Desired States by Lessie Jo Frazier

Author:Lessie Jo Frazier [Frazier, Lessie Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Latin America, South America, Social Science, Gender Studies, Political Science, World, Caribbean & Latin American, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780813597232
Google: g9fkDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2020-06-12T01:07:53+00:00

Perpetuating the Space of Death in Transitions to Free Market Democracy: The Chilean Case

A central problem in Chile over the first decade after the end of formal military rule was the inability to address human rights violations of the past through reparations or prosecutions of perpetrators, and especially the problem of survivors of torture, detention, and internal and external exile. Except for the health program, state reparations policies overwhelmingly privileged the immediate families of people who had been killed, and the civilian government’s official Truth and Reconciliation report documented only cases ending in death. This is why the shift in the state health care reparations program away from human rights issues to domestic violence was so disturbing. The premise was that after a certain amount of time, surviving victims of the repression, who had been most directly affected by state violence, should “get over it” and reintegrate into society rather than continue to press for justice and full reparations. This is the obvious problem with the policy shift, but there are deeper, more disturbing implications. Feminist movements have taught us that “the personal is political,” but here we have an example of bringing into the public or ostensibly political realm something defined as “domestic”: that is, violence within families, as a way of depoliticizing issues defined as “political.” In this depoliticizing move, desire is channeled from political demands to serve the reproductive necessities of the family. After feminism, we have to explore the linkages between these forms of violence, as they are all “political.”

Chile’s shift from military to civilian rule began in the early 1980s, when the global recession undermined the legitimacy of the military regime’s neoliberal economic policies of privatization, incentivization of foreign investment in the export sector, and reduction of government social programs. In the midst of the recession, numerous social movements began to stage large-scale public demonstrations against the military and its abuses. Leading this movement were shantytown associations, collective soup kitchens, human rights groups, and other organizations in which a large proportion of militants and leaders were women. These groups included feminist organizations such as Women for Life, who explicitly articulated the need for democracy both “on the street and in the home.”47 The military had attempted to formalize its rule with a new constitution stipulating a plebiscite to choose between civilian or military rule by the end of the decade; however, in this 1989 plebiscite and subsequent presidential election, approximately 60 percent of Chileans managed to vote against the military and its most vehement supporters, and civilian rule resumed in 1990. Thus, a central contradiction has been the taming of social mobilizations that made the end of military rule possible. Widespread sociopolitical mobilizations forced the military to begin to hand over the reins of government in a moment of crisis in the reordering of the economy under the aegis of the market. Yet afterward these mobilizations were domesticated through a language of national reconciliation. This mandate in the name of the nation to reconcile came

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