Human Rights in Chile: Remeberance and Reckoning

My memories of the guerrilla tactics, referred to in the media as student protests are not very clear. I was a 20-yr. old Latin American Studies major, with a strong interest in theatre and literature, who had read and studied about the political situation in Chile. I wasn’t trained as an Anthropologist and did not anticipate that very vivid, real experiences would eventually become harder and harder to remember. And I was busy, caught up in classwork and perhaps most significantly, in an immersion program. As part of learning about the culture, there was the experiencing of a culture. In Santiago, this was social culture that had been strongly reorganized and directed toward a certain type of socioeconomic development, and to competition in an international marketplace. There was a new metro system and the microbuses, in middle-class neighborhoods, every morning at 8AM, were literally overflowing with suited people on their way to work. The microbuses, I had been told, were different before Pinochet, all painted different colors, some with designs, whereas now they were all painted a standard pale yellow. This is one of the ways Chileans expressed differences of pre- and post-dictatorship to me, in describing small details and changes, unemotional and somehow representative of much deeper social forces and realities. It was similar when my hostess mother matter-of-factly pointed to where there had been bullet holes in her small, modest apartment from the night-time violence during the days of the coup.

The first protests in the first semester of 1994 were about financial plans for students, who wanted more government assistance. Although they were not directly connected to the dictatorship, the role of the state in education was certainly approached differently under the Allende and Pinochet governments, with the former providing more government funds for education. Eventually, the same methods of protest were used to mark days of disappearances from the public university, La Chile, that occurred in the days of the coup and its aftermath. One protest, I remember, was for two students and one professor who had disappeared on a specific day, their bodies never recovered or whereabouts never known.

Each protest at Grecia-Macul started the same way. (Sometimes there were parallel protests organized in the city center, at another campus, on the same day.) There was a group of buildings and lawn, wooded areas— not very big, about four city blocks— surrounded mostly by a high fence that separated the campus from major highways. From somewhere on campus, students or individuals (maybe 20) with black t-shirts wrapped around their faces appeared with Molotov cocktails and started climbing the fence. They would throw things into the highway, breaking up traffic and place themselves as human barriers, often burning a tire or regularly throwing Molotov cocktails. Usually some protestors stayed on the fence watching the scene below.

Many by-standers fled to the other side of the campus when this happened, going onto side streets and reaching safe areas. Sometimes it was possible to catch a bus on a different highway, but the whole area was backed up with traffic shortly after the protests started. Other students on the campus would watch the spectacle from a distance or from the many windows in the building closest to the Grecia-Macul intersection, seeking shelter.

One of the reasons for this kind of protest, I was told later, was a logical, tactical maneuver. In some of the reforms passed during the transitional democracy, the military police were forbidden to enter university campuses because of the many unwarranted disappearances, arrests, and cases of harassments during the dictatorship. The protestors could successfully break up traffic and create disturbance, with the eventual retreat option of climbing back over the fence and fleeing to safety on campus.

This greatly affected everyone else, however, in the military counter-maneuver. The military police would move in slowly from either side of the highway, having to clear and get through traffic in order to do so. Protestors would continue to throw Molotov cocktails and block the streets with random objects. The police used tanks and carried fireproof shields, managing to approach in safety by tear-gassing the area in front of them. This usually affected the whole area— several city blocks or more. As they got closer to the scene of protest, the police would try to move in and arrest protestors, sometimes using rubber bullets, who usually managed to scramble back onto campus in safety. The military then proceeded to spray the campus with tear-gas until time had passed and all signs of protest had ended. The whole ordeal usually lasted several hours.

As I joined other Chilean students— head on my desk, waiting for the air to become bearable; watching the action of the protest from a building; or running across campus trying to find an exit— I was invariably initiated into part of the modern Chilean experience. Many of the students felt helpless about the situation. They were uncomfortable with the violence and danger, but no attempts were made to prevent protests, that I saw. Someone always knew what the protests were about. There was a kind of legacy in being a student, it seemed, because so many of those who were targeted during the coup were students or university-affiliated. Graffiti about disappearances or political arrests were scattered about the campus, reminding students of this legacy.

Within Chile’s governmental institutions and legal system, pluralistic reforms were occurring in 1989, with the democratic election of a new government. With human rights becoming a widely-recognized problem, there was a tension between the effects of military repression, the forgetting and denial of the human rights situation and the effects of trying to re-establish democracy and instigate social justice. A mental health team working with human rights victims in Santiago at the Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights (ILAS) in 1990 concluded that, "The institutionalization of political violence in this police state not only imposed traumatic experiences on its victims but also produced trauma at a macrosocial level." (134)

This “macrosocial” level of trauma is exhibited in the country’s moves toward remembering and forgetting: