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Tracing collective memory: Chilean truth commissions and memorial sites Katrien Klep Memory Studies 2012 5: 259 DOI: 10.1177/1750698012441299 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mss.sagepub.com/content/5/3/259

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MSS5310.1177/1750698012441299KlepMemory Studies

Article

Tracing collective memory: Chilean truth commissions and memorial sites

Memory Studies 5(3) 259­–269 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1750698012441299 mss.sagepub.com

Katrien Klep

Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Abstract This article takes a closer look at the master narratives of the Chilean truth commissions and how these are contested and negotiated by social actors demanding truth and justice. Over time these actors have created new spaces for their narratives about the military dictatorship (1973–1990), broadening the perspectives on the past in the public space. The process of contestation and negotiation can be traced on the local level in the creation of a memorial site on the grounds of a former detention and torture centre, Villa Grimaldi, which led to fierce debates on what should be remembered, and how. Through the ongoing process of negotiation and contestation and social action the collective memory of the dictatorship in Chilean society has become ‘thicker’.

Keywords Chile, memory, reconciliation, social action, truth commission, Villa Grimaldi

Introduction On 11 September 2013 it will be 40 years ago that the Chilean military moved against President Salvador Allende and bombarded presidential palace La Moneda in the heart of Santiago de Chile. During my research in Santiago, people assured me that Chileans will never agree on what happened on 11 September 1973. For some people, it was the day that Chile was saved by its glorious armed forces from a civil war and a communist dictatorship. For others, it was the day that a democratically elected government and a project for a more equal society were crushed, and the start of a cruel dictatorship that eventually would last 17 years. ‘No truth commission, no criminal prosecution, no mea culpa, no memorial, will ever change that’, my interviewees and friends have told me time and again.1 Since the return to democracy in 1990, however, the memory landscape in Santiago de Chile has undergone profound changes. In 1991, the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Corresponding author: Katrien Klep, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands Email: [email protected]

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documented the fate of 2279 persons who were either disappeared or executed, framing the period of the dictatorship firmly in terms of human rights violations, national reconciliation and ‘never again’. Thirteen years later the Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (CNPPT; National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture) looked into the fate of tens of thousands of political prisoners, and recorded the use of torture and imprisonment during the dictatorship throughout Chile, thus broadening the official, publicly recognized narrative of the dictatorship. Over time the discourse of the military leaders changed from open denial to the formal recognition of human rights violations. From 2003 (the 30th anniversary of the coup) onwards, the discourse on the dictatorship of the Concertación government focused more on memory and on the memorialization of those violations. Today Santiago de Chile boasts the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, inaugurated by former President Michelle Bachelet in January 2010. In this article I will take a closer look at the changing memory landscape of Santiago, and show how the master narratives of the Chilean truth commissions are contested and negotiated by social actors demanding truth and justice. Through time these actors have created new spaces for their narratives on the dictatorship, broadening the perspectives on the past in public space. These processes can be traced on the local level where many memory initiatives ranging from plaques, monuments and memorials to the recuperation of several former detention and torture centres have been undertaken by a wide array of social actors. My focus is on the creation of a memorial site on the grounds of one of these former detention and torture centres, Villa Grimaldi, which gave rise to fierce debates on what should be remembered and how. I will show how, through the ongoing process of negotiation and contestation of the official narrative about the dictatorship and social action by social organizations of family members, victim-survivors, human rights advocates and others, the collective memory of the dictatorship in Chile has become ‘thicker’. It is this process of ‘thickening’ collective memory that, the article suggests, might be understood as a process of reconciliation.

Reconciliation and memory In the international legal community today ‘reconciliation’ is considered to be a much desired but elusive goal of transitional justice (Hayner, 2011; Laplante, 2011). Those who take a critical stance towards the ‘transitional justice toolkit’ point out that the discourse on ‘reconciliation’ refers less to a truly attainable goal in societies and more to political strategy of nation-building by political elites.2 In the transitional justice debate reconciliation is linked to truth-telling both for the sake of healing of the (individual) victims and the reconciliation of the conflict-ridden nation. The idea is that by seeking truth and revealing truth to the victims and the nation as a whole, people may be able to come to terms with the painful past. In literature reconciliation is often defined as the (re) creation of relations between individuals and groups. ‘Reconciliation, which is by nature intersubjective and multiple can only emerge with the creation of at least minimally shared – and probably much more than minimally shared – narratives of the past and visions of the future’ (Avruch, 2010: 40). Deeply entwined with the political transition process, truth commissions are negotiated between many actors, driven by demands for justice and truth, and the need to legitimize the new government. Truth commissions are both informed by the global discourse on human rights and rooted in specific local historical processes and in the power relations of the given country.3 They put past events into an understandable, graspable story, presenting a master narrative of the conflict (Phelps,

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2004: 79), aiming for the creation of a ‘collective memory’ that unites the citizenry under one government and one nation. As we shall see, in the Chilean case this master narrative was challenged by different groups in society. People raise their voices to bring their memories of the dictatorship to the fore and attempt to create spaces to make their voices heard. I consider it theoretically important to understand memories as plural and memory-making as a relational process. This process takes place between individuals and groups, and inherently carries an element of conflict. Collective memory is under a constant construction and reconstruction, which will never finish (Robben, 2005: 15). It can be seen as an attempt to debate, to create common ground, and to negotiate the present (Lambek, 1996: 239). This implies the importance of focusing on the (historical) circumstances in which collective memory is produced: which groups can enforce what is to be remembered, and determine how it is to be remembered? What negotiations, discussions, silences and debates underlie particular memorializations? In short, the production of collective memory is a process that takes place on multiple levels through time. A truth commission emerges in and is part of these processes. Theidon (2006: 456) has argued that reconciliation is ‘forged and lived locally’, urging us to look at the processes on the local level. Rather than framing ‘reconciliation’, then, as something that can actively be initiated or provoked by certain political measures or acts, this article proposes to look at processes of collective memory production that take place on multiple levels in Chilean society in order to come to an understanding of processes of reconciliation.

Truth and reconciliation: The detained-disappeared In 1990 the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission was installed by President Patricio Aylwin of the first Concertación government. It was created at a time when several graves with bodies of detained-disappeared were found and reported in the press.4 The Commission focused on ‘the grave human rights violations’ committed under the military regime between 11 September 1973 and 11 March 1990: executions, forced disappearances and torture that had resulted in death.5 The normative framework and the carefully crafted master narrative of the report set truth-finding to work in the light of the higher goal of national reconciliation. It presented the human rights violations as an undeniable truth that should be accepted and recognized by all Chileans. It emphasized that ‘legitimate differences in opinion on the causes of 11 September’ could exist among Chileans, in an attempt to allow for the polarized opinions to co-exist peacefully through consensus regarding the reprehensibility of human rights violations. The Commission recognized individual victims on ‘both sides’: those persons who had died or disappeared at the hands of agents of the state (2025 persons, 957 of whom were disappeared), and those who died at the hands of ‘individuals acting under political pretexts’ (90 persons). In doing so, the Commission effectively equated the repressive system of the regime with the actions of the left-wing groups who had resisted the dictatorship. Moreover, the focus on individual human rights violations obscured the collective and political nature of the repression. The last volume of the report presented an alphabetical list of the victims with a short summary of the circumstances of their death or disappearance. Not a single one of the perpetrators was named as ‘naming the names’ fell outside the mandate of the Commission. The Rettig Commission recommended both monetary and symbolic reparations, including a monument that was to mention all victims on both sides individually, and a public park in memory to all the victims (CNVR, 1991: 825).6

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After 17 years of denial by the military regime and of silence regarding the fate of the detaineddisappeared, the Rettig Report confirmed the use of forced disappearance by the dictatorship and identified individual victims of disappearance and execution. The master narrative of the report hinged on the recognition of ‘individual victims of grave human rights violations’ in an attempt to forge at least a minimal consensus on the past.7 For the family members the report and the reparation law were an official acknowledgement of the repressive practices, its victims and their suffering. However, the report was also contested by family members, because it gave no answer to their most urgent question: ¿dónde están? Where are they? It remained unclear what exactly had happened to the detained-disappeared and who were responsible for their fate. Moreover, tens of thousands of Chileans who had suffered political prison, torture, dismissal and exile were left out. The partial truth of the report spurred the demand for further truth, to find the bodies that had been disappeared and to prosecute the perpetrators. These processes at play on the national level can also be traced in the creation of a memorial site on the grounds of a former detention and torture centre, Villa Grimaldi.

Peace Park – Villa Grimaldi Only months after the coup on 11 September 1973, the secret service Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) installed ‘Cuartel Terranova’ on the grounds of a colonial estate with a spacious house and large gardens, known as ‘Villa Grimaldi’, in the outskirts of Santiago. It is estimated that around 5000 political prisoners of the military dictatorship passed through the gates and torture rooms of Villa Grimaldi and that 229 persons registered as detained-disappeared were last seen on its grounds. Around 1977 the makeshift cell-blocks in the garden and the torture cells made in the old water tower were dismantled. The 1985 earthquake severely damaged the constructions left on the site, including the house. The tower burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a square cement foundation.8 When by the end of 1990 heavy machinery entered the grounds of Villa Grimaldi to demolish what was left of the constructions, local social organizations together with survivors and family members of the victims, who wanted to save the grounds of Villa Grimaldi, denounced the situation with national and local authorities and in the press. Not only did they want to commemorate the fallen, they also appropriated the grounds as a platform from which they demanded the recuperation of the human rights lost under the dictatorship, full disclosure of the truth, and criminal justice. Around the same time, a young architecture student at the conservative Catholic University decided to write her thesis on symbolic architecture. She managed to get into contact with survivors of Villa Grimaldi and visited its barren grounds in their company. They told her about the horrors, but also about the solidarity between prisoners and about the sounds and smells of the garden. These stark contrasts inspired her to create a design with the help of two other architects that would remake that place of horror into a place of peace and reflection, a Peace Park. After the publication of the Rettig Report the local organizations started to present their initiative as part of the ethical campaign of (symbolic) reparation of the victims of the military regime. They sought the support of some influential local politicians and, around 1994, managed to obtain the (financial) support of the municipality and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning for both the recuperation of the grounds and the creation of the Peace Park. Its initial design was heavily debated in open meetings held by the architects, especially when more and more former prisoners of Villa Grimaldi who had returned from exile started to arrive.9 The debate between the architects, family members, survivors, local human rights activists and others concentrated on the question whether to construct the Peace Park with symbolic references

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to the torture and detention centre and the plight of the victims or reconstruct Cuartel Terranova exactly as it had operated. On the one hand, a sizeable group wanted to reconstruct so as to show what really had happened in Villa Grimaldi and to gather evidence for court cases. On the other hand, there were those calling for peace, reflection and commemoration. Apart from bureaucratic problems (the land of Villa Grimaldi was registered as ‘park land’, which meant that that only a small percentage of the land could be subject to construction), reconstruction would be expensive, and many felt that funding the reconstruction of a place of torture and murder would be politically impossible. 10 The Peace Park’s main feature is a cross laid out on the grounds. The giant ‘X’ marks the earth as if to say: ‘Here people were tortured’. It also represents the ‘X’ of nunca más, never again. The central piece of the Peace Park is a water fountain, a mosaic made of the rubble of the constructions that once stood on the grounds. The water washes the place clean of suffering and sorrow, symbolizing a catharsis. At the place where the cells once stood, stones on the ground give their outline, while the trees planted in straight lines represent prisoners in their cells. When the Peace Park was inaugurated on 22 March 1997 there was no explicit representation of the human rights violations committed on the grounds. Its master narrative was one of commemoration, peace and reflection. Visitors would walk through the gardens and stand still at the white wooden panels with the names of the detained-disappeared and the executed of Villa Grimaldi painted in black letters as silent witnesses. The creation of the initial Peace Park must be understood in its historical context. The demands for truth, justice and commemoration of the victims of the dictatorship and particular local processes, generated a space where the Peace Park initiative could emerge. The local actors involved used the Rettig Report to insert their project into public space by framing it as an expression of the ‘symbolic reparation’ called for in the report. At the same time, in the debate on the project of Villa Grimaldi, the master narrative of the Rettig Report was contested. Not only was the focus of the project on the victims of the repression (and not on ‘all victims of both sides’), the narratives about the experiences of the political prisoners tortured at Cuartel Terranova that were left out of the Rettig Report, started to come to the fore. Still, it would take some more time before these memories would find their explicit expression on the grounds of Villa Grimaldi.

Political prison and torture: The survivors On 16 October 1998 the impossible happened: Pinochet was detained in London. While manifestations in favour and against extradition of Pinochet took place in downtown Santiago, the leaders of the Chilean government tried to negotiate a solution for ‘the human rights problem’ with the leaders of the Armed Forces who, for the first time, felt the heat of justice (Bakiner, 2010: 58). Family members, victim-survivors, human rights organizations and others had kept the memory of the detained-disappeared alive in countless acts, meetings, commemorations and long stagnated court cases; now their demands for truth and justice gained new force. Moreover, the accusations against Pinochet also included several cases of torture, an element of the repression that was mentioned in the Rettig Report but otherwise received little attention, in terms of either official recognition or reparation. Survivors of prison and torture began to organize, demanding truth, justice and reparation. At the local level in Villa Grimaldi, the debates on the contents of the Peace Park flared up again. More and more former prisoners came to visit the park, and found it impossible to relate their experiences to the quietly laid out gardens. Those who dedicated themselves to giving guided tours in the Peace Park also felt they needed something more concrete to be able to show what

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really happened on those grounds. Again voices rose to recreate a part of the detention and torture centre. This time these voices won. The quiet features of the Peace Park were ruptured by the addition of several elements that expressed explicitly what happened on those grounds. A large-scale model of the detention and torture centre ‘Cuartel Terranova’ was put on permanent display and, in 2002, the Tower with its torture cells was rebuilt, both based on the testimonies of former prisoners. As Chile moved to the 30th anniversary of the coup, the organizations of the former prisoners, although riddled with internal conflicts, became increasingly active in demanding justice and reparations from the Chilean government. In November 2003, President Ricardo Lagos created the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture with a view to providing reparation to the victims.11 Its mandate was ‘to determine, in accordance with the antecedents presented, who are the persons that suffered deprivation of liberty and torture for political reasons, by acts of agents of the state or persons in its service, in the period between September 11, 1973 and March 11, 1990’ (CNPPT, 2004: 21).12 Almost a third of the report is dedicated to listing all the (military) precincts involved, showing that, during the dictatorship, political prison and torture occurred throughout Chile. Testimonies are not reproduced integrally, although there are anonymous quotes and excerpts. The chapter on torture lists in detail the different torture methods used, but the names of perpetrators mentioned in the testimonies are absent from the report.13 Almost 35,000 persons testified before the commission, 27,255 persons were recognized as victims of political prison and torture and named in the long alphabetical list in the annex.14 The master narrative of the first truth commission created a collective memory of the dictatorial past framed in terms of individual human rights violations and national reconciliation. The contestation and negotiation of this narrative through continuous demands for truth, justice and reparation, countless acts of commemorations and manifestations by social actors, and historical moments such as the detention of Pinochet and the 30th commemoration of the coup, led to the creation of a second truth commission that broadened the narrative on the military dictatorship: not only were thousands killed and disappeared; tens of thousands were imprisoned and tortured for political reasons. Through the ongoing process of negotiation and contestation on multiple levels in Chilean society, the collective memory of the dictatorship has become ‘thicker’.15 It is the process of contestation and negotiation that has forged new relations between actors and has opened new spaces for narratives on the dictatorship, broadening the perspectives on the past in public space and changing the understanding and perceptions of the past in Chilean society. These processes can also be traced on the local level on the grounds of Villa Grimaldi where the narrative changed over time, moving from an abstract representation of the repression cast in the language of peace and human rights, to a more concrete and specific representation of what happened in Villa Grimaldi based on the testimonies of the political prisoners who survived. In 2005, on my very first visit to Peace Park – Villa Grimaldi a young girl who had been listening to a guided tour took my hand and made me peek into the Tower, ‘You can go up if you want to’, she whispered, ‘others did!’ The old man who led the tour heard her and asked her if she wanted to see. We all climbed the first staircase together. The man opened a trap-door in the wall, a dark hole behind it. ‘They were locked up with four people, they had to take turns to stretch’, the girl said softly. ‘That’s right’, the old man said. ‘How did you survive?’ another visitor asked him. Just then the other guide called us down; it was time to leave, the Peace Park was closing (fieldnotes, 11 August 2005). The Tower of Villa Grimaldi rose in 2002 from the memories of former prisoners of Villa Grimaldi. Both a significant group of the former prisoners and of those working at Villa Grimaldi at that time felt it was necessary to rebuild it, in order to provide evidence, to show what really

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happened and to make visible what had been denied and silenced. With the Valech Report in 2004 a belated official recognition of torture practices during the military dictatorship was given, which made the public denial of these practices impossible and broadened perspectives on the past in society. A guided visit to the tower, today part of the educational program of Villa Grimaldi, allows people to enter into dialogue about the social and political repression during the dictatorship with former prisoners and others, opening up a space for narratives of the dictatorship (Figure 1).

Final reflections: Memory debate in public space Several authors have argued that for a truth commission to be helpful to the victims it should be open ended, leaving room for other voices that may differ and even oppose the historical narrative. Teresa Phelps (2004), for example, has argued that a truth commission should not present the past as a closed case, as a carefully constructed narrative, but that it should warn against the closure of the past. ‘To capitalize on the justice-producing potential of truth reports, we must be brave enough to trust stories to be tools of disruption. We must allow reports to be incomplete, multivalent, heteroglossic’ (Phelps, 2004: 128). In Chile, both the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture provided for master narratives based on strict mandates written in a legal language with a focus on individual victims of human rights violations, leaving out the perpetrators. Their aim was to come to a definitive collective memory on the dictatorial past. However, social actors striving for truth and justice, have tirelessly engaged and challenged the official discourse on the past, creating monuments, memorials and memory sites in former detention and torture centres, and prosecuting perpetrators either in court or by publicly denouncing their crimes. This process of contestation and negotiation of memory continuously restructures the Chilean memory landscape, opening new spaces for people to voice their memories, broadening the perspectives on the dictatorship in public space, allowing for collective memory to become ‘thicker’, changing understandings and perceptions of the past. Under the presidency of Michelle Bachelet (2005–10), herself once a prisoner in Villa Grimaldi, a governmental infrastructure for the funding of memorialization projects was developed. Many groups of family members, survivors and others who had been active in the struggle for truth and justice for many years seized the opportunity and applied for funds, which led to a small boom in monuments and memorial sites in Chile. Some former detention and torture houses, such as Londres 38 can be visited today.16 While these initiatives are (partly) government funded, the activities and development of these sites are in the hands of social organizations. This leads to intensive debates between the different actors involved on how to remember the past, and how to relate to pressing political and social issues in the present. The Museum of Memory and Human Rights inaugurated in January 2010 may be understood as the culmination of 30 years’ Concertación human rights policy.17 The brand-new building boasts a three-floor permanent exhibition on the 1973–90 dictatorship, and a subterranean library and documentation centre.18 In the entrance hall there is a small show case with the reports of the Chilean truth commissions. A sign tells us that the museum is based on these reports. The museum combines a strong human rights narrative with the narrative of the return to democracy, which recounts the crisis of democracy on 11 September 1973, the subsequent violations of human rights, and the triumphant road back to democracy. The museum has also opened its doors, its conference rooms and exposition spaces to a variety of themes, debates and performers.19 Thinking of the museum and its permanent exhibition both as physical master narrative of the dictatorship (as opposed to the textual ones of the commissions) and as a powerful new actor in the

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Figure 1.  La Torre, the reconstructed water tower with torture cells in Peace Park – Villa Grimaldi (www. villagrimaldi.cl), September 2007

memory landscape of Santiago, several questions impose themselves. What will be the place of the museum among the other memory initiatives? Will the new museum and its master narrative be contested by other actors and alternative narratives? Will it serve as a catalyst, and encourage all kinds of memories; or will memories become centralized somehow and fit into its master narrative? What will change in the memory landscape of Santiago?

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If we try to come to an understanding of reconciliation processes in post-conflict societies I would argue that these are ongoing processes in society where people are living their lives, trying to articulate the experiences and memories of their past with their future. Where people open spaces and engage in social action allowing for polyphony in public space, is where we can begin to understand how processes of reconciliation in a society may work. Acknowledgments I would like to thank all my interviewees in Chile for sharing their time and thoughts with me; Dr Fabiola Jara for the many inspiring conversations; my PhD colleagues for their comments at various stages; and the anonymous reviewer whose valuable comments helped sharpen my arguments.

Notes   1. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork (two periods of eight months between 2005 and 2008, and short visits in 2009, 2010 and 2011), which is part of the authors’ doctoral research into the production of the collective memory of the dictatorship (1973–90) in the public space of Santiago de Chile through the analysis of the interrelated processes of transitional justice and commemoration.   2. For a critical analysis of transitional justice, truth commissions and nation-building, see Arthur (2009) and Grandin (2005).   3. Andreas Huyssen (2003: 95–6) has pointed out that even as ‘memory projects may construct or revise national narratives’ these narratives today are ‘invariably located somewhere between the local and the global’ now that ‘discussions about how to remember the past have morphed into an international debate about human rights, restitution and justice.’   4. In June 1990 a mass grave was found in Pisagua with 21 bodies preserved by the climatologically harsh circumstances of the coastal village. The pictures of the mummified bodies on the front pages of the newspapers imprinted the image of the detained-disappeared on the Chileans. See Lira and Loveman (2002: 46–7).   5. The Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (CNVR), also known as the Rettig Commission after its president, lawyer Raúl Rettig, was created on 25 April 1990 (DS 335). The report was published in March 1991 (CNVR, 1991).   6. Reparation Law 19.123 (8 February 1992) granted reparation payments to the family members of all the victims recognized by the report. For reparation policies, see Lira and Loveman (2005). The officially recognized total of detained-disappeared and executed in Chile is 3196 persons (Collins, 2010: 72).   7. General Pinochet presented the reaction of the military before the National Security Council on 27 March 1991. He disqualified the Commission’s report as ‘not objective’, ‘violating its explicit judicial limits’, and ‘inciting violence and hostility’ (Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), 1991: 450).   8. In her doctorate research the author has attempted to map the networks of actors on the local and (inter) national level involved in Villa Grimaldi, the memories connected to its grounds, and their expression on the grounds through time. She has visited the park regularly, done archival research and has interviewed former prisoners, local leaders, architects, (former) members of the Corporación Parque por la Paz – Villa Grimaldi, visitors, volunteers, and others to all of whom she is very much indebted. The reconstruction of the creation of the Peace Park presented in this section is based on this research.   9. James Young (1993: 14) has argued that it is crucial to study the coming into being of a monument in order to make visible the ‘activity of memory’ in monuments. A study of the ‘inner life of monuments’, so he argues, will show us the ‘tempestuous social, political and aesthetic forces’ at play and broaden our understanding of memory as relational, dynamic and related to the present. 10. At the heart of the debate lies the question of the representation of horror, which has been written on extensively, especially in the context of the Holocaust. In his 2010 theatre play Villa+Discurso the young

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12.

13.

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15.

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17. 18. 19.

Memory Studies 5(3) Chilean director Guillermo Calderón takes the debate about Villa Grimaldi to the present: ‘Reconstruct or build a modern museum?’ engaging his public in this still much debated question. The Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Politica y Tortura (CNPPT), also known as the Valech Commission after its president Monsignor Sergio Valech, was created on 11 November 2003 (DS 1.040). The report was published in November 2004. Three weeks before the Valech Report was published, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, General Emilio Cheyre, in his speech ‘Ejército de Chile: el fin de una vision,’ officially declared that the Armed Forces would accept its contents and conclusions ‘with … serenity and responsibility’ (CEP, 2005: 507). The fact that the names of perpetrators were not mentioned in the Valech Report once again led to an outcry against impunity. On the development of national criminal prosecution of crimes committed under the dictatorship in Chile, see Collins (2010). Reparation Law 19.992 (24 December 2004) and Law 20.405 (10 December 2009) grant reparations to those recognized by the Commission. In February 2010 (DS 43) the Comisión Asesora para la Calificación de Detenidos Desaparecidos, Ejecutados Políticos y Víctimas de Prisión Política y Tortura was created; 30 cases of disappearance and execution (622 applicants), and 9795 cases of political imprisonment and torture (31,831 applicants) were recognized in August 2011, see the Commission’s website (www.comisionvalech.gov.cl). The notion of ‘thickening collective memory’ is inspired by the work of Clifford Geertz on ‘thick description’ in anthropological ethnography, which refers to the analytical effort to make sense of the ‘multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed or knotted into one another’ (Geertz, 1973: 10) by taking on a historical and spatial perspective, a multidimensional, multilayered and actor-oriented approach. I use the notion of ‘thickening’ to come to an understanding of the production of collective memory through analysis of the processes between multiple actors on multiple levels at specific historical moments in Chilean society. After years of struggle and weekly candle vigils, so-called velatons in front of the house, different organizations of family members, survivors and friends negotiated a covenant with the government which allows them to administer and use Londres 38. Today the house can be visited and provides an active social space from which people engage with past and present social issues (see www.londres38.cl). For a critical analysis of the (narrative of the) Museum of Memory and Human Rights, see Richard (2010). For more details on the tensions between the government and other actors in the creation of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, see Hite and Collins (2009). See the website of El Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (www.museodelamemoria.cl).

References Arthur P (2009) How ‘transitions’ reshaped human rights: A conceptual history of transitional justice. Human Rights Quarterly 31(2): 321–67. Avruch K (2010) Truth and reconciliation commissions: Problems in transitional justice and the reconstruction of identity. Transcultural Psychiatry 47(1): 33–50. Bakiner O (2010) From denial to reluctant dialogue: The Chilean military’s confrontation with human rights (1990–2006). International Journal of Transitional Justice 4(1): 47–66. CEP. (1991) Respuestas de las Fuerzas Armadas y de Orden al Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, 27 de Marzo 1991 [Answers of the armed and security forces to the Report of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 27 March 1991]. Estudios Públicos 41: 449–504. CEP. (2005) Ejercito de Chile: El fin de una visión, 3 Noviembre 2004 [The Chilean army: The end of a vision, 3 November 2004]. Estudios Públicos 97: 505–8.

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Author biography Katrien Klep (LLM and MA Arts) is a PhD student and junior lecturer at the Cultural Anthropology Department of Utrecht University. Her research explores the production of collective memory of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) in the public space of Santiago de Chile through the analysis of transitional justice mechanisms and commemoration practices. She is also involved in research on truth and history telling in transitional justice in the project ‘Imagery of Transitional Justice’ at the Faculty of Law, Utrecht University.

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