Abstract
Macleod studies public resistance to torture in Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Appealing to ethical values, the arousal of strong emotions, and dealing with fear and terror through collective action, the Movement Against Torture Sebastián Acevedo (MCTSA) broke the silence enshrouding torture through performative protests in public spaces. The chapter highlights two curious paradoxes about the movement: its highly charged emotional nature at a moment when militant social politics did not permit the expression of emotions. It also prioritized performance and highly visible actions while simultaneously resorting to almost clandestine forms of organizing to ensure the safety of its members. MCTSA actions enhanced various forms of emotional communities: some ephemeral, others strategic and political, some traveling across time.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For the caged bird
For the fish in the fishbowl
For my friend who’s imprisoned
For saying what he thinks
For the uprooted flowers
For the trampled grass
For the shorn trees
For the tortured bodies
I name you Freedom….
Yo te nombro/I name you, by Gian Franco Pagliaro, based on Éluard’s poem “Liberté”, MCTSA anthem.
- 2.
All interviews and publications in Spanish are my translations.
- 3.
- 4.
Unfortunately the action “It wasn’t war, it was massacre” does not appear in the Movement’s reports and lists of actions so its exact date was not recorded.
- 5.
I ask myself now why on earth I used a pseudonym, and can only conclude that being in Chile under state of siege in 1985, immediately after the “3 degollados”, men whose throats were slit, one a human rights worker I knew, and marching to denounce the killing of the “2 cabros del MIR” (2 brothers from a leftwing organization) had drenched me with fear.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
La base de datos digital que esconde el secreto Valech, 17 abril de 2017, http://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/opinion/tu-voz/2017/04/17/la-base-de-datos-digital-que-esconde-el-secreto-valech.shtml
- 9.
The CNI (Central Nacional de Investigaciones, 1977–1990) replaced the notorious DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, 1973–1977) after international outcry over its flagrant human rights abuses.
- 10.
I say “official” as there was a conflict within the movement, some wanting the MCTSA to carry on, as torture and impunity continued, while others—including movement founders and leaders of weight, such as José Aldunate, s.j., considered the MCTSA had fulfilled its purpose once democratic transition had taken place. A group continued carrying out actions for many years, and Father Aldunate participated in the protest against General Pinochet becoming a life-long senator, an action that met with fierce police brutality.
- 11.
Rosa Parissi organized my first trip to Chile in December 1980 when I was in charge of the Chile Committee for Human Rights based in London. It is thanks to her that I was able to write “Pinochet’s Chile: An Eyewitness Account” (1981), as a result of that intense, emotionally charged, eye-opening visit.
- 12.
In two interviews and a video, shock was expressed at the hatred some Movement members encountered when they visited churches and talked to church-goers. While this strategy was well-met in shantytowns, in Santiago’s richest neighborhoods, particularly upper-class women virulently verbally mistreated Movement women who were denouncing torture.
- 13.
Video El camino de la no violencia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH8_Kp6ab48
- 14.
Ballesteros was forcefully disappeared and his body was subsequently found. The MCTSA carried out three actions to save and then mourn his life.
- 15.
Barbara Rosenwein’s (2010, 11) notion of emotional communities as “largely the same as social communities—families, neighborhoods, syndicates, academic institutions, monasteries, factories, platoons, princely courts” refers more clearly to other contexts.
- 16.
- 17.
This entailed coordinating the adoption of Chilean political prisoners, commuting their sentences to exile in Britain; advocacy and urgent actions; organizing defense lawyer and victim tours; and giving endless talks around England and Scotland.
References
Aldunate, José. 2004. Signos de los Tiempos. Crónicas de una década de dictadura. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones.
Bastidas Urrea, Bárbara et al. 2013. Memorias de resistencia en la dictadura militar chilena: El caso de Sebastián Acevedo. B.A. Dissertation, Concepción University.
Benjamin, Walter. 2006. [1940] On the Concept of History. In Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge MA/London: Harvard University Press.
Bhaskar, Sarkar, and Janet Walker, eds. 2010. Documentary Testimonies. Global Archives of Suffering. New York: Routledge.
Bolton García, Roberto. 2010. In Testigo soy; memorias del Rvdo. Roberto Bolton García, ed. Rosa Parissi. Santiago de Chile: IGD.
Burke, Peter, ed. 1991. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Oxford: Polity Press.
Calveiro, Pilar. 2006. Los usos políticos de la memoria. In Sujetos sociales y nuevas formas de protesta en la historia reciente de América Latina, ed. Gerardo Caetano, 359–382. Buenos Aires: Clacso.
Castillejo Cuellar, Alejandro. 2007. La globalización del testimonio: Historia, silencio endémico y los usos de la palabra. Antípoda 4, enero – junio 2007, pp. 76–99.
Denzin, Norman K. 2003. The Call to Performance. In Performance Ethnography, ed. Norman Denzin, 1–24. California/London/New Delhi: Sage.
Felman, Shoshona. 2000. Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 1.2 1: 465–507.
García Villegas, René. 1990. Soy testigo. Dictadura, tortura, injusticia. Santiago: Editorial Amerinda.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La mémoire collective. Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1997. On History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Howland, Marianne. 1985. Exactly What Is a ‘State of Seige’? Encuentro, The Mexico City New Political Supplement 90: 7.
Jimeno, Myriam, and Morna Macleod. 2014. Interview with Myriam Jimeno, November 2014. Available at http://mornamacleod.net/?p=767
Jimeno, Myriam, Daniel Varela, and Ángela Castillo. 2011. Experiencias de violencia: etnografía y recomposición social en Colombia. Sociedade e Cultura 14 (2): 275–285.
Jimeno, Myriam, Daniel Varela, and Angeles Castillo. 2015. Después de la masacre, emociones y política en el Cauca Indio. Bogotá: ICANH y CES: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Kershaw, Baz. 1997. Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968–1989. New Theatre Quarterly 13: 255–276.
Macleod, Morna. 1981. Pinochet’s Chile: An Eyewitness Report. London: Chile Committee for Human Rights.
———. 1987. La no violencia en Chile. In La aventura de la no violencia, Revista Casa del Tiempo, número 72, volumen VIII, July–August 1987, 76–78.
———. 1988. Un Estudio Comparativo de la Represión en Chile y Guatemala. MA Dissertation, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico.
Niezen, Ronald. 2013. Truth and Indignation. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Orellana Vargas, Patricio. 2015 [2008]. La represión en Chile 1973–1989. Serie CODEHS. Stockholm: Editorial Senda.
Parissi, Rosa. 2006. Sebastián Acevedo Movement Against Torture: A Project for the Dignity of Life. In Visions of Development, Faith-Based Initiatives, ed. Wendy Tyndale, 137–144. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Rappaport, Joanne. 2005. Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2010. Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions. Passions in Context I: Journal of the History and the Philosophy of the Emotions 1 (1): 1–32.
Stephen, Lynn. 2017. Bearing Witness: Testimony in Latin American Anthropology and Related Fields. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 22 (1): 85–109.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memories in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
Torres Bruna, Aliro, and Sebastián Vega Morales. 2010. Testimonio y no violencia: la historia del Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo. B.A. Dissertation in Journalism, Academy of Christian Humanism, Santiago de Chile.
Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Memoria e historia del siglo XX en Acuña. In Archivos y memorias de la represión en América Latina, ed. María Patricia Flier, Miriam González Vera, et al., 17–29. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones-FASIC.
Vidal, Hernán. 1986. El Movimiento Contra la Tortura “Sebastián Acevedo”: Derechos Humanos y la Producción de Símbolos Nacionales Bajo el Fascismo Chileno. Edina: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, Society for the Study of Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Revolutionary Literatures.
Key Videos
El camino de la no violencia (Claudio Escobar, Prensa Opal). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH8_Kp6ab48
Por la vida, (Movimiento contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo), Peter Chaskel Benko and Pablo Salas. Published 19 Aug 2016, Filmed in 1987. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2ZUzYcK0bY
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Macleod, M. (2018). Protesting Against Torture in Pinochet’s Chile: Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo. In: Macleod, M., De Marinis, N. (eds) Resisting Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66317-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66317-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66316-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66317-3
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)