Reckoning with Pinochet

Reckoning with Pinochet
Author: Steve J. Stern
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2010-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822391775

Reckoning with Pinochet is the first comprehensive account of how Chile came to terms with General Augusto Pinochet’s legacy of human rights atrocities. An icon among Latin America’s “dirty war” dictators, Pinochet had ruled with extreme violence while building a loyal social base. Hero to some and criminal to others, the general cast a long shadow over Chile’s future. Steve J. Stern recounts the full history of Chile’s democratic reckoning, from the negotiations in 1989 to chart a post-dictatorship transition; through Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998; the thirtieth anniversary, in 2003, of the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende; and Pinochet’s death in 2006. He shows how transnational events and networks shaped Chile’s battles over memory, and how the Chilean case contributed to shifts in the world culture of human rights. Stern’s analysis integrates policymaking by elites, grassroots efforts by human rights victims and activists, and inside accounts of the truth commissions and courts where top-down and bottom-up initiatives met. Interpreting solemn presidential speeches, raucous street protests, interviews, journalism, humor, cinema, and other sources, he describes the slow, imperfect, but surprisingly forceful advance of efforts to revive democratic values through public memory struggles, despite the power still wielded by the military and a conservative social base including the investor class. Over time, resourceful civil-society activists and select state actors won hard-fought, if limited, gains. As a result, Chileans were able to face the unwelcome past more honestly, launch the world’s first truth commission to examine torture, ensnare high-level perpetrators in the web of criminal justice, and build a public culture of human rights. Stern provides an important conceptualization of collective memory in the wake of national trauma in this magisterial work of history.

Civil Obedience

Civil Obedience
Author: Michael Lazzara
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 029931720X

Boldly breaks new ground in studies of Latin American postdictatorial memories by tackling a taboo topic--civilian complicity with the Pinochet regime--that Chilean society has strategically avoided.

Battling for Hearts and Minds

Battling for Hearts and Minds
Author: Steve J. Stern
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2006-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822388545

Battling for Hearts and Minds is the story of the dramatic struggle to define collective memory in Chile during the violent, repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, from the 1973 military coup in which he seized power through his defeat in a 1988 plebiscite. Steve J. Stern provides a riveting narration of Chile’s political history during this period. At the same time, he analyzes Chileans’ conflicting interpretations of events as they unfolded. Drawing on testimonios, archives, Truth Commission documents, radio addresses, memoirs, and written and oral histories, Stern identifies four distinct perspectives on life and events under the dictatorship. He describes how some Chileans viewed the regime as salvation from ruin by Leftists (the narrative favored by Pinochet’s junta), some as a wound repeatedly reopened by the state, others as an experience of persecution and awakening, and still others as a closed book, a past to be buried and forgotten. In the 1970s, Chilean dissidents were lonely “voices in the wilderness” insisting that state terror and its victims be recognized and remembered. By the 1980s, the dissent had spread, catalyzing a mass movement of individuals who revived public dialogue by taking to the streets, creating alternative media, and demanding democracy and human rights. Despite long odds and discouraging defeats, people of conscience—victims of the dictatorship, priests, youth, women, workers, and others—overcame fear and succeeded in creating truthful public memories of state atrocities. Recounting both their efforts and those of the regime’s supporters to win the battle for Chileans’ hearts and minds, Stern shows how profoundly the struggle to create memories, to tell history, matters. Battling for Hearts and Minds is the second volume in the trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. The third book will examine Chileans’ efforts to achieve democracy while reckoning with Pinochet’s legacy.

Story of a Death Foretold

Story of a Death Foretold
Author: Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1608198960

Presents an account of the short rise and fall of President Salvador Allende, who died of gunshot wounds on September 11, 1973, following the military coup that deposed him.

Narrow But Endlessly Deep

Narrow But Endlessly Deep
Author: Peter Read
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-06-15
Genre: Chile
ISBN: 9781760460211

On 11 September 1973, the Chilean Chief of the Armed Forces Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende and installed a military dictatorship. Yet this is a book not of parties or ideologies but public history. It focuses on the memorials and memorialisers at seven sites of torture, extermination, and disappearance in Santiago, engaging with worldwide debates about why and how deeds of violence inflicted by the state on its own citizens should be remembered, and by whom. The sites investigated -- including the infamous National Stadium -- are among the most iconic of more than 1,000 such sites throughout the country. The study grants a glimpse of the depth of feeling that survivors and the families of the detained-disappeared and the politically executed bring to each of the sites. The book traces their struggle to memorialise each one, and so unfolds their idealism and hope, courage and frustration, their hatred, excitement, resentment, sadness, fear, division and disillusionment.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2002
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781859843987

In this incendiary book, Hitchens takes the floor as prosecuting counsel and mounts a devastating indictment of Henry Kissinger, whose ambitions and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.

Chile and the Nazis

Chile and the Nazis
Author: Graeme Stewart Mount
Publisher:
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN:

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's subsequent declaration of war upon the United States, Chile's reluctance to sever diplomatic ties with Nazi Germany allowed Germany to maximize its opportunities there, influencing Chilean politicians, military operations, and the popular media. This is the story of Chile, of its efforts to maintain neutrality, its abandonment of neutrality, and the significance-long-term and short-term-of those actions. Based on documentary evidence from the archives of the Chilean Foreign Office, and from U.S., British, German, and, intercepted, Japanese documents, Mount is one of the first authors to provide evidence of the events and circumstances surrounding Chile's refusal to comply with the will of the White House and the State Department, in 1942, that they sever diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. According to his findings, this refusal, fueled by bribes to influential politicians and journalists, a respect for the German-Chilean electorate in a presidential election year, a fear of what Nazi submarines might do to Chilean shipping and the Chilean coastline, and a desire to demonstrate independence, allowed these countries to use their embassies as centres of espionage that radiated as far north as Canada and threatened Allied shipping. Mount concludes that although the government of President Rios finally did make the break, sympathy for the Nazis and their values did not disappear but continued to have an impact upon Chile into the era of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean head of state from 1973 to 1990. Graeme S. Mount teaches history at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. He is author of many books dealing with Canada-United States relations. His most recent include The Caribbean Basin: An International History,/I> and Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American Policies toward Canada during the Cold War.

The Remainder

The Remainder
Author: Alia Trabucco Zerán
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1566895588

Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela’s childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents’ violent militant past. The body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.

How to Order the Universe

How to Order the Universe
Author: María José Ferrada
Publisher: Tin House Books
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1951142314

A San Francisco Chronicle and Southwest Review Best Book of the Year and A World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year “A dreamscape of a book. I adored this compelling, wise, and utterly unique coming-of-age tale.” —Tara Conklin For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D’s life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the unusual life they’ve created. María José Ferrada expertly captures a vanishing way of life and a father-daughter relationship on the brink of irreversible change. At once nostalgic, dangerous, sharply funny, and full of delight and wonder, How to Order the Universe is a richly imaginative debut and a rare work of magic and originality.

Seeking Meaning, Seeking Justice in a Post-Cold War World

Seeking Meaning, Seeking Justice in a Post-Cold War World
Author: Judith Keene
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004361677

The challenge for historians, as for individuals and nations, has been to make sense of the Cold War past without recourse to the obsolete frameworks of a dichotomous world. The editors of Seeking Meaning, Seeking Justice in the Post-Cold War World, Judith Keene and Elizabeth Rechniewski, have brought together contributions that address the diverse modes by which the Cold War is being assessed, with a major focus on countries on the periphery of the Cold War confrontation. These approaches include developments in historiography as new intellectual and cultural frame are applied to old debates. Authors also consider the ‘universal’ principles and moral discourses, including that of human rights, on which judgements have been based and judicial processes instigated; and the forms of memorialisation that have sought to come to terms, and perhaps achieve reconciliation, with a Cold War past. Contributors are: Ann Curthoys, Philip Deery, Katherine Hite, Michael Humphrey, Su-kyong Hwang, Perry Johansson, Judith Keene, Betty O'Neill, Peter Read, Elizabeth Rechniewski, Estela Valverde, Adrian Vickers and Marivic Wyndham