Archives and the Politics of Memory in Post-Authoritarian Chile

In 1990 Chile entered a new democratic period after seventeen years of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.  The new governments began a policy of truth telling and reparation regarding human rights violations under military regime. In that context, the government published the Retting Commission Report (1991) on disappearance and political executions, and the Valech Report (2005) on torture and political prison. Civil society, and especially former political prisoners and victims of torture, exposed houses and previous clandestine detentions centers to public opinion, and claimed them as “places of memory”.  Some of these places became foundations and institutions dedicated to preserve and educate future generations about the horrors and legacies of the dictatorship. One major project was the foundation of “Parque por la Paz,” located in the former illegal detention center called “Villa Grimaldi,” in 2000. In the next decade, and as a result of citizens’ initiatives, a former clandestine torture center known as “Londres 38” was established as “house of memory.” Both institutions have developed a politics of memory and have created oral archives and document collections open to researchers and the general public.

This paper proposes a comparative study on the politics of memory and transmission implied in these collections of documents, photographs, and videos.  From their logics of organization and the ways in which they gathered the information kept in their archives, I analyze the ways in which political violence is depicted and presented to the public.  I study the Villa Grimaldi’s Oral Archive and the Interviews and visual archives of Londres 38 from three major perspectives: the historical narrative and contextualization of violence, as well as the ways in which victims are constructed from gendered and ethnic points of view, since both institutions have created special collections regarding these issues.