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The Third Party: Power, Disappearances, Performances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Antonia Garcia Castro
Antonia Garcia Castro*
Affiliation:
Centre for Conflict Studies, Paris
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Extract

The scene takes place in O'Higgins Park, in Santiago, Chile, on 1 October 1995. Some women have just taken their place on the stage and the enthusiastic audience is applauding, the women have started singing accompanied by a guitar, but they cannot be heard, for the audience is still applauding. One of the women gets up. Like the others, she is wearing a white blouse and a long black skirt, she is old and her hair is grey. She moves to the front of the stage, chooses her place and stops, her eyes search the horizon but do not wander aimlessly, her eyes are fixed somewhere between the here and the hereafter. When she finds what she is looking for, she raises her right hand to wave a white handkerchief, and the dance begins. The audience, suddenly attentive, watches. And what do they see? Not the woman alone on the stage, but the empty space which she traces. The empty space disturbs us, as Chilean spectators, because the cueca, the national folklore dance, is danced by two people, or it is not danced at all. The invisible other is invoked by this woman's every gesture and we do not smile when faced with the absence of her man because we have a premonition that she is not pretending, we have a premonition that she can see him. The image of women dancing alone has become one of the symbols of the struggle of the families of the disappeared under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. The families are commemorating, on 1 October 1995, the twentieth anniversary of their organization into an association in 1975. The term “the disappeared” has progressively become accepted to indicate the victims of a novel, coercive practice in Chile, since the coup d’état on 11 September 1973. The forced disappearance of people differs from political assassination, as Amnesty International never ceases to indicate in the various reports which it commissions on them. In the Chilean case, this speciality is in part due to the security system which has taken on the responsibility of destroying all organized opposition to the military dictatorship: the DINA, the intelligence service created by the military junta, which is only answerable for its actions to the junta. More fundamentally, the special character of disappearance is due to the invisibility of the victim's body and to the doubt that this invisibility arouses within the victim's family circle: the disappeared is not identified as dead because his death is never certified, on the other hand his sudden and unexplained absence indicates that he is a person in danger and that this danger extends to all those who notice his absence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 49 , Issue 193 , March 2002 , pp. 66 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2002

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References

Notes

1. Les disparus. Rapport sur une nouvelle technique de répression (The disappeared. Report on a new technique of repression), Éditions francophones d'Amnesty International, Paris: Seuil, 1981; "Disparitions" et assassinats politiques dans les années 80-90. L'inacceptable ("Disappearances" and political assassinations during the 1980s and 1990s. The unacceptable), Éditions francophones d'Amnesty International, Paris: Seuil, 1993; Les Disparitions, Paris: Babel, 1994. See also "Disparitions", Cultures & Conflits ("Disappearances", Cultures & Conflicts), Paris: L'Harmattan, N° 13-14, Spring-Summer 1994.

2. The text printed here continues an analysis developed within the framework of a thesis in sociology presented in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences), under the direction of Marie-Claire Lavabre, "Où sont-ils? La permanence des disparus dans le champ politique chilien. Enjeux mémoriels, enjeux de pouvoir (1973-2000)" ("Where are they? The continued existence of the disappeared in Chilean politics. Issues of remembering, issues of power (1973-2000)"), May 2001.

3. The government coalition which won the election on 4 September 1970 was made up of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Radical Party, and MAPU, the Movement for Popular Action. The coercive practices of the military were aimed first of all at the militants in the various parties but also the militants of MIR, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left. The latter were the preferred targets of the DINA: since they advocated armed struggle, they were considered to be particularly dangerous.

4. For disappearances in Chile and the involvement of DINA agents see: E. Padilla, La memoria y el olvido. Detenidos desaparecidos en Chile, Santiago: Ediciones Origenes, 1995. For disappearances in Argentina see: P. Calveiro, Poder y desaparición, Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1998.

5. Numerous testimonies have been published by former prisoners telling, amongst other things, of their meetings with prisoners who have been reported as disappeared. See in particular: León Gomez, Tras las huellas de los desaparecidos, Santiago: Ediciones Caleuche, 1990; Marcia Merino, Mi Verdad. "Más allá del horror", Santiago: ATGSA, 1993.

6. This testimony is quoted in a report by the CNVR, the National Truth and Reconciliation Committee, appointed by Patricio Aylwin, the President of the Republic (1990-1994), to carry out an investigation into crimes committed during the dictatorship. Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, Santiago: Edición especial de la Nación, 1991, p. 176.

7. For information on the lists of the 119 see: Paz Rojas (ed.), La gran mentira, Santiago: CODEPU, 1994.

8. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish), Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1991, p. 61.

9. Ibid, p. 38.

10. On this topic, see Book I of the Code de la Justice Militaire (Code of Military Justice), in particular the section devoted to military tribunals in time of war. For a summary of the legislation and other practices of military tribunals, see the report by the CNVR, op. cit., p. 18 and following. The report records, region by region, the various sentences delivered by the aforementioned tribunals.

11. See Merino, op. cit.

12. Pierre Pachet, "La pensée de la torture" ("The rationale of torture"), Encyclopedia Universalis, 1993.

13. Claude Lefort, "Le corps interposé: 1984, de George Orwell" ("The interposed body: George Orwell's 1984"), in Écrire à l'épreuve du politique (Writing put to the test by politics), Paris, Presse Pocket 1984.

14. Foucault, op. cit., p. 39

15. Rojas, op. cit., p. 19

16. P. Virilio, Vitesse et Politique (Speed and Politics), Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977, p. 47.

17. H. Vidal, Dar la vida por la vida, La agrupación chilena de familiares de detenidos desaparecidos (ensayo de antropología simbólica), Minnesota: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1982, p. 127.

18. Ibid., p. 131.

19. The introduction of a "cheerful" element in a denunciation which is concerned with tragic events is not the exclusive property of the families of the disappeared. In the case of the cueca sola, it is extremely subtle. But in other cases, humour has been a method of denunciation, and even of resistance, in its own right, notably in camps where prisoners have sometimes organized theatrical productions. The testimonies of former political prisoners cite a series of "scenes" which they act out amongst themselves, including tragic events. More recently, the disappeared have become the subject of a denunciation which is not overtly declared to be "political". In 1990, street theatre was very much inspired by current affairs, marked at the time by the discovery of mass graves in the north of the country. The actors warned the audience: "Do not dig your garden, you run the risk of finding one of the disappeared!" And that made people burst out laughing. On another level, the smiles of mothers of some of the disappeared is striking. The laughter and the smiles are not necessarily cheerful … It is a good subject, firmly rooted in Chilean and perhaps Latin American culture. Raul González Tunón, the Argentinian poet, wrote: "Perhaps sadness is nothing but a subtle modality of cheerfulness." And why not vice versa? Humour and tragedy, practical jokes and denuncia tion, these are the subjects which this text brings out, but which cannot be developed here.

20. These pressures are, amongst others, the amnesty law passed in 1978, forbidding indictment for crimes committed between 1973 and 1977, but also the Constitution of 1980, still in force, which allows the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces to nominate nine "life" senators. Until now, this distortion of the system of representation has favoured the sectors of the right who are in the majority in the Senate; it jeopardizes / compromises any attempt to reform the legislation put in place by the military.