Trauma and the Politics of Memory of the Uruguayan Dictatorship (original) (raw)
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Social Identities, 2006
The Southern Cone's Cold War-era dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s unleashed state violence in the region through forced disappearance, political imprisonment, torture, blacklisting and massive exile unparalleled in its modern history, justified under the USled neo-colonial ideology of National Security Doctrine. Region-wide state repression in this period emerged in response to the rise of the 1960s radical movements against structural economic reforms and privatizations and for agrarian public reforms and public programs. This period was followed by US-led neoliberal ideologies and economic reform programs of 'structural adjustment' in the 1980s, programs which needed authoritarian governments to take control of radical oppositional politics and serve the special needs of elites and corporate power. In Uruguay, such neoliberal political and economic arrangements helped shape a transitional politics of silencing and obliteration of the former regime's human rights abuses. Such policies silenced ordinary people's capacity to collectively remember and transmit their experiences of political repression and solidarity. Among them, women's experiences of state terror in Uruguay were particularly invisible. This article documents, discusses and offers a case study of the emergence, development and gendering of memory in a women's testimonial project that grew to resist Uruguayan 'policies of oblivion' and brought women's previously silenced experiences of the dictatorship back into public discussion.
ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical …, 2010
Impunity is a term that is all too familiar to the Uruguayan lexicon, often employed in relation to the gross human rights violations committed during the civil-military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. However, since the mid 1990s, Uruguayans have witnessed an upsurge in the societal mobilisation around past human rights violations, as actors voice their demands for truth, memory and justice. This paper focuses on one of the most recent additions to the Uruguayan human rights movement: Niños en Cautiverio Político (Children in Political Captivity), a group formed in 2007, and assesses the role it plays in reminding Uruguayans of their recent traumatic past and the ongoing legacy of state terror in a context of continuing cultural and legal impunity.
I draw on first-hand oral testimonies taken from two groups of Argentine women who represent two antithetical versions of the recent Argentinine past: those affected by military repression and those affected by armed guerrilla violence. I contend that we need to look beyond political and ideological contestations and engage in a deeper analysis of how memorial cultures are formed and sustained. I argue that we cannot account for the politics of memory in modern-day Argentina without acknowledging and exploring the role played by individual emotions and affects in generating and shaping collective emotions and affects. In direct contrast to the nominally objective and universalist sensibility that traditionally has driven transitional justice endeavours, I look at how affective memories of trauma are a potentially disruptive power within the reconciliation paradigm, and thus need to be taken into account.
Latin American Perspectives, 2015
The democratization that followed the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983) has been influenced by human rights organizations’ relentless work to bring about truth and justice regarding the consequences of state terrorism and to keep the memory of that period alive. These efforts frame the discursive context in which human rights violations, including torture, are interpreted in contemporary Argentina. Argentine interviewees from across the political spectrum condemn torture, but the language and frames they use and the narratives surrounding political events vary. These accounts expose the conflicted terrain of memory making and the ambivalences and contradictions that permeate the construction of a torture-rejecting culture. La democratización que vino después de la última dictadura militar en la Argentina (1976–1983) ha sido influenciada por el trabajo incesante de las organizaciones de derechos humanos para lograr que se establezca la verdad y se haga justicia sobre las consecuencias del terrorismo de estado y para mantener la memoria sobre ese periodo viva. Estos esfuerzos enmarcan el contexto discursivo a través del cual las violaciones de los derechos humanos, entre ellas la tortura, son interpretadas en la Argentina contemporánea. Las personas entrevistadas en Argentina, quienes atraviesan el espectro político, condenan la tortura. Sin embargo, el lenguaje y los esquemas que usan y las narrativas sobre los acontecimientos políticos varían. Estos relatos exponen el terreno conflictivo de la construcción de la memoria y las ambivalencias y contradicciones que permean la construcción de una cultura de rechazo hacia la tortura.
Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina
2021
Acts of Repair explores how ordinary people grapple with political violence in Argentina, a nation home to survivors of multiple genocides and periods of violence, including the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Despite efforts for accountability, the terrain of justice has been uneven and, in many cases, impunity remains. How can citizens respond to such ongoing trauma? Within frameworks of transitional justice, what does this tell us about the possibility of recovery and repair? Turning to the lived experience of survivors and family members of victims of genocide and violence, Natasha Zaretsky argues for the ongoing significance of cultural memory as a response to trauma and injustice, as revealed through testimonies and public protests. Even if such repair may be inevitably liminal and incomplete, their acts seeking such repair also yield spaces for transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/acts-of-repair/9781978807426
Sealing and Unsealing Uruguay’s Transitional Politics of Oblivion
Latin American Perspectives, 2016
Three decades after state terror in Uruguay, counter memory making has endured in successive waves despite the official politics of oblivion, a transitional politics based on the denial of state abuses, absence of redress for victims, and impunity for perpetrators of the crimes of state terrorism. The Uruguayan case illustrates the impossibility of foreclosing memory through political engineering and the unsustainability of blanket impunity. It also highlights the long-term effects of ongoing social mobilization for memory and personal memorialization after social trauma and offers a sociocultural and intersubjective approach to the understanding of the generation of social memory after massive political violence.Tres décadas después del terrorismo de estado en el Uruguay, la construcción de la contramemoria ha resistido en oleadas sucesivas a pesar de una política oficial del olvido, una política de transición basada en la negación de los abusos del estado, la ausencia de reparacio...
Testimony of Traumatic Political Experiences: Therapy and Denunciation in Chile (1973-1985)
Psyke Logos, 2009
This article shows how clinical practices developed during the military dictatorship led to new knowledge about trauma, particularly its effect on memory. Psychologists came up with the idea to have patients write down their testimony as a central element of their therapy. Patients embraced this. The shame and rage that was eating away at them could be channeled toward denouncing what had happened and demanding justice. Things changed in the 1980s: the public began to know about what was going on and the detainees' stories found their way into the press. This »modified the place of denuncia and made the therapeutic process of giving testimony less necessary.« The last part of the work, shows the new social purpose written testimonies took on in the changing political climate of the 1980's
2013
This thesis is concerned with the aftermath and afterlife of violence (Gómez-Barris 2009) in postcoup Chile from the perspective of the second generations of victims of state violence perpetrated during the dictatorial period (1973-1988), the modes of inheritance of family political memories and the mechanisms of inhabitation of such family legacies. Drawing on Plummer's 'documents of life' approach (Plummer 2001)and Avery Gordon's theory of haunting (Gordon 1998), the research is based on thirty one family life story interviews and two group interviews. This thesis critically dialogues with the Holocaust tradition and its legacies for the memory field, arguing for a critical awareness of 'what is helped and what is hindered' by its lens (Huyssen 2003). Departing from the widespread belief that trauma is something 'other' to everyday life, this thesis 6 Dramatic events resulting from World War II have inspired multiple discussions in such kind of dilemmas (Portelli 1991; Cappelletto 2005; Suleiman 2012) To give an example from another historical context, after the fall of Mussolini the members of some Italian villages collaborated with the Nazi occupation while others joined the political opposition and became members of the resistance. Commenting on this, the scholar Michael Lambeck suggests: 'Here the usual dualistic categories of friends and enemies, victims and perpetrators, are much more ambiguous but the violence even more insufferable and far less easily resolved that when it is understood to come from outside' (2005: xiii). 7 Levy and Sznaider call this 'transnational solidarities' (2002). 12 The initial number of victims listed was 2000, while a subsequent investigation recognized a total of 3,216 in August 2011 (Collins, 2013). 13 In the report they formed 11 per cent of final victims. However Hite et al. note that today this number has fallen 'since no judicial case has to date found any other than state actors responsible' (Hite 2013 28). 14 According to Collins: 'Specific threats, civilian-military standoffs, and the negative example of neighbouring Argentina finally convinced president Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) that limited truth, together with some reparations measures, was the most that could be achieved or should be attempted' (Collins 2013, 65). 15 My translation. Chapter 2: The legacies of the Holocaust and the status of family memory Our first consciousness of the Shoah was transmitted to us through the immediacies and intimacies of family life and through means that were bodily, palpable, densely affective.
This article reconstructs and analyzes the memories of victims of political prison and torture during the Chilean Military–Civilian Dictatorship who were minors when they experienced this violence. Participants in the study were 11 adults, six women and five men from the region of Valparaíso, who were victims of State terrorism during childhood and adolescence. The information production technique used was the focus group. A textual analysis was performed, based on interdisciplinary contributions from interpretation theory and discourse theories. The analysis of the information identified distinctive elements in the traumatic memories according to the sex-gender system associated with the private/public and passivity/agency dimensions. The results of this study reveal the urgent need to recognize boys, girls, and adolescents as people with rights who should be protected by both adults and States. Moreover, these results emphasize the need to implement early intervention programs in people affected by psychosocial traumas and disasters of different types, and improve their quality of life.