Reflections on new historical interpretations at the National Stadium, Santiago, Chile

Marivic Wyndham and Peter Read

I will tell my son that all the fires, all the pain, will be meaningless, if he will not transmit our story to others, to his friends, and one day to his own children.¹

The words of Elie Wiesel that form our epigraph seize the moment when the memories of victims of state violence, however violent and traumatic, are reinterpreted by succeeding generations. Our article traces how this has occurred in Chile since the dictatorship. We begin with the proposition that every new generation will, and must, form its own view of its own history. But, we ask—at what cost? Are Wiesel’s pain and the fires to be meaningless? Should history be a negotiable commodity to suit current purposes? We consider some changing interpretations at several sites of detention, torture and extermination in Santiago to ask whether such rewriting of history to suit educative or other purposes really is useful. Finally, we consider more closely the memorials at the National Stadium, where the passionate words of the victims—now known as ‘survivors’—are almost completely avoided by younger guides intent on imparting their own interpretative message.

Between 2007 and 2022, the authors annually returned to Santiago, Chile, to track the memorialisation of a site of torture, detention and extermination known locally, after the street in which it is situated, as Loyola. The precinct was a former air force maintenance depot, occupied during the Pinochet dictatorship by the state security service. Details were imprecise as to who had been detained, or when, or what had happened to them, but matters seemed resolved at an impressive ceremony in September 2012 in which, before a large crowd, a memorial was unveiled containing 17 names painted on a stone tablet, five of which were in red. Its invocation read:

Nothing is Forgotten

Nothing is Forgiven

Justice and Punishment

The clear implication was that each of those named had been incarcerated within the depot and the five in red had been politically executed.

The following year we were surprised to discover that the memorial was no longer in its honoured place near the precinct entrance. Where was it? We found it propped some 50 metres away against a wall in an obscure section of the repair yard. The following year it was lying on its back in an abandoned vegetable garden. The following year it was in two halves at right angles to each other, the paintwork almost illegible. In 2018, it had gone altogether. We asked the leader of the Loyola community that now occupied the site what had happened to it? ‘Oh we just threw it away.’²

It transpired that the 12 persons whose names were inscribed in black had been killed by troops trying to quell demonstrations in the early 1980s in the surrounding district known as Quinta Normal. Their deaths had nothing to do with the site itself. The five names in red were members of the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodriguez, an ultra-leftist group who had been apprehended and politically executed after the failed assassination of Pinochet in 1986. In 1987 their bodies may have been loaded into a helicopter from the Loyola base to be dropped into the sea. Julieta Varas, Frente member and the memorial’s sponsor, had, it seemed, foisted the memorial on the Loyola community, attracted the publicity, worked the press, supervised its unspecific title and allowed the spectators to draw their own conclusions as to what had happened within the air force depot during the Pinochet years.³ The dismal trajectory of the monument, insignificant enough in the terrible history of the Chilean dictatorship, demonstrates how easily memorialisation can be bent to the demands or manipulations of minorities and how unstable can be the intergenerational perceptions of state violence.

In the past four decades since a ‘No’ plebiscite removed Pinochet from the presidency in 1988, Chileans’ interpretation of the past has regularly collided with uncompromising ideologies: a bronze plaque to the memory of the famous entertainer and cultural critic Victor Jara was levered, by persons unknown, off the wall of the Victor Jara Stadium in which he was murdered by soldiers in 1973. It has never been replaced for fear the same thing will happen. Another deadly nexus lies between the private experiences of the survivors and the public purposes to which the state wishes to put those experiences. At Loyola, the Chilean state did not involve itself, but at the detention centre Villa Grimaldi, where more political disappearances took place during the dictatorship than anywhere else in Chile, many survivors insisted that the horrors they had endured should be allowed their own validity. Echoing the point of Wiesel’s epigraph cited above, they specifically did not want their experiences homogenised or neutralised as a springboard of nation building and reconciliation. Alarmed at President Bachelet’s announcement in 2015 of the construction of a national museum of memory and human rights, the survivor Osvaldo Torres argued passionately:

[A] museum of memory and human rights is of a different nature. The memory is ours, the testimonies are ours … In this sense [our memories are] not a museum of the republic setting out epic lectures on the construction of representative democracy, but rather a piece of history which contains unshakeable truths and various interpretations.⁴

The driving principle of the museum turned out to be exactly as Osvaldo had feared. Its stated purpose was, and is, to make known the:

systemic violations of human rights … so that ethical reflection about memory, solidarity and the importance of national human rights will be strengthened so that Never Again will these attacks on human dignity be repeated.⁵

The questions, resolved apparently without qualms by the young curators at Santiago’s Sites of Conscience, are these: How much do young people need to know about past events, and what should they do with that knowledge? What is the desired balance between historical knowledge and nation building? Does the more of one imply the less of the other? Today’s guides at Villa Grimaldi seem to hold no doubts. They choose to avoid the worst instances of human cruelty and degradation when instructing groups of school children. They deliberately reduce deeds of infamy to generalities like: ‘it is here that men and women were kept at night’, ‘it was here that those tortured most harshly were kept crouched in these tiny wooden cells’. The instructors, before a class of secondary students, proceed to sidestep history by asking: ‘What can be learned of these experiences?’ ‘Can you think of an instance in your own life when someone’s human rights were violated? What should you have done about it?’ These guides, still mostly in their twenties, exemplify the widening dissent between Chilean generations.

Tensions between those who suffered under Pinochet and those born later began at least 20 years ago, when political centrist and leftist opinions were united in the need for educating the young. It seemed that young people sometimes wondered what the struggle had been about, since Allende and Pinochet could both seem to represent aberrations in their nation’s otherwise stable democracy. Another indication of such intergenerational dissent occurred at another Santiago Site of Conscience, José Domingo Cañas. In about 2002, one or more victims of the dictatorship entered the precinct to blaze on the perimeter:

Here were committed the

Most ferocious violations

Of human dignity

For this reason we demand

JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT

This was one of the strongest victim denunciations of the dictatorship in the whole of Chile; however, 15 years later, during which the corporation’s founder had written a series of books listing every known atrocity that had occurred within the walls,⁶ a younger group of collective members became the dominant voice and adopted the opposite position. The new agenda was to ‘carry out the construction of a society in which justice and respect for human rights comes first thus linked to the new generations of young people in Chile’. And, in the only use of capitals in the entire Domingo Cañas website, to ‘Train and educate people in memory and NOT IN HORROR.’⁷ The passionate message beginning ‘Here were committed’ is now partially obscured by an electricity meter. Nobody in the corporation today seems disturbed by this.

Commemorate or educate?

Remember the past or prepare for the future? Any memorial plaque, plinth or sculpture is meant to link a supposed history to a supposed shared cultural heritage and a collective identity, but nowhere are these questions more apposite than on public memorials to state violence that has divided and traumatised so many nations.

Through their public memorialisation, former protagonists and the state strive to retrieve their own history. They may be in concert, more likely they will not be, but each will seek to validate, make known and have their experience acknowledged by others while implicitly contesting the interpretations of others.⁸ Yet, months or years later, as we have seen, the words inscribed on monuments may well coalesce and freeze, an eternal reminder and embarrassment to the generations that follow.

A strong strand of theoretical discussion holds that the mere recital of terrible events may not do much to discourage their repetition. ‘Memory and history’, as Pierre Nora famously put it, ‘now appear to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies … history is a representation of the past.’⁹ The casual destruction of the Loyola plaque and our other examples of Chilean radical reinterpretation reinforce the speculation of David Rieff, invoking the oft-cited example of protagonists of the 1992 Bosnia war alluding to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, that state governments would do well to discourage public memorialisation of any sort. It has led, he argues:

far too often to war rather than peace, to rancour and resentment rather than reconciliation, and the determination to exact revenge for injuries both real and imagined, rather than to commit to the hard work of forgiveness.¹⁰

Setting aside the seemingly unstoppable human disposition to create conflict out of not very much, Rieff may have a point, especially in nations like Zimbabwe, where it is claimed that the state:

under the guise of state rituals and public memorialisation of past events, has come to dominate the public arena filling the fluid space which exists between memory and history with a disturbing asphalt-like cover of enduring cement.¹¹

Curators of the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Sydney seem to assume that history-as-knowledge alone will be sufficient to impel later generations to right action. Its stated purpose is to:

Commemorate the lives of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, honour the Survivors and pay tribute to the Righteous Among the Nations. Ensure through education, academic research and the display of artefacts and memorabilia, that the Holocaust and its uniqueness in history is never forgotten and that it is recognised as a crime against humanity with contemporary and universal significance.¹²

Does the contemporary significance of past state violence really flow so predictably from historical knowledge to right action? The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is less optimistic. Its charter is twofold: to recognise historic sites that ‘activate the power of places of memory to engage the public with a deeper understanding of the past and inspire action to shape a just future’.¹³ The public memorialisation of victims of the Pinochet dictatorship at the National Stadium in Santiago that we now consider indicates that a mere recital of suffering by the survivors, however horrific, cannot be trusted by the next generation to be the principal lever of societal reform. Here the contemporary interpreters assume a highly activist role that directs action, discourages historians from interfering in site interpretation and consigns memory to the archives.

We now focus on the best known of all the detention and torture sites associated with the Pinochet dictatorship, the National Stadium in Santiago. Most of those held were members of left political parties, while others were apprehended simply by their humble appearance or picked up casually in street patrols. For some six months after September 1973 many hundreds of these detained men and women were rammed into its changing rooms by night and paraded into the spectator seating by day. Their appearance in the arena formed the best known and most iconic photographs of the Pinochet regime. An unknown number were politically executed within the grounds of the stadium itself; most were beaten by soldiers, many hundreds were tortured.

Exactly how these events should be memorialised, if at all, is an issue that has beset every Chilean government since the transition to democracy in 1990. Thirty-five years of nervous indecision by moderate or centre-left governments passed before the turning point. This was the scheduled hosting of the 2014 South American Games in the National Stadium that caused President Piñera’s centre-right government to conclude that it would have to be seen to be active in memorialising the nation’s most iconic concentration camp. The stadium itself, a vast precinct offering facilities for every major sport, would logically become Piñera’s principal national memorial to all the victims of the dictatorship. A prominent sign would declare that this was to be the last site in the country to be formally memorialised:

National Stadium

National monument

The plaque’s definitive brevity implied finally that it was here, of all of Chile’s Sites of Conscience, that the memorialisation of the human rights violations under Pinochet were to be finally focused and encapsulated. Hereafter, official state-sponsored memorialisation was to be concluded.

The pronouncement in 2013 coincided with finalisation of a plan developed over seven years by the Association of Prisoners of the National Stadium (Agrupación de Prisioneros y Prisioneras del Estadio Nacional) led by Ms Wally Kunstmann. The Kunstmann plan, presented to the Department of Sport for approval and funding, was to be a journey of discovery. Everyone entering the stadium, for whatever purpose, would pass through a single gate, notice the restored changing room where the female prisoners had been held, read a large plaque of explanation and reflect on the past before a pool of remembrance. A wide path in coloured concrete would sweep survivors, visitors and soccer fans alike, 40 metres to the main stadium itself. At this point, sports fans would enter the stands, while others following the history of the dictatorship would separate to the areas below the seating. Most of these might pass through Escotilla 8 (entrance gateway 8) on whose walls a number of prisoners in September 1973 had inscribed names or messages; then they were to proceed to a changing room under the seating of the stadium above. After inspecting the abandoned and desolate spaces and the bathrooms now coated with three decades of dust, visitors would then visit the principal ‘detainee’ entrance, before processing up the ‘Via Dolorosa’, the track up which detainees were frog-marched to the velodrome. They would then view the tunnel leading to the cycle track in which, it was rumoured, detainees were either shot or subjected to mock execution.

The visitors’ ultimate site was scheduled to be the dreaded changing room adjacent to the velodrome, known as el Caracol. In this small concrete structure, once the changing room for the adjacent velodrome, were enacted almost all the tortures carried out within the stadium precinct. Frequently after electrical torture, victims had to be dragged back to the main stadium by soldiers.¹⁴

At this endpoint of the tour, it would be here that the worst excesses of the dictatorship would be explained. Clearly Kunstmann thought of el Caracol not only as the endpoint of the tour but also as the emotional centre of the stadium atrocities, rather like Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, the crematorium at Teresienstadt or the Gestapo prison cell in Katovice, Poland, made a focus of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Kunstmann held no doubt that the generation of stadium survivors dreaded el Caracol. Carmen Luz Parot dwelt on the experiences of its survivors in her famous documentary, Estadio Nacional, including that of the journalist known as El Gato who was taken for torture there seven times. Much commentary about the site has invoked Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’, especially after a survivor recalled his torturer remarking to his companion: ‘We’d better make this quick, I have to take my wife to see “The Godfather” tonight.’¹⁵

Such was the journey for the detainees beginning, on arrival at the stadium, with roughing up, terror, gunfire and shouting and ending at el Caracol, in torture; and, for the visitor, a three-hour expedition from an initial curiosity through trepidation to fear, ending, at el Caracol, in terror.

Such was the Kunstmann plan. But who was to write the memorial plaques through which the key information was to be conveyed? What were they to say? It is our contention, developed in our monograph on the memorialisation of Santiago’s Sites of Conscience, that if full democracy had not completely returned to Chile by 2012, then state bureaucrats certainly had. The majority were administrative and well-educated, middle-class survivors of the dictatorship, many of whom, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, were working for powerful areas of government, like the Department of Sport. They were tertiary educated survivors, knowledgeable in lobbying, experienced in working the system and strong in friendships in the right places. As their cruellest nightmares passed, these highly articulate survivors were already writing their experiences into documentaries, autobiographies, histories and poetry. They well understood that both the public and the state’s impulse to memorialise the atrocities that they had endured had almost run their course. They knew that whatever they wrote on the plaques of the National Stadium would be their last chance to interpret their own history. Subsequent generations could not follow them with the same legitimacy or intensity. Accustomed to rhetoric, the evocative, literary wording of plaques at the National Stadium would fall easily from their pens; less preoccupied with daily issues of food and shelter, they were more able to focus their energies on memorialisation than those from working-class districts. What they would inscribe on their memorials at the National Stadium would be their last chance to interpret their own history, and they knew it. It was they, especially the women, who would write the texts to define their experience at the stadium.

On an imposing metal plate mounted on an eye-level plinth, the women began their mordant and passionate testament to later generations of Chileans:

Here in this former swimming pool’s changing room was the place where hundreds of women suffered the brutal repression of the military coup.

It was here in this sombre place where the dream of thousands of Chileans and those from overseas was interrupted by political detention, the horror of torture and death.

Through these walls, curling up round each other against the sneers, hundreds of women, housewives, students, workers and professional women paid in pain and blood for their decision to be part of the construction of a more just and decent new nation for all.

Here inside, through these walls and beneath the claws of the gaolers, daughters, sisters and mothers were the first women in Chile to endure the beginning of a long and dark night of cowardice.

Yet it was also here that the pain wove the unbreakable net of fraternity which gave the prisoners mutual protection against terror, and cared with their lives for their pregnant comrades, for outside these walls tomorrow, it is certain that life will continue and fulfil their hopes.

In memory of all those who suffered within its walls and those who hoped, in the darkness, to see the light of justice and liberty.

Regional Metropolitan Association for Men and Women Prisoners and Political Prisoners¹⁶

Nothing was left to the visitors’ imagination. Inside the adjacent women’s memorial—the former swimming pool changing room—Teresa Anativia López wrote:

We kept guard over a piece of soap for our comrades who had been raped, offering care and caresses, especially when they woke up at night screaming with nausea and vomit.

In the permanent plaque installed in front of the changing room, detainees were regularly described as ‘prisoners of war’. The former detainee Roland Carrasco invoked the smell, sound as well as vision of:

The Stadium, barracks and prison, where artillery points at the entrances of the sporting complex. The (military) patrols tramp on the pavement of the interior paths allowing the echo of orders, greased metal sounds, shouts and discharge of rifles and heavy machine guns. The gunpowder stinging in the nostrils paralyses the prisoners’ hearts in the cells like Gate 8. The three long-haired teens were taken away with their heads covered under a blanket and they never returned to be healed [by fellow prisoners] at the gate. Neither did the two workers in Dressing-room 4 taken off to interrogation in the frightful Velodrome. Many years later, we understood that their relatives found their mortal remains.

Five hundred metres away, at the endpoint of the Kunstmann journey, the urgent narratives last seen at the other end of the stadium began again:

It was in this place that el Caracol, by chance constructed in the shape of a snail, was chosen by the Armed Forces to commit the most shameful atrocities …

For a few seconds, imagine raucous military marches filling the air in a vain attempt to disguise the sharp bark of rifles and the deadly thudding of the machineguns and the terrified cries of the victims …

The truth of these facts disclosed here must prevail and with that truth the recovery of the dignity of the victims. Night will pass into a day in which the new generations, mindful of the recent history, will never repeat such terrible deeds.

Kunstmann’s ambitious plan assumed that the government, once its trepidation over a further military coup had passed, would fund it. Very little of that has actually happened. El Caracol is not the last destination of the standard tours, the visitors don’t go there at all! For reasons said merely to be of convenience, the secondary and tertiary students who form the great majority of stadium visitors do not venture past the spectator benches where they hold their last discussion on what they have learned. We argue that it is no accident, for reasons we now explore, that apart from the searing signage completed in 2015 for very little cost, everything in the last phase of the Kunstmann plan has been ignored.

First, it seems clear at last that the powerful and well-funded Department of Sport probably never intended to do more than construct the entrance precinct of the women’s prison, the memorial pool and the signage. The rest could be completed by drip feeding through the underfunded Council of Historic Monuments and international benefactors—if they could be found. Kunstmann, who in 2020 was serving her last year as volunteer leader of the Agrupación, was tired and disillusioned. Her plan had stalled. The Department of Sport refused to answer her letters. The only regular government funding her corporation received was for education through guided tours.¹⁷

The second and more significant reason is that the younger generation of guides do not wish their student visitors to enter either the velodrome or el Caracol. A tour that the authors joined in 2018 was led by Gonzalo.¹⁸ Explaining his terminology, he at once distinguished between the ‘inevitable preoccupations of the past and the present’. While previously the incarcerated had been referred to as victims, heroes, militants or activists, he, like all the stadium guides, he explained, now used the terms ‘prisoners of war’ and ‘survivors’. At the Pool of Remembrance, he pointed out the words, ‘Estuviste Aquí’, ‘You were here’, no invocation of terror but rather implying ‘(Since) You’re here now. What are you going to do about it?’ The history of the Cold War and the role of the superpowers had little relevance in this interpretation; by implication, the gold standard of government was the Socialist President Allende’s ‘Popular Unity Party’, so wrongly destroyed. By contrast Pinochet, he related, regarded the radical left generally as ‘enemies of the state’.

Gonzalez’s larger question was: ‘How do we, who are present here, resolve it?’ ‘We’re all young Chileans: what we need now is social mobilisation, a resignification of the events, an adoption of a new ethic of moral living’. Concluding this lengthy introduction, Gonzalo ‘did not intend to recite a pedagogy of violence’, rather, he would emphasise ‘virtue’. The stopping places on the tour were not to be understood as ‘static memory sites, but invitations to reflection and social mobilisation’. His information would be ‘good news’ stories.

The young Chileans shuffled forward, having no idea how radically different was this interpretation of their nation’s history from what they would have heard only five years earlier. Gonzalo led with ‘good news stories’. Rather than invoking the terror of being identified by an informer or relating the brutality of the daily interrogations, he cited an officer who tried to compensate for the stadium violence, a soldier who offered surreptitious cigarettes to the prisoners of war, the Swedish ambassador who allowed refugees to shelter in his embassy in defiance of the military.¹⁹ Notice how the women, he continued, seemingly so fragile, turned to each other to form a carapace of protective sisterhood, a living room inside the swimming pool changing room doubling as a prison; they even picked flowers to decorate it. ‘We didn’t try to escape’, they said, ‘we’re women, not soldiers’. He continued, somewhat perversely: ‘The direction we want to encourage is the detainees’ example of not dwelling on the horrors but their solidarity.’ This was the voice of the post-violence generation using historical narration for its own ethical purpose.

In 2019, a second earnest young man, Moises, conducted Wyndham on another tour but without the students. The young people’s tours, he explained, were now even shorter. They bypassed the searing entry signage that the female prisoners had produced in their own words because ‘it takes too long to read them’. Introductions to the dictatorship now take place at the memorial pool and proceed directly through Escotilla 8 to a changing area under the stadium seating. The journey is not a walking tour but a ‘ruta intervenida’. Guides do not allow any independent wandering about reading signs or looking at photographs, no, this is a tour to be interrupted only by Moises.²⁰

The visitors proceed directly to the restored changing room known as Escotilla 8, whose interpretation is largely financed, in the conspicuous absence of government support, by the Spanish Building and Heritage Restoration company KALAM and opened in 2018.²¹ In an astonishing contrast to the words inscribed on the entrance plaque, as well as dozens of oral and written histories, survivors here actually celebrate their experience:

Here was lost all pride, here was born generosity; we became better friends, here we shared our secrets. If I stumbled, several helping hands would cheer me up. All of us were as one. The day came when they asked me my birthday (the ninth of October), and soon everyone in the camarín [changing room] began to sing Happy Birthday with two hallullas (Chilean celebratory bread) with a lighted match in each one. It was the most delicious birthday cake in my entire life.²²

It is a fine, fully professional, and costly display whose signage, perhaps, carries a hint, if not of victimhood, then of the resigned pathos that the plaque writers of 2014 were so determined to put behind them. On each side of the space, perspex screens carry inscriptions as touchingly poetic as those now unread in the women’s changing rooms, but without the fury: ‘When I left the Stadium, some children ran towards me. I did not recognise them. They were my daughters’.²³ And: ‘I used to gaze at the night sky, thinking that beneath that vast blue motionless sky, my children were sleeping far away.’²⁴ The raw violence and terror that characterised the first few weeks of imprisonment after the coup are drained in the apparent belief and assumption that one does not need to know any more than that which is imparted by the guide to get visitors to ‘get themselves to a different place’.

The students now proceed to the stadium seating outside for concluding discussions. ‘What would you do if you saw someone being bullied?’ ‘How can we ensure, through resistance, that these things never occur again?’ A huge sign above the bleachers reads: ‘Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro’ (A people without memory is a people without a future’). But there is very little memory being imparted here, only redirected reflections upon what little is shared to form a ‘a springboard for the future’. The violent street protests that occurred in Santiago from August 2019, and continue sporadically still, add new tensions as to how any society may improve itself. Moises asked a school group: ‘What if someone (in 1973) had pointed a gun at your head?’ A student responded: ‘It happened to me last week.’ Moises himself, he concedes, was recently chased by the police. The daily tensions only strengthen his desire to relate a particular version of the past to the present.

The lengthy ethical discussion as the students look down on the stadium soccer field uses up the two allotted hours, allowing for the students to visit neither the velodrome nor the torture chamber, el Caracol. As the sole participants of this second tour, we requested that Moises proceed there.

The memorial plaque outside the velodrome has vanished! Of the screaming invocation of ‘raucous military marches filling the air in a vain attempt to disguise the sharp bark of rifles and the deadly thudding of the machineguns and the terrified cries of the victims’, only the bare concrete plinth remains. The text engraved in metal has gone. In explanation, what Moises calls, rather pejoratively, ‘those ponderous words’, were ‘set at the wrong angle to wind and sun and faded so badly they had to be removed’. They will only be replaced, according to Kunstmann, ‘in time, when there are funds available’. Questioned, Moises concedes that, yes, the survivors’ memories are crucial, but ‘their place is in the archives, not here’. A plan to reproduce silhouette figures standing in an adjacent tunnel leading to the velodrome awaiting mock execution he does not want either: that would be ‘too distracting’. On the rare occasions that the students ever come here, Moises never mentions torture except in the most general terms. Such discussion, he maintains, ‘closes doors. I need them open because we need to talk about the concept of resistance.’ Though there is no obvious physical deterioration in the past 14 years, no student visitor enters the chamber itself. It is locked and said to be unsafe due to deterioration. The epitaph on the stone monument at Loyola rings in our ears, ‘Oh, we just threw it away’.

The National Stadium curriculum followed by the guides is highly directed at the ‘information as springboard’ motif. Not much room is allowed for spontaneity or deviation from the approved uplifting script. Visits by sociologists, even philosophers, to the stadium precinct are welcome, but, Moises affirms pointedly, historians are discouraged. Yes, accounts of trucks driven over detainees so slowly that bystanders could hear the bones cracking, and of rats inserted in the vagina, as occurred at Villa Grimaldi, have no place in any standard guided tour unless someone asks about them.

To be sure, every generation has the right to interpret its own past and has always done so. Yet we have argued elsewhere that the current production of a Chilean historical narrative intended primarily as a springboard to further action may carry unfortunate consequences, namely that some truly heroic moments of those opposing the dictatorship, for which this next generation might be truly proud, are omitted in current curricula and thus forgotten. A disinclination to avoid the worst excesses of the dictatorship acts also to level off the actions at the most heroic level.²⁵ We can take the argument further: children of Holocaust survivors, if denied family knowledge, must rely only on well-known photographs and films to imagine their own family history and their own family identities. Analogously, it is argued that what passes as memories of the Spanish Civil War are largely the (possibly imagined) post-memories of the grandchildren, whose grandparents could not, or chose not, to reveal even to their own families what had occurred in their country, or to them.²⁶ Concluding a similar argument, the political scientist Katherine Hite maintains that, ‘like the second generation of Chileans, Holocaust survivors who were very young children are denied their childhood’.²⁷ While the stadium master narrative remains as sanitised as it is, we wonder how much of the history of the dictatorship these young guides themselves know.

It is becoming clearer that these post-dictatorship generations have not had the last word, though each generation, perhaps, has thought it had. A Chilean ‘master narrative’ is no more achievable than one for nineteenth-century Australia, because, as with Spain’s 2007 Ley de la Reparación, the values of peace, justice and truth will remain dynamically in tension with one another for as long as deep and unacknowledged trauma remains. While conceding the acute need for Chilean nation building, many historians will remain disturbed when any firsthand historical experience is subsumed prima facie for what is taken to be a greater purpose. Rather than being distracted by Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’, the new generation of stadium guides might reflect on our epigraph, the admonition of another Holocaust intellectual, Ellie Wiesel:

I will tell my son that all the fires, all the pain, will be meaningless, if he will not transmit our story, if he will not transmit our story to others, to his friends, and one day to his own children.

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1. 1 Elie Wiesel, cited in Rosh White, From Darkness to Light (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1988), 8–9.

2. 2 Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, Narrow but Endlessly Deep. The Struggle for Memorialisation in Chile since the Transition to Democracy (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016), 206, doi.org/10.22459/NBED.06.2016.

3. 3 Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, ‘Those Who Have No Memorial’, in Memories and Violence, Problems and Debates in a Global Perspective, ed. Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar (Dubai : Zayed University Press, 2013), 181–96.

4. 4 Cited in Ozvaldo Torres, ‘A Museum in Villa Grimaldi: Space for Memory and Education in Human Rights’, International Seminar, August 2005 (Santiago: Corporación Parque por La Paz Villa Grimaldi, Municipalidad de Peñalolén, c. 2006), 27; Read and Wyndham, Narrow but Endlessly Deep, 133–4.

5. 5 Museum of Memory and Human Rights, [Home: English version], accessed 14 November 2023, mmdh.cl/english-version.

6. 6 Laura Moya, Tortura en Poblaciones del Gran Santiago (1973–1990) (Santiago: Colectivo de Memoria Histórica Corporación José Domingo Cañas, Sant, 2005), 1.

7. 7 Read and Wyndham, Narrow but Endlessly Deep, 197.

8. 8 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, ‘History and Memorialisation: Narratives about the Past Examined through the Lens of Cultural Rights’, accessed 9 January 2024, www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/CulturalRights/Pages/HistoricalMemorialNarratives.aspx.

9. 9 Piere Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24, doi.org/10.2307/2928520.

10. 10 David Rieff, ‘The Cult of Memory: When History Does More Harm than Good’, Guardian, 2 March 2016, www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/02/cult-of-memory-when-history-does-more-harm-than-good.

11. 11 Triulzi, cited in T. Ranger, ‘The Politics of Memorialization in Zimbabwe’, in National Histories and the Construction of Nations, ed. S. Carvalho and F. Gemenne (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 62–76.

12. 12 Sydney Jewish Museum, ‘Mission Statement’, accessed 14 November 2023, sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/our-story/mission/. See also Rieff, ‘The Cult of Memory’.

13. 13 International Museum Committee, [Info], accessed 14 November 2023, icom.museum/en/committee/international-coalition-of-sites-of-conscience (emphasis added).

14. 14 Figueroa Adolfo Cozzi, Estadio Nacional (Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana Chilena, 2000), 70.

15. 15 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963), 19. Arendt insisted that:

    Only good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet—and this is its horror!—it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

16. 16 Fue aquí en este viejo camarín de la piscina, el lugar donde cientos de mujeres padecieron la brutal represión de los militares golpistas. Fue aquí en este sombrío lugar, donde el sueño de miles de chilenas y extranjeras se vió interrumpido por la detención política, el horror de la tortura y la muerte. Tras estas paredes, acurrucadas contra el vejamen, cientos de mujeres, amas de casa, estudiantes, obreras y profesionales pagaron con dolor y sangre por incorporarse con decisión a la construcción de una nueva patria más justa y digna para todos.

    Aquí adentro, tras estas paredes y bajos las garras de sus carceleros, hijas, hermanas y madres fueron las primeras mujeres de Chile que debieron soportar el comienzo de una noche cobarde, larga y oscura.

    Sin embargo, también fue aquí que el dolor tejió la red irrompible de la fraternidad, que hizo a las prisioneras protegerse mutuamente del terror, cuidar con sus vidas a sus compañeras embarazadas porque mañana fuera de estas paredes, es cierto que continua la vida y se realizan las esperanzas.

17. 17 Wally Kunstmann, interview by Marivic Wyndham, 14 December 2014, 5 December 2019.

18. 18 Gonzalo, interview by Marivic Wyndham, 17 October 2018.

19. 19 Of the many accounts of interrogation, see, for instance, Cozzi, Estadio Nacional (Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana Chilena, 2000), 70. See also the account of Samuel Riquelme, in Sergio Villegas (Madrid: Cartago, 1974): 79–82.

20. 20 Moises, interview by Marivic Wyndham, 22 November 2019.

21. 21 Kalam works extensively in restoration projects in Latin America as well as Spain. The guides assert that the company’s founder donated his company’s services to the stadium because he had been unable to mourn his father’s violent death in Franco’s Spain.

22. 22 Jose Manuel Mendez, a former prisoner, conducted Wyndham on an individual tour of the stadium on 7 December 2018, in which he stressed the solidarity of male detainees rather than the horrors of incarceration. The camarín, he declared, had become his ‘second home’. The caption on his photograph reads: ‘Aquí se perdio el orgullo, aquí nació ser generoso, aquí nos hicimos más amigos, aquí nos contamos los secretos. Si yo caía varias manos más estaban dándome animo. Todos nosotros éramos uno. Llego un día en que me preguntaron la fecha de nacimiento (9 de octubre) al rato todos dentro del camarín, empezaron a cantar el cumpleaños feliz con dos hallullas en cada una, un fósforo incendido. Fue la torta más rica que he comido hasta hoy.’

23. 23 Al salir del estadio, unas niñas corriéron hacia mí, no las reconocí, eran mis hijas.

24. 24 En las noches miraba al cielo y pensaba que bajo la amplia azulada de ese cielo inmovil, lejos dormían mis hijas.

25. 25 Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, ‘Chilean History and the Sine Wave’, Public History Review, 27 (2020): 69–85, doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v27i0.7259.

26. 26 P. Violi, ‘Memories in Transition: The Spanish Law of Historical Memory’, in Historical Justice and Memory, ed. K. Neumann and J. Thompson (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2015), 117–20.

27. 27 Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2013), 77, doi.org/10.4324/9780203156841.