Memoria, miedo y refugio

This article analyses the memory of the coup d'état and the civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) as it was formulated in Chillán around 1998, a provincial city largely absent from Chilean historiography on memory and human rights. The analysis draws on five in-depth interviews conducted for an undergraduate thesis in History and Geography Education (Universidad del Bío-Bío), on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coup and only eight years after the formal end of the dictatorship. These testimonies are revisited here more than fifty years after the events. The twofold temporal distance –between events and interview, between interview and analysis— is embraced as an epistemological condition of the study. Drawing on Chilean recent-history scholarship (Moulian, Lechner, Salazar, Garcés, Illanes, Milos, Cancino) and Latin American memory studies (Halbwachs, Pollak, Jelin), the testimonies are organised around three axes: the differentiated temporality of the coup according to social position and gender; fear as an everyday structure which, in 1998, still dictated what could be said; and the local Church as a space of refuge, denunciation and memory. The central finding is that, in a small city where victims, perpetrators and neighbours shared streets, surnames and trajectories, the memory of the period is organised as an ongoing negotiation between the duty to remember and a learned fear. The Diocese emerges as a specific node of that memory.