The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The culture that opposed the legacy of the Chilean dictatorship

2020-10-29T01:47:59.813Z


The triumph of the social movement that has buried Pinochet's Constitution is also the victory of the artists who fought against the heritage of the military regime that ruled the country between 1973 and 1990.


The victory of the

Approve

last Sunday in Chile is, in part, a victory also for Chilean artists who for decades have created political works that denounce the terrible legacy left by Pinochet.

Many of them consistently supported the social movement that exploded a year ago, such as the filmmaker Hernán Caffiero - director of the award-winning series

A Necessary History

,

about cases of disappearances during the dictatorship - who directed the television advertising of the movements in favor of the

I approve

.

"Many people lent us free cameras," Caffiero told EL PAÍS a few weeks ago about his work to produce moving advertisements without a large budget. "Instead, there were technicians who were offered to work for the

Rejection

, they were offered three times more than we can, but they preferred to work with us. "

The Chilean social movement rebuilt the popular cultural scene drawing (or rather, beheading) statues throughout the country, a radical and forceful way of questioning the past, as Chilean visual artists such as Luis Montes Rojas or Andrés Durán had been doing in museums.

The outbreak greatly enriched the tradition of protest music that Víctor Jara or Violeta Parra once sang and that, in recent years, rappers like Chill-E (“I come from Chile, from Chile ugly / where children are born just to be inmates ") and Spokesperson (" We live in a segregated society / and it is no coincidence, the wealthy class always wanted it that way ").

Last October, the protesters took up

El baile de los que sobre

de Los Prisioneros (“Nobody is going to miss us / Nobody really wanted to help us”), and rapper Ana Tijoux brought

Cacerolazo

as an anthem for the protest

in 2019

( “Renuncia Piñera / La Moneda is ours through the mall”).

The group of four women Las Tesis denounced the sexist violence of the state in their performance

El Violador eres tú

;

the group of singers Yorka dedicated some verses to Jara and Parra with

The song is protest

("Memory makes us brave");

and the famous singer Mon Laferte went to the Grammys a year ago with her chest painted with this phrase: "In Chile they torture, rape and kill."

In the cinema there was also the desire to end Pinochet's legacy.

Just this month, a film entitled

Matar a Pinochet

, by Juan Ignacio Sabatini, about the group of young revolutionaries from the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front who tried to assassinate the General in 1986 (based on the book

Los Fusileros,

by Juan Cristóbal Peña)

was released in Chile.

.

In addition, despite the fact that the movie theaters were closed, one of the films most watched in homes was the new

I am afraid Torero

,

by Rodrigo Sepúlveda Urzúa - about the love of a transvestite woman during the dictatorship - and based on the novel by Pedro Lemebel with the same title.

Among other well-known films about Pinochet's legacy are the multiple documentaries produced by Patricio Guzmán - a moving example is

Nostalgia de la luz

(2010), which bridges the gap between the beautiful geography of the Atacama desert and the horror that the families of the disappeared experienced. there-.

Guzmán, who left his country after the coup in 1973, returned in recent months to film the days before the plebiscite.

Another film that shocked the world in 2012 was Pablo Larraín's film

No

, in which Gael García Bernal plays the creative publicist who worked on the campaign to force Pinochet to end his term in 1988. His famous

jingle

- "Chile, joy is coming "- he helped the millions of voters who voted against the dictator.

The joy did not come entirely: Pinochet retired from the executive branch, but the economic and legal model that he imposed remained almost intact.

Although many more films after the Pinochet regime recounted the horrors of the dictatorship -

Machuca

, by Andrés Wood;

The city of photographers

, by Sebastián Moreno—, two excellent documentaries from recent years stand out for questioning the dictator's legacy in the media and in the economic system:

In 2008, Ignacio Agüero's

newspaper Agustín

questioned the role of the influential newspaper

El Mercurio

before and during the dictatorship;

and

Chicago Boys

, by Carola Fuentes and Rafael Valdeavellano, interviewed the small group of economists who turned Chile into the laboratory of the most extreme neoliberal model in the world, after taking classes with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.

"There are no corrective measures that are painless," says one of them, justifying the deep social discontent against the model they imported.

In the world of fiction there are some tales that are impossible to avoid when it comes to looking back.

One of the most famous came in 1996,

Estrella distante

, by Roberto Bolaño, about a Pinochet aviator infiltrated a poetry workshop, and one of the murderers of the military regime.

In 2011, Alejandro Zambra's novel

Formas de Volver a casa

, an invitation to look at the dictatorship from the eyes of a child,

also won recognition

, as does the book by feminist writer Nona Fernández

Space Invaders

, on the effort of a group to remember the classmates of the school during the dictatorship.

His book

Mapocho

, in honor of the river that runs through the city of Santiago, is an even deeper effort to remember the dead thrown into the river before and during the dictatorship.

Although it was published in 2002, the relationship of the river as a witness to state violence continues.

Just a few weeks ago, a police officer was charged with pushing a 16-year-old teenager into the Mapocho River in the middle of a protest (the boy was taken to hospital and survived).

In the world of poets, none has shone more recently than Raúl Zurita, who was arrested during the dictatorship and has openly expressed his support for the social movement.

"I deeply support the process," he said recently in an interview.

“We are governed by a Constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship and that is inconceivable.

It is as if Germany is still governed by the Constitution that Hitler made.

Zurita, who won the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry a month ago - the third Chilean to win it - is the protagonist of a recent documentary about his work (“through the wound art comes out,” he says in

Zurita, you will see no see,

by Alejandra Carmona), and in 2011 he published his monumental work

Zurita

.

But his

Song to his disappeared love

, one of his famous works published during the dictatorship, is still a sore in which the voices of the relatives of the disappeared can be heard (“I looked for you among the destroyed, I spoke with you. Your remains looked at me and I I hugged you").

The ocean of Chilean poetry is enormous, but lately it has given greater spotlight to poets like Elicura Chihuailaf, the first Mapuche poet to win the National Prize for Literature in Chile this year.

One of the wishes of the Chilean social movement is that the indigenous people have greater representation and greater rights in the new constitution, and Chihuailaf is one of those writers and activists who has spent several decades giving the same respect to Mapudungun as to Spanish, and more relevance to the indigenous vision of the southern cone that has been - until now - ignored by the de facto power in Chile.

"In the land of memory / we are the children of the children of the children / The wound that hurts, the wound that opens / the wound that bleeds towards the Earth," say his verses from 1988, the year in which Chile began the long road to end Pinochet's legacy.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-10-29

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-06T20:22:11.361Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.