There is a large and still growing literature on traumatic
memory in Chile. Nearly forty years
after the coup and over twenty since Augusto Pinochet left power, the powerful
psychological effects of political violence remain painfully relevant. The
academic literature has gradually though incompletely responded to understand
it. In Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile:Testimony in the Aftermath of State Violence, Michael Lazzara grapples with
some of the most difficult aspects of memory through a series of interviews
with Luz Arce.
The case of
Luz Arce is unsettling and tragic, not only because of the suffering she
depicts but because she forces all of us to ask ourselves uncomfortable
questions about how we would react under extreme duress. As she detailed in her
book El infierno (published in Chile
in 1993, with an English translation, The
Inferno, in 2004) she became part of Salvador Allende’s inner circle in
1972 and worked as a militant in the Socialist Party. The military government
abducted her in 1974, tortured, raped, and shot her, then worked to make her a
collaborator. She subsequently provided
not only details about the structure of leftist organizations, but also
specific names. She became a formal employee of the dictatorship’s notorious
intelligence agency, the Dirección de
Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), and its successor, the Centro Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). That book is required
reading for anyone who wants to understand the depth of repression of the
Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Lazzara
begins with an abridged version of her statement to the National Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in 1990, which is essentially a boiled down version
of The Inferno. He follows with seven
thematic chapters consisting of interviews he conducted with Arce from 2002 to
2007. It ends with a discussion by a number of participants in a 2008 forum in
Santiago based on the based on the book, which was first published in Spanish
but then updated and expanded in an English version.
It isn’t
easy reading, because of course the interviews probe the very architecture of
authoritarian repression in all its naked brutality. When confronted by the
reality that her work with the DINA led directly to four deaths, she quickly
responses that “as a functionary I bore no responsibility for deaths linked to
the detention of people or to torture” and that “I was forced to be a functionary” (p. 80, emphasis in original). She
struggles to reconcile her personal need for catharsis by writing the book in
the first place with the fact that she worked for the DINA for an extended
period of time, an experience she admits was not entirely negative.
What the
book demonstrates is the need for a framework within which we can better
understand not only memory but also collaboration. The complexity of Steve Stern’s trilogy on
memory in postauthoritarian Chile (
TheMemory Box of Pinochet’s Chile) attests to the difficulties inherent in
explaining the experiences even of those who did not switch sides. When
perpetrator and victim get blurred together, analysis is even harder. For example, the forum itself demonstrates
how problematic the term “collaboration” can be. The discussants—one of whom
suffered the loss of her husband because of Luz Arce--differ greatly in their
treatment of Arce, and come to no agreement about how to determine where the
line can be drawn between victim and active participant. Rather than acting as
a real conclusion, the forum is characterized by the raising of multiple and
sometimes contradictory questions. Arce’s
testimony reflects the fact that her answers to such questions change over
time. When asked whether she felt that
she was a victim, she responds that initially she did not, but then later did,
especially after talking to the Rettig Commission (p. 87).
Ultimately, then, this is a book that seeks not to answer
questions, but to leave them open intentionally. In the introduction, Lazzara notes that he
hopes the book can serve a pedagogical function (p. 9). Of that, there is little doubt. For an instructor, it would be a useful
addition to courses on Latin American politics or on authoritarian rule more
generally for the issues it forces the reader to contemplate.
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