Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lessie Jo Frazier is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is a coeditor of Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America.

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"The modern Chilean state has been linked to violence since its inception, despite official historiography's assertion that the 1973 coup and the Pinochet regime that followed were 'aberrations' in an otherwise democratic order favoring peace. Lessie Jo Frazier illuminates the competing uses of the past across cultural, racial, and class lines. Through her brilliant analysis of memory as a dynamic category employed by clashing collectivities, Frazier demonstrates how the use of memory in post-dictatorial regimes is not in and of itself liberating or new, but rather modeled on previous historical instances of remembering and forgetting."--Licia Fiol-Matta, author of "A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral"

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Salt in the Sand

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION Ethnography, History, and Memory................................................................................................11 Memory and the Camanchacas Calientes of Chilean Nation-State Formation.....................................................................212 Structures of Memory, Shapes of Feeling: Chronologies of Reminiscence and Repression in Tarapac (1890-Present)............................583 Dismantling Memory: Structuring the Forgetting of the Oficina Ramrez (1890-1891) and La Corua (1925) Massacres...........................854 Song of the Tragic Pampa: Structuring the Remembering of the Escuela Santa Mara Massacre (1907)...........................................1175 Conjunctures of Memory: The Detention Camps in Pisagua Remembered (1948, 1973, 1990) and Forgotten (1943, 1956, 1984).....................1586 The Melancholic Economy of Reconciliation: Talking with the Dead, Mourning for the Living..................................................190CONCLUSION Democratization and Arriving at the "End of History" in Chile......................................................................243Notes.........................................................................................................................................261Selective Bibliography........................................................................................................................355Index.........................................................................................................................................365

Chapter One

In May 1991, during my stay in Santiago, Chile had just entered the second year of a shift to formal democracy. This shift, officially termed "the transition," moved Chile from the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet, which had ruled since the 1973 coup, toward an elected coalition of political parties, despite the fact that the new civilian regime operated under the scrutiny of the former dictator and the military he still controlled. Political tensions had been exacerbated by the assassination of Jaime Guzmn, a major ideologue in the former military regime, a prominent senator, and a law professor; Guzmn had crafted both the terms of transition between regimes and the baroque constitution, which was designed to protect and institutionalize the prerogatives of those who had ruled earlier and to constrain the initiatives of those who sought to mold a new political system. Guzmn's murder had prompted the nervous new civilian government, eager to demonstrate its ability to maintain law and order, to permit police raids of shantytowns and mass detention of "suspects." To the horror of those who had held great hope for the new government, the murder served as the government's justification for unleashing the state's repressive forces in all-too-familiar ways.

As I walked late one evening through a downtown pedestrian mall, a group of young folk musicians were performing for passersby and an audience of about fifty that had gathered around them. Dressed in alpaca ponchos and blue jeans, the folk musicians played several pieces of Andean music on panpipes, guitars, charangos, and drums. In the middle of their street-corner set, the musicians announced their next song by noting the ongoing police raids and stating: "Today our government is in crisis over the death of one rich man. Here is a song about the deaths of many." To audience applause, which grew even more enthusiastic as they recognized the first notes, the group performed the opening movement of Santa Mara de Iquique: Cantata popular (commonly known as "Cantata Santa Mara de Iquique") a familiar retelling of the government's 1907 massacre of striking nitrate workers in Tarapac, two thousand kilometers away at the northern frontier.

How do such memories of repression shape collective subjectivities? In this case, the street performers employed music instantly recognizable to many in their audience; this music, in turn, elicited an emotional response based on collective memories of the original incident and its linkage to new instances of repression and also on memories of prior performances of the memory-form itself, in other words, this particular music. The cantata had emerged from the New Song Movement of the 1960s, in which artists reinterpreted folk melodies and genres in order to create and validate the political category of "the people," bearers of an authentic national culture and thus legitimate claimants to state power and economic resources. After the military coup of 1973, many of the movement's artists were killed or exiled and their music banned. Nonetheless, those exiled artists performed their music worldwide, working to isolate the military regime internationally and to generate support for opposition groups within Chile. During the years of dictatorship (1973-1990), many in the opposition used the events and characters of the long-ago Tarapac massacre portrayed in the cantata as an allegory for the more recent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government that had governed Chile in 1970-1973, an allegory that vindicated Popular Unity's attempts to enact a gradual socialist transformation of the state, despite its having been declared a failure by the military dictatorship and by many civilian politicians as well.

Thus it was that in the constricted and delicate political arena of transition from military to civilian rule, I witnessed street musicians calling on memories of state violence, connecting through analogy the Tarapac strikers of 1907 and the residents of Santiago's poorer neighborhoods who in 1991 were being politically harassed. By playing the cantata, the musicians implicated the current civilian government as comparable to the repressive Chilean state that had existed more than eighty years earlier. This parallel is surprisingly absent in professional histories of Chile, which either deal with times before or after, but not during, the 1973 coup, thus reinforcing the notion that the post-1973 violence was an aberration in the nation's otherwise democratic history. Memory, for all its complexities, is a useful analytic category because it places the historical observations of professionals alongside those of street musicians and reveals both to be political interventions. Thus, one can take as a serious proposition the connection made by the street musicians and their audience between the two moments of state violence as being about the ways in which the state secures certain interests at the expense of others.

The musicians' critical analogy demonstrated the political vulnerability of the new civilian government. Although the government had won the electoral contest against the military regime by speaking a language of justice and had identified itself as advocating for a broader collective of citizens and a more just distribution of resources, the civilian officials were eager to avoid charges by the pro-military opposition that they were ineffective in maintaining "order"-the lack of which the new generation of politicians understood as having contributed to the demise of the Popular Unity government, since disorder had been a key charge in the anti-Popular Unity propaganda. In prioritizing "order" over civil liberties, however, the civilian leadership risked being seen as the latest players in the long history of state violence in Chilean history.

By evoking the cantata to accuse the new government of state violence, the street musicians also tapped into memories of decades of violence in the North, which had made the region famous as a site of violence. However, in addition to its legacy of colonial violence, military glories of national conquest, and suppression of striking workers, Chile's northernmost region, Tarapac, was also the birthplace of the country's labor movement and major political parties. For Chileans, therefore, Tarapac symbolized state violence and rebellious vitality, repression and transformation.

The seemingly simple incident of the street musicians raises questions about the ways in which political and social struggles for dominance (hegemony) can employ narratives, images, and sensations from the past to animate or resist specific projects. Furthermore, it shows how hegemonic processes operate both in spite of and in intimate linkage with histories of state violence by creating possibilities, significations, and constraints for that violence. The idea and particular elements of "the past" get mobilized in multiple ways to generate specific kinds of support (affective ties) for political projects, while other aspects of the past must be erased to make those projects viable-in short, the cultural and political processes of remembering and forgetting.

The memories sustained in narratives-such as historiography, educational texts, or state documents coming from or intimately connected with the state-adopt, deny, or erase specific aspects of the histories of both repression and resistance, which in turn inform the tactical choices of political players on the deployment of violence. Social movements in Chile, such as the contemporary human-rights movements, emerge at particular conjunctures, constructing and sustaining memories through songs, poems, plays, folk tales, and the like in order to "recover" memories of state violence for their own political projects. In addition, groups such as the Chilean political parties represented in the state via congress or the presidency attempt to transform structures of power from within, as well as wider understandings of the past within the cultural frameworks available to them at any given point in time. These competing memories are a key component of hegemony, and by examining their deployment one can better understand the ways in which power and violence are intertwined.

Memory in Northern Chile's Tarapac has persisted as a nebulous realm filled with the promise, but never the guarantee, of liberatory action. Although widely regarded as a positive component in political struggles, memory has also often played a role in domination. Even as activists, artists, and leaders have refashioned their own stories of struggle, their own and dominant visions of the past also have contributed to a history of deception and degradation. Throughout the twentieth century, state officials and allies have used forms of memory to occult state violence in Tarapac. Both state officials and oppositional activists in Santiago-Chile's capital, located almost two thousand kilometers south-have summoned images of northern desert violence at critical political junctures in the contest over national memory.

Memories of state violence have played a key role both in the constitution of alternative collective projects (e.g., social movements) as well as in state formation, as an examination of their dynamics over time makes clear. Although national memory is traditionally considered the purview of the upper middle classes and the intelligentsia and is articulated in schools, media, and professional history, there is, in fact, a dialectic between and among what come to be regarded as "national" and oppositional memories. On the one hand, the idea that a national memory exists is in part the work of architects who must be specified and defined at any given moment, since the ability to assert a national memory is the product of a struggle for hegemony: thus, the notion that the state makes memory is an effect of the state as an arena of contestation. Oppositional memories are also made by a cast of actors that changes depending on who has less access to the power of the state at any given moment and that includes members of the official opposition and members of sectors marginal even to the opposition. In Chile, different sectors, including those among elites and non-elites, were or were not included in either the national or oppositional fields according to the degree to which they were incorporated or expelled from the political arena, especially as that arena became increasingly organized around the nation-state over the course of the twentieth century.

As I began this research, I was stunned by the brutality of the military dictatorship and inspired by the courage of Chilean human-rights groups struggling for democracy. Yet I remained puzzled by the historical narrative that held sway among the coalition of democratic oppositional parties, a narrative that denied the significance of state violence in the longer course of Chilean history by defining it as an exception, rather than the norm. The opposition parties maintained that Chile was exceptional among Latin American countries for its hundred-and-fifty-year tradition of democracy, a tradition ruptured by the 1973 military coup, whose extreme violence against the Chilean people was depicted as completely unprecedented in degree and scale. The parties of the postdictatorship coalition, the Concertacin, talked about state-sponsored brutality, authoritarianism, and even military intervention as historical aberrations from which democratization would return Chile to its authentic, natural state. The violence of the coup was considered a blip in Chile's history.

However, even aberrations have to be accounted for in historical analysis. As I explored the antecedents to the 1973 coup, fellow historians of Chile questioned the logic of putting the coup and prior incidents of violence on the same analytic plane and also of looking at the Chilean state as the same state across regimes and even types of regimes. As I looked back in time, I began to see that the story of the state varied dramatically according to the storytellers' position. The scale and kinds of violence that followed the 1973 coup were indeed unprecedented for elite and some middle-class sectors, which had been relatively unscathed in earlier conflicts. But for non-elite sectors, especially in certain localities, did the state violence following the 1973 coup represent relative continuity or dramatic rupture? And could human rights-a set of discourses largely emerging in the post-World War II international political context and often used to frame the recent violence-be useful as an analytic category for thinking about Chile's earlier periods of violence, periods that could in turn enhance current understandings of the politics of human rights?

To answer these questions, I looked to the Northern Chilean desert province of Tarapac, a place whose state violence has a deep temporal resonance and where contemporary human-rights issues have been key. The many struggles of people from Tarapac, known as the "cradle of Chilean politics," implicate violence as integral both to state formation and to memories of that formation, and suggest that violence enters into the making of Chilean politics precisely from this northern cradle. The cruel legacies of even colonial Tarapac emerge in tales of indigenous slaves working the silver mines of Huantajaya; in the major religious dance festival of La Tirana (the female tyrant), the incarnation of the Virgin as a renegade Incan princess who taunted and warred against Europeans until her conversion and martyrdom; and in accounts of the brutal treatment of Chinese indentured labor in the nineteenth-century guano industry. The Chilean military conquest of the nitrate riches of Tarapac from Peru in the War of the Pacific (1879) cemented the centrality of violence on the frontier in Chilean state formation. But violence works in relation to political projects, not apart from them. While many studies of memory and the nation support the idea of the nation-state as constituted by a foundational moment of state violence, which must then be forgotten for the nation to cohere, I argue that nation-state formation instead entails an ongoing dynamic of violent conjunctures policing belonging and negotiated memories of that violence.

Political projects that blend coercion and consent to build viable claims to power (hegemony) require certain connections between their constituency and the project; and what is required to build claims changes over time depending on the political project. A long-range view pulls together periods and phenomena (e.g., labor history, political history, cultural history) not usually connected in the historiography and can reveal shifts in the affective ties mobilized in various projects of nation-state building. Even in Chile, where state building has been central to the overarching political culture, nation-state formation does not take a single form, nor is it a single project at any given moment. "The state" comprises multiple actors, organizational forms, agendas, and ideologies. In state formation those divergent aspects coalesce into an entity that exudes coherence, continuity, and agency-for example, in its ability to set and enforce policies, deliver services, and represent itself vis--vis other states and interests.

For any political project to work, citizens must care about and invest appropriately in that project: if fascism is at stake, citizens must be willing to militarize and die; if syndicalism is at stake, citizens must be willing to unionize and strike and even support the strikes of others. Scholars have pointed to the centrality of memory in nation-building, memory being the core of a unified imagining of the nation's story, with different memories representing the positions of competing actors. For Chile, such analysis has been applied only to the post-1973 coup era. Drawing on this work on memory and competing visions of the nation, I look over a longer period of time to map the changes in political culture by tracing out the predominant shared mode of memory for different periods.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Salt in the Sandby LESSIE JO FRAZIER Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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