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This is what I can tell you about the March: It brings us to that essential reflection about what we are, where we are headed.

Juan Pablo, 39, speaking at Villa Grimaldi.

What is the local meaning of a transnational peace march in a post-dictatorship society? How do divided symbols inform local activists’ understandings of such an initiative? And how does a transnational peace march inform or transform their relationship to local symbols of division? This chapter explores these questions in relation to the former Cuartel Terranova (Terranova Station) in Santiago de Chile. The site was one of hundreds of secret detention centers that operated throughout Chile during the 16-year-long military dictatorship that followed the 1973 coup d’état. In 1994, the site became the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park, dedicated to promoting human rights and commemorating the abuses of the dictatorship. Since then, the park has been the stage of numerous human rights and peace education efforts of local and international scope. In 2009 the Park was included in the official route of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence (the March), a transnational campaign that promoted alternatives to war and militarism.

On a warm December afternoon and after almost 90 days of travel, the Pacific and Atlantic legs of the March converged in Santiago de Chile. Local supporters and international travelers marched towards Villa Grimaldi for an event that included a tour of the park, a recital, and speeches by international marchers and local organizers. Among the roughly 500 people in attendance there were international marchers, primarily from Europe and the Americas, as well as local supporters of all ages. For many of these local activists, community organizers, and peace advocates, the March’s arrival in Santiago created a unique opportunity to visit the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park for the first time. The March also stressed the global relevance of this local symbol of trauma and division. During the event 13 attendees contributed their testimonies to the Memoscopio archive (Muñoz Proto, Devoto Lyon, Villar Castillo, & Battistella, 2013), which was developed through a participatory study of the March in seven countries in the Americas. The Villa Grimaldi testimonies are part of a digital collection of 193 testimonies by March participants from 20 countries.

This chapter offers a close analysis of four Memoscopio testimonies and the ways in which their authors address the complex meanings of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park through their accounts of the March. Before delving into this analysis, the chapter first offers a brief discussion of the Chilean post-dictatorship context and a framework for thinking about the contemporary meanings and sociocultural functions of Villa Grimaldi. The chapter then describes the March and the Memoscopio archive in more detail and presents the analytical framework used to interpret the Memoscopio testimonies. The chapter ends with a discussion of the functions of Villa Grimaldi as a divided symbol that was briefly recruited into a transnational peace and nonviolence campaign.

A Brief Discussion of Political Memory in Post-dictatorship Chile

Recently Chile observed the fortieth anniversary of the 1973 coup d’état. The coup brought a violent and controversial end to the administration of Salvador Allende, the first socialist government in Latin America to have been formed through open elections (Dávila, 2013; Meade, 2010). In the context of the Cold War and US interventionism, the coup set the stage for a 16-year military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet (see Esparza, Huttenbach, & Feierstein, 2010). During the dictatorship years the ruling junta reversed Allende’s socialist policies and turned the country into a laboratory of authoritarian neoliberalism inspired by the Chicago School of Economics (Retamozo & Garrido, 2010). As it happened in other countries of the region, private actors and state agencies persecuted, tortured, killed, and disappeared thousands of communist and socialist supporters, union leaders, workers, and left-leaning community organizers (see Esparza, Huttenbach, & Feierstein, 2010). Between 1973 and the early 1980s a network of over 1,000 clandestine detention, torture, and extermination centers operated in numerous cities and towns in Chile (Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004). There, thousands of Chileans were the targets of systematic state violence while normal life, albeit under a dictatorship, went on outside their walls. These events transformed Chile’s psychological, sociocultural, economic, and political landscape in lasting and controversial ways.

For the last 40 years every anniversary of the coup has inspired contentious reflections about the causes, significance, and consequences of the dictatorship and of Chile’s return to democracy (Han, 2013; Volk, 2013). The psychological dimensions of these events have received considerable attention by scholars and practitioners (Lira, 2013). Contemporary scholarship by Chilean psychologists tends to explore the ways in which diverse sectors of society engage in public and private debates about the politics of memory, truth, and reparation (see the special volume introduced by Cumsille, 2013). The profound conflicts these debates activate reveal the continued relevance of the past within the Chilean landscape. During the last two decades the country has developed institutional approaches to commemorate this painful past. Studies of everyday life, however, suggest that a perceived the impossibility of achieving true reconciliation has driven many sectors of society to tolerate irreconcilable differences and take part in depoliticized forms of memory and discourse (Reyes Andreani, 2006; Reyes, Muñoz, & Vázquez, 2013).

As Escobar Nieto and Fernández Droguett (2008) argue, the production and performance of collective memory about the coup rely heavily on the places, events, and public figures that have come to represent deep divisions in Chilean society based on political tradition, class, ethnicity, and role during the coup and dictatorship. Ex-torture centers are among the most complex symbols of past and present conflict. As I will discuss in more detail in the following section, this is in large part due to the irreconcilable meanings these sites carry for communities that have historically been in conflict with each other. Among these groups are victims and perpetrators of violence, right wing and left wing parties, the armed forces and the civilian population, and Chileans of indigenous and European descent, among others.

The Complex Meanings of Villa Grimaldi

According to the records of Corporación Villa Grimaldi (n.d.), the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park was originally an early twentieth century Italian style hacienda house in the outskirts of Santiago. The property served first as a private summer home and later as a restaurant frequented by left-leaning intellectuals, artists, and leaders of Allende’s political coalition, the Unidad Popular (Corporación Villa Grimaldi, n.d.; Violi, 2012). Not long after the 1973 military coup the villa became a center of detention, torture, and extermination known as Cuartel Terranova. From its origins Cuartel Terranova has been a symbol of national trauma and division. The site’s complex history has caught the attention of numerous intellectuals and artists who have attempted to promote public dialogue about the ethics, aesthetics, and legal aspects of commemoration and remembrance (see Gómez-Barris, 2010; Lyon, 2011; Soto Castillo, 2009; Traverso & Azúa, 2009).

The Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (National Intelligence Headquarters, later renamed Central Nacional de Informaciones), which had been created in 1974 to oversee the surveillance and repression of dictatorship detractors, ran Cuartel Terranova during its 5 years of operation. The human rights violations that took place at the site were similar to those that took place in other detention centers across the country (Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004). Post-dictatorship investigations estimate that nearly 5,000 people—among them men, women, and children—were held at the site (Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004; Corporación Villa Grimaldi, n.d.). Most of these prisoners experienced torture and sexual abuse before being released or exiled, and nearly 230 were killed or disappeared as a result of their captivity. The Park’s records show that at least 20 intelligence agents, police officers, and military personnel were involved in these actions.

During the early years of the dictatorship the meaning of detention centers was deeply tied to their role as secret tools of control and repression. For many sectors of Chilean society patriotism has long had a repressive edge that is well captured in the national emblem “By Reason or Force.” This has been coupled with social representations of military strong men as forefathers of Chile’s independence. These notions of patriotism operated as an aesthetic and cultural backdrop to the coup and the dictatorship (cf., Errázuriz, 2009). This cultural backdrop helped justify the actions by the military regime and its supporters as means to defend the fatherland against the alleged threat imposed by communism and socialism. The meaning that Cuartel Terranova held for the soldiers and agents who ran the operation was likely infused with these notions. Very much in contrast, this secret detention center was a site of defeat, trauma, resistance, and resilience for many detractors of the dictatorship (Gómez-Barris, 2009).

The Cuartel Terranova operated in secrecy until February of 1978, when it was dismantled and its management was transferred to a second intelligence agency. The site remained abandoned, partially demolished, and unknown to many Chileans until 1987, when demolition plans gave rise to a conflict between those wishing to destroy the site and those wishing to preserve it. After 9 years of abandonment the then director of the Central Nacional de Informaciones sold the property to a development company owned by his relatives (Corporación Villa Grimaldi, n.d.; Violi, 2012). Similar to other ex-torture centers in Argentina and Brazil, the ex-Cuartel Terranova quickly became an epicenter of important conflicts over demolition, preservation, and modification of torture centers (Hidalgo, 2012; Schneider, 2012; Violi, 2012). In 1988 the developers leveled the buildings, tower, and cells in preparation for the construction of luxury apartments. But while those directly responsible for the abuses attempted to erase Cuartel Terranova from the map of Santiago and the history of the country, victims’ organizations mobilized to publicly demand preservation. Through legal battles, and with the help of private and state organizations, victims and victims’ relatives succeeded in transferring the site to the administration of Corporación Villa Grimaldi which had been founded to oversee the construction of a future memorial.

Vast sectors of society and the state apparatus were silent bystanders to the legal battles over the fate of Cuartel Terranova. As Gómez-Barris (2010) and others have argued, the desire to “leave the past behind” and seek reconciliation without truth was based on well-founded fears of new military interventions. Many believed that the still weak efforts to restore democracy—threatened by Pinochet supporters in the state, the civilian population, and in the Armed Forces—would not survive truth and reconciliation efforts such as those sought out by the victims of Cuartel Terranova. Caught between erasure, preservation, and fabricated indifference, the site came to symbolize a larger tension between two paths to reconciliation and democracy: Amnesty and erasure of state brutality versus recognition, prosecution, and reparations (cf., Hite & Collins, 2009).

In 1994, 4 years after the end of the dictatorship, the site became the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park. Today the site is a reconstruction of the various elements of Cuartel Terranova as described in survivors’ testimonies. As Violi (2012) and Lyon (2011) argue, Villa Grimaldi is defined by its designers’ choice to recreate the original villa’s gardens rather than re-present the horror of Cuartel Terranova through a total reconstruction. Contrasting the Park to a high-profile ex-torture center in Cambodia, Violi (2012) explains:

Tuol Sleng is explicitly defined as a ‘Museum of Genocide Crimes,’ while Villa Grimaldi was renamed as ‘Park for Peace’. The different denominations imply a radical shift in the categorization of the place itself, according to a double system of oppositions: ‘museum’ versus ‘park’ on the one hand, and ‘genocide crimes’ versus ‘peace’ on the other, forcing in this way a completely different reading of the site. (p. 54)

For almost two decades now the site has been devoted to bringing the victims’ experiences back from erasure. The Park is a lush garden where visitors find: (1) the water tower where prisoners were kept in isolation before being disappeared; (2) a reconstruction of one of the cells; (3) a model of the center as it was in 1975; (4) a Wall of Names honoring the site’s victims; (5) the Rose Garden, honoring the women detained at the site; (6) the Hall of Memory, which profiles several of the disappeared; (7) the Tracks Monument, which honors the disappeared; and (8) the Homage to Militants, which honors the detainees’ political parties and groups. In addition, the Park houses an oral history archive, the Memory Site Human Rights Education Program, and a museum that educates school children and the general public about the site’s history. The Park’s mission to commemorate violence and resistance is similar to that of other memory projects. Psychologist Susan Opotow (2011), for instance, argues that the Jewish Museum of Berlin:

brings evidence, artifacts, and voices of the past back to Berlin to teach people today about moral exclusion and its catastrophic outcomes for those excluded and for the larger society. The museum is not only commemorative but also symbolizes the return of Jewish culture to Berlin. (p. 72)

The Villa Grimaldi Peace Park represents a similar return of the disappeared and the silenced into the political and cultural landscape of post-dictatorship Chile.

But while state agencies, private institutions, and community organizations have celebrated this return and commemorated the site’s legacy for the last two decades (cf., Hite & Collins, 2009), other sectors have engaged in conflict-avoiding forms of indifference. Reflecting a wider trend (see Reyes et al., 2013), the initial conflict over the preservation or destruction of the site seems to have been replaced by a quieter tension between politicized remembrance and fabricated indifference. For many, the Park is an unwelcomed call to respond morally and politically to the country’s painful past, as well as a challenge to narratives that claim a full return to democracy and justice (cf., Kennedy, 2004). Gómez-Barris (2010) argues that the contemporary meaning of the site is defined not only by the brutal events that took place during the dictatorship but also by the events that have taken place since the country’s transition to democracy:

Recent historical events in Chile, including the death of Pinochet, his own and his family’s tarnished image, and the election of former political prisoner and torture survivor Michelle Bachelet to the presidency, have helped pave the way for a more truthful rendition of the nation’s authoritarian period. Even so, the lasting effects of Pinochet’s restructuring of the Amnesty Law, the widespread legacy of fear in the aftermath of the military regime, the culture of impunity, and a massive desire for novelty fueled by neoliberalism continue to constrain Chile’s transitional justice and democratic process. What the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park offers is not only an antidote against forgetting, but a meaningful historical and present-day location in which communities politically engage their past, as I soon show. By understanding this memorial’s contemporary social use as an organized micro political culture, rather than merely analyzing its symbolic value, we can begin to analyze how the past continues to structure people’s exercise of citizenship at such a place. (p. 33)

Building on Gómez-Barris’ approach, the rest of this chapter explores the symbolic dimension of the site in relation to the social uses that peace advocates gave to Villa Grimaldi in the context of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence. Within this framework, the focus is on the ways in which these activists’ understandings of the March and of Villa Grimaldi informed and transformed each other.

The World March for Peace and Nonviolence

As mentioned earlier, the World March for Peace and Nonviolence (www.theworldmarch.org) arrived at the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park on December 28, 2009 after 3 months of travel around the world. The March was a 2009 transnational campaign that promoted alternatives to war and violence through a 94-day journey around the world. Endorsers included world-renowned public figures (n > 1,198); grassroots and not-for-profit organizations (n = 504); special interest groups (n = 125); governmental, cultural, and media institutions (n = 149); educational institutions (n = 46); and local municipalities (n = 183) in 19 countries. Across identities, languages, geographies, generations, and movements, these diverse supporters found common grounds on a demand for:

(1) nuclear disarmament at a global level; (2) the immediate withdrawal of invading troops from occupied territories; (3) the progressive and proportional reduction of conventional weapons; (4) the signing of non-aggression treaties between countries; and (5) the renunciation by governments of the use of war as a means to resolve conflicts, [as well as the] rejection of all forms of violence. (World Without Wars and Violence, 2009).

The March departed from Wellington, New Zealand, on October 2, 2009. Its start was celebrated with simultaneous activities in 54 countries and 300 cities. During the 3 months of the March, local organizers held press conferences, symposia, concerts, exhibits, recitals, processions, carnivals, parties, and other events in nearly 600 cities around the world. After visiting 60 countries, the March arrived at the Punta de Vacas Park of Study and Reflection, in the Argentine Andes, where over 4,000 marchers took part in its closing ceremonies. As one of the first transnational peace marches of the twenty-first century, the initiative was a unique window into the psychology of transnational peacebuilding in a digital and globalized world. Because of its scale and diversity, the March was an opportunity to study how a wide range of local activists and organizations from around the world participated in, and experienced, such a large-scale initiative.

Marching across national borders was only possible for a core group of volunteers with access to the right kinds of funding, time, passports, and visas. For this reason, there were thousands of local marchers who joined in as the March passed through their neighborhoods, towns, and countries. (The sample of testimonies presented in this chapter features both local and international marchers.) March events combined the remembrance of past wars, suffering, oppression, and resistance with activities that invited participants to imagine a future culture of peace, justice, and nonviolence. Most March events around the world took place at temples, mountains, and other sacred sites; at city halls, central squares, and other civic centers; and museums, commemoration sites, and other memorials such as the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park. Indeed, many of the sites the March visited could be conceptualized as divided symbols with complex histories and meanings. In addition, the March had a strong social media and digital component that included online collections of videos and images, blogs, and Facebook groups. Hundreds of thousands participated virtually through websites, blogs, and social media. The Memoscopio archive was one among hundreds of digital initiatives inspired by the March.

Memoscopio: A Participatory Study of the March

The Memoscopio archive was created during 2009 and early 2010 at the request of Chilean March organizers. The work was carried out by a diverse team of advocates, activists, and researchers who founded the Memoscopio Project (Muñoz Proto, Devoto Lyon, Villar Castillo, & Battistella, 2013). The project aimed to: (1) document the diversity of individual experiences within the March; (2) generate knowledge about the March’s psychosocial significance within and across places; and (3) produce a resource that would be useful to educators, advocates, and researchers. The questions that guided this project focused on the social-psychological meaning of the initiative from the perspective of its participants: What did this ‘march around the world’ mean to them? What did their participation mean to their advocacy work, their communities, and their contribution to a culture of peace? How did the March deepen or change its participants’ understandings of peace, justice, and nonviolence? And how did it inform their ways of remembering the past, experiencing their lives, and imagining the future?

Memoscopio’s approach to answering these questions was inspired on what Michelle Fine (2012) calls a psychology for “revolting” times, which favors participatory methods in the study and transformation of conflict and injustice. With roots in action research (Lewin, 1951) and the pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire, 2000), a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach emphasizes the applicability, relevance, and shared ownership of research-based knowledge (Brydon-Miller, 1997; McIntyre, 2007; Torre & Fine, 2011). Based on the tradition of community self-surveys and the principles of PAR (Fine, 2006; Torre & Fine, 2011), the Memoscopio team conceived the project as a participatory digital archive of testimonies to be developed in collaboration with March participants. The project put an equal focus on memory and imagination, playfully describing itself as:

Me·mos·co·pio \me-mō –skōpēō-\ noun [from memory + kaleidoscope]: (1) A collective act of memory and creation; (2) An online archive of testimonies about the World March for Peace and Nonviolence.

The use of archiving as a research strategy positions Memoscopio within an increasing number of memory websites, digital archives, and testimony collections that are being created in the context of human rights campaigns and peace activism worldwide (Ashuri, 2012; Fadda-Conrey, 2010; Gregory, 2006; Reid, 1997). The design of the project responded to the fact that the production, circulation, and remote use of information were central to the March (Muñoz Proto, Devoto Lyon, Villar Castillo, & Battistella, 2013; Muñoz Proto & Opotow, 2012). Among other practices sharing and listening to personal testimonies was an important component of participants’ experiences during planning meetings, public events, and online participation.

The project builds on a relatively recent but rich array of archives of peace and conflict that house individual testimonies. These antecedents include the archives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on South African Apartheid (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, n.d.) and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (Hartman, 2006). Other institutional archives that inform Memoscopio include the September 11 Digital Archive (Brier & Brown, 2011) and The Commonweal Collection on the Quaker Peace Testimony (Arbor, 2002).

The testimonies in the Memoscopio archive were gathered during March events in the United States, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. The team collected accounts from a diverse sample of marchers during “down times” (i.e., sitting down, resting). The team invited participants to share written, audio, or video accounts on any of the following themes: (1) The March and I: Its connection to my personal story; (2) The March and the world: Its role and significance today; (3) The March and the future: Its contribution and projections; and (4) Any other topic that seems important. Memoscopio contributors, who were at least 18-years old, provided their informed consent for the team to publish and study their testimonies (For a detailed description of see Muñoz Proto, Devoto Lyon, Villar Castillo, & Battistella, 2013).

The archive that resulted from this approach (archive.memoscopio.org) houses 36 written and 157 video testimonies (N = 193) by marchers from 20 countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The contributors range in age from 18 to 75 and represent a wide range of levels and types of involvement in the March. These contributors are diverse in cultural backgrounds, genders, occupations, and affiliations. They also range in their levels of familiarity with, and commitment to, peace and nonviolence activism. Memoscopio contributors represent various levels of involvement with the March, including: (1) national and international organizers; (2) international marchers; and (3) local supporters. These various categories of contributors are in themselves diverse, with each person bringing to their testimony their own situated understanding of protest, trauma, violence, in/justice, activism, and peace. These perspectives include those of (1): young Iraq War veterans and conscientious objectors and relatives of 9/11 victims, as well as antiwar and antinuclear organizers from the United States; (2) both seasoned and young environmental, health, and pro-democracy activists from Colombia; (3) spiritual and union leaders from indigenous communities from El Alto in Bolivia; (4) youth leaders and educators working in Lima, Peru; (5) political artists from Argentina; (6) and middle-aged professionals who lived through Pinochet’s dictatorship, as well as young student activists from Chile, among many others.

The subset of 13 testimonies that inform this chapter was gathered during the March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi. The interviews followed the aforementioned protocol and took place: (1) near a central fountain while marchers toured the park; (2) near the stage after the recital; and (3) by the Park’s gates as the marchers prepared to leave. In addition, three marchers who spoke during the program gave permission for their speeches to be included in the archive. This approach resulted in a set of ten video testimonies and three written testimonies. The contributors in this subset range in age between 23 and 72 years old and include six women and seven men. Among them are local March organizers (n = 3), local supporters (n = 6), and international marchers (n = 4).

Approach to Analysis

As a method, the analysis of testimonies builds on a tradition of oral histories, and photo-voice methodologies used by social scientists to study individual and collective experiences with exclusion (Luttrell, 2010) and conflict (Lykes, 2010). In their most basic definition, testimonies are accounts of an event or experience that a witness or protagonist shares with an audience, either in person, writing, video, or otherwise. Testimonies are what Mikhail Bakhtin (1982, 1986) calls a distinct genre of discourse, with unique conventions and affordances. Testimonies are tools for powerless people to make public their perspectives and knowledge (Lykes, 2010), thus addressing both allies and enemies. As a genre, testimonies have a growing relevance in cultural, political, and scholarly life. Testimonies have deep roots in Latin American society (Bustos, 2010), Holocaust research (Hartman, 2006), and Truth and Reconciliation processes (Duncan, Stevens, & Sonn, 2012).

Testimonial accounts can be valuable windows into individuals’ changing perceptions of divided symbols. In this case, Memoscopio testimonies offer critical information about the ways in which local peace advocates engaged with Villa Grimaldi in the context of the March. The following section presents a content analysis of the subset of 13 testimonies from Villa Grimaldi, which was carried out in tandem with a larger analysis of the entire archive. The first stage of this analysis involved the creation of an online exhibit in collaboration with the Memoscopio team (http://archive.memoscopio.org/exhibits/show/moments-of-the-world-march/concert-in-villa-grimaldi/item/1752s). This approach addressed the need to engage the testimonies as public digital objects whose meaning is situated within specific lives, places, sociopolitical contexts, and moments of the March (cf., Walker, 2010). The second stage involved watching each testimony in the subset multiple times, transcribing, and translating them from Spanish to English. During this process I listened for: (1) descriptions of the March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi; (2) articulations of the meaning of Villa Grimaldi in the marchers’ own lives and in post-dictatorship Chile; (3) reflections on how Villa Grimaldi informed and/or changed their experience of the March; and (4) reflections on how the March informed and/or changed their understandings of Villa Grimaldi. I carried out the analysis using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). In the following section I present the analysis through a close look at four testimonies by March participants from Santiago de Chile.

It is important to mention that the excerpts I present in the following sections do not do full justice to the emotional, gestural, and linguistic richness of the video testimonies, which were intended to be viewed online in the context of the archive. Furthermore, the excerpts lack the sounds, the landscapes, and the weather conditions in which the participants shared their testimonies, thus missing another layer of richness: the testimony as an embodied act that marchers carried out at a given time, place, and in a given psychological state (of excitement, reflection, anticipation, etc.). The aforementioned online exhibit that accompanies this written analysis serves to compensate for these shortcomings and allows the reader to experience the testimonies in their original language, diversity, and intended medium.

Four Testimonies

The testimonies that Alex, Magaly, Danilo, and Sergio shared at Villa Grimaldi communicate an atmosphere of excitement and engagement but are also infused with the pain and conflict of the dictatorship. These testimonies are a sample of the diversity of perspectives and intentions that converged under the March’s banner and gave meaning to events such as a visit to the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park. The testimonies suggest that the meaning of the March and its visit to the Villa Grimaldi are rooted in the marchers’ life stories as well as in the activities through which they experienced the March. Each testimony contributes a rich and complex description of the March’s significance within post-dictatorship Chile and a globalizing world. An important theme that is present throughout the subset of testimonies is the significance of the March as an opportunity to learn about the history of Villa Grimaldi. The marchers describe the Chilean past and present from their unique positions and experiences. These descriptions are often coupled with deepened understandings of the marchers’ relationship to the dictatorship, Villa Grimaldi, and/or post-dictatorship society. The testimonies shared by Alex and Magaly illustrate this theme.

Alex: Reflections on a First Visit

Alex is a therapist who was 49-years old at the time of the March. In his testimony, Alex reflects on the experience of visiting Villa Grimaldi for the first time. Sitting under one of the Park’s beautiful trees, Alex spoke into the Memoscopio camera:

I had the misfortune, when I was 11 or 12, to live the start of the dictatorship period in Chile. I am the child of right wing parents. However, the values they themselves transmitted onto me did not allow me to follow their same paths and the same outlook they had. Maybe I took a part of their values and with that I built my own life. And for a long time my eyes were shut… [pauses, chokes up] …until arriving at places like [Villa Grimaldi] that I did not know existed. One of the things that touches me the most is knowing that there can be people that can make others suffer so much. I work, to the extent possible, to accompany others. And this is a place that is beautiful but [also a place] where the suffering of many people is palpable. And, actually, there must be many others going through the same [suffering] (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 314, translated from Castillian).

Alex makes sense of his first visit to Villa Grimaldi through an origin story that begins with his family and his upbringing as “the child of right wing parents.” In the Chilean context, this means he most likely grew up within the sectors of society that supported the dictatorship. In this sense, Alex’s experience echoes that of many Chileans who grew up during the dictatorship within right wing or Pinochetista families, which made up a large portion of the country. It is possible that a large portion of the local marchers in attendance that day may have never before visited a former torture center, despite their open condemnation of the dictatorship. What is unique and striking about Alex’s testimony is the open admission of his ignorance and of his unintentional contribution to the erasure of this painful past. As it is visible in the video, he is moved by the realization that, until then, he had been unaware of the Park’s existence (“I did not know [it] existed”). Another interesting element in Alex’s testimony is the description of how the very values received from his family allowed him to build a different outlook and, among other things, recognize the significance of international peace and justice initiatives such as the March. This and other mentions of intergenerational relationships in the archive speak of how the dictatorship impacted family relations.

The following portion of the testimony provides clues as to why he may have chosen to speak publicly about his experience. This portion of the testimony also touches on how previous life experiences prepared him to recognize the transformational potential of the March:

I want to share my testimony because I approached the humanist movement [which organized the March] due to personal reasons, due to health reasons. And I found a group of people that would give an unconditional amount of love and care that I have never seen before in other places. And it was strange [is that] I discovered that there was so much to learn and so much to tell, and so much that people don't know. I discovered that it was possible to give unconditional love and that I could also contribute to this. Of course [a health problem] is a cause of sadness and one feels great pain, but it is the moment to rebuild life and rebuild the outlook towards the world and forward. That seed also forms part of this Park, in its idea, in this participation in the project (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 314, translated from Castillian).

Alex’s testimony speaks of the power of community life to turn private, silent health crises into a source of collective strength, and mutual recognition. His accounts suggest that this previous experience prepared him to recognize and value the social function of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park as a place that helps make public the invisible suffering of those held there during the dictatorship. For Alex, recognition and community are sources of strength for survivors who, despite their sadness and pain, hope “to rebuild life and rebuild the outlook towards the world and forward.” While reflecting about himself, Alex also touches on issues that are central to post-dictatorship Chile. Slow transformation towards nonviolence and growing awareness are among these issues:

I believe the World March is a way to warn, to tell, and to say that violence in the world can be stopped but this must be built from within, stopping one's own violence. The contributions [of the March] will be significant for a very long time. I believe it will be one moment, and then another, and then has to come another one until people can come to awareness of what it means to not face reality through violence by working on one's own violence. I believe this is how we can live in peace with one self and with the world (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 314, translated from Castillian).

This last portion of Alex’s testimony touches on the meaning of the March and its contribution to building a culture of peace. Speaking at Villa Grimaldi from his newfound position as a Chilean who has moved from fabricated ignorance to the recognition of violence, Alex shares a deepened understanding of the meaning of peace and of the March’s contribution to peacebuilding.

Magaly: Returning Home

Alex is not the only Memoscopio contributor who found a new voice through his participation in the March and his visit to Villa Grimaldi. Magaly’s brief testimony offers a similar account of transformation. Magaly, a middle-aged activist from Santiago, joined the March’s three-week journey through Latin America, marching from Mexico City to Punta de Vacas in Argentina. Magaly makes sense of this experience through a story of return. Speaking from the Villa Grimaldi stage, she describes her growing sense of belonging to a peacebuilding community, both as a Latin American and a Chilean. She also describes a deepened understanding of the healing intentions that inspired the preservation of Villa Grimaldi:

My journey was through Latin America, through our sibling towns, and I must say that everywhere I went I would say… “I want to stay here” because the affection was so strong…And I arrive here [where] I was born, and I also feel the violence that was exerted. But there is a reason why at some point we stood up and said “we are going to build something different because life is beautiful.” …I deeply thank having participated of this team [of marchers] that has been wonderful and having participated of the March (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 472, translated from Castillian).

Magaly describes how her journey through Latin America and her participation in the March inspired in her new feelings of solidarity with places and communities she had no previous relationship with. In addition to this new sense of community, the March gave her the opportunity to return to her city as a ‘marcher’ whose experience and opinions were worth sharing with others. It is from this position that she publicly acknowledges the painful history of Villa Grimaldi and celebrates the attempt to rebuild Chilean society.

Danilo: On Apolitical Peace and Political Memory

In addition to a deepened understanding of the past and the present, a second theme that runs across this subset of testimonies is the impact of Villa Grimaldi on the marchers’ opinion of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence. The testimonies shared by Danilo and Sergio exemplify some of the ways in which Villa Grimaldi informed their experiences of the March. Danilo is a 27-year-old teacher and political activist who promoted the March and helped organize its activities in Chile. He shared his testimony near the Peace Park’s gates as the marchers left the site:

The significance of the World March for me grew from little to large. At first it was a very weird thing, a thing that did not resonate with me. I felt it [to be] very naive, it is true. But with time I saw that it gained in strength, it gained in shape, and in content. And that filled me much more, resonated much more with me. And even more now that it has arrived to Chile. To be here in Villa Grimaldi. This really does have substance. It is not any March. I has a lot of weight (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 309, translated from Castillian).

Danilo’s testimony speaks to how memory sites such as Villa Grimaldi can give weight and political relevance to peace initiatives such as the March. Speaking as an engaged activist and citizen, Danilo articulates a concern expressed by many contributors to the Memoscopio archive: The tension between crowd-pleasing apolitical peace events and politicized forms of memory that promote greater recognition of local histories. As Danilo, many March participants who are active in local political movements described their rejection of any initiatives that equate peace with the absence of conflict. In the Chilean context, this version of peace is often used as a justification to work for reconciliation and democracy in the absence of memory, truth, and reparations. Such approaches to post-dictatorship peace purposefully avoid dialogues about the most painful aspects of the dictatorship. It is in this context that Danilo understands the site’s political relevance and “weight.” The visit served as proof that other March organizers were committed to a more complex approach to peace that welcomes conflict and politicized memory about the past.

The Memoscopio interview also served as an opportunity for Danilo to infuse the March’s culture of peace discourse with a public reflection on the complex relationship between peace, memory, and justice:

For me the importance of the March for the world is that it is relevant. It is a small grain of sand that this collective is contributing towards the construction of a humanist social revolution, a revolution that is militantly nonviolent… that is the future, to project ourselves in that direction, to connect with old generations and new generations, to create that bridge between Chile, Latin America, the world without excluding any one. And I feel that here we lived a great ceremony full of emotion, on the topic of human rights and the topic of how from memory and from not-forgetting you project yourself to the future with joy, without resentment, but firmly. And that is active nonviolence. That is peace and nonviolence. That is all (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 309, translated from Castillian).

In the above portion of his testimony Danilo offers a theory of change in which events such as the March make small contributions towards a more all-encompassing transformation. This transformation involves three elements that counter local politics of silence and erasure. These include growing solidarity, a transnational understanding of peace and violence, and an intergenerational movement that promotes the transmission of knowledge and memory. For Danilo, events such as the March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi serve to open imagination about the future of post-dictatorship societies and to infuse a politics of memory and reconciliation based on the practice of “not-forgetting.”

Sergio: Denouncing Silent Forms of Violence

Sergio, a 38-year old painter from Santiago, shared his testimony while standing on the sidewalk next to the tall wall that delimits the Park. While Alex, Magaly, and Danilo begin their testimonies with personal accounts, Sergio jumps directly into political commentary. Speaking as a witness to the Chilean process, he seems to address an international audience that is not familiar with the country’s history:

First of all, here in Chile there was a fairly violent period, there was a lot of suffering for a long time, when violence was present on a daily basis. The problem is that despite the arrival of democracy, some aspects have not changed. And our duty now is to struggle against that violence, which is a bit more secret, and [to raise] the consciousness we need so there can be that change within my country, Chile (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 391, translated from Castillian).

The March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi provided an opportunity for Sergio to counter official narratives about Chile’s transformation. Sergio rejects the notion that Chile’s nominal return to democracy means the country has overcome violence or achieved a peaceful society. In his analysis, direct violence and state brutality have been replaced by the “secret violence” of social exclusion, economic exploitation, and other structural forms of violence rooted in neoliberalism and the legacy of the dictatorship. Sergio not only denounces these forms of structural violence but also speaks about complacency and stresses the responsibility that Chileans have to address these problems and help their country reach more profound changes. It is against this context that he offers a positive evaluation of the March’s significance. More specifically, he celebrates the March’s capacity to bring people together, raise awareness about ongoing problems, and take the first steps towards a less violent culture:

I think is indispensable that people become connected through this idea and generate a whole movement within which we may become energized and have a common objective which is to beat violence in these days. And it has to do with [the March’s] contribution and projection. I think this denunciation can be a first step among many that can be taken so that future generations can live in a country and a community of nonviolence or of more controlled violence so that there may not be so much aggression of all kinds, such as the media. In my view it is necessary that all these topics be approached and become subject of conversation, of debate, of change, totally contemporary. I give thanks to be here. I will always participate of these things because they are part of my life and I invite you all to join this (Excerpt from Memoscopio Testimony 391, translated from Castillian).

Similar to Danilo, Sergio ends his testimony with a call to engage critically with the post-dictatorship reality as a “subject of conversation, of debate, [and] of change.” Together, Danilo, Sergio, and other marchers suggest that the March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi was significant not only at a personal level but also at a political level.

Agents of Memory, Agents of Imagination

Despite having been transformed into a peace park the ex-Cuartel Terranova continues to be a ‘repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary’ (Meskell, 2002, p.558; cited by Hidalgo, 2012). As a site of national trauma, the Park is defined by an uneasy relationship to silence and indifference (cf., Reyes et al., 2013). It is thus imperative to study how these dynamics may be interrupted in order for the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park to play an even greater role in Chile’s peace and justice imagery. The Memoscopio testimonies presented in this chapter offer a window into these interruptions and transformations. The focus of the analysis presented here has been on the reflections that Alex, Magaly, Danilo, and Sergio shared with Memoscopio about the World March for Peace and Nonviolence and its visit to the Peace Park. As a set, these testimonies describe what ‘marching for peace and nonviolence’ meant to local March supporters who visited Villa Grimaldi. Most importantly, they offer a window into how the March informed or transformed these marchers’ relationship to the conflicts the site has come to symbolize.

As Alex and Magaly describe, the context of the March helped local March supporters experience the site in new ways. For Alex, this meant making sense of his first visit to Villa Grimaldi through an origin story that connects his upbringing and community life with the country’s conflicted relationship to memory. Magaly’s testimony, in turn, presents her experience through an account of her journey with the March and her emotion-filled return to Chile and Villa Grimaldi. Both Alex and Magaly describe a deepened capacity to value and support the Peace Park’s mission and to connect Chilean experiences with a broader movement for peace. These testimonies exemplify some of the ways in which the March may have deepened other marchers’ engagement with the significance of Villa Grimaldi in post-dictatorship Chile. The Memoscopio testimonies also suggest some of the ways in which Villa Grimaldi informed local activists’ understandings of the March. As Danilo and Sergio argue, Villa Grimaldi served as a bridge between a global peace discourse and the local concerns of Chilean activists. The March’s inclusion of Villa Grimaldi in its route enabled Danilo to fully commit to the initiative. The March’s visit also allowed him to reflect on the importance of remembrance and to offer a public critique of depoliticized peace initiatives that brush over local memories and post-conflict tensions. For Sergio, the March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi was a double opportunity to visit the Park in an act of remembrance and to warn the public against narratives that portray violence and injustice as matters of the past.

While the symbolic meaning of the Cuartel Terranova seems ‘frozen’ in irreconcilable narratives about the causes and consequences of the dictatorship (cf., Reyes et al., 2013), these testimonies suggest that the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park can foster more fluid, dynamic, and generative reflections among Chileans who are willing to support transnational peace initiatives. As a place of activism and community building, the park is a site where real people of diverse backgrounds can meet; where they can rethink their personal and family connections to the dictatorship; and where they may reach new understandings about life in post-dictatorship Chile. The Memoscopio testimonies suggest that the March’s visit may have enriched these dynamics in three ways. First, the March shifted the marchers’ frame of reference from a local to a transnational one, thus creating ‘space’ for new kinds of knowledge about the site. Said differently, what may have seemed controversial or taboo to the marchers within the Chilean context may have suddenly become common sense in the context of global peace initiative. Second, the March created an opportunity for new voices to speak about the site as witnesses and protagonists of its ongoing history. Ex-torture centers such as Villa Grimaldi are often and rightfully represented through the testimonies of survivors and, less often, of perpetrators of violence. The March created an opportunity for young people and for activists from various sectors of society to experience an important event at the site. The March also invited them to reflect on their relationship to the violence of the dictatorship and to speak about their peace and nonviolence activism outside local discourses about conflict, human rights, and democracy. Finally, the March created new audiences for these accounts and reflections. The opportunity to address a wide audience of national and international March supporters and detractors may have catalyzed the reflections and realizations found in the Memoscopio archive. The existence of this audience also helped local activists articulate their complex relationships to memory, community, and reconciliation in post-dictatorship Chile.

These new frameworks, experiences, and audiences helped position local March supporters at Villa Grimaldi as advocates of memory and imagination. Alex, Magaly, Danilo, and Sergio would agree that memory sites such as Villa Grimaldi are defined by exclusion, erasure, and amnesia (cf., Greetham, 1999). The context of the March and the Memoscopio interviews were opportunities for local activists to speak publicly against these dynamics and to reflect on the personal and political significance of Villa Grimaldi in post-dictatorship Chile. In this way, the March and Memoscopio positioned local peace advocates as moral memory agents (Ashuri, 2012). Both initiatives positioned these March participants as experts whose experiences and testimonies could promote a more engaged and active form of collective memory about the dictatorship.

The March and Memoscopio also invited these activists to act as agents of imagination. By this I mean that these initiatives helped the marchers publicly claim Villa Grimaldi as a site where peace, democracy, and justice are learned, documented, and promoted. Acting as agents of imagination, the marchers shared provocative articulations of the meaning of peace advocacy in a post-dictatorship society. Consistent with Reardon and Cabezudo’s (2002) view of peace as process, their testimonies sketch an organic theory of change towards a truly peaceful Chile. According to Alex, Magaly, Sergio, and Danilo, post-dictatorship peacebuilding should involve: (1) constructive and nonviolent dialogue about the past even if it produces discomfort (cf., Deutsch, 1983); (2) remembrance, reconciliation, and recognition of violence and suffering through the preservation of, and active engagement with, sites of trauma (cf., Eaton, 2011); (3) the fostering of a political imaginary that rejects quiet forms of violence such as inequality and exclusion (cf., Bradbury, 2012; Fine, 2006); and (4) the fostering international solidarity and dialogue. In these ways, the testimonies describe peace as an ongoing process of healing and transformation that builds on, yet overcomes, past conflict.

In analyzing the Memoscopio testimonies, it is important to consider that individual experience in the archive “stands for collective social and economic experience” (McEwan, 2003, p. 748). For this reason, it is important to understand these accounts as entry points into dynamic experiences rather than as static texts (Eltringham, 2009). It is impossible to know whether the marchers will describe their experiences in similar terms years or decades after the event. Neither is it possible to know the extent to which their new understandings of Villa Grimaldi were enduring. In addition, the small sample of testimonies discussed here offers only a glimpse into the layered and diverse dialogues that were inspired by the March’s visit to Villa Grimaldi. March participants tended to be peace advocates and peace movement sympathizers. For this reason, the Memoscopio archive does not include the views of Chileans who actively avoid Villa Grimaldi. Neither does it represent Chileans who would have preferred having the site destroyed rather than preserved. Additional research is needed to understand how such an initiative would be experienced and described by various sectors of Chilean society, such as victims and perpetrators of violence; right wing and left wing parties; the armed forces and the civilian population; and Chileans of indigenous and European descent, to mention a few. For this reason, it is important to consider this analysis in terms of its theoretical generalizability (Fine, 2006) to other moments and contexts of the March, as well as to other societies with a history of conflict. Rather than forcing homogeneity, this perspective brings attention to how and why the meanings of the March and of Villa Grimaldi may be different across lives, times, and settings.

Conclusion

From the case of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park and the World March for Peace and Nonviolence we learn that the recruitment of local divided symbols into international peace initiatives can fuel generative dialogues and realizations. International initiatives such as the March can help turn a nation’s sites of trauma into stages from where local advocates can articulate visions of peace and justice. This emergent knowledge, in turn, can positively transform participants’ experiences of local conflicts by strengthening their capacity to engage in sensitive dialogues.

Ex-torture centers are among the most complex symbols of past and present conflict in Chilean society. This is in large part due to the irreconcilable meanings these sites carry for communities whose historical conflicts were aggravated by the dictatorship. But while the symbolic meaning of Cuartel Terranova may be “frozen” in the past, the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park seems capable of fostering constructive dialogue and transformation in the present. Building on Gómez-Barris’ (2010) work on the social functions of Villa Grimaldi, this chapter has explored the uses that peace advocates gave to the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park during the World March for Peace and Nonviolence. Through a close reading of four testimonies in the Memoscopio archive, the chapter explored how the meaning of the March and of Villa Grimaldi informed the experiences of local activists.

The history of Villa Grimaldi and the testimonies of March participants speak of the important yet contentious roles that reclaimed sites of trauma play in post-dictatorship societies. Caught between erasure, preservation, and fabricated indifference, this site came to symbolize a larger tension between two paths to reconciliation and democracy: Amnesty and erasure of state brutality versus recognition, prosecution, and reparations (cf., Hite & Collins, 2009). What is at stake symbolically the role of remembrance and amnesia four decades after the coup (Baxter, 2005; Gómez-Barris, 2010; Hidalgo, 2012; Violi, 2012). For this reason, the inclusion of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park in the March’s route was a momentous occasion for many peace advocates. For the marchers represented in the Memoscopio archive, the presence of the March at Villa Grimaldi was an opportunity to explore the site’s significance to their national histories and their personal lives. The Memoscopio project, in turn, created a concrete opportunity for them to publicly share their testimonies. Together, both initiatives invited the marchers to act as agents of memory and imagination whose testimonies enrich collective memory and collective understandings of peacebuilding in post-dictatorship Chile. This was enriched by the ways in which the March and Memoscopio created new frames of reference, new experiences, and new audiences for these local activists.

The present chapter has sought to make four contributions to the study of divided symbols in post-dictatorship societies. First, it highlights the dynamic nature of trauma and memory sites as divided symbols. The case of Villa Grimaldi suggests that divided symbols have dynamic and complex histories, and that the nature, implications, and protagonists of the conflicts they represent can change over time. Acute conflicts over destruction or preservation, for instance, can give way to ongoing tensions between remembrance and indifference that pose important challenges to peace and reconciliation. Second, the chapter brings attention to what happens when local divided symbols are recruited into international peace initiatives. This point is especially relevant to the study of international peace activism and to the development of global cultures of peace that are grounded on local histories and traditions. Third, the chapter brings attention to how the meaning of divided symbols lies in the interaction between macro-level dimensions (e.g., collective memory) and individual-level phenomena (e.g., testimonies). Attention to these interactions can shed light on the transformation of divided symbols over time and on their potential role as peacebuilding tools. Finally, the chapter exemplifies how the testimony genre of political speech can be a generative site of research about how these transformations take place. The work presented here calls for further theorizing about the conditions under which transnational peace initiatives can engage local divided symbols in ways that are both constructive and generative. In any case, the chapter offers a starting point for more systematic research on the social functions of sites of trauma and on their interactions with translocal peace initiatives.