Resumen de When surviving is not enough: from militancy to collaboration: (on the ethical implications of researching the political transformations of Marcia Alejandra Merino Vega, Luz Arce Sandoval, and María Alicia Uribe Gómez)
Arce, once a member of Chile's Socialist Party (SP), Marcia Merino (also known as "La flaca Alejandra") a leader of Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), and María Alicia Uribe Gómez (also known as "Carola"), a former member of MIR, all began their entry into militancy with a promising future as political leaders but soon evolved into collaborators for Pinochet's regime during their time in detainment in the 1970s. Published by the small artisanal publishing house A.T.G.S.A. in July of 1993, Merino's testimony discloses her inability to withstand torture and recounts the fear she endured from both the military and MIR as a collaborator.7 The accusations directed against both women have relegated their testimonies to a state of textual limbo; their texts, like their political subjectivities, have come to embody a limit-identity. The re-interpretation of their stories by historians, writers, cultural critics, and artists, have relegated both of their testimonies to textual spheres that we could term are "out ofjoint;" their stories of survival occupy "a non-presence" that does not follow a linear order of time but rather a temporal disorder that transfers 'specters' to temporalities and competing histories at once (Derrida 18,101). In analyzing the textual (re)productions of Arce's and Merino's stories, I also intend to bridge a more nuanced analysis of how the public reconciles the absence of their works, to shed light on the ways in which that absence is then compensated for through various cultural productions.
