2013 Conference
40 years are nothing:
History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile
History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile
Friday October 4, 2013, 9am to 6pm, School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. A conference where academics and young researchers from Australia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and United States of America presented and discussed their latest research regarding the 1973 coup d’états in Uruguay and Chile, and their ramifications today. The conference was open to the public and featured actors of these events as special guests.
Introduction to conference by Fernando López
Presentations
Óscar Cardenas Navarro: New Chilean cinema after the dictatorship
Mario Cortés Santander & Gabriel Andrés Arévalo Robles: Colombia: A Country of War, Guerrillas and Constituents
Cynthia Fernández Roich: Final Disposition, the legacy of the Condor Plan
Pablo Leighton: September 11, 1973 - September 11, 1974: The most violent and the most hegemonic year of the Chilean junta
Fernando López: Los hermanos sean unidos..: regional cooperation and State terrorism in South America
Florencia Melgar: ASIS involvement in Chile´s coup
Debbie Sharnak: Uruguay and the Reconceptualization of Transitional Justice
Pedro Ivo Carneiro Teixeirense: Struggling for the past: transitional justice in Uruguay in the aftermath of its dictatorship
Ana Maria Tomaino: Documentary Film: The Powerful Trace of Memory
Yael Zaliasnik: Moving Memories
Special events
Introduction by Pablo Leighton and interview with Dr James Levy
Interview with Alejandro Fernández Allende
Entrevista con Gustavo Mártin-Montenegro
Motion presented to the conference by Paula Sánchez
Presentations
Óscar Cardenas Navarro: New Chilean cinema after the dictatorship
Mario Cortés Santander & Gabriel Andrés Arévalo Robles: Colombia: A Country of War, Guerrillas and Constituents
Cynthia Fernández Roich: Final Disposition, the legacy of the Condor Plan
Pablo Leighton: September 11, 1973 - September 11, 1974: The most violent and the most hegemonic year of the Chilean junta
Fernando López: Los hermanos sean unidos..: regional cooperation and State terrorism in South America
Florencia Melgar: ASIS involvement in Chile´s coup
Debbie Sharnak: Uruguay and the Reconceptualization of Transitional Justice
Pedro Ivo Carneiro Teixeirense: Struggling for the past: transitional justice in Uruguay in the aftermath of its dictatorship
Ana Maria Tomaino: Documentary Film: The Powerful Trace of Memory
Yael Zaliasnik: Moving Memories
Special events
Introduction by Pablo Leighton and interview with Dr James Levy
Interview with Alejandro Fernández Allende
Entrevista con Gustavo Mártin-Montenegro
Motion presented to the conference by Paula Sánchez
Introduction to conference by Fernando López
Presentations
Access to digital technology, State support and the rise of film schools have given rise to a generation of young filmmakers in Chile. They have developed parallel paths, different from the older generation of filmmakers, with more international reach and an original narrative proposal that use limited resources as an advantage. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to present this phenomenon in a historic and technological context, including its relationship with Chile’s more classic cinema developed in the 1960s and 90s.
Oscar Cárdenas Navarro is a filmmaker, who graduated from the Escuela de Cine de Chile. He has taught History of Cinema and Directing Workshops in that same institution. His first feature film “Rabia” was selected in the official competition in various international film venues, such as Locarno, Donostia - San Sebastian, La Habana-Cuba, Cairo and Hong Kong film festival, among others. His second film, “Una parte de mi vida” premiered on Chilean cable TV.
Mario Cortés Santander & Gabriel Andrés Arévalo Robles: Colombia: A Country of War, Guerrillas and Constituents
The South American dictatorships like those of Chile and Uruguay were part of a strategy of containment of social movements. This method, however, was not the only applied in the region. The atypical case has been Colombia, which despite having a permanent democracy has a very high number of disappeared, tortured, and imprisoned. Now, if the Chilean dictatorship is used as a reference for the first neoliberalism in South America, Colombia can be considered as neoliberalism of the second generation (i.e. repressions within democracies under the disguise of human rights and the pursuit of peace).
Gabriel Andrés Arévalo (PhD candidate University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea) is a researcher and political activist with a Law degree from the Free University and a Sociology degree from the National University of Colombia. He received a Master's degree in International Decentralized Cooperation and International Studies at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Within its intellectual and spiritual interests are galactic nomadism, transnational struggles, insurgent ontologies and the intercultural processes seeking to build a new civilization beyond the West. Currently, he is undertaking PhD studies at the UPV/EHU with a Predoctoral Fellowship funded by the Basque Government. He is also a member of the Intercultural Association BerriakMundu in Bilbao.
Mario Cortés Santander graduated from the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the Universidad Libre de Bogotá. He has conducted Reconciliation Studies, Constitutional Law, Education and training curriculum and Administration in Colombia and Australia. Mario is linked to academic, administrative and development in higher education in Colombia and vocational level in Australia. He also has experience in socio-legal research and university of Political Institutions, Legal Argument and Hermeneutics and is passionate about education and communication.
This paper analyses the production and circulation of the military discourse to justify the ‘final disposition’ of detainees in Argentina during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983). The term defined in military jargon, relates to the fate of thousands of disappeared. Final Disposition is also the title of a book published in 2012 where, for the first time, the former de facto Argentinean President Jorge Rafael Videla explained the reason behind this method of disappearing thousands of citizens. Because they appeared to be neither dead nor alive, such ambiguity was the answer to avoid public condemnation. Argentina was not alone in the policy of disappearances. The country was part of the Condor Plan, an intelligence system that allowed members of Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile to seize, torture, and make political opponents disappear in one another’s territory. These partners learned from one another’s experiences and helped to refine the repressive machinery. The Uruguayan dictatorship relied heavily on the incarceration of political opponents. In contrast, the Argentinean dictatorship chose to kidnap political opponents, torture them in clandestine centres, drug them and throw them into the sea. The use of the so-called ‘death flights’ allowed the Argentinean junta to avoid witnesses, overcrowded prisons and an immediate international condemnation, making the work of human rights organizations much more difficult in the aftermath.
Cynthia Fernández Roich graduated in Media and Communication at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in 2000. Cynthia completed a Masters degree in Journalism at the University of San Andres (UDESA) in 2007. Her masters thesis compared global trends of education, transport and current affairs in Sydney and Buenos Aires through content analysis of the section ‘Opinion and letters’ from the Sydney Morning Herald and Clarin newspapers. Cynthia is currently in the last stages of completing her PhD in Criminology at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in the School of Social Sciences. Her research explores the condition of production and circulation of the ‘iron fist’ discourse during the 1990s in Argentina.
Pablo Leighton: September 11, 1973 - September 11, 1974: The most violent and the most hegemonic year of the Chilean junta
This paper focuses on cultural practices of the Chilean junta led by Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) during its first years in power, with an emphasis on the mass event of the first anniversary of the coup d’état, broadcast live on national television. Together with a violent, practically genocidal strategy to attain political power, the paper shows that the Chilean dictatorship from the beginning also developed culture and discourse to hold and justify that same power. The article points to the rarely acknowledged sense of ceremony and spectacle of the Chilean dictatorship usually framed as mass televised events. In the afternoon of September 11, 1974, a televised simulcast shows hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the first anniversary of the coup in Santiago. The exact size of the crowd or how to measure the popular appeal of a dictatorship is the first point of contention to be explored. The paper proposes that any percentage of the urban population that attends that rally becomes a ‘universal audience’, thanks to a comprehensive televised portrait. While most of academia has concluded that the Chilean dictatorship was not fascist because that concept would be incompatible with the mistrust of the military of politicised masses, this paper highlights a case that escapes from that analytical consensus: the mass event of September 11, 1974. The paper, in sum, brings to light that the first year of the dictatorship is not only the most violent one but can be the most hegemonic and cultural as well.
Pablo Leighton researches the concept and practices of propaganda in 20th Century and current media, and specifically on the history of audiovisual culture in Chile and Latin America since the 1970s. He has taught at several universities in Australia, United States, Chile and Central America, and has worked as film director, screenwriter and editor in fiction and documentary productions (see his film work here). He co-edited with Fernando López the book 40 years are nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’etat in Uruguay and Chile (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK), a selection from works presented at the October 2013 conference 40 years are nothing. He has published the essays: Archives and narratives for the coup-history of Chile (Southland Papers 2018 & Neo Journal, Macquarie University, 2008); Televisión + estado de sitio: la perentoria doble cadena del golpe en Chile (Ediciones Escaparate, Santiago, Chile, 2012); ASIS & ASIO in Chile: transparency and double standards four decades after the coup (co-written with Florencia Melgar, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK 2015); The Celebration: violence and consent in the first anniversary of the Chilean coup (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK 2015); and Territories of Violence: State, Marginal Youth, and Public Security in Honduras – book review (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2016). He holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney, and in Latin American Studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He also has a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art (Boston, USA).
Fernando López: Los hermanos sean unidos..: regional cooperation and State terrorism in South America
The 1973 military coups in Uruguay and Chile produced radical changes for South America. Supported by the Nixon administration and regional powers like Brazil, Juan María Bordaberry and General Augusto Pinochet spearheaded a process that led to greater regional cooperation between countries, especially on economic development, and security matters. By mid-1970s, and with the exception of a number of armed groups in Argentina, the South American regimes had achieved considerable victories over the leftist guerrillas. That military success, however, came with a high price. The Uruguayan and Chilean governments received increased pressures from abroad, as a consequence of their repressive security measures and human rights violations. That international isolation exacerbated these governments’ economic problems and eroded their internal and external legitimacy. By 1974, this situation had extended to Bolivia and, to a lesser degree Paraguay and Brazil. In this environment, many government officials in South America began to consider cooperation as the only alternative to overcome these challenges and break that isolation. The Uruguayan dictator Juan María Bordaberry increased calls for unity, establishing a number of bilateral and multilateral agreements to strengthen regional economic ties. The Chilean junta was one of the most receptive of Bordaberry’s calls for unity and expanded it to focus on improving working relations with its neighbours’ security forces. The work carried out by the Uruguayan and Chilean regimes, and the international political situation helped the armed forces in the Southern Cone to set aside old military and geopolitical rivalries. This spirit of cooperation led to the transnationalization of state terrorism as a tool to neutralize the activities of the exiles and their supporters who had effectively undermined and isolated these regimes from key international allies.
Fernando López is a Doctor in History from the University of New South Wales and author of the book The Feathers of Condor: Transnational State Terrorism, Exiles and Civilian Anticommunism in South America (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2016). The latter determines why the military regimes of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia agreed to formally launch Operation Condor in November 1975 and, therefore, transnationalize State terrorism. He has a Bachelor of Arts and Honours in History (BA HONS HIST) from University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. His Honours thesis studied the origins of the Uruguayan leftist National Liberation Movement- Tupamaros (MLN-T) and its connections with the sugarcane workers’ trade union. His areas of research focus on contemporary Latin American History and the Cold War in Latin America. He co-edited with Pablo Leighton the book 40 years are nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’etat in Uruguay and Chile (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK), a selection from works presented at the October 2013 conference 40 years are nothing.
Florencia Melgar: ASIS involvement in Chile´s coup
40 years ago, Chile's democratic government headed by Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup. Since September 11, 1973 until 1990, General Augusto Pinochet led a regime in which some 2,300 people were executed, more than 38,000 were imprisoned and tortured and more than 1,200 disappeared. It is no secret that the coup was supported by the United States through the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. What is not so public is that the CIA had help from its counterpart in Australia, ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.
Ten days after the victory of Salvador Allende in democratic elections, the White House in Washington hosted a secret meeting to plan the overthrow of Allende. The following month, in November 1970, the CIA asked for help from ASIS. This request was documented four years later in the investigation by an Australian royal commission headed by Justice Robert Hope. The decision to provide assistance to the CIA was made by then Minister of Foreign Affairs, William McMahon, who later became Prime Minister. The Australian spies operating in Chile arrived in 1971 and the coup was in September 1973. By that time, Gough Whitlam and the Labor party were in power. Bill Robertson, then head of ASIS, says Whitlam was informed of this operation in February 1973, and took no action, worried of how the White House might react. Whitlam however, had a different recollection. In his memories, he stated that he was notified in early 1973 and that the ASIS officials left in the first half of that year. But according to Justice Robert Hope´s findings, ASIS last official didn´t leave Chile until October 1973. And in that period of time, Allende´s government was destabilised and the coup took place. The material in this academic presentation was presented as media reports in SBS radio, TV and online platforms (Special Broadcasting Service, Australia), between September 10 and 14, 2013.
Florencia Melgar is an investigative journalist and independent researcher who has worked at numerous media outlets in Uruguay and Australia for more than 10 years. She produced “No Toquen Nada”, the highest rating current affairs radio show in Uruguay. She also worked in print media and television for six years. She co-authored “Las palabras que llegaron” in 2009 and “Sabotaje a la verdad” in 2006. She has worked for SBS Radio and Online, ABC Television and Instituto Cervantes. Melgar was awarded the best investigative story of the year in NSW multicultural media for the multimedia report The Other 9/11 that explores the participation of Australia in the Chilean coup 40 years ago.
This paper examines how Uruguay’s continued struggle with accountability efforts questions some of the central assumptions of transitional justice, mainly regarding the perceived length of a transition. Uruguay’s transitional justice (TJ) process seems to fall short when evaluated within a traditional conception of TJ that assumes accountability can occur within such a short time frame. It took decades for the state to offer a truth commission or an official apology; and the possibility of reopening trials is currently a subject of heated debate. When evaluated with a longer view, Uruguay’s attempts to deal with its past sheds light on the possibility that persistent human rights advocacy, which required time to build-up particularly within the second generation of survivors’ children, can have great effect. The new possibility of trials place into view a longer time frame for reckoning with the past where any one achievement or failure should not alone be used to evaluate a nation’s trajectory, but rather, as offering opportunities to open space for discussion and further grappling with traumatic periods (see Steve J. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006). My work questions the field of transitional justice regarding the different concerns for survivors of authoritarian rule and whether justice is an important consideration during the immediate period of transitions, and what political factors shift for these questions to resurface (see Patrick Vinck and PuongN.Pham, “Consulting Survivors,” in The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents in the Global Age) My paper will examine how and under what conditions the goals and mobilization of a human rights discourse and transitional justice aims overlap.
Debbie Sharnak is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in history. She also managed the New Media Advocacy Project’s campaign on Uruguay, ¿Nunca Más Qué?, in 2013 on reopening trials in the nation. She is a Fulbright Scholar for Uruguay in 2013-2014.
Pedro Ivo Carneiro Teixeirense: Struggling for the past: transitional justice in Uruguay in the aftermath of its dictatorship
It is commonly held in current transitional justice literature that societies and individuals are entitled to know the truth about past human rights violations. Indeed, this concept of a society’s right to the truth has engendered the idea that, in the process of transition to a representative democracy, the emerging regime has to confront its past and its relevant human rights abuses. Furthermore, in the absence of the mentioned process, it would be impossible to institute an authentic democratic order. While correct, these assumptions do not manage to establish any correlation through the use of historical evidence. This paper presents an historical analysis of transitional justice mechanisms that have been adopted in Uruguay since the last military dictatorship. I argue that, even though it is a rapidly expanding subfield at the intersection of jurisprudence, comparative politics, and political theory, “transitional justice” is essentially a reflection of the historical possibilities to accommodate political groups vying for the control of the transition to democracy. Accordingly, I propose to analyze the mentioned mechanisms through the study of three distinct periods in Uruguay’s history. Firstly, between 1985 and 1989, I will demonstrate that the transition to democracy was mainly characterized by the faith in a new social setting, which would be achieved by acknowledging the wrongdoings throughout the dictatorship. In the second part, I propose to analyze the political clashes that caused a setback in the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms. Finally, I intend to discuss the emergence of political conditions that enable a return to public debates on Uruguay’s recent past. These debates indicate a discrepancy between domestic laws and the international human rights agreements signed by Uruguay.
Pedro Teixeirense is a researcher and has a PhD in Social History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. Pedro Teixerense has a Bachelor with Honours in History and a Masters degree. His field of research covers democracy, social control and children´s rights, and prevention of violence and human rights. He has worked as a teacher, researcher and legislative consultant for the Federal Senate; has been a member of the Special Commission of History of the Senate, and worked as Associate Consultant for the Plan of Public Policies in Brazil. Pedro was also a Research Analyst offering technical advice on issues related to human rights, transitional justice, memory and truth, with the aim of providing support for the National Truth Commission (NTC). He organized data analysis that enabled the Commission to clarify facts and circumstances surrounding cases of serious human rights violations, and conducted teams of researchers in identifying files and other sources of information on the death and the forced disappearance in Brazil and abroad, during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). He was also involved in organizing database for the Council of Children´s Rights and the Guardianship Council in the process of building democracy for children and adolescents in Brazil.
Ana Maria Tomaino: Documentary Film: The Powerful Trace of Memory
Cinema is one of the most effective means to attract people's attention in our times. One of the advantages of audio-visual material is its ability to save images and sounds that have occurred in the past. From this point of view, film is regarded as a vehicle to get to know the culture, identity and history of our society. It is a way of telling the story, enhanced by images and sound. It is therefore essential to promote the broadcasting of these materials as well as ensure its preservation over time, so they can be accessed by future generations and as a means of preserving memory. It has been greatly debated about the legitimacy of film as a document or as a reliable historical source. For instance, Virginia Martinez, Uruguayan historian and filmmaker, in her article "Documentary and dictatorship" presents an overview of the Uruguayan documentary´s history, referring specifically to the issue of “memory of the dictatorship”. In her opinion documentary and memory are synonymous and the work of the documentary maker has an ethical and a social dimension. "In his/her desire to know what happened and make it known to others, there is an attempt to repair the offense against those who were humiliated", dice Virginia Martínez. This paper will discuss the legacy of the Uruguayan documentary, based on an interview with one of the country´s greatest documentary makers, Mario Handler and his film Decile a Mario que no vuelva/Tell Mario not to come back.
Ana María worked as Associate Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies, Department of International Studies, at Macquarie University. She holds a degree in BA/BEd and a MA in Applied Linguistics from UNSW. She is currently working on a project entitled The Impact of State Terror on National Identity: A Study of Post-dictatorship Cinema in Uruguay.
Cinema is one of the most effective means to attract people's attention in our times. One of the advantages of audio-visual material is its ability to save images and sounds that have occurred in the past. From this point of view, film is regarded as a vehicle to get to know the culture, identity and history of our society. It is a way of telling the story, enhanced by images and sound. It is therefore essential to promote the broadcasting of these materials as well as ensure its preservation over time, so they can be accessed by future generations and as a means of preserving memory. It has been greatly debated about the legitimacy of film as a document or as a reliable historical source. For instance, Virginia Martinez, Uruguayan historian and filmmaker, in her article "Documentary and dictatorship" presents an overview of the Uruguayan documentary´s history, referring specifically to the issue of “memory of the dictatorship”. In her opinion documentary and memory are synonymous and the work of the documentary maker has an ethical and a social dimension. "In his/her desire to know what happened and make it known to others, there is an attempt to repair the offense against those who were humiliated", dice Virginia Martínez. This paper will discuss the legacy of the Uruguayan documentary, based on an interview with one of the country´s greatest documentary makers, Mario Handler and his film Decile a Mario que no vuelva/Tell Mario not to come back.
Ana María worked as Associate Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies, Department of International Studies, at Macquarie University. She holds a degree in BA/BEd and a MA in Applied Linguistics from UNSW. She is currently working on a project entitled The Impact of State Terror on National Identity: A Study of Post-dictatorship Cinema in Uruguay.
Yael Zaliasnik: Moving Memories
In my presentation, I want to focus on the concept of “moving memories” through the analysis of different theatricality resources present in three marches, related to the memories of the last dictatorships in Uruguay and Chile. Instead of trying to fix the past the marches’ performative strategies acknowledge and encourage the vital features of memory. The concept also refers to the importance of emotions in the development and construction of memories. Elements like kinetics, participation, sonority, characters and routes of these events will be described with the purpose of understanding these strategies. In Uruguay, I will study the “Marcha del Silencio”. In Chile, two marches will be analysed. One of them is a “procession” that took place in December of 2009, when thousands of people walked through different streets in Santiago with the body of the musician and man of theatre, Víctor Jara, to the cemetery. The other one is a march of August of 2012, from Villa Grimaldi, a detention and torture camp during the dictatorship, to Cuartel Simón Bolívar, a place of torture and death. Using different elements common to theatrical practices, these marches pursue to “encourage” citizens to act critically and to take a stand in the scenarios where they take place (broader than the blocks walked). The marches aim to “defamiliarise” our way of looking and to confront certain facts, places and attitudes.
Yael Zaliasnik is a journalist and has a Master in Literature from Universidad Católica de Chile, and a PhD in Latin American Studies from Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Some of her areas of academic interest are Cultural Studies, Theatricality, Art and Politics, and Memory.
Special events
Introduction by Pablo Leighton and interview with Dr James Levy
Interview with Alejandro Fernández Allende
Entrevista con Gustavo Mártin-Montenegro
Motion presented to the conference by Paula Sánchez