Battling for Hearts and Minds

Stern Steve J. Stern

Description

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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• América del Sur
• Cultural studies
• South America
• History of the Americas
• Chile
• Chili

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 25 septembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388548
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

battling for hearts and minds

9

A book in the series latin america otherwise: languages, empires, nations

Series editors:

Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University

Irene Silverblatt, Duke University Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of California, Los Angeles

l atin america otherwise: l anguages, empires, nations is a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts

used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad inter-

play of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American

worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local

responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the

nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America

as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that

demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the

ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that

have characterized Latin America’s experience.Latin America Otherwise: Languages,

Empires, Nations is a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions,

that rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, that assesses convictions

of the academy and of public policy, and that, correspondingly, demands that the

practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from

Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny.

9

September 11 brought terror to Chile when General Augusto Pinochet, in 1973, led a

coup to overthrow the country’s elected president, Salvador Allende. With the back-

ing of the United States, Pinochet used the machinery of state to intimidate Chile’s

citizenry and unspeakable acts of state violence—torture and murder—became life’s

daily fare. Steve Stern here asks piercing questions of historical memory—how those

who su√ered as well as how those who caused such inhuman su√ering recalled

those terrible times.

Steve Stern has written an extraordinary trilogy, ‘‘The Memory Box of Pinochet’s

Chile,’’ devoted to those years and how they were understood by participants in the

horrors.Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–

1988, the second book in the trilogy, focuses on the devastating period beginning

with Pinochet’s coup and ending with the plebiscite of 1988 when Chileans voted

the dictator out of power. It explores struggles for political legitimacy as expressed by

struggles over memory: the Chilean state’s o≈cial view of history versus the voices

of dissent that reckoned the past in a strikingly di√erent calculus. Stern traces the

changing balance of feelings toward Chile’s past from the 1970s, when Pinochet

captured the political apparatus and, to a significant extent, popular approval, to the

1980s, when his rule and the o≈cial presentation of the past were increasingly

doubted. Stern points to four structures of memory through which Chile’s past was

understood, accepted, and challenged. These interacted in ways that transformed

Chile’s moral politics, and turned the idea of memory into a sacred symbol and

battleground.

steve j. stern

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Battling for Hearts and Minds

Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988

book two of the trilogy: The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile

Duke University Press Durham & London 2006

∫2006 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of

this book.

9

Para mi tan querida Florencia,

mi chilenita de corazón,

corazón sin fronteras . . .

acknowledgments

maps

xvi

Contents

x

i

Introduction to the Trilogy: The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile xix

Introduction to Book Two: Battling for Hearts and Minds

p a r t i

Foundational Years: Building the Memory Box, 1973–1982

Chapter 1 Chronicling a Coup Foretold? Previews of the Impossible afterword‘‘This Is Chile’’ 29

Chapter 2 Saving ‘‘Chileans of Well-Placed Heart,’’ 1973–1976 afterword77Rumors of the Impossible

3

3

1

1

1

Chapter 3 Witnessing and Awakening Chile: Testimonial Truth and Struggle, 1973–1977 81 afterword129Laughing and Singing in Times of Trouble

Chapter 4 Road to Oblivion? Crisis and Institutionalization, 1977–1982 137 afterwordComing of Age 179

Chapter 5 Digging In: Countero≈cial Chile, 1979–1982 afterword231Fending o√ Despair

Conclusion to Part I: Building the Memory Box: Foundational Years 237

196