Memory and state violence in Chile: A historical ethnography of Tarapaca, 1890-1995.

Abstract

Memory and State Violence presents trends and transformations in the social, economic and political history of the Northern Chilean desert province of Tarapaca to frame a detailed study of specific moments of violence and struggles to recuperate a social memory of that violence. Specifically, I introduce a history of memory as praxis. Over the course of the twentieth century, Tarapaca has been a site of state violence and opposition to that violence part of which has taken the form of struggles over the constitution and representation of that history. There are three arenas for which Tarapaca is famous in Chilean history: (1) for the military glories of national conquest (the War of the Pacific) and the enforcement of national cohesion (the Civil War of 1891); (2) as the 'cradle of Chilean politics' in the context of labor struggles in the nitrate extraction era (1890-1930); and (3) as a specially marked site of state violence in the repression of the labor movement, in Cold War detention camps (1948, '56, '73, '84), and for the first excavation of a mass grave in the process of regime transition (1990). I have found that these competing memories can enable and inhibit action on the part of popular sectors as well as the exercise of power by the state. I offer a history of the ways in which memories of political violence inform the conjunctures of state policies of governance with the practices of social movements.