Memories and silences of a segregated city: Monuments and political violence in Santiago, Chile, 1970–1991

Abstract

How does Santiago, Chile, remember its dead, the victims of political violence of the 1970s and 1980s? The existence of dozens of memorials, monuments, and sites dedicated to the memory of victims of the dictatorship would seem to indicate a settled national cultural politics that recognizes the injustices and crimes committed by a terrorist State. The public, nongovernmental nature of the initiatives is, nonetheless, the first indication that we are dealing with an ambiguous political story. While the central government has supported these initiatives, they are mostly the result of efforts by social organizations and victims’ groups. The spatial-temporal reading of the scenario of commemorative markers proposed in this article offers evidence of a geography of memory that is configured, on one hand, by a memory project that has inherited political trajectories which have been passed down for a long time, articulated by small groups that at certain junctures manage to form into producers of local memory. On the other hand, the high socio-economic segregation in residential areas shapes politics of memory that are territorially discontinuous and that encourage forgetting in residential settings of the country’s elite.