Introduction: On the evening of May 29, 2018, around one hundred protesters converged on the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Santiago. Inside the hotel, a comparable number of supporters of the Pinochet civilian-military dictatorship (1973-1990) gathered to launch a book by Álvaro Corbalán, a former agent who belonged to Pinochet’s intelligence service. By 2018 Corbalán had been in prison for twenty-seven years and was serving more than 150 for his role in human rights violations. In the book, he defends the 1973 coup as the salvation of Chile from chaos and ruin, and military rule as the reconstruction of the nation. Regarding the specific charges against him, Corbalán affirms his innocence, but in general defends the use of torture and blames the “terrorists” for making it necessary. He rejects the findings of Chile’s truth and reconciliation reports – the 1991 Rettig Report and the 2004 Valech Report – and frames the number of dead as modest, while calling for “definitive reconciliation.” He uses quotation marks to refer to “human rights” and describes them as a legal fiction, while also referring to convicted perpetrators as political prisoners and victims of human rights violations. He laments the “cowardice” of regime supporters, singling out right-wing politicians and the army for having abandoned imprisoned soldiers. He insists he has the “right to want to communicate” his side of the story and rails against what he sees as “pluralism” and “relativism” in contemporary Chilean society that have blurred the distinction between good and evil, truth and lies.
Corbalán’s book and its launch briefly became a focal point for Chile’s broader memory struggle. The narrative of salvation and reconstruction, the denials, and the sense of victimhood were not new, but they did form part of a strident, public and unrepentant resurgence of Pinochetista memory that employed the “logic and lexicon” of human rights. The memories of perpetrators in different Latin American contexts have re-emerged in the face of truth-telling processes and advances in transitional justice, at times adopting the tools of victim-oriented memories. In Chile, too, shifts in transitional justice proved a catalyst for the mobilization of the “military family,” that is, retired officers, their families, and civilian supporters. This chapter examines that mobilization and its relationship with human rights as an idea, a strategy, and a language. It tracks the emergence of the discourse of human rights as a fiction as the military family felt increasingly vulnerable and isolated in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it reveals how, encouraged by the election of right-wing president Sebastián Piñera in 2010 and public clashes with protesters, they began to speak of their own violated rights and freedom of expression. From 2013, amid reinvigorated calls to end impunity and renewed threats to Pinochet’s political and social legacy, the military family adopted human rights as a legal strategy, arguing imprisoned soldiers were victims of human rights violations. These understandings of “human rights” did not neatly replace one another, but rather they coexisted. Within this mix, speaking the same language of human rights as victims groups established a relativism and facilitated a sense of “courage” that helped drive the public resurgence of Pinochetista memory and denials of his regime’s abuses.
Citation: Leith Passmore, “Fiction, Freedom and Relativism: Human Rights in Pinochetista Memory in Post-Pinochet Chile (1998-2019),” in Cynthia E. Milton and Michael J. Lazzara eds., How the Military Remembers: Countermemories and the Challenges to Human Rights in Latin America, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2025.
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