud a 1973 minority statement proclaiming Allende’s government unconstitutional weeks before the coup, implying that the attack was necessary to save the nation. High-ranking military officials are calling for an end to memory politics, while avoiding any institutional responsibility for the crimes committed during the dictatorship.
President Boric is hoping to bring together all the political parties to sign a far-reaching consensus statement but, unsurprisingly, his efforts have not gained traction. The nation seems to have lost the ability to achieve consensus built during the years of transition into democracy around the recognition of the human rights violations committed by the Chilean state. Of this fraught memorial landscape, President Boric recently said that the environment was increasingly “electrified and charged.” That same day, former President Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010 and 2014-2018), who had been imprisoned at Villa Grimaldi during the dictatorship, detailed how she and others were tortured by electric shock.
For someone like me, who remembers both previous commemorations, marking the thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries, this one seems unmistakably different. In August 2003, social democrat President Ricard Lagos (2000-2006) gave a memorable speech, “No hay mañana, sin ayer” (There is no tomorrow, without yesterday), and announced what, at the time, was the most ambitious and comprehensive human rights and reparation policy yet. Memorials were inaugurated and sites of terror, including the National Stadium, were protected as historic monuments. More importantly, a commission was created to identify the victims of the military dictatorship who survived, expanding their number from three thousand to over forty thousand.
In 2013, it was the turn of the first right-wing president since the dictatorship to lead the commemorations. President Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022) gave a commemorative speech from the La Moneda Palace reinaugurating the renovation of the public space north to the building, known as Constitution Plaza. His gesture included the closure of the elite prison where many of the sentenced perpetrators were incarcerated, and to the shock of his own political coalition, the unveiling of the many silent civil accomplices who allowed Pinochet to rule for seventeen years. Piñera was whitewashing his own support for the dictatorship, but his speech unlocked the democratic field, announcing that regardless of political color, the right would always condemn the human right violations, and that it would not rule with Pinochet.
“There is no longer consensus around the things that many Chileans once believed unquestionable.”
A lot has happened since. A far-right party, unironically called “the Republican Party,” has broken the rules of democratic respect that Piñera and his political coalition promised in 2013. The left has reorganized in the Frente Amplio, today’s ruling coalition, which for better or worse resulted in an abrupt generational shift amongst elected officials, who are now, like Boric, predominantly in their mid-thirties. The past weeks have made it clear that this year’s commemoration will be different: not as grandiose, and certainly not as unitary.
Meanwhile, Chile has many more urgent problems. At the top of the list is that the country still has a constitution imposed during the military dictatorship, in 1980. A proposal for a new constitution was rejected by voters in 2022; another will be put to a referendum this December. Even more contentious are proposed tax and pension reforms. The crux of the debate is whether a percentage of contributions to private retirement funds should go into a public one dedicated to benefiting seniors in poverty. Most countries have an integrated private-public pension system. Thanks to the extreme neoliberalism of the dictatorship (and quiet complicity of subsequent regimes), Chile does not. My uncle, who would have been seventy-one years old today, would probably benefit from this pension reform. The most striking thing about this debate is that it is about the generation that suffered the most from the violence and abuses of the dictatorship: those who were in their twenties and thirties in the 1970s and ‘80s. Targeted by the terrorist state, that generation is now being denied a dignified old age.
In this context, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup without addressing its profound economic and cultural legacy seems pointless. At the same time, it is the last big commemoration that many victims will witness, and whatever happens in these next weeks will cement the memory and reparation politics for the next decade.
The most significant event of this year’s commemoration has already happened. August 30th was International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. President Boric announced a new national search plan to find the 1,162 detenidos desaparecidos that are still missing — including my uncle. This is a groundbreaking announcement because responsibility for finding victims has primarily fallen on their families and the justice system. Standing next to Boric, the Secretary of Justice added that it is not the duty of victims’ families to be detectives; the state has to be responsible for the disappearances perpetrated by the state. The announcement made it to the front page of the New York Times, while local newspapers highlighted the absence of representatives from the right. This is yet another sign that something is wrong, that there is no longer consensus around the things that many Chileans once believed unquestionable.
I have come to adjust my expectations for a grand memory event on September 11, and admire how many microevents are popping up all over Chile. They are signs of the force that has always driven the human rights movement — not presidents, but neighbors, volunteers, friends and families. I am daunted by my generation’s immense task of carrying on personal and collective memories of the dictatorship, but I am optimistic about creating spaces to host, preserve, and multiply those memories.
— Santiago de Chile, September 1, 2023
