Chilean History and the Sine Wave: Changing Interpretations of Pinochet’s Dictatorship

Public History Review, Vol. 27, 2020
ISSN 1833-4989 | Published by UTS ePRESS | https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj

Chilean History and the Sine Wave: Changing Interpretations of Pinochet’s Dictatorship

Marivic Wyndham and Peter Read

Citation: Wyndham, M. and Read, P. 2020. Chilean History and the Sine Wave: Changing Interpretations of Pinochet’s Dictatorship. Public History Review, 27, 1-11.

© 2020 by the author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

In a recent essay, Katherine Hite reflected on her concern at the evident confusion among her US students as to their role as citizens. Confronted by historical exhibitions on Pinochet’s Chile, in which their own country had been implicated, she wrote: ‘Call it the decline of empire, chickens coming home to roost, whatever you wish, but I am surrounded by young people, smart, engaged, yet also alienated, confused, even disgusted.’ They questioned why and where they fitted in, asking each other what was the point? Her focus on their malaise was the interaction between her US students and Chilean guides at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. Listening to the guides’ descriptions, surrounded by the graphic videos and artefacts relating to the Pinochet dictatorship, she wondered if and how her students might reimagine less ‘structural violence’. Would they get it? Might they glimpse a possible way to fit in? The results were not encouraging.1

In this article we continue our investigation as to how Chilean museum guides impart factual and emotional knowledge, this time to students of their own country.2 Our focus is on what is presented not at the Museum but the National Stadium. Besides the Museum itself, this internationally-recognised Site of Conscience has become the Chilean state’s own principal memorial to the victims of Pinochet.3 Compared to other well-known Santiago sites such as Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi, where tours have been conducted for two decades, student-directed historical tours have begun fairly recently at the Stadium, partly because of the previous uncertainty as to the stadium’s future.4

The history of the dictatorship presented at Santiago’s Sites of Conscience generally, whether in monument, plaque or guided tour, has changed greatly since the first visit of the authors in 2006. It is changing still. We observed, over more than a decade, not much homogeneity either in the memorialisation of the different sites of torture and disappearance, or in the changing interpretation of any single site. The reasons are several. First, for the two decades in which public memorialisation has been allowed, the attitude of the state has determined decisively what could be displayed, written and said at any place at which it had administrative or financial control, including the National Stadium. Local interpretations elsewhere have depended on the literacy level of the guides and plaque-writers, funding and the political position of the guides – from the centre left such as the Communists, to the far left, such as the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Among the guides, men tended to be more dominant than women, the educated elite more than those from the poorer poblaciónes (towns or settlements). Most dominant have been the voices of the once clearly defined political parties such as the Marxist-Leninist-Guevarist MIR, the Communists and the Socialists.5

We can now recognise that the most significant turning point in what is imparted occurred sometime after 2013. That year was the fortieth anniversary of the coup. From this point, little by little, historical interpretation would no longer be led by the generation which suffered the repression. The next generation learned of it second-hand from their parents and grandparents – when the generation that suffered under Pinochet’s dictatorship as survivors or relatives of the detained-disappeared and politically executed ceased to act as guides and were replaced by those who were removed from that experience. Thus it was not just the historical interpretation which had changed, but the guides themselves. The relationship between guide and listener began to slip from a monologue to something closer to a dialogue between equals.

Though the mantle of interpretation has only recently passed to the ‘nineties’ generation, the ignorance of the young about the dictatorship had concerned the older generation for some time. Their chief concern lays not so much in student apathy but a basic ignorance of the deadly events which occurred in their own lifetime. Politically committed students from 2010 demanded free tertiary education rather than the Socialist Republic of Chile that their parents had fought for. The founder of the memorial at 1367 Casa de Memoria José Domingo Cañas in Santiago, Dr Laura Moya, lamented that the young took only a shallow and passing interest in rebuilding their society.6 Curators at the Parque Por La Paz Villa Grimaldi (henceforth Parque Por la Paz) occasionally reprimanded youngsters for ambushing each other in the reconstructed series of tiny wooden cells at the Tower. More generally, children often seemed unaware that Pinochet and Allende were much more than simply two significant figures of the recent past!7

In 2016, where our article begins, forty-three years after Pinochet’s coup, the polarities that had divided the nation so bitterly were softening. The founder of the far-right Fatherland and Liberty political grouping, Roberto Thieme, now believed that Pinochet had been a traitor –that at the time of the coup Pinochet had lacked political sense.8 On the other side, dozens of exiles from the intellectual left had spent the later 1970s and 1980s in Eastern Europe learning that the imposed socialist state held unsuspected and unwelcome strictures on freedom of speech and personal movement.9 By contrast others had spent years in Western Europe absorbing the subtleties of Euro-communism.10 In exile they had learned, like Thieme, that politics were complex, that Chile is at base a conservative country and that much desirable change could be accomplished by compromise. From the 1990s the exiles returned home not only older but wiser.

Changing Interpretations

Most complex of all were the changing interpretations that occurred at Parque Por La Paz. Probably the greatest number of political prisoners of Pinochet’s regime were held here – perhaps 450 detained and at least 229 detained-disappeared. Since opening in 1988, the site has experienced a variety of interpretations by its voluntary Collectives, composed both of survivors and relatives of the disappeared and politically executed.

One survivor in 2002, Pedro Mata, took every group of visitors to the memorial to the politically executed and openly and unselfconsciously wept.11 The governing collective of the time, never fully united on what should be preserved or taught to visitors, were uneasy at Matta’s overt emotionalism. His guided tours were terminated. Several years later another survivor-guide, having since completed a Foucauldian PhD at the Sorbonne, spoke of the ‘epistemological rupture that speaks of pain, suffering and torture’.12 The ‘mercantilist production of social relations allowed an array of possibilities for every individual, such as the solidarity of rubbing one’s skin, while blindfolded, against an unknown fellow detainee’.13 Another survivor and Collective member, Claudio Durán, was interviewed as part of an oral history project. He was concerned that several significant experiences were unrepresented in the sometimes graphic accounts of imprisonment and torture. Where was comradeship? Where was resistance? Agency, rather than victimhood, was beginning to enter the discourse of the survivors.14

The restored democratic state, however, seemed intent on channelling the interpretation of these terrible events into its own purposes. President Michele Bachelet had presaged such a development while announcing the construction of today’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights in March 2006. ‘The violations of human rights can have many explanations’, she proposed, ‘but absolutely no justification’. Her words implied that one did not need to know everything that had happened at every site of torture and death. The point was that Human Rights had been seriously violated. One did not need to know exactly how.15

Oswaldo Torres, a survivor of Villa Grimaldi, had anticipated such a betrayal of experience. He wrote in 2006:

Should an educational memorial reinforce the values of the pluralist state in reifying reconciliation and democratic values; or should visitors be given the full catalogue of horrors? [A] museum of memory and human rights is of a different nature. The memory is ours, the testimonies are ours, the multiplicity of interpretations flow through our communication channels, different types of schools and family chats. In this sense it is not a museum of the republic which sets out epic lectures on the construction of representative democracy, but rather a piece of history which contains unshakeable truths and various interpretations.16

The memories were his, the testimonies were his. But when would his experiences be valued in their own right?

At a time when the National Stadium still had no organised tours, the interpretations at Parque Por La Paz drifted towards the restrained, factual and bland. In 2016 a self-guided audio-tour for adult visitors, in Spanish and English, outlined dates and sites, but avoided the personal. Only by entering ‘further information’ could visitors learn of the solidarity of women prisoners (that of the men was not mentioned at all) while the most personalised part of the display, the ‘Memory Room’ of memorabilia of individual victims, was usually locked.

Memorialisation at the National Stadium

By about the turn of the twenty-first century there occurred two not unrelated developments. One was that many of the exiles, the left wing highly-educated intellectuals whose youthful enthusiasms for the teachings of Che Guevara had so brought down Pinochet’s repression upon them, had risen to senior government and administrative positions. They were concerned that they, the survivors, had been robbed of their voice. The factual historical interpretations found in schoolbooks and at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights had drifted too far from the particulars that they had personally endured. Secondly, many of the former survivors and exiles were rising to senior roles in government and administration for which their education and class had prepared them. Since the government, with their assistance, had concluded that the National Stadium would become the focus of its entire on-site memorialisation of the dictatorship, the chance had presented itself to inscribe their actual and bodily experiences on the historical record by inviting visitors to share their emotions at the same national icon of repression where very many of them had been incarcerated.

It was too good an opportunity to miss. Gone would be the bland and opaque. The new memorials, the signage for which would be supervised by themselves, were to prioritise the survivors rather than the detained-disappeared and politically executed. Women would take precedence over men; emotions over raw data and political allegiance. The lexicography would be metaphoric; personal in its appeal to the intuitive and the poetic; quite unlike anything previously inscribed on any Chilean memorial. The following example is drawn from the precinct of the place where the women were held – the swimming pool changing-room, opened by Bachelet in 2016. It is almost the first building the adult (not school) visitor sees on entering the Stadium:17

Within these walls, curling up round each other against the claws of the jailers, daughters, sisters and mothers were the first women in Chile who had to endure the beginning of a long and dark night of cowardice.18

If the generation of the survivors had intended these words to be their valediction, their ambition has been achieved through the signage. They created the milieu in which the young guides were to function at the Stadium from 2018. But what would this next generation of guides make of such passionate outpourings when their first task, as agreed in the Kunstmann plan, was to seek a responsible and practical response from Chilean youth?19

December 2018. Our guide was Gonzalo, a part-time volunteer and full-time music student. Most of the guides, he said, were like him: dedicated to inculcating what he termed a new spirituality to their secondary and tertiary students. A variety of tours are conducted at the Stadium, some mostly connected with sport. But Gonzalo’s focus, and that of all the young peoples’ guides, is pedagogic.20

Let’s accept, he begins, that the Stadium has many personalities. For eighty years it has been the home of the national football team. It functions as an electoral polling station. National Festivals are held here. It is where President Aylwin addressed the first grand post-Pinochet convocation and where two women symbolically danced the Cueca Sola before seventy thousand people.21 The homeless have been allowed to take nightly shelter here. He reprises the historical parameters that the children learned, or should have learned at school: the Cold War, the fear of a Cuban-style dictatorship, the interference of the CIA, the refined techniques of torture learned from the Brazilians and the School of the Americas, the strikes that were organised by the right against the elected Socialist government.

Between 12,000 and 20,000 people, he recounts, were held here in the Stadium in the first three months after the coup of 11 September and 9 November 1973. An unknown number were disappeared here. He explains his terminology: Pinochet regarded the radical left generally as ‘enemies of the state’. In the past, the incarcerated have been referred to as victims, heroes, militants or activists. In this tour he will use the terms ‘prisoners of war’ and most importantly, survivors.22

In words that would have offended Osvaldo Torres and the many who wish their horrific experiences validated, Gonzalo affirms: ‘we need to know the legacy, yes, but the important thing is, how do we resolve it? We’re all young Chileans: what we need now is social mobilisation, a resignification of the events, an adoption of a new ethic of moral living.’ Gonzalo, in accordance with the guides’ guidelines, explicitly does not believe in reciting a ‘pedagogy of violence’ but prefers to emphasise ‘virtue’. Rather than the terror of being identified by an informer or the brutality of the daily interrogations, he cites an officer who tried to compensate for the Stadium violence, a soldier who offered surreptitious cigarettes to the prisoners of war, the Swedish ambassador Harald Edelstam who allowed refugees to shelter in his embassy in defiance of the military.23

We shall see below how the women, seemingly so fragile, portrayed themselves as turning to each other to form a carapace of protective sisterhood. They constructed a living room inside the swimming pool changing room doubling as a prison, and even picked flowers to decorate it. ‘We didn’t try to escape’, they said. ‘We’re women, not soldiers’. Gonzalo continues: ‘The direction we want to encourage is the prisoners’ example of not dwelling on the horrors but their solidarity’. ‘The places I’m about to show you,’ he announces, ‘are not static memory sites, but invitations to reflection and social mobilisation.’

Yet the purpose of not dwelling on the prisoners’ horrors is greatly at variance with the poetic yet pungent affirmations in the women’s precinct, written only three years earlier, and by the female survivors themselves. Any student passing through the main gate would have walked past the following inscription, but few would have had time to read it:

Here in the former changing room of the swimming pool was the place where hundreds of women suffered the brutal repression of the military coup.

It was here in this sombre place where the dream of thousands of Chilean and foreign women was disrupted by political detention, the horror of torture and of death.

Within these walls, huddled together against the taunts, hundreds of women, housewives, students, workers and professional women paid in pain and blood for their decision to be part of the construction of a more just and decent new homeland for all.

Here inside, through these walls and in the claws of the jailers, daughters, sisters and mothers were the first women in Chile who had to endure the beginning of a long and dark night of terror.

Yet, it was also here that pain wove the unbreakable net of solidarity which gave the prisoners mutual protection against terror, as they cared with their lives for their pregnant comrades because tomorrow outside these walls life will continue and their hopes will be fulfilled.

In memory of all those who suffered within these walls and those who hoped, in the darkness, to see the light of justice and liberty.24

Only four years since the plaque was installed, the appalled anguish of the women survivors is about to be eviscerated in the guided tour.

The standard tour involves progressing, by walking, through all the significant sites of the Stadium, from the plaques at the main entrance, to the pool of remembrance, the escotillas (the entrances into the stadium proper), the changing rooms, the stadium bleachers and the ‘Via Dolorosa’ along which the prisoners were forced to march towards, finally, the velodrome and torture chamber in the changing-room, known as the caracol.

Stopping outside the arena, Gonzalo borrows an idea from the tours practised at Villa Grimaldi where students are asked to choose one of the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He forms groups to discuss how they might use the principles to resolve a contemporary issue. In the tour in 2018 in Parque Por La Paz in which we accompanied the students, most chose the right to free assembly. ‘In these circumstances, what would you do?’25 asks Gonzalo who relates that those seated in the Stadium awaiting interrogation quaked before the advance of the ‘encapuchado’, a masked and hooded figure who identified prominent members of the left to the interrogators. He says: ‘He was promised his freedom if he identified, that is, if he betrayed – his friends. What would you do?’

In the Stadium, Gonzalo again asks: ‘How do we confront “Never Again”.’ He invites the students to choose two of the Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘from your own home or school, discuss how you can recognise or enact one of these. It’s easy to be horrified by these events, but we still live in a society riddled with class prejudice and racism directed against the Mapuche Indigenous people. How does the Universal Declaration, and our sense of responsibility, help us to confront these contemporary demands?’26

Camarín (changing room) number 8, in conditions once so packed that a few men had to sleep on the clothes racks near the ceiling strapped by their belts, now holds some fifty photographs and testimonials of the survivors. Here the themes of fellowship at the expense of brutal experience are displayed. That of José Manuel Mendez, who also acts as an occasional Stadium guide, reads:

Here was lost all pride, here was born generosity; we became better friends, here we shared our secrets. If I stumbled, several helping hands would cheer me up. All of us were as one. They asked me my birthday (the ninth of October) and soon everyone in the camarín began to sing Happy Birthday with two hallullas (Chilean celebratory bread) with a lighted match in each one. It was the most delicious birthday cake in my entire life.27

This is the first time, in our experience, that the expressions of comradeship among the men has been displayed – or perhaps we should say – have been ‘allowed to be displayed’.

Meanwhile the designers and curators have been busy in the wide display spaces beneath the Stadium seating in reinforcing this philosophy which we might call heroic acceptance. In the centre, a requiem mass for the souls of the politically executed and disappeared is held annually. On each side, Perspex screens carry inscriptions as touchingly poetic as those in the women’s changing rooms, but without the fury:

When I left the stadium, some children ran towards me. I did not recognise them. They were my daughters.28

I used to gaze at the night sky, thinking that beneath that vast blue motionless sky, my children were sleeping far away.29

I return and am seeing all that has happened, I weep neither for pain, nor for cowardice, rather it makes me furious, because if my country needed me to fight in a war to defend my home, my country, I am not a coward, but this, given we are all Chileans and the things that they did: what for?

Gonzalo argues: ‘Historians deal with the past, and in fact have questioned some of the survivors’ accounts. Let them get on with it while we deal with the present’. The most overt political commentary here carries the same tone of urgent outrage as that of the women’s prison while skirting around any reference to gaolers’ claws or a long dark night of terror. The emotions run almost as high but the rationale is less precise. This signage, perhaps the strongest in the current display, implies that although responsibility lies with the young, we older ones must help them to absorb (‘interiorarse’) the meaning of the events:

Forty years have passed and the spaces remain silenced, hoping that what happened will not be forgotten, hoping that we will not forget what happened, hoping that we will rescue the history that happened there, so the new generations can know and absorb that this great national Colosseum is not only a sporting and artistic cultural centre but a place in which thousands of men, women and children saw their human rights trampled by their own countrymen.30

Perhaps, in the mood of this display area under the seating, there is a hint, if not of victimhood, but of the resigned pathos which the plaque-writers of 2015 were so determined to put behind them. The raw violence that characterised the first few weeks of imprisonment after the coup is drained in the apparent belief and assumption that one does not need to know any more than that which is imparted by the guide to get visitors to ‘get themselves to a different place’.

Significantly Gonzalo’s tour ends here. He does not normally take his students to the most infamous part of the Stadium dictatorship apparatus, the cycling velodrome and its changing room where the most terrible of the tortures were enacted. The students bypass it as surely as they have bypassed the excoriating inscriptions at the main entrance. And indeed, if the students’ journey had extended to the velodrome, they would have read on a plinth nearby:

The patrols pound the pavement of the interior paths resounding with the echo of orders, the sounds of greased metal, the shouts and the discharge of rifles and heavy machine guns. The gunpowder that stings in the nostrils paralyses the prisoners’ hearts of those incarcerated in the cells as in Gateway 8. The three long-haired teenagers were taken away with their heads covered under a blanket and they never returned to our ministrations in Gateway no 8. Neither did the two workers in dressing-room 4 taken off to interrogation in the frightful Velodrome. Many years later, we discovered that their relatives had found their mortal remains.31

Gonzalo’s concluding observation is that ‘Many Chileans seem to despair of the future: but here we have more and more visitors, from children of private schools to army cadet officers… To them, and to all Chileans, I say, “Come and do what I do as a guide and put yourself in touch with the new generation. This will get us to a different place. This is my hope for Chile.”’ Such invitations, though, mean some deflection from the larger Human Rights agenda which flourished in Chile from about 2005 to the present, which encompasses such issues as racism and poverty, to name but two, which are irrelevant to the current interpretation at the stadium. Allende’s government is still presented as the much-lamented gold standard while the issues raised by the guides, perhaps inevitably, have become those of most concern to the generations which live them.

We sympathise with the new interpretation, laudable, earnest and necessary as it may be. For if young Chileans despair of the future, there is indeed nothing uplifting or constructive to be gained by learning about the truly terrible excesses of the regime. Guides at the Stadium and those at Villa Grimaldi will only admit to accounts of rats being introduced to the vagina, asphyxiation by plastic bag or the young conscript whipped to death with chains while hanging from the tallest tree in Villa Grimaldi – only when they are specifically asked by individual students. The new pedagogy, which to judge from the behaviour of students at both Sites of Conscience, seems to be seriously received and may well meet the changing needs of the state.

Yet we believe that there is a further and negative dimension to the new education. We reason thus: Technicians of radio programs reduce the high frequencies of a recording to make it less shrill and reduce the lower to minimise distortion. The resulting broadcast will be acoustically acceptable to almost everyone. National Stadium guides following the new spirituality evidently have proceeded as if the bottom frequencies of the sine wave are to be lost then the top frequencies must be lost in equal measure. But in setting aside the poetic passion inscribed on the entrance and the velodrome monoliths something important has vanished.

The architects of the memorial which greets (or is ignored by) visitors at the main Stadium entrance worked so hard to be all-inclusive. Unlike practically all previous memorialisation, the inscribers avoid identifying their political allegiance. All of us, runs the implication, were women survivors together, touched and forever affected by our common experience, we housewives, students and workers. These emotions are surely but another form of the dynamic that drove these same, much younger Chileans of the 1970s to conceive and create a more just and equal Chile. The passion of the valediction on themselves, in full view of every visitor, surely could alleviate a little of Gonzalo’s despair for the future or the alienation of Katherine Hite’s students.32 Yet we suspect that the strength of the words would be an embarrassment to him. Nor does it appear that visitors have perceived any disjunct between the signage and the guided tour. It seems that most tend to follow one or the other, perhaps more out of convenience than any other motive.

The story of the dictatorship also holds many poignant moments which the guided tours, nor, for that matter, the National Museum, do not encompass. For instance, the MIRista Muriel Dockendorff Navarrete, detained with her husband Juan Molina Manzor in another centre called Cuatro Alamos, scribbled a message to her friend and fellow detainee Sandra Machuca, and a poem to Juan, on a cigarette packet and entrusted it to Sandra. Muriel was disappeared. Juan, Sandra and the cigarette packet somehow survived. Muriel’s message to her friend reads:

I remember when I met you in the house of terror, what you gave me and shared with me.

In those moments in which a light was a dream. Or a miracle. But you were light in those shadows.

We were one in misfortune. Today thousands of misfortunes. Later I see you as you were, as I always am still, in some place always looking to windward.

We shall meet again through the mist that we will dissolve.

Do not forget me comrade.

Rucia.
In the month of despair
In the year of torture.33

A second national treasure is the story of Gladys Díaz Armijo, MIRista and well-known journalist incarcerated in a tiny cell for three months at Villa Grimaldi. Immediately on arrival at Villa Grimaldi she was beaten. An unidentified voice snarled: ‘Leave this bitch for me’. Her blindfold was caked in old blood: ‘Don’t worry about it, you won’t be getting out alive anyway’. Strapped to the electrified wire frame, the parrilla, she regained consciousness to recognize the voice of the same man raping her. During each of the several sessions of electrical torture her screams became so high pitched and continuous that she could not recognise her own voice. After each session she bled from every orifice, including her breasts and her navel. ‘I didn’t give myself permission to feel the pain… So much electrical current that it’s hard to understand that the body can resist it.’ She was forced to watch her partner being tortured. Some of her many bones smashed by beatings have never healed.

Afterwards Gladys Díaz reflected: ‘The worst part of torture is not the physical pain that you suffer – I think that the worst part of torture is to have to realize in such a brutal way that human beings are capable of doing something so aberrant to another person as torturing them.’ From her experiences grew a love of humanity: ‘I believed, and still believe, in humanity despite such unbelievable crimes… I gained a profound admiration of the human being. I felt such a capacity of love so unconditional that I had never felt before. And that remains.’ She found that ‘the ways that one finds to defend oneself are unlimited. I sometimes dreamed about beautiful things… I remember having awakened to the sound of a little bird that was outside, and how I was able to keep the sound of that bird’s singing in my ears for days.’34

The words of Dockendorff Navarrete and Díaz Armijo are among the most noble moments to emerge from the dreadful saga of the dictatorship. The heroism of these women, of the students’ own country, and within the lifetime of their own grandparents, can be set alongside the heroic actions of, for example, the Chilean military hero Arturo Prat in the battle of Iquique in 1879. Or Anne Frank. Surely they must rank among the very finest treasures of the national story.

Chileans, do not forget them.

Endnotes

1. Katherine Hite, ‘Teaching the politics of encounter’, Radical History Review, January 2016, pp8-9; DOI 10.1215/01636545-3160086. The Chilean guides were especially perplexed by the students’ reaction. Did their polite silences signify a mix of self-consciousness about historic complicity, faulty Spanish, not wanting to appear offensive, or about how difficult it can be to express emotion or pain in any language?

2. Our principal work in this field is a chronological examination of the changing interpretations of seven sites of torture and extermination in Santiago, P. Read and M. Wyndham, Narrow but Endlessly Deep: The Struggle for memorialisation in Chile Since the Transition to Democracy, Canberra: ANUPress, 2016.

3. The designation comes not from a formal pronouncement but from the large scale and expensive memorialisation carried out at the state’s expense within the precinct, and recent signage which identifies the Stadium as ‘National Stadium National Monument’.

4. Often this was a three-way contest between the mayor in whose jurisdiction the Stadium fell, the Department of Sport and the Department of Historical Monuments.

5. The authors have visited these sites to participate in official or spontaneous tours, in some of which Chilean children were included, for many years. Each presentation we have recorded and noted the changing signage, for example, Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, ‘The Disappearing Museum’, in Rethinking History, Routledge, http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=rrhi20 2014.

6. Laura Moya, interview by Marivic Wyndham, 22 April 2014.

7. Adolescent misbehaviour has been observed by the authors themselves at Parque Por La Paz.

8. Interview with Tomás Maciatti, Youtube, 17 September 2013, wwww.youtube.com/watch?v=b3usy7JAYw4 (accessed 3 May 2017).

9. For instance, Antonio Leal, cited by Katherine Hite, When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–1998, Columbia University Press, New York, 2000, pp137-145.

10. For a development of this argument, see Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, ‘Eurocommunism and the Concertación’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American History, 2015, vol 1, no 21, pp116-125. https://doi.org/10.1080/13260219.2015.1040210

11. Pedro Alejandro Matta, ‘A Walk Through a 20th Century Torture Centre Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile. A Visitor’s Guide’ (written in English), 2000. See also Diana Taylor, ‘Memory, trauma, performance’, Aletria, vol 1, no 21, 2011, p70.

12. Michel Foucault in his seminal work Discipline and Punish examined the relation between the state, representing sovereign power, and the imprisoned or executed individual. This guide’s interpretation of his experience we see as trying to make more meaningful intellectual sense of the events beyond the simple binary of the left/right political spectrum.

13. Roberto Merino Jorquera, recorded guided tour, Nov 2013

14. Some of this discussion on the changing interpretations of the sites of trauma is drawn from Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, Narrow but Endlessly Deep: The Struggle for Memorialisation in Chile since the Transition to Democracy, ANU Press, Canberra, 2017.

15. Cited, Peter Kornbluh and Katherine Hite, ‘Chile’s turning point’, The Nation, 17 February 2010.

16. Osvaldo Torres in A Museum in Villa Grimaldi: Space for Memory and Education in Human Rights, International Seminar, August 2005, Corporación Parque por La Paz Villa Grimaldi, Muncipalidad de Peñalolén, Santiago, nd, c2006, p132.

17. Wally Kunstmann, President of the Metropolitan Region of Political Prisoners, in planning documents stressed the centrality of women detainees at the expense of the attention thrown on male detainees memorialised (or supposed to be memorialised) within the stadium itself. If the authorities had elevated the status of anybody, it was that of the detained-disappeared and politically executed. The survivors had remained forgotten since the Transition to Democracy. The circumstances of the men generally were well known, she declared, but those of the women, hardly at all. (Claudio Metrano, ‘Este martes se inaugura el Memorial a prisioneros políticos en Estadio Nacional’ [Opening of the Memorial to the Political Prisoners in National Stadium on Tuesday], DiarioUchile, 3 March 2014.)

18. We develop this argument in Read and Wyndham, pp285-289.

19. The first design principles, which the current display broadly follows, were developed by Wally Kunstmann, President of the Metropolitan Region of Political Prisoners, and a composite group of a lawyers, a historian and several architects, in the document Projecto Nacional, Memorial Nacional, Comité Estadio Nacional 2002-2007.

20. Stadium tour with Gonzalo reproducing, at our request, a student visit, 6 December 2018.

21. The Cueca is a lively Chilean dance for one or more couples. Since the Transition to Democracy the ‘Cueca Alone’ is danced by one or more women without a partner. The ‘Ceca Sola’ has been adopted by the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparacidos as an emblem of their struggle.

22. On 12 October 1973, in an effort to display the even-handedness of the regime, 327 detainees out of a group of 3,500 were released; Steve Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006, p59.

23. During the dicatorship Edelstam allowed diplomatic protection to many hundreds of Chileans, Cubans and others wanted by the Pinochet regime and arranged their refugee status in Sweden.

24. Fue aquí en este viejo camarín de la piscina, el lugar donde cientos de mujeres padecieron la brutal represión de los militares golpistas. Fue aquí en este sombrío lugar, donde el sueño de miles de chilenas y extranjeras se vió interrumpido por la detención política, el horror de la tortura y la muerte. Tras estas paredes, acurrucadas contra el vejamen, cientos de mujeres, amas de casa, estudiantes, obreras y profesionales pagaron con dolor y sangre por incorporarse con decisión a la construcción de una nueva patria más justa y digna para todos.

Aquí adentro, tras estas paredes y bajos las garras de sus carceleros, hijas, hermanas y madres fueron las primeras mujeres de Chile que debieron soportar el comienzo de una noche cobarde, larga y oscura.

Sin embargo, también fue aquí que el dolor tejió la red irrompible de la fraternidad, que hizo a las prisioneras protegerse mutuamente del terror, cuidar con sus vidas a sus compañeras embarazadas porque mañana fuera de estas paredes, es cierto que continua la vida y se realizan las esperanzas.

25. Tour conducted for senior secondary school students, Villa Grimaldi, 6 December 2018.

26. Identification by a masked informer, see the evidence of Esteban Carvajal ‘Patricio’ in Villegas, El Estadio, pp28, 38–39.

27. Jose Manuel Mendez conducted the authors on an individual tour of the Stadium, 7 December 2018, in which he stressed the solidarity of male detainees rather than the horrors of incarceration. The camarín, he declared has become his ‘second home’. His inscription reads ‘Aquí se perdio el orgullo, aquí nació ser generoso, aquí nos hicimos más amigos, aquí nos contamos los secretos. Si yo caía varias manos más estaban dándome animo. Todos nosotros éramos uno. Llego un día en que me preguntaron la fecha de nacimiento (9 de octubre) al rato todos dentro del camarín, empezaron a cantar el cumpleaños feliz con dos hallullas en cada una, un fósforo incendido. Fue la torta más rica que he comido hasta hoy.’

28. Al salir del estadio, unas niñas corriéron hacia mí, no las reconocí, eran mis hijas.

29. En las noches miraba al cielo y pensaba que bajo la amplia azulada de ese cielo inmovil, lejos dormían mis hijas.

30. Han pasado más de 40 años y los lugares estan silenciosos esperando que no se olvido lo occurido; esperando que no se nos olvide lo occurido, esperando que rescatemos la historia que allí sucedió para que las nuevas generaciones puedan conocer e interiorizarse de que el maximo coliseo nacional no es solo un recinto deportivo y de actividades artisticas culturales, sino un lugar en que miles de hombres, mujeres y niños vieron sus derechos humanos atropellados por sus propios compatriotas.

31. Taconean las patrullas en el pavimento de calles interiores, dejan entrando el eco engrasado en metal con órdenes, gritos, descargas de fusiles y ametralladoras pesadas. La picazón de la polvera en las narices paraliza el corazón de los encerrados en las celdas como en la Escotilla 8. Los tres muchachos de pelo largo sacados con la frazada cubriéndoles la cabeza, tampoco volvieron a nuestras curaciones en la Escotilla. Como no regresaron los dos obreros del Camarín 4 llevados al interrogatorio en el temible caracol del Velódromo. Después nos enteraríamos que tras muchos años después sus familiares hallaron restos de sus huesos. Trans. Paula González Dolan.

32. The focus on women survivors, rather than all survivors, or all the politically executed and disappeared, is seen by Hite and Sturken, in the ‘context of feminist tactics of solidarity and resisting political violence, among older generations of women who were revolutionaries and former political prisoners and younger generation of progressive activists, as well as the history of feminist womens’ activism through the tactic of intervention into public space’. Katherine Hite and Marita Sturken, ‘The Estadio Nacional de Chile and the Reshaping of Space through Women’s Memory’ in Ayse Gül Altinay, Maria José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, Alisa Solomon (eds), Women Mobilizing Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, np. (on-line)

33. Me recuerdo cuando te conocí en la casa del terror, de lo que me diste, me entregaste.
En esos momentos en que una luz era un sueño. O un milagro, sin embargo, fuiste luz en esas tinieblas. Fuimos una en un revés. Hoy miles de reveses. Más tarde te veo como entonces, como sé estarás hoy, en algún sitio, siempre mirando al frente. Nos encontraremos a través de la niebla que despejaremos.
No me olvides, Camarada.
Rucia.
Mes: de la desesperada
Año: de la tortura

34. We may note that these profound emotions are in essence non-political. The examples we cite here should rise above national politics to the same level of heightened emotion as that forgiveness shown by the Rwanda massacre Alice Mukarurinda. Twenty years after the massacre which killed 800,000 of her countrymen and women, she works alongside the man who killed her baby and cut off her own hand with a machete, in a project building brick homes for other massacre survivors. See (http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/07/dozens-of-traumatized-mourners-carried-from-stadium-as-rwandans-mark-20th-anniversary-of-horrific-genocide/”%5D (accessed 15 January 2019).