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Luz Arce's testimonial offers the harrowing story of the abuse she suffered and witnessed as a survivor of detention camps, such as the infamous Villa Grimaldi.
Since the demise of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990, collaboration and complicity - both in the torture chamber and civil society - have been taboo topics not only for the Chilean left but also for society at large. By revisiting the experience of Luz Arce Sandoval - a leftist militant turned collaborator with Pinochet's secret police - Luz Arce and Pinochet's Chile raises urgent political and ethical questions about how nations carry out unspeakable violence in the name of "progress" and "democracy." Juxtaposing interviews, legal documents, and academic analysis, this book probes the personal and collective dimensions of torture, collaborationism, truth, justice, reconciliation, and memory, issues that resonate in Latin America and beyond.
In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. When "draining the sea" to eliminate the support for rebel groups gave license to eliminat...
During the seventeen-year Pinochet dictatorship, more than three thousand Chileans were murdered or disappeared without a trace. In 1991, a year after the brutal military regime ended, the new civilian government tasked the nation’s detective force to investigate these crimes. Chilean journalist Pascale Bonnefoy tells the dramatic story of the detectives who hunted down and attempted to bring human rights violators to account. Led by a tiny group called Department V, the effort took place in the context of a frail transition to democracy and while the force itself was undergoing profound reforms. With Pinochet still in charge of the army, a center-left government tested how far it could go...
The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revol...
Though the civil-rights abuses by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) were later recognized by reparations and truth commissions, the difficult emotions suffered by the victims and their families were often pushed into the background or out of the national conversation entirely. In response, novelists began writing memory of feelings experienced during the dictatorship into their books. In The Chilean Dictatorship Novel, Weldt-Basson examines fifteen novels and one testimony written on the topic of dictatorship to illustrate how these Chilean narratives center on affect and emotions. Each chapter focuses on a different emotion: feelings of loss because of father abandonment and sp...
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 o...
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.
Diamela Eltit’s literary work emerged on the Chilean cultural scene in the 1980s when the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) had consolidated its project of extermination, censorship, and neoliberal shock therapy. Forced to write in a suffocating atmosphere of restriction and violence, Eltit boldly cultivated a radical, insurrectional poetics aimed at questioning the very underpinnings of authoritarian power and discourse. While Eltit’s novels, published between 1983 and the present, provide a remarkable vision of Chile that has evolved over the past decades, she offers a different vantage point through her prolific and rigorous cultivation of literary essays. Translated for the first time into English, this collection of Eltit’s essays allows readers to delve into her key concerns as a writer and intellectual: the neoliberal marketplace; the marginalization of bodies in society; questions of gender and power; struggles for memory, truth, and justice after dictatorship; and the ever-complex relationships among politics, ethics, and aesthetics.
This book deals with the gross human rights violations that characterized the military repression in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay from the 1960s to the 1980s. Dr Wolfgang Heinz, the author of three of the four case studies is a German scholar. The second author, Dr Hugo Frühling, is a Chilean researcher. Both are renowned human rights specialists who have done in-depth research on the causes of gross human rights violations in these countries. They have interviewed generals and officers directly involved in the repression. They have unearthed secret documents and, building on existing scholarship, they have managed to draw a unique picture of the mechanisms of repressive domestic social control. They have investigated international factors as well as the dynamics of the interaction between guerrilleros and urban terrorists on the one hand, and the military, the police forces and the death squads on the other. The result is a comprehensive volume, broad and comparative in scope, and written with clinical detachment but also with humanitarian sympathy for the victims of repression.