Battling for Hearts and Minds

Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973–1988

by Steve J. Stern

Published by: Duke University Press

Series: Latin America Otherwise

Imprint: Duke University Press Books

576 Pages, 36 photos, 2 maps

Hardcover
9780822338277
Published: September 2006

£128.00

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Praise

Battling for Hearts and Minds is the story of the dramatic struggle to define collective memory in Chile during the violent, repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, from the 1973 military coup in which he seized power through his defeat in a 1988 plebiscite. Steve J. Stern provides a riveting narration of Chile’s political history during this period. At the same time, he analyzes Chileans’ conflicting interpretations of events as they unfolded. Drawing on testimonios, archives, Truth Commission documents, radio addresses, memoirs, and written and oral histories, Stern identifies four distinct perspectives on life and events under the dictatorship. He describes how some Chileans viewed the regime as salvation from ruin by Leftists (the narrative favored by Pinochet’s junta), some as a wound repeatedly reopened by the state, others as an experience of persecution and awakening, and still others as a closed book, a past to be buried and forgotten.

In the 1970s, Chilean dissidents were lonely “voices in the wilderness” insisting that state terror and its victims be recognized and remembered. By the 1980s, the dissent had spread, catalyzing a mass movement of individuals who revived public dialogue by taking to the streets, creating alternative media, and demanding democracy and human rights. Despite long odds and discouraging defeats, people of conscience-victims of the dictatorship, priests, youth, women, workers, and others-overcame fear and succeeded in creating truthful public memories of state atrocities. Recounting both their efforts and those of the regime’s supporters to win the battle for Chileans’ hearts and minds, Stern shows how profoundly the struggle to create memories, to tell history, matters.

Battling for Hearts and Minds is the second volume in the trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. The third book will examine Chileans’ efforts to achieve democracy while reckoning with Pinochet’s legacy.

“Battling for Hearts and Minds is an extraordinary narrative and analysis of the ways conflictual interpretations and memories were framed and built in the Pinochet years.”-Paul W. Drake, coeditor of State and Society in Conflict: Comparative Perspectives on Andean Crises

“Battling for Hearts and Minds is the first comprehensive history of the struggle to define collective memory in Pinochet’s Chile and one of the first of its kind about Latin America in general.”-Peter Winn, editor of Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002

“By probing the dark undercurrents which shaped the Chilean dictatorship, as well as the wondrous ways in which the resistance managed to defeat Pinochet, Steve J. Stern has given us an indispensable guide to recent Chilean history.”-Ariel Dorfman

“[A] brilliantly crafted, deeply layered narrative of the interaction between memory and history. . . . It is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of authoritarian rule and democratic resurgence in the Cold War period of Latin American history. Given its conceptual resonances and unique methodology it is sure to be of interest to students of historical memory anywhere in the world.”
- James A. Wood (The Latin Americanist)
“[A] remarkable tale of the inner contest between rival public memories-those of the regime’s backers and those of its detractors. Going well beyond some of the (now conventional) reliance upon testimonials, Stern follows the hopes and heartaches of civic activists, teachers, officers, and churchgoers as they organized themselves around real and symbolic struggles during the dictatorship’s most brutal years and its eventual demise.”
- Jeremy Adelman (Journal of Interdisciplinary History)
“[T]his is an impressive synthesis based on prodigious research. . . . His focus on social memory, which allows him to consider the moral and subjective elements of human experience, together with his historian’s sensitivity to indeterminacy and human agency make this a compelling interpretation of how Chileans lived the Pinochet years.”
- Alexander Wilde (Left History)
“As a superb study of contemporary Chilean history, Stern’s two volumes are certain to become classics for all those interested in the social, political, and economic evolution of Chile. Yet, Stern’s extraordinary accounts of how memory is built, signified, and reconstructed-as a dependent and independent variable, as methodologically rigorous jargon would have it-can also provide a useful and attractive framework for those interested in how memory is, ultimately and within constraints, created and re-created.”
- Patricio Navia (Latin American Research Review)
“In a classic oral historian’s fashion, Stern shares stories and voices of the seldom heard. . . . Battling for Hearts and Minds also provides meticulous explanations of how Stern gathered and assessed distinct memory strands. In this 500-page work, almost 100 pages are notes, and Stern includes a thoughtful essay on primary sources as well as oral research as methodology. Combined with his lucid prose, this makes the volume quite valuable as a model for young researchers as well as for classroom use.”
- Katherine Hite (Journal of Latin American Studies)
‘Accessibly narrated and based on extensive archival research and ethnographic interviews, Stern's volume is certain to appear on many course syllabi in the near future. . . . [He] manages, quite adeptly, to add a dimension of complexity to concepts like censorship that are often discussed in rather unambiguous and generalized terms both in scholarly work on dictatorship and in university classrooms. . . . Stern brilliantly traces the evolution of memory as a critical category in Pinochet's Chile and helps us to see how the scripting of the past became a fierce political battle that would last long into the years of transition.”
- Michael J. Lazzara (The Americas)