Remembering Pinochet's Chile

During the two years just before the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, the historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part of an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this compelling work, Stern shares the recollections of individual Chileans and draws on their stories to provide a framework for understanding memory struggles in history.“A thoughtful, nuanced study of how Chileans remember the traumatic 1973 coup by Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende and the nearly two decades of military government that followed. . . . In light of the recent revelations of American human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners, [Stern’s] insights into the legacies of torture and abuse in the Chilean prisons of the 1970s certainly have contemporary significance for any society that undergoes a national trauma.”—Publishers Weekly“This outstanding work of scholarship sets a benchmark in the history of state terror, trauma, and memory in Latin America.”—Thomas Miller Klubock, American Historical Review“This is a book of uncommon depth and introspection. . . . Steve J. Stern has not only advanced the memory of the horrors of the military dictatorship; he has assured the place of Pinochet’s legacy of atrocity in our collective conscience.”—Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability“Steve J. Stern’s book elegantly recounts the conflicted recent history of Chile. He has found a deft solution to the knotty problem of evenhandedness in representing points of view so divergent they defy even the most careful attempts to portray the facts of the Pinochet period. He weaves a tapestry of memory in which narratives of horror and rupture commingle with the sincere perceptions of Chileans who remember Pinochet’s rule as salvation. The facts are there, but more important is the understanding we gain by knowing how ordinary Chileans—Pinochet’s supporters and his victims—work through their unresolved past.”—John Dinges, author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents

“Stern’s collection makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of how interpretations of the role played by the Chilean coup influenced subsequent political culture, and is a valuable exploration of personal histories through ethnographic research. Stern can only be praised for recording and disseminating stories that have rarely if ever been heard before, demonstrating a rare gift for eliciting testimony that is a tribute to his skill as a researcher and providing the reader with a potent and, indeed, moving sense of the full impact that the Pinochet dictatorship had on Chilean society.”, ‘Accessibly narrated and based on extensive archival research and ethnographic interviews, Stern's volume is certain to appear on many course syllabi in the near future. . . . [He] manages, quite adeptly, to add a dimension of complexity to concepts like censorship that are often discussed in rather unambiguous and generalized terms both in scholarly work on dictatorship and in university classrooms. . . . Stern brilliantly traces the evolution of memory as a critical category in Pinochet's Chile and helps us to see how the scripting of the past became a fierce political battle that would last long into the years of transition.”, “The work operates at a high level of theoretical sophistication of memory studies, but it applies that theory most concretely and insightfully to the events in Chile. . . . Recommended.”, “Stern successfully paints a broad picture of the dictatorship, its effects, and the struggle against it. Elegant and accessible, his book is likely to remain, for many years to come, a central reference text on the Pinochet regime and its ensuing battles to define historical memory.”, “[T]he theme of memory, a rigorous interdisciplinary methodology, and a creative narrative structure are the combined source of this work’s brilliance, one that sets a benchmark for future historical studies and challenges the conceptual boundaries for the study of Latin American dictatorships.”

Steve J. Stern is Alberto Flores Galindo Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his most recent books is Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995, also published by Duke University Press.