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 …

General Augusto Pinochet was the Commander-in-Chief of the Army from 1973-1998, and “President” of Chile from 1973-1990. He was one of only two Army commanders in the nation’s history to hold both titles simultaneously, and the only one to have …

I had the opportunity to interview the director of the brand-new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, a project pioneered by Michelle Bachelet and her administration.

Romy Schmidt, Museum director and politician

The museum opened in January 2010, …

“Pinochet’s arrest and court judgement was all a lie…Everything they say is leftist propaganda and it’s accepted as the true version of Chilean history today.”

Published in La Nación, 2009

Hermógenez Peréz de Arce sat in… Continue reading…