Today, August 30, marks two days. One is mundane and irrelevant, and the other is an internationally recognized day for activism.

First, it is my one-month anniversary of working with Amnesty International in India. Second, today is the International “Day …

I spent nearly two years enmeshed in the history of Chile’s brutal dictatorship, a regime that killed more than 3,000, and tortured thousands more. Although my research ended in 2011, the struggle between the extreme right and left in Chile, the Pinochet loyalists and human rights victims, continues. The New York Times just published an article by a journalist I knew in Chile named Pascale Bonnefoy, that exemplifies the dichotomy in how Chileans remember Pinochet and his rule even now, 20 years later. Here’s the link to the New York Times article titled: “Hundreds Protest Screening of Pro-Pinochet Film in Chile,” and if you’re curious about my own findings, you can visit the Pinochet Project Page found on this site.

Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Pinochet Project is a journalist’s rendition of the Chilean memory struggle after the dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, left office in 1990.  Last summer, May-August 2010, I spent three months in Chile, interviewing subjects and reporting for the English-language newspaper, …

Chile’s Human Rights Museum Reopens
View full article on the Santiago Times website:

Santiago’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights will reopen this Saturday after being closed to the public for nearly six months following February’s earthquake.

The museum …

The Academic

Steve Stern: A history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stern specializes in historical memory and political violence in Latin America. I was first introduced to his work in Chile when I read an excerpt from “Remembering Pinochet’s …

Most Chileans acknowledge that Pinochet’s regime captured and tortured people that were a perceived threat to the government. What they don’t know is that their office building, bank or gym building may have once been used as torture center. More …

Hermogenes Peréz del Arce and Chile’s Military Academy: Memory As Salvation

Steve Stern, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, divided Chile’s historical memory into four camps: salvation, persecution, the open wound, and the closed box. Although all four exist …

The Potency of Memory

Luis Navarro is one of Chile’s most famous human rights photographers. Despite his fame, Navarro lives alone, unable to rid himself of the atrocities he witnessed under Pinochet’s regime.

In memory lore, there are some individuals who never escape the painful memories that haunt them, memories of torture, death and disillusionment. They lead “double lives.”  One “surface life” where they go on from day to day as a normal person but underneath they lead a “secret life” hidden from the rest of society.  Their secret life is full of unresolved pain, bitterness and anger.

So I went to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, reopening tomorrow after being shut down after the earthquake, and asked for Marcía Scantlebury, a member of the MIR from 1967-1975, when she was arrested and held in various …