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 DOI: 10.1177/1470412910380345

2010 9: 409Journal of Visual CultureMacarena Gómez-Barris

GuatemalaVisual Testimonies of Atrocity: Archives of Political Violence in Chile and

  

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journal of visual culture

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)Copyright © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 9(3): 409–419 DOI 10.1177/1470412910380345

AbstractIn the aftermath of political violence in Latin America, the testimonial emerged as an important document of witness regarding the atrocities that had been committed in the region. In many cases, testimonies stood in for the absence of evidence, whereby archives of witness had been destroyed, hidden, or otherwise disappeared from public record. In this essay, the author analyzes forms of visual evidence in Guatemala and Chile, such as documentary film and illustrations from survivors that extend the function of the testimonial by not only narrating the past, but also visualizing spaces of terror and witness, such as the collective grave, prison camps, and photographs of skeletons. Such visual interruptions in the landscape of memory have the potential to fracture dominant State memory in their refusal to merely disappear. Instead, these forms of visuality name and mark social suffering.

Keywordsart and politics • Chile • cultural memory • Guatemala • political violence • visual testimony • witness

Visual Testimonies of Atrocity: Archives of Political Violence in Chile and Guatemala

Macarena Gómez-Barris

In 1989, during the transition from Pinochet’s brutal authoritarianism to a new democracy, the military attempted to bulldoze Villa Grimaldi, a group of buildings in the outskirts of Santiago that had been used to house and torture prisoners. The attempt to wipe away all evidence of the violent methods used specifically against detainees and more generally against the populace at large is not at all unique to the context of Chile or Pinochet: generally speaking, authoritarian regimes attempt to leave no evidence of their crimes against humanity and,

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in the wake of their wide-scale destruction, they leave another legacy: silence, absence and the disappearance of the traces of the blood they have spilled, the bodies they have tortured, and the more intangible social dreams that they have crushed. In the wake of such violence and its erasure, visual artists, activists and legal theorists face an enormous task: how to represent to the law, to survivors and the world the enormity of a crime that has left no traces? In what follows, I use examples from Chile and Guatemala to argue that visual culture, as opposed to oral testimony, has produced methods of representation suited to the complex interplay between memory and forgetting, appearing and disappearing, and truth and fiction that follows in the wake of violent regimes.

Within the purview of the US public, the dirty wars of the Southern Cone during the 1970s and 1980s, and the civil wars in Central America of the 1980s and 1990s have indeed been scantily remembered, even while a growing body of work in English concerns itself with collective violence about Latin America.1 The lack of public memory regarding egregious crimes in the region has been caused by a lack of institutional and political response from various nations within Latin America, although there are some important exceptions regarding institutional justice. In many cases, the ‘democratic’ transitions from civil and dirty wars have led to a culture of impunity and oblivion about authoritarian pasts, and little official recognition of the US role regarding collective violence in the region.

While there is a large body of work regarding this history (Menjívar and Rodríguez, 2005; Lewis, 2002; Manz, 2004; Stern, 2004; Kaiser, 2005), less has been written regarding visual documentation of the effects of this violence (Gómez-Barris, 2009). This makes some sense since the forms of violence in Latin America were often in torture cells, or rural spaces, and committed away from the public eye. Indeed, there is little photographic evidence of what occurred at the site of tens of thousands of disappearances, and hundreds of thousands of cases of torture in Latin America.

In terms of accessing the past, what kinds of visual evidence might stand in the place of photographic witness? What is the potential rupture that such evidence produces? One way to address the first question is to examine the vast genre of written testimonials, testimonials that often provide the bulk of evidence for Truth Reports, and the collections in human rights archives. These also serve as primary sources for scholarly work, and circulate as stand-alone publications.2 As a source of truth claims about the past, testimonials have been an important starting point for investigating what exactly happened during the dirty wars in Latin America. Even though the genre has had an enormous impact in educating, transmitting, and witnessing the tragedies of State-sponsored violence, written testimonials (owing to their legalistic, overtly political, and often highly mediated format) often eclipse the complexity of experiencing and living with the effects of terror. In some cases, written narratives work alongside visual formats to highlight the complexity of the scene of atrocity and its effects on people’s lives, as well as the meaning that survivors ascribe to death, torture, and rupture.3

In this piece, I examine the aftermath of the atrocities committed in Chile and Guatemala through visual testimonials. The reason for comparing these two very

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different locations and formations regarding political violence is that, in both cases, visual testimonies have attested to the horrors of the past and highlighted what it means to live through and witness State violence, forming a visual archive that counters both official histories and the format of the written testimonial whose genre demands a certain kind of narration. The counter-visual, or those filmic and photographic repositories of memories of collective violence, present a social experience of memory. I am interested in comparing image production in the aftermath of State violence in Chile and Guatemala precisely because visual testimonies widen the terrain of representation in the continent regarding its violent past. Of course, it is important to contextualize the different histories of Guatemala and Chile in relationship to national experiences of State violence and its aftermath. Although the Chilean case of authoritarianism was often coded as a ‘war against subversives’ and therefore a civil war, the Pinochet dictatorship dealt swiftly and violently with any potential counter-attack, and through systemic torture, later documented in the Valech Report (2004), effectively eliminated and disarticulated opposition and revolutionary groups. Films, such as Patricio Guzmán’s monumental The Battle of Chile (1979) captured important moments leading up to and during the military coup itself, including the corroborations of generals at the funeral of René Schneider and the death of cameraman Jorge Muller Silva. During the dictatorship itself, censorship operated to eliminate the national film production company Chile Films, and to eliminate photojournalism as a way of circumventing bad global publicity. The avant-garde artistic practices of the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) and other important visual and experimental efforts during the Pinochet dictatorship, although often short-lived, served to interrupt the homogeneous public arena produced by authoritarianism, which otherwise disavowed the possibility for struggle over meaning.4

In the transition to the political democracy period in Chile, documentary films such as Obstinate Memory (1998) and The Pinochet Case (2003) directed by Patricio Guzmán, They Danced Alone (2003) directed by Marilú Mallet, and The National Stadium (2001) directed by Carmen Luz Parot incorporated visual testimonials, experimental performance, and re-enactments as strategies of representation and as an audiovisual landscape towards the construction of historical memory.

Within Guatemala, in a genocidal war that led to the death of at least 200,000 people, the majority of whom were Mayan-Quiché, a visual archive exists in multiple forms including the forensic evidence of common graves and documentary films, but also in the form of artistic interventions and actions which are politically motivated to interrupt the normalizing tendencies of forgetting. That the majority of the atrocities were committed in Guatemala far from the public eye in remote highland communities only emphasizes the absence of evidence and the tendency for atrocities to disappear all too quickly from historical memory. Recently, Steven Hoelscher (2008) has argued for the case of Guatemala that ‘the specific histories and geographies of memory are marked by exceptionally massive displacements and ruptures exposing wide societal gaps from which ghosts emerge’ (p. 202). Hoelscher explores the extent to which works by artist–activists, in this case the photographer Daniel

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Hernández-Salazer, can become an aid to memory by insisting upon witnessing the past in the vernacular of everyday public spaces like the street. Through an exhibit entitled Street Angels, in which the angels are strategically ‘watching over’ military locations in Guatemala City, Hoelscher argues that visual eruptions become a form of combating institutional forgetting (p. 197). In both Chile and Guatemala, the afterlife of collective violence has been documented through a visualization of the unearthing of collective graves, as I later address. For instance, in the case of Guatemala, the documentary Bitter Memories (2000), directed by Nefertiti Kelley Farias and Carlos Bazua Morales, offers visual testimony of the forensic efforts at two of the many sites of massacres. As Mayan survivors watch and participate in the exhumations, they also create spaces of healing through ceremonies that honor their dead.

As part of a mnemonic territory, the visual enhances the ability to communicate the often loaded and incommunicable story of atrocity, especially for subsequent younger generations, as a bridging point for cultural memory. In what follows, I elaborate on a number of examples to further address other forms of visual evidence that produce the potential for reckoning with the fraught landscapes of memory in both nations.

Villa Grimaldi

When one first enters the former concentration camp on the periphery of Santiago, Chile, visitors to the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park are confronted with a modest sign detailing the horrors committed there during the early years of Augusto Pinochet’s military regime: ‘four thousand tortured, two hundred and eight disappeared, eighteen executions’. Immediately below these death and torture counts the sign reads: ‘Ayudenos a construir un museo a la memoria’ which translates as ‘Help us to build a museum to memory’. Villa Grimaldi Peace Park is located on the outskirts of Santiago on the site of a concentration camp from 1974–7, during the early Pinochet dictatorship that eventually lasted for 17 years until 1990. In the transition to democracy period, after a 1989 plebiscite, a group of concerned witnesses and activists came together to rescue the site. There are no photographs of the torture that occurred there or even photographic evidence of the space as it was used when it was called the Cuartel Terranova for three years during the Pinochet period. In fact, during the transition to the democratic rule of 1989, the site was bulldozed and burned by the military regime to avoid architectural and archival evidence of torture.

In 1997, human rights activists, torture survivors and local residents began to transform Villa Grimaldi into a Peace Park. In a tourist pamphlet, there are no photographs that display what occurred at the site during its use as a prison and torture center. Instead, the pamphlet’s central image references the large-scale event of the military coup over the more specific iconic image of Villa Grimaldi (Figure 1). The photograph of the Villa was probably taken during the 1950s or 1960s when the building was used as a place of aristocratic luxury and later transformed into a restaurant. By early 1974, the DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) had converted the site into a concentration camp.

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Figure 1 Cover of Pedro Alejandro Matta’s 2000 Guidebook, featuring ‘A Walk through a Twentieth Century Torture Center’.

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A former detainee at Villa Grimaldi, Miguel Lawner, became known for his capacity to illustrate, and thus tell a visual story of torture at the site (Figure 2). What are these images? In a series of illustrations, Lawner renders the torture scenes that took place in multiple locations within the camp, making the experience of captivity and torture vivid for the viewer. Prisoners are locked up in the perrera or dog closets, tied down to wire bed frames and electrocuted, and put into solitary confinement. Although some of the physical sites of torture at the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park have now been reconstructed so that visitors can literally step inside torture cells and climb into spaces where captives were held in isolation, the pen and ink illustrations that Lawner produced during the late 1970s present a different form of knowing regarding what occurred at the site.

Lawner uses detailed sketches to convey the spatial organization of terror that relied above all on torture techniques. The images allow for a precision of description, a presentation of a form of evidence, and provide a visual link to a ‘missing’ archive. These images have accompanied human rights testimonials and attest to the veracity of these experiences but also to the enormity of their brutality and impact on the 4000 plus detainees at Villa Grimaldi. Most of these detainees experienced torture by the techniques that Lawner’s drawings capture. Villa Grimaldi then stands as mute testament to the horrors perpetuated within its walls by the Pinochet regime. Its flamboyant past as a venue for elite recreation stands as an ironic counterpoint to its contemporary status as a symbol for all the

Figure 2 The perreras, small drawers used as a form of torture, drawn by Miguel Lawner, 1976 (Lawner, 2003).

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homogenizing forces of institutional memory and its erasures from the national memory. The fact that the democratic government wanted to bulldoze it in 1989 because it stood as a shameful reminder of the violent past tells a story about how torture has a way of marking and being marked by the very architecture of its enclosures. It was not so easy to resignify Villa Grimaldi as a simple symbol of peace; its walls, its gardens, its very structure continues to bear witness to the atrocities it has harbored. What happens when no structure marks the location where violence has transformed political and personal lives?

Fernando Returns

Throughout Latin America, the term ‘N.N.’ – a term that literally means no name, or in translation, ningún nombre – has been assigned to unnamed remains often found in marked and unmarked collective graves. Even when there is a trace through skeletal remains, in many cases no legal or formal recognition of personhood is ever made, often due to the lack of verifiable evidence. As pioneered by the work of a team in Argentina in the aftermath of the dirty war, it has become a more common practice for forensic scientists to identify remains through genetic testing and dental work, which makes it possible to calculate stature, physical condition, and so on.5 These processes require visual evidence for the purposes of scientific identification, an imprecise science. During the period of unearthing mass graves over the last two decades throughout the region, some ‘N.N.’s have been named by using post-mortem images of dental work, and matching them to pre-mortem photographs that emphasized facial bone structure. In Chile, as in many nations, cases of a seamless match between names and remains are few and far between.6

In Fernando Returns, a 1998 documentary directed by Silvio Caiozzi, the problem of identifying remains forcefully emerges. Agavé Díaz de la Morí was finally able to recover her husband Fernando’s bones, after 35 years of disappearance. Fragments of ‘Fernando’s skeleton’ were found amidst the rubble of ‘No Names at Patio 29’ in the General Cemetery of Santiago, a site where over 300 bodies were dumped during the first months after the military coup of 11 September 1973. In one particularly haunting sequence, we encounter a photograph: an image of Fernando taken prior to his disappearance superimposed over an image of ‘Fernando’s’ skeleton. The two images are meant to underscore that the jaw line and dental work in both the x-ray of the skeleton and the ‘real’ photograph resemble the same person, Fernando de la Morí. In the climactic scene of the documentary, Díaz rests her hands on the cranium and sighs, as a gesture of relief. We find out that she is relieved that the remains presented to us are indeed her husband’s and that she will finally be able to bury his remains. After interviewing the director and writing about the visual sequence for my book, even I slept a little better knowing that one more N.N. had been named.

The last sequence of the film shows scenes of Fernando’s funeral and wake, and conversations with family members about the importance of giving Fernando a proper burial, and the effort to move on from the feeling of uncertainty as part

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of the trauma they had faced for almost three decades since his disappearance. However, the epilogue of the DVD version of Fernando Returns provided another, less seamless, ending. Forensic scientists who promised a match between the bones and the body of Fernando, between what Agave Díaz described as the ‘huesos calientes’ (or ‘still warm bones’ of her husband) and his memory were forced to recant their findings on the basis of inconclusive evidence. Visual evidence, in this case, did not prove conclusive enough. Once again, Fernando de la Morí was returned to the status of disappeared. Without DNA proof, the family could not be reassured that these remains indeed belonged to Fernando.

DNA testing thus promises scientific truth and real information about the identities of the dead and the missing but, in the process, it disappoints the families of the disappeared as often as it comforts them with confirmation of the fate of their loved ones. The haunting image of Fernando’s x-ray image superimposed over his photographic image is a fitting symbol of the match we want to make between the visual and the bodily representation but also of the difficulty of ever matching the dead to the name or the face in the wake of their disappearance. It also stands for the immateriality of the archive, the lack of legal evidence of political violence that obstructs efforts to attain justice in the wake of wide-scale attempts to annihilate and ‘disappear’ people. And yet, while the fragments of skeletons and the unidentifiable skulls and bones, may not be easily named and accounted for, they tell nonetheless of some unspeakable crime that has not disappeared with them.

Discovering Dominga

Witnessing atrocity often produces the incapacity to remember, a condition experienced especially by small children who have encountered unimaginable loss. Dori Laub and Nanette Auerhahn (1993) categorize several forms of remembering trauma that emerge regardless of one’s awareness, including the presence of overpowering narratives, transference, remembering in fragments, not knowing, and fugue states.

As an orphan growing up in Iowa with her adoptive white American parents, Denese Becker experienced many of these emotional states. Despite the fact that she was one of the few survivors of the Rio Negro massacres in Rabinal, Guatemala (1980–2), she had no access to these memories for 18 years. In early sequences of Patricia Flynn’s Discovering Dominga (2005), Denese was depicted as a well-adjusted, ‘normal’ mid-western girl, a representation enhanced through photographs of her coming of age. Though she experienced being teased in school for ‘looking Chinese’, in her family there was apparently little discussion of Denese’s racial and cultural differentiation vis-à-vis her parents, where she was mostly constructed as acculturated.

The premise of the documentary is that Denese Becker is actually Dominga Sic Ruíz, a Mayan-Quiché woman from the Guatemalan highlands. After marrying her high-school sweetheart, a gringo, as he referred to himself later in the film, Denese experienced a series of recurring nightmares. To begin to piece together

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her fragmented memories, Denese returned to Rabinal, Guatemala, to be greeted by an extended family and community. After this community gathering, and in the more intimate space of getting to know those who remained, she has a cathartic flashback, suddenly remembering her experience as a survivor of the 13 March 1982 Rio Negro massacre, one of several massacres in the area between 1980 and 1983.

In the most poignant scene of the film that documents the period during the nine days after the massacre, we witness a recreation of Dominga’s escape from the army into the highlands. With her baby sister in her arms, a little girl dressed in a huipil rushes through fields. In a speeded-up time sequence, the little girl continues to run bare-foot in the green mountains, stopping only to squeeze berry juice into the mouth of her sister. Ultimately, all her efforts to nourish her sister are in vain. In the final scene of the re-enacted sequence, the little girl stands before the tree and a dirt mound, where she has buried her sister using only her hands and nearby rocks.

What the sequence visualizes and affectively registers is both the fragmented character of traumatic memories, and the vivid recreation of flashbulb memories that can powerfully flood survivors, even years after the original event. The film beautifully chronicles a journey of endless returns to the scene of the massacre, both as re-enactment, but also following Dominga’s ‘re-discovery’ of her people’s historical and contemporary encounter with genocide, again, as unfinished business.

Concluding Remarks

The act of witnessing is never a complete act. Witnessing can be a melancholic refusal to let go of the ghosts or traces of the past. What the figure of the survivor makes visible is the crisis of representation of modernity, a crisis of representation that registers the incommunicability of living through projects of extermination that include terror inflicted because of class, race, or gender. Giorgio Agamben (1999) asserts that ‘not even the survivor can bear witness completely, can speak his own lacuna’ (p. 39). Language indeed fails to capture the moment of rupture, the event of disaster, the effects of living with terror in the mind and body. It is precisely in the gap of language, where narrative description fails to translate the uncanny grip of limit events.7 That is, narration fails to capture the intensity, affective density, and experiential dimension of atrocity. In the legal sphere, witnessing often passes through the genre of the testimonial where a story follows particular conventions of re-telling the details. Although these accounts are never linear and hardly simplistic, the convention of testimonial has placed particular constraints on the ability of the written testimonial to convey the complexity of experiencing extreme states of captivity and torture. Visual work, however, often has a wider set of representational strategies and makes available various forms of witnessing.

The question of survival after such events brings to the foreground a central concern: if disaster resists smoothed-out translations and narrativization, then

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what work can the visual do to resist rendering atrocity as a seamless and rational act? In this article, I have sketched a few ways that visual evidence can present itself, not just as the objective witness of atrocity, but as a form of inquiry into the past that opens up a field of signification, memories, and counter-memories. Re-enactment, illustration, and other visual formats, potentially disrupt collective closure, in its various forms, over limit events. Although photojournalism and forensic visual evidence play a particular role in representing atrocity, the visual can forge new modes of thinking about the complexity of historical witness and new ways of understanding evidence, witnessing and memory itself. Just as important, perhaps, visual evidence can create moments of rupture in the dominant collective memory, fracturing coherent narratives in ways that resist the renarrativization of events; visual evidence can also produce fissures in a mnemonic landscape that often operates through concealment and oblivion, and can recreate the very meaning of the act of remembering. In the face of authoritarianism, institutional modes of forgetting that such visual interruptions may produce open onto more complex renderings of the past. The visual has an impact on the manner in which the transfer points of memory become artifacts of the social, signaling how the past can indeed become enlivened and activated for present-day social struggles.

Notes

1. The work in Spanish on this topic that circulates in Latin America is quite extensive. In the last 10 years, research into the Southern Cone dictatorships and collective memory relating to this period has proliferated.

2. John Beverley’s (1993) classic work on testimonial marks a moment in scholarship on that subject where the testimonial, its circulation, and its political implications are a dense nexus point of reflection for research into Latin America.

3. Here, I’m thinking about the way that children’s illustrations depicting war and what they have witnessed in places such as Hiroshima and Darfur work in tandem with their verbal narration of the drawn image.

4. See the Revista de Crítica Cultural, edited by Nelly Richard for articles about the important intersections between art, oppositional politics, and public space during and after the authoritarian period.

5. Robben (2000) discusses the importance of the act of burying and identifying remains. First, on a personal level, reburial signified a form of reconciliation with the death of the disappeared. Second, politically, the death is wrestled from the ‘totalizing grip’ the military has over death and unfinished mourning (p. 86, fn13).

6. This work led to national controversy that resulted in the loss of State funding for the Servicio Medíco Legal, the most prominent national organization conducting this work.

7. A limit event is an ‘event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community’ (Gigliotti, 2003: 164).

References

Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.

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Beverley, John (1993) Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Gigliotti, S. (2003) ‘Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the

Stolen Generations’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 49(2): 164–81.Gómez-Barris, Macarena (2009) Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in

Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press.Hoelscher, Steven (2008) ‘Angels of Memory: Photography and Haunting in Guatemala

City’, GeoJournal 73: 195–217.Kaiser, Susana (2005) Post-Memories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the

Legacy of the ‘Dirty War’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Laub, D. and Auerhahn, N. (1993) ‘Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma:

Forms of Traumatic Memory’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 74: 287–301. Lawner, Isla Dawson (2003) Tiroque, Tres Alamas ...: La vida a pesar de todo. Santiago:

Lom Ediciones.Lewis, Paul (2002) Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina, Westport, CT:

Praeger.Manz, Beatriz (2004) Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror and

Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.Menjívar, Cecilia and Rodriguez, Nestor P. (eds) (2005) When States Kill: Latin America,

the US and Technologies of Terror. Austin: University of Texas Press.Robben, C.G.M (2000) ‘Disappearance, Protest and Reburial in Argentina’, in C.G.M.

Robben and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco (eds) Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stern, Steve J. (2004) Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2009) addresses cultural forms of memory and forgetting in the aftermath of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime. Her articles have appeared in Latino Studies Journal, Culture and Religion, Television and New Media, Sociological Forum and numerous anthologies. Her current work analyzes memory, representation, and race in the Andes.

Address: Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, Kaprielian Hall Room 352, Los Angeles, California 90089–2539, USA. [email: gomezbar@usc.edu]

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