Overwriting Pinochet: Undoing the Culture of Fear in Chile

Abstract

bout eight months after the coup of 11 September 1973, General A August0 Pinochet gave a speech to what seems to have been the founding gathering of a new state entity, the National Secretariat for Women, established by the new junta and headed by Lucia Hiriartde Pinochet, the general’s wife.’ To a highly selective audience, Pinochet proposed to “lay out the thought of the authorities with respect to the role corresponding to women in the plans of the government over which I preside, and the new state that it proposes to install in the future .”2 It takes little more than Pinochet’s opening sentence to grasp the raw authoritarianism that characterized the military regime, especially in its early, triumphal, and extremely violent period. People have roles that “correspond” to them; ”thought” is in the hands of the authorities, who do not include women; citizenship consists, as Pinochet loved to say, in either ordering or obeying, and only those who do one or the other well are useful to the state. “In Chile,” the speech continues, women have always been “active and effective collaborators in the lives of men”-so Pinochet codes the role that women played in bringing