Resumen de Memory Symbolics in Chile: Manuel Guerrero Antequera, Cultural Memory and Political Consciousness
37 years after the September 11 “golpe de estado” and 21 years after the restoration of democracy, Chileans continue to explore various ways to represent authentically their painful and conflicted memories of Pinochet’s lengthy dictatorial reign. Pinochet’s legacy continues to reverberate strongly four years after his death. Even Heraldo Muñoz, Chile’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and current Permanent Representative, and certainly no apologist for the dictator, acknowledges “Pinochet’s long shadow,” recognition of the ruler’s deep but highly contested historical repercussions, especially in the economic arena. As sociologist Macarena Gómez-Barris suggests in her recent book, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), the transition period between dictatorship and full democracy has led to many distinct manifestations of what she terms “memory symbolics,” efforts that in their own way tell of the dictatorial past and its often unfortunate aftermath. Examples of memory symbolics might include truth commissions, memorials, museums, commemorative parks, witness statements, documentary films, and the visual arts. Gómez-Barris and other scholars who investigate both the history of the dictatorship and contemporary responses to the Pinochet era have focused appropriately on concrete, visible, clearly identifiable signs and records: museums, films, public displays, books, and the arts. Public memorials that commemorate the victims of Pinochet’s regime have appeared throughout Chile, in many cases constructed upon a site where beatings, torture and murder earlier had occurred. Another potential area of memory symbolics that has shown amazing vibrancy, fluidity and resistance to state control has been on the Internet through digital media, especially with dedicated websites and blogs.Manuel Guerrero Antequera is one in particular who has devoted the last several years developing a dynamic and extensive blog (manuelguerrero.blogspot.com) that uncovers the dictatorship’s systemic brutalities as well as incisively critiques Chile’s current economic, political and social reality. As the son of a murdered “desaparecido,” someone who as a child actually witnessed his father’s second (and ultimately fatal) state-sanctioned abduction, Manuel Guerrero Antequera blogs with particular acuity and personal insight into an era that, for better or for worse, continues to weigh heavily on contemporary Chile’s collective imagination.
