The Demobilization of Civil Society

Traumatic Memory and Civil Society

The study of collective trauma began to be important in the mid-twentieth century, when World War II made it necessary to explain how those and other tragic events occurred and their consequences for the memory of societies. Bettelheim (1943) was one of the first to analyze psychological trauma, warning that an experience of this kind is extreme in being unavoidable and indepen-dent of the individual, of uncertain and unpredictable length, and not simply an immediate but a permanent threat. Martín-Baró (1990) uses the term “psychosocial trauma” to identify an injury caused by the prolonged lived experience of political violence. It is fed and maintained in the relation between persons and the social whole, and the political context becomes crucial for the course of the traumatic events—whether the damage can be repaired or becomes chronic (Lagos et al., 2009: 31–38). Lira, Becker, and Castillo (1989: 21) speak of the traumatic experiences produced by political repression as “extreme traumatisms.” The traumatic element of repression is established by the combination of multiple threats to life that are difficult to avoid or confront and the chaotic and ineffective responses of disorganized subjects and social groups, which may even intensify the trauma.

State terrorism is a systematically planned action aimed at causing physical and psychological harm to certain individuals and thus creating horror in society as a whole (Scapusio, 2006). The repression has been described as a social catastrophe in that the state, instead of being the guarantor of security and welfare, attempts to legitimize a discourse in which it alone is responsible for that security. All this generates confusion, a sensation of generalized helplessness, cultural disintegration, inversion of values, silence, and social paralysis (Lira and Castillo, 1991).

In contexts of intense social conflict such as that in Chile and the rest of Latin America since the 1970s, political violence, polarization, and terrorism originated by the state have been naturalized by creating “cultures of fear” (Koonings and Kruijt, 1999; Procupez and Obarrio, 2006). Repressive actions generate an impact at the social level when a warning to the population is sent through the victims and an atmosphere of constant fear is fostered as a way of consolidating power (Deutsch, 2007; Munczek, 2007). Similarly, the strategies of direct and indirect violence put into practice in these scenarios produce an impact both in the moment in which these situations are lived but also when daily violence ceases and leaves space for the elaboration and processing of trauma.

Experiences of violence on both the individual and the social level are clearly evident in the sociopolitical events of recent decades in Chile. Beyond the direct victims of state terror, individuals and society experienced trauma that resulted in withdrawal into the private sphere and demobilization. As Barbera (2009) points out, the problems of individuals and families that suffered political violence have been extensively documented, but less attention has been given to the influence of human rights abuses at the community level. Collective trauma in Chilean civil society emerged from the decades of exposure to violence and social domination observed during the military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet. It included severe repression, both direct and indirect, psychological warfare, generalized fear, and a refoundational economic and political project. Chilean civil society has suffered an extreme structural transformation induced by authoritarian social relations, the disciplinary effects of the dictatorship’s culture of fear, and the expansion of the market and the privatization of public services (Garretón, 2003; Lechner and Guell, 1998). According to Lechner and Guell, these changes provoked a privatization, withdrawal, and individualization of Chileans’ behavior during the democratic transition.

Decades of conflict and violence and the radical imposition of a new political and economic model in a repressive context generated trauma in Chilean civil society (Castillo and Lira, 1993; García, 2006; Iglesias, 2005; Kovalskys, 2006; Lechner, 2002; Páez, Basabe, and Gonzalez, 1997; Piper Shafir, 2005; Stern, 2009). The effects of this trauma, installed in collective memory, have persisted beyond the dictatorship to impact the political process, the behavior of social actors, and the forms of citizen participation. Thus, posttraumatic factors play a fundamental role in the social dynamics of redemocratization.

Silence, Negation, and Oblivion as a Response to Collective Trauma

After a traumatic experience, mechanisms emerge to process it and react to it as instinctive strategies for confronting its consequences. In the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, political repression was a trauma both for the direct victims and for the nation, and therefore there are reactions to it on both levels (Vergara and Tocornal, 1998). As Páez, Basabe, and Gonzalez (1997) point out, collective memory is normative, focused on defending social identity, and therefore a common response and effective strategy for overcoming past trauma is silence and forgetfulness. In other words, a group uses oblivion to protect its values and self-image.

Silence has also been identified as a response to collective trauma by Danieli (1998), who uses the concept “conspiracy of silence” to describe a generalized social reaction consisting of indifference, avoidance, repression, and negation. With regard to the Chilean case, Genevieve (2004) speaks of “psychic numbing” as a useful defense mechanism against stress after catastrophic events. Becker and Diaz (1998) argue that behind the lack of political and social participation in postdictatorship Chile is the internalization of political threats, fear, and mechanisms of self-repression and self-censorship that unleash a generalized state of social alienation. Along these lines, the Chilean democratic transition has been defined as a process characterized by a “hyper-amnesia” (Gaudichaud, 2009: 69), and, given that memory is an essential component of group identity and collective action, a lack of memory would limit the potential of action on this level. The conflictive issues of the past and the tendency to avoid confronting or verbalizing traumatic experiences made it possible to come together on an official version of the facts and a distinction between victims and perpetrators, and this contributed to the silence and the necessity of forgetfulness in a democratic recovery characterized by a silent memory (Lechner, 2002) or a closed box (Stern, 2009). As Gloria Cruz of the Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights ¹ pointed out (interview, Santiago, December 17, 2014), ²

The issue of silence in society is fundamental, and although we feel very proud that there have been advances and more advances than in other places, it has been very slow and with quiet sorrows. In the Valech Committee, all this about sexual repression of women was very strongly revealed; many women came forward who had never spoken with their husbands or children, and when this possibility appeared of going to speak about how they had been detained, they started to “remember” that they had been raped. So this need to silence the horror, accompanied by a society that tries to say, “Let’s reconcile and start over,” maintained it encapsulated. That is always the worst; encapsulated pain is like a little pump that grows but has nowhere to escape and that is very demobilizing, demobilizing of the soul, and therefore of action.

Silence, oblivion, and evasion are strengthened when, as in Chile, they take the form of state policies and mandates. Forgetting, silence, and the almost obsessive tendency to look to the future are both responses to a selection process that is necessary for survival and the product of political and ideological will (Jelin, 2003; Páez, Fernández, and Martín, 2001).

The first democratic government created the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1990 with the aim of contributing to the discovery of the truth about the human rights violations committed between 1973 and 1990. In 1991 it released its report and proposed a series of compensatory measures for victims’ relatives. This was a significant effort to expose the facts and place the issue of political violence on the public agenda, but, as Ricardo Brodsky, director of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, pointed out (interview, Santiago, December 4, 2014),

The Aylwin government worked with a paradigm of truth and pardon and tried to skip justice, and the Frei government went deeper—effectively, I think, the Frei government tried to silence the issue. In fact, Frei never received relatives of the detained and disappeared. He asked the Council of Defense of the State to discontinue the trial of Pinochet on the issue of the checks. In other words, he actively sought a policy to overcome the problem on the basis of silence.

This state paradigm included avoidance of justice and tacit impunity for those responsible for crimes of political violence. The intention of prioritizing truth about what occurred while impeding justice and thus avoiding tensions and conflicts with the military was reflected in the declaration of the first president under redemocratization, Patricio Aylwin, about seeking justice “to the extent possible.” This was especially the case in the first phase of the transition, when authoritarian regression was a constant threat and the perspective of moderation, responsibility, and consensus proposed by political elites was shared by civil society. Consensus was thus achieved and the acceptance of just the justice “possible” became the dominant climate in postdictatorship Chilean society. Asked how much they agreed with Aylwin about seeking justice “to the extent possible,” half of the participants in a poll by the Centro de Estudios Públicos said that they agreed or strongly agreed (CEP, 1999).

In the face of a divisive past, forgetting is experienced as a respite after so many years of uncertainty, and reviving the subject seems meaningless when it divides and produces weariness and pain (Moulian, 2002). Gloria Cruz added that the posttrauma in Chilean society was expressed in various ways (interview, Santiago, December 17, 2014):

One has to do with natural fear and not wanting to move things so that “the dishes don’t break.”. . . There was all this ideology of “Let’s not move much because this could break”—that was something that was very present. Later, there was tiredness, a natural tiredness of many leaders who had sustained a struggle at high costs of different kinds and, in a way, didn’t want any more. And another thing was fear, personal fear, the fear that this could happen again.

Thus the “transitional silence” (Olavarría, 2003) at the level of civil society could be understood as a factor in social deactivation. The traumatic experience is an obstacle to mobilization in a context in which processing of the past is avoided and silence and forgetting are promoted both at the social level and by state policy, generating a deficit of common discourse, shared truth, collective identity, and, therefore, mobilization.

Mistrust, Disarticulation, and Delegitimation

Social movements saw their organization affected by the dictatorship’s repressive measures—exile, relegation, infiltration, and prohibition of meetings—and by indirect measures such as the delegitimation of protest and political action. In other words, social disarticulation occurred as a result of dictatorial repression and then the impossibility of reconstructing the social fabric in a context of mistrust and delegitimation of political practices. After the military coup, the traditional social movements (unions, organizations, poblador groups, workers, peasants, students) were left leaderless and fragmented (de la Maza, 2003; Garcés and Valdés, 1999). Prolonged fear and the elimination of safe meeting places and solidarity produced uncertainty, insecurity, and mistrust that materialized in social relations (Corradi, Weiss, and Garretón, 1992; Koonings and Kruijt, 1999).

The result of these operations was profound disturbance of social codes, apprehension with respect to social participation, loss of group identity, and the decline of social organizations and collective action. As Manuel Cancino, former president of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores in El Loa, pointed out (interview, Calama, November 14, 2014), ³

Beginning in the 1990s with the return to democracy we found ourselves with a workers’ movement that was practically disarticulated. . . . What happened there, then, was a process of organizing workers. At that time, there were probably 13,000 workers of CODELCO and some 23,000–25,000 contract workers who were not organized. . . . Then we began this organization that lasted approximately five years, and at the same time here in Calama there were no other expressions of grassroots social struggle, of students or workers of other sectors.

Another source of postdictatorship demobilization was exhaustion and perceived defeat. During the dictatorship, mobilization was considered a valid tool of political action and pressure, but by the end of the 1980s it was considered a failure in the light of the triumph of elitist negotiation and electoral strategy. Collective action had not been enough to defeat the Pinochet regime, and it began to lose legitimacy and be treated with disdain. According to Rodrigo Rocco, leader of the Federation of Chilean Students in 1996–1997 (interview, Santiago, January 13, 2015),

It was very difficult to organize anything. It was something you could see in people. I remember activists or those who had struggled against the dictatorship who in 1990 or 1991 would say, “It’s not worth it. Let’s go home. Why should we form students’ centers?” . . . So, we would see this strongly in the poblaciones as well. I worked at the grassroots level a long time, and organizing an event in the poblaciones at that time was a real feat because there was no momentum. There was little room for that. . . . There was fear, tiredness, and feelings of frustration.

Thus, as Roberts (1998: 161) argues, demobilization in Chile can be traced to the political defeat of social movements and protests of the mid-1980s, “a defeat that determined the negotiated character of the transition to the regime in Chile, agreed to on the basis of the ‘genetic code’ of the new civil regime, and consolidating the socio-economic revolution imposed by the dictatorship.” Manuel Inostroza, leader of the first postdictatorship Federation of Chilean Students, said that the dynamics of this student organization in the redemocratization period should be sought in the events of the end of the 1980s (interview, Santiago, November 11, 2014):

For us, 1986 was the decisive year, the year that we would throw Pinochet out as a result of the social mobilization and a society that was joining in an atmosphere of effervescence and protest . . . and that did not occur. So, beginning at that date, a different political strategy began to take shape, which was politico-electoral—join the institutionalism and defeat him in the 1988 plebiscite. Those years began the first period of demobilization, and the strategy of social agitation was left behind in favor of mobilizing for the plebiscite. . . . So with that leitmotiv, the Federation aimed all its social capital at the political-electoral, and many students began to see this as an instrumentalization of the Federation . . . and it began to be discredited by low participation and scant representation, demobilized from the previous strategy.

The climate of demobilization was accompanied, as Hipsher (1996) points out, by a tendency of social movements to moderate their demands in response to their own experiences during the dictatorship. The trauma of dictatorial repression had lowered expectations in certain social sectors and their political leaders, and this had disposed them to limit their actions in the context of the transition. Francis Valverde, board member of the Chilean Association of NGOs, remarked (interview, Santiago, November 7, 2014),

When we returned to democracy, many things happened. One of them had to do with the level of expectations that all of us citizens had regarding the new government, especially the social movements that were fundamental in the fall of the dictatorship—the pobladores, women, to some extent students, the citizenry that took part in the marches, . . . and at the basis of all that, the human rights movement— . . . The expectations were of all types: criminal justice, social justice, recovery of rights that had been lost. . . . [On the other hand, with the return to democracy] leaders began to necessarily retreat to rest and wait, not to “make waves for the government.” We had to be careful because we couldn’t have the military get angry and command a coup.

The leaders of the social movements unequivocally considered support for the Concertación governments, especially in the 1990s, support for democracy in a strategy that included social demobilization (Donoso and Gómez Bruera, 2014). Thus, Chilean civil society, and especially the middle-class sectors, tended toward gradualism and strongly rejected radical political expressions at the beginning of the new democratic era (Mella, 2014). The main fears among Chileans in 1989 were conflict with the armed forces (38.8 percent), the influence of the Communist Party (34.1 percent), and protests and disorder (29.1 percent) (CEP, 1990). It was fundamental, in this context, that the new government avoid disorder and protest and too much influence from the Communist Party and tension with the armed forces.

Retraumatization and Chronic Trauma

Finally, the collective trauma had a demobilizing impact not only on those it directly affected but also on subsequent generations. With the return of democracy in 1990, the transitional conjuncture’s silence, lack of consensus, impunity, and irruption of memory ⁴ made the trauma chronic. Studies of the effects of trauma on the direct victims of repression, their friends and relatives, and especially their descendants (Agger and Jensen, 1994; Becker and Díaz, 1998; Deutsch, 2007; Faúndez and Cornejo, 2010; Hirsch, 2008; Hite, 2013; Kellermann, 2001; Lagos et al., 2009; Scapusio, 2006; Serpente, 2011) have suggested that trauma resulting from violence can be transmitted transgenerationally. When trauma has not been processed, what is directly transmitted to the next generation takes on the aspect of a secret charged with fear and guilt to which one reacts with silence. Páez, Fernández, and Martín (2001) point out that traumatic events are transmitted in a dominant climate that is maintained in the active memory of at least three generations and in the form of silence for cycles of 40 years.

Drawing on her work not only with victims of the regime but also with their children, Gloria Cruz commented (interview, Santiago, December 17, 2014):

Many children have lived through many harsh things, and their parents had to keep going as if nothing had happened. They assimilate all that, and this democracy comes, and they don’t have space to tell what they have experienced, what happened to them, and no one has asked them either. So when they talk about that “no estoy ni ahí generation” [whatever generation], ⁵ how different they are from today’s generation, I think it has a lot to do with that—with children who had a lot of fear and their parents could not calm their fears. . . . Members of that generation were often children of parents who were politically active, who saw so many things and then were so passive.

For Faúndez and Cornejo (2010), among the factors that facilitated the transgenerational transmission of trauma were the difficulty of processing trauma in the first generation and the processes—political-ideological, judicial, moral, and communicational—stemming from the social context. According to Lagos et al. (2009: 27), the persistence of harm was strong in the Chilean transition because of the lack of a political, institutional, and social environment in which society could confront past events, given the climate of silence, stigmatization of victims, and absence or insufficiency of justice and investigation into the crimes. According to Ricardo Brodsky, “Impunity is intimately associated with trauma, the desire to not provoke conflicts that put the transition at risk. I think that there was a tacit agreement with Pinochet that there would be impunity or that he and his people would not be judged, and that was an agreement that was in force until his arrest” (interview, Santiago, December 4, 2014).

Similarly, retraumatization by new events occurs not only because of the politico-institutional environment but also because of the particular conjuncture of the original traumatic experience. Trauma may have been reactivated by what have been called “memory knots” (Stern, 2000; 2009) or “irruptions of memory” (Wilde, 1999), terms used to describe the social circumstances, personages, dates, or public events that require building bridges between individual and collective memory—that evoke a political past that is still in the imaginations of much of the population and causes individuals to confront the trauma again. Among the most important of these knots are milestones of the democratic transition such as the publication of the Rettig Report, the “Boinazo,” and the assassination of Jaime Guzmán, which, even in a context of collective amnesia, emerged as forced reminders of a past that could possibly return.

However, the dynamics of oscillation between forgetting and exhaustion and the need to remember and pass judgment on past events (even if only to restore tranquility to everyday life) were definitely interrupted by Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998. This event would mark a turning point in the development of posttraumatic memory and social mobilization. In the words of Winn (2007: 38), it “broke the historic silence” and allowed the “unleashing of deadlocked memory.” For Rodrigo Rocco (interview, Santiago, January 13, 2015),

Fear was an issue, and if you ask me when Chilean society began to wake up, it was when Pinochet was arrested in London. We felt it, suddenly—Pinochet imprisoned in London and showing us that we had been living as if “shut in a cave”—and from then on the thing was uncovered and this phenomenon occurred. . . . For the 30 years since the coup, we began to rediscover an entire past that had been denied.

In connection with this event, the first protests of major importance took place. Thousands of people gathered either to celebrate Pinochet’s arrest and demand that he be brought to trial or to protest against his prosecution. Closing the circle of amnesia—the emergence of the need to talk about and make judgments about the past—was later forced by financial scandals and the subsequent death of the general.

Final Reflections: Traumatic Memory as an Agent of Demobilization?

The social trauma generated up to 1990 and its consequences after the return to democracy created an amnesiac democracy, a generalized state of silence, forgetting, denial, apathy, disarticulation, anomie, and withdrawal that became constitutive of a demobilization of civil society. As the transition advanced, posttraumatic collective memory began to evolve and produce new interpretations of the past, opening the way for new discourses and collective identities with implications for the action of social movements. Thus trauma and posttraumatic memory facilitated demobilization during the first stages of the transition to democracy, but later the knot of posttraumatic memory began to come undone, generating new unifying discourses and key inputs that became elements for mobilization. In this context, forgetting and social deactivation began to lose preponderance, giving rise to what Salazar (2001: 18) has called “memory turned toward action.” This type of memory, the product of interpretation of the past, constructs a truth focused on the future and motivates action, becoming a sort of heritage or mnemonic capital that provides identity and cognitive bases for social movements.

In postdictatorship Chile, these mnemonic strata especially emerged from a mythic memory of the welfare state (1938–1973) and of the dictatorship itself. The past, reinterpreted and resignified, came to constitute a discourse that unified and fed collective action and contributed to the cycle of mobilizations that began in 2011. Students protested against what they termed the “Pinochet educational model,” chanted “y va a caer, y va a caer” (“it’s going to fall, it’s going to fall”), and beat on pots and pans—drawing on the same collective action repertoires used in the marches against the dictatorship in the 1980s but this time against the educational system originated in those years. The idea of a past in which there were rights that were lost under the dictatorship is relevant to an understanding of the motivations for these protests. As Giorgio Jackson, president of the Federation of Students of the Catholic University of Chile in 2011, pointed out (interview, Santiago, December 19, 2014), memory, especially memory of the period before 1973, was important to the student movement:

It was strongest for the generations that we wanted to organize, who were those that struggled against the dictatorship and that today are subjected to the system because of their responsibilities. . . . For this generation it was very important because they had had the experience or had studied for nothing or very little or that their parents, our grandparents, had studied for free. So they said, “Yes, today we are all indebted,” which generated coherence in remembering that once [education] was free, and if today we are a richer country, why can’t we do the same? . . . The dream was less impossible because there was an antecedent.

Along these lines, Camilo Ballesteros, president of the Federation of Students of the University of Santiago (USACH) in 2011, said, “I think that the past weighs very, very heavily. . . . For example, the rallying cry of USACH continues to be the rallying cry of the UTE [Universidad Técnica del Estado], ⁶ and it has to do with a very nostalgic logic of the 1970s. . . . In 2011 we think about the educational reform at the end of the 1970s. It has a lot of that” (interview, Santiago, December 5, 2014). Francisco Figueroa, vice-president of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile in 2011 (interview, Santiago, December 11, 2014), agreed:

There is a genetic memory of some social actors who were in some way related to institutions that experienced the welfare state, which had free public education, which relied on nationalized copper, and who call up that image to attempt its recovery, and I think that was very present in the student movement that was organized in traditional universities, recalling the twentieth-century model of education.

Thus, as redemocratization advances in Chile, the legacy of the traumatic past, beyond inhibiting collective action, is gradually transformed into discourses and demands directed through social mobilization, with a firm expression in September 2013 in the context of the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the military coup, a key date for the irruption of memory and closure of the transitional cycle of amnesia. On September 5, one of the then-frequent student protests took place in which the Confederation of Chilean Students used the following message (CONFECH, 2013):

It’s been 40 years since our country experienced a breakdown. On September 11, 1973, we had a before-and-after, a before of construction of a model and project for a country that sought a society for everyone. For 20 years the injustices and segregation worsened in housing, health, and education, and education ceased to be a social right and became a marketed good, and the rich studied with the rich and the poor with the poor, and there was profit, fraud, business. May that never happen again! Chile woke up.

Using repertoires of past actions, the Asociación Coordinadora de Estudiantes Secundarios (Coordinating Assembly of High School Students—ACES) put out a call to occupy educational establishments as a way of commemorating the 40 years since that September 11 (Garrido and Cornejo, 2013). One of the spokespeople of the ACES, Isabel Salgado, said, “The slogan for commemorating this date is ‘40 years of resistance.’ . . . We students have been affected by the educational system we inherited from the dictatorship and that the Concertación and the Alliance perfected in recent years” (El Mostrador, 2013). Examples such as this abound in the action repertoires of the student movement. In addition, the image of Salvador Allende, made invisible during the early transition, began to emerge as redemocratization progressed as a prominent symbol of struggle and claim making. According to Giorgio Jackson (interview, Santiago, November 14, 2014),

Allende is a symbol, a symbol of the struggle over ideals. Despite the fact that the majority of those who are marching don’t know the pros and cons of what occurred under Popular Unity, there is a representation of the meaning of justice, struggling for ideals—in this case, education as a right—that I think they are representing with his figure.

Reference to the past went beyond the student movement to become part of the demands of the regionalist and environmental movements that appeared in 2011. The social movement of the city of Calama made the renationalization of copper, a state resource until the dictatorship, one of their main demands. Esteban Velasquez, mayor of Calama and 2012 leader of this movement (interview, Santiago, November 14, 2014), said that in this mobilization

There was a longing to recover a law similar to the so-called law of new treatment of the 1950s, which established . . . Copper Law 11828, leaving 5 percent of copper profits to communities and cities like Calama. We lost it in 1974 with the dictatorship, and that is what we would say: “If it was like that then, why not now?” From then on, we launched a lawsuit.

Thus Páez, Fernández, and Martín’s (2001) suggestion that traumatic events remain in the active memory of at least three generations seems to apply to the Chilean case.

Therefore, the 20 years of Concertación governments seem to be fertile ground not only for analyzing in depth the factors behind demobilization but also for examining the evolution of trauma and identity reconstruction that laid the foundation for the new phase of mobilization beginning in 2011. The premise of citizen weakness or absence in 1990–2010 is called into question, readdressed, and replaced by the idea of a restructuring of civil society in which new memories, identities, and social structures are generated, a phase of incubation for the coming cycle of activation.