Latin American Perspectives

Concentration camps were established in the Northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará in 1932 as a response to the displacement of thousands by severe drought. The experience of the camps, as reported by those who survived them, was one of privation and death. Residents of Senador Pompeu, the site of one such camp, commemorate the experience with an annual procession to the cemetery and are attempting to have the ruins of the camp declared “heritage.” Marking such places as heritage is in many ways an intervention not only economically, as heritage tourism, but through the active critical processes of conscientization, communicating the violence that persists in contemporary society.

Despite recent constitutional reforms, Bolivian democracy struggles to reconcile the inclusive rhetoric of state reform, the expansion of rights, and special attention to previously ignored groups, on the one hand, with continued poverty, inequality, and a history of state abandonment of the majority, on the other. This “disjunctive democracy” produced a series of standoffs, often violent, between the state and popular-indigenous coalitions between 2000 and 2005. Throughout, popular memory was one vehicle for protest in which distinct democratic commitments—one constitutional or representative, the other participatory and direct—collided. The response of one exceptional labor union to the era’s neoliberal democratization, that of the Manaco Shoe Factory in Quillacollo, highlights this disjunctive democracy. The centrality in workers’ accounts of the political struggle of the k’araku (union assembly), with its remembered ideals of reciprocity, trust, accountability, and collective unity, differentiates popular from procedural democracy. The case of Manaco emphasizes that democratic reform in Bolivia will have to take account of the way culture informs the popular political imagination.

Chile’s collective memory has been brutalized by state-implemented terrorism. This historical process has resulted in, among other things, a “torn collective memory.” The history and memory of the period of so-called popular power (1970—1973) continue to be largely unknown. Oral history allows us to begin a slow process of historical reconstruction as well as to reflect on the construction of militant memories.

The dictatorship in Chile perpetrated massive human rights violations for 17 years, causing a rupture in social processes and engendering fear in the population. Data being gathered in an ongoing participatory action research study of the población (shantytown) La Pincoya show that while memory can be debilitating to most persons, it may empower others. Memories of the practices of the military regime continue to cause fear in some of the population, affecting community cohesion and participation in local organizations. This has led to the dismantling of social networks in the community, robbing members of their ability to be the protagonists of their own lives.

Since the mid-1970s, a number of testimonial narratives have contributed to the literature on the Brazilian military regime. These works, representing both the military and the Brazilian left, carry on the political struggles of the period (1964—1984). Through the dynamics of their publication, a tense dialogue has been established. A comparison of the memoirs of leftist militants with those of military men reveals that the practice of torture continues to be a source of apparently unending discord between the two sides.

The Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City reflects upon the retrieval of the past as a prerequisite for healing from national trauma. If postdictatorship countries are to implement a transition to democracy, their citizens must confront the past. The denial of national trauma perpetuates tyranny. Taken together, the many fragmented stories in Piglia’s novel can be viewed as a metaphor for the process of retrieving a repressed history. The central trope of the novel is Elena, a gendered machine made responsible for integrating Argentina’s past dissociations and making healing possible.

The new Chilean narrative’s noir genre, exemplified in the work of Ramón Díaz Eterovic, is an allusive and tangential exposé of recent national history. Implicit in the detective stories of this genre are a critical approach and an attempt at reconstruction of the political and social conflicts of dictatorial and postdictatorial Chile through a criminological narrative. Situated between the authoritarianism of the dictatorial regime and the ambiguities of the transition, the noir genre enables engagement with the subject of memory as a possible tool for the strengthening of civil society.

Central to the analysis of a corpus of films dealing with current psychosocial conditions in Chile and the challenges of communal reconciliation, are the concepts of collective memory and social trauma. Chilean cinema of the postdictatorship reflects a society whose channels of communication have been broken, in which the past continues to be a source of contestation and dispute. The neoliberal system imposed in the early 1970s has significantly contributed to an isolation and disaffection that limit the possibilities of social healing. Cinema has assumed the role of recovering a sense of community by disallowing the privatization of pain fostered by the hegemonic political practices and discourses of the period of dictatorship by returning this suffering to the social arena from which it originated.

Two Argentine filmmakers of the postdictatorship generation have used the documentary as a space in which to question constructions of history, memory, and identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. Both projects foreground the idea of loss and the difficulties of writing a “truthful” version of the past when confronted by politically motivated “official histories,” temporal shift, ideological change, lost referents, and missed experience. Andrés Di Tella’s La televisión y yo (2003) questions the intersections among history, identity, and the media. In it the filmmaker’s identity, fragile and tenuous, is shown to be based upon memories of the television programs of his youth that he missed because of his family’s self-imposed exile during the Onganía regime. The film is a clear critique of globalization’s effects on subjectivity. Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2003) highlights the tenuousness of her identity by exploring the gaps and silences of memory. It raises key questions about “postmemory” and generational shifts and, more particularly, about how those at a generational remove from the traumas of dictatorship can comprehend these traumatic historical events and their own relationships to them.

The 2006 Nicaraguan elections saw a victory for Daniel Ortega, who has continually been identified as an icon of the revolutionary era in which the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) destroyed the Somoza regime and formed a revolutionary government. Ortega’s success can be better understood by viewing the Nicaraguan Revolution as a state formation process in which popular culture is a field of conflict between social groups. The conflict here is between party militants and Sandinista supporters who do not enjoy the privileges of membership. Examination of oral histories reveals that the conflict between militants and popular combatants began in the Insurrection of Monimbó. The FSLN has appropriated and used the social memories of the combatants to produce its own history of that insurrection. Social memories reflect concrete processes of political subordination that result in the production of a dominant political language.