Lifting the Sentence of Secrecy in Chile
Last edited Tue Sep 2, 2014, 04:13 AM - Edit history (1)
Lifting the Sentence of Secrecy in Chile
Aug 21 2014
Alexia Richardson
As the number of Chileans with direct memories of the Pinochet dictatorship dwindles, the country continues to face the question of how it commemorates and deals with the past. Like in other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Guatemala, archival issues form part of such debates, since whether or not state security files are made public affects what it is possible to know about past repressive regimes. Human rights organizations across Latin America have demanded that their governments open the files, using social media tools to network, raise awareness, and pressure authorities.
In 2014—40 years after the dictatorship and nearly 25 years since the first truth commission—a human rights collective called Londres 38 launched a campaign known as “No Más Archivos Secretos” (No More Secret Archives) to open up secret (hidden, non-public, denied) archives related to the Chilean dictatorship. The campaign has been bearing fruit, illustrating the intersections of physical and virtual spaces in a post-dictatorship society.
Londres 38 was a former detention, torture, and extermination center in central Santiago, but is now open to the public as a memorial for victims of the dictatorship, run by the human rights collective of the same name. One of Londres 38’s major tasks is to highlight the importance of free access to archives in the defense of human rights, and of civil rights in general. It has pushed to raise awareness of the existence of secret archives in Chile, putting pressure on the State to open these documents to the public.
There are three main groups of archives highlighted by Londres 38 as secret: first, those of Chile’s two official truth commissions, which judges ordered sealed for a period of 50 years; second, the archives of the German enclave Colonia Dignidad; and third, those of the armed forces, police and intelligence services.
More:
http://nacla.org/news/2014/8/25/lifting-sentence-secrecy-chile
