Laura Klein | Latin America Fellow
Villa Grimaldi. Image sourced from Marucela Ramirez via Wikimedia Commons.
‘Comprehension means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has places on us – neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality- whatever it may be.’ Arendt (1951), Origins of Totalitarianism.
Southern Cone states successfully build and nourish historical sites and institutions that engage with the uncomfortable reality of their histories still in living memory. They provide an exemplar for the modern world replete with internal conflict.
Once an operational torture camp from the years 1973-1978 during the Pinochet dictatorship, Villa Grimaldi is today repurposed as a public centre of historical memory. The tranquil site sits under the watchful eye of the snow-capped Andes mountains range that borders Chile and Argentina, nestled in an everyday suburb on the outskirts of crowded Santiago. It now hosts guided tours on the site’s violent history and the larger recent history of state violence that it inhabits.
Sites such as these are scattered throughout Latin America. They are especially prevalent in the Southern Cone states of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, which share experiences of military dictatorship in the second half of the 20th century. In all these cases, state violence was perpetrated by dictatorial regimes against their civilian populations. This history, omnipresent and distressing, does little to service the promotion of national identity, making historiography a difficult and often politicized enterprise. In academic literature these controversies are known as the politics of ‘historical memory’.
‘Nuncas Más’ (Never Again) is the mantra of this mentality of collective reckoning seen throughout the region and was first used by Julio César Strassera during the historic trial of members of Argentina’s military government. Cemented in history, the statement Nunca Más disengages historical memory discourses from political intolerance by imparting an unquestionable moral and civic duty on the recollection of violent histories.
Critical debates around the public consumption and display of history are held most prominently in the context of specific decolonisation paradigms or post-memory of the Holocaust. Not easily fitting into these archetypes, Latin America's recent experience with, conceptualisation of, and struggle over historical memory is typically sidelined to the detriment of global conversations. Latin America tells a modern, mostly successful story of institution building and acceptance that can easily be used as an example for other states wishing to confront their histories.
The Southern Cone experience differs from many: whereas others have opted for amnesia, they have accelerated processes of publicly acknowledging and documenting the recent history of repressive dictatorial regimes. For example, Chile’s dictatorship ended in 1990 with the return of democratic elections. As soon as the early 2000’s, the proliferation of public sites of memory began, with many built on the physical grounds of the disgraces of history as seen at Villa Grimaldi.
Nevertheless, efforts of resolution, reconciliation and peace are complicated by the simple fact that people do not share the same memories. Deciding what and how to remember brings into the fold larger discussions on historiography and the difference between history and memory. Southern Cone examples in particular grapple with different histories written by survivors of the regimes and those who wrote on behalf of the dictatorial state whose actions they saw justified by their own memories of victimisation by the political left. This highlights the difficulty of threading multiple consciousnesses into one resolute telling of history.
By sponsoring investments in education and other resources such as sites of historical memory, Southern Cone states are far from passive bystanders to their historical contexts. They encourage the public to assess their own understandings by reclaiming sites of atrocity as places of memory, endowing cultural significance and promoting open community dialogues.
Latin America is actively engaging with the question of what state-sponsored violence implies for historical narratives by investing in public spaces of memory – an important and necessary step towards unity and stability in a society that still holds living memory of its violent past. The success of this Latin American framework invites other nations with histories of disgrace or violence to learn from their experiences as architects of modern techniques to display and discuss the consequences of history.
Similarly to Southern Cone countries, Australia bears the burden of learning to tell uncomfortable histories. We share a context of state-sponsored violence as seen in the state’s treatment of First Nations peoples, very much still part of the living memory and prominent in the case of the Stolen Generations and their ancestors. Our own history as seen in the public domain and taught in the classroom has been caught in the same political paradigms of whether to remember and pursue justice or forget and reconcile.
The building of sites of historical memory in Latin America is a symbol of societies' attempts to not simply acknowledge but constantly and justly commemorate an uncomfortable past. Australia can look to our neighbours across the Atlantic as an example of how to remember uncomfortable histories.
Only through such earnest attempts to reclaim a state’s history with violence can a nation be comfortable in the knowledge that it is moving forward in a manner respectful to the place in history it inhabits.
Laura Klein is the Latin America Fellow for Young Australians in International Affairs. She recently completed her Bachelor of International Relations at the Australian National University majoring and minoring in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and has since been accepted to a Masters program at the London School of Economics where she looks forward to further engaging in research. She has a deep affection and respect for the Latin American region and in her writing, strives to destigmatise and promote the opportunities that abound in Latin America, especially to an Australian audience.
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