Nunca Más Meets #Niunamenos— Accountability for Pinochet-Era Sexual Violence in Chile (original) (raw)
Related papers
Human Rights Trials in Chile during and after the 'Pinochet Years
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2009
This article reflects on the recent Chilean experience of accountability actions, particularly the attempted prosecution of perpetrators of past human rights violations. While acknowledging the undoubtedly substantial impulse provided by the dramatic October 1998 UK arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, it focuses on domestic actors and drivers in a post-1998 revival of such attempts. The article examines the extent and limitations of recent change in the area of prosecutions in Chile, noting that these have been undertaken at the insistence of private actors rather than the state. It also notes that the self-amnesty law of 1978 is still textually intact despite advances in restricting its application with regards to certain categories of internationally proscribed crimes. Finally, the article examines some explanatory factors for both recent advances and remaining blockages in the Chilean human rights accountability scenario.
Prosecuting Pinochet: Late Accountability in Chile
2008
The notable post-1998 revival of prosecutions for past human rights crimes in Chile is often attributed to the so-called ‘Pinochet effect’, the impact of the UK arrest of the former dictator in that year. In this sense, the arrest can be viewed as an example of international action shifting domestic blockages. In fact, though, the Chilean justice scenario had already begun to change, with the minimal conditions for revisiting transitional era impunity already apparently in place and beginning to show limited results. In this way, the dramatic events in London were able to accelerate national processes, galvanising both activists and judges in Chile to deal in a more comprehensive way with the outstanding human rights legacy of the recent past. Additional internal factors contributing to this domestic change included previous institutional and judicial reform, persistence on the part of domestic relatives’ groups and lawyers, and the simple passage of time. Change has not been limite...
Journal of Human Rights and Social Work, 2023
This study explores the gendered violence dimension present in the torture exerted in Chile and the problems that continue to affect the reparation policies. The analysis covers the cases of political prisoners during the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990) and that of the people detained within the context of the social protest of October 18, 2019. The methodology used for this study includes desk research on secondary sources on gendered political violence and torture such as scholarly books, journalistic and academic articles, and non-governmental organization reports, analyzing their contents from a perspective based on human rights and gender. We argue that the crystallization of gender-based violence exerted by Chilean State agents is linked to the biases present in post-dictatorship reparation policy and reflect on the impact of these biases on the assurances of non-repetition of human rights violations.
Sexual Political Violence and State Terrorism in Chile (Review)
NACLA Report August 16, 2024
Review of Jocelyn Maldonado Garay:Violencia política sexual y terrorismo de Estado en la dictadura civil-militar en Chile. La genealogía oscura del neoliberalismo. (LOM Ediciones, 2023) Jocelyn Maldonado Garay’s new book, Violencia política sexual y terrorismo de Estado en la dictadura civil-militar en Chile argues that beneath state terrorism and sexual violence imposed upon people’s bodies lies the neoliberal logic of dispossession. In colonial times and during the construction of the capitalist nation-state, state violence took the form of wars, rape, sexual abuse, and sometimes Indigenous genocides. While state terrorism mobilized memories and practices of these previous eras of violence, the neoliberal governance embraced by the Chilean dictatorship also installed a sophisticated model of dispossession that exerted both material and symbolic violence on individual bodies, collective social groups, and society. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship, as dynamics of repression became more complex, the sexualization of violence reflected just how profound punishment and the imposition of authority could get.
Truth, Justice and Legal Impunity: Dealing with Past Human Rights Violations in Chile
2000
Dealing with past human rights violations has been a difficult issue in various Latin American democratization processes. Within the academic and political field of “transitional justice”, similar questions have been asked in various countries in Latin America and elsewhere. Under what circumstances can perpetrators be prosecuted? When is reconciliation and pardon possible? Should truth and justice be sacrificed so that fragile democratization processes are not undermined?
Latin American Research Review, 2007
I have had the pleasure of reading an outstanding set of books on a critically important topic. As a group, these books expand our notions of human rights because they deal with the political and ideological sources of human rights abuses, the consequences of the abuses for individuals and societies, and the progress made in the last decade as trials against abusers are finally taking place. Latin American societies have been struggling with the establishment of democratic institutions and the protection of individual rights since they won their independence. It is clear that lack of democracy resulted in a persistent pattern of human rights abuses and that the Cold War created a set of circumstances that intensified that pattern of abuse. What is particularly disturbing is that human rights abuses were equally prevalent in countries that had already made substantial progress toward democracy as they were in countries that lacked a democratic tradition.
Lustration, and Criminal Prosecution of Regime Crimes: the Chilean Experience
MEMORY OF NATIONS Democratic Transition Guide, 2020
The Democratic Transition Guide offers practitioner-focused studies of transitional experiences in a range of countries, to assist decisionmakers by offering a reference guide to lessons learned in areas including political and constitutional reform; transformation of the security services; justice, reparations, and the preservation of archives. The Chile chapter of the guide includes sections by Cath Collins on lustration and on prosecutions
2015
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) case of Garcia Lucero et al vs Chile deals with claims over insufficiency of reparations and denial of justice made by a Chilean survivor of dictatorship-era torture, now resident in the UK. In its 2013 judgment in the case, the Court suggests that the Chilean state ought to have initiated an ex officio investigation of crimes committed against Mr Garcia Lucero as soon as it was apprised of his alleged torture by state agents. In this finding, the Court reiterates the putative active duty to prosecute to which it first alluded in the Velasquez Rodriguez case of 1988 when it found that investigation “must […] be assumed by the State as its own legal duty, not as a step taken by private interests that depends upon the initiative of the victim or his family”. The Garcia Lucero case therefore intersects with particular force with debates about whether, how and by whom justice can be delivered at domestic level for, in particular, survivo...