front cover of The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile
The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile
Gregory Weeks
University of Alabama Press, 2003

A thorough account of the struggle between civilian and military factions for political control of Chile after Pinochet's dictatorship.

Why have political leaders of developing and authoritarian nations run into so many obstacles as they attempt to establish civilian supremacy over armed forces in the democratization of their countries? This is the question Gregory Weeks poses in his study of Chile from 1990 onward. He explains how the Chilean military has maintained a high level of political influence in the tumultuous aftermath of dictatorial rule by Army General Augusto Pinochet, thus confounding a smooth transition to civilian authority.

Even after the reins of power were officially handed over in 1990, Pinochet continued as commander in chief of the army until 1998, when he took a lifetime seat in the Senate and led the military’s efforts to retain its legal and constitutional prerogatives while limiting civilian oversight of military affairs. This assertion of guardianship by the military has produced a political tug-of-war between it and civilian authorities the two contenders for political primacy in Chile. In addition to recounting the historical background of this situation, Weeks’s study examines where conflict between these two contenders has been most productive and accord has been highest. His findings suggest that formal contacts, conducted through formal institutions, have been the most conducive to civil supremacy and, therefore, the consolidation of democracy.

Based on interviews, government documents, military journals, newspapers, and other archival sources, The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile describes how presidents, military officers, members of Congress, and judges have interacted since the end of the military regime. With implications for conflict resolution studies, this book will be valuable for Chileanists and
policymakers and analysts of Latin American regimes, as well as academic libraries, military historians, social scientists, and students and scholars of Latin American history and politics.

Gregory Weeks is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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front cover of The Pinochet Generation
The Pinochet Generation
The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century
John R. Bawden
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Weaves together the dramatic history of Chile’s complex and fraught relationship to its armed services by thorough analysis of the experiences of General Augusto Pinochet’s generation of soldiers and the beliefs and traditions that motivated their actions

Chilean soldiers in the twentieth century appear in most historical accounts, if they appear at all, as decontextualized figures or simply as a single man: Augusto Pinochet. In his incisive study The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century, John R. Bawden provides compelling new insights into the era and posits that Pinochet and his men were responsible for two major transformations in Chile’s constitution as well as the political and economic effects that followed.
 
Determined to refocus what he sees as a “decontextualized paucity” of historical information on Chile’s armed forces, Bawden offers a new perspective to explain why the military overthrew the government in 1973 as well as why and how Chile slowly transitioned back to a democracy at the end of the 1980s. Standing apart from other views, Bawden insists that the Chilean military’s indigenous traditions and customs did more than foreign influences to mold their beliefs and behavior leading up to the 1973 coup of Salvador Allende.
 
Drawing from defense publications, testimonial literature, and archival materials in both the United States and Chile, The Pinochet Generation characterizes the lens through which Chilean officers saw the world, their own actions, and their place in national history. This thorough analysis of the Chilean services’ history, education, values, and worldview shows how this military culture shaped Chilean thinking and behavior, shedding light on the distinctive qualities of Chile’s armed forces, the military’s decision to depose Allende, and the Pinochet dictatorship’s resilience, repressiveness, and durability.
 
Bawden’s account of Chile’s vast and complex military history of the twentieth century will appeal to political scientists, historians, faculty and graduate students interested in Latin America and its armed forces, students of US–Latin American diplomacy, and those interested in issues of human rights.
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front cover of Reckoning with Pinochet
Reckoning with Pinochet
The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006
Steve J. Stern
Duke University Press, 2010
Reckoning with Pinochet is the first comprehensive account of how Chile came to terms with General Augusto Pinochet’s legacy of human rights atrocities. An icon among Latin America’s “dirty war” dictators, Pinochet had ruled with extreme violence while building a loyal social base. Hero to some and criminal to others, the general cast a long shadow over Chile’s future. Steve J. Stern recounts the full history of Chile’s democratic reckoning, from the negotiations in 1989 to chart a post-dictatorship transition; through Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998; the thirtieth anniversary, in 2003, of the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende; and Pinochet’s death in 2006. He shows how transnational events and networks shaped Chile’s battles over memory, and how the Chilean case contributed to shifts in the world culture of human rights.

Stern’s analysis integrates policymaking by elites, grassroots efforts by human rights victims and activists, and inside accounts of the truth commissions and courts where top-down and bottom-up initiatives met. Interpreting solemn presidential speeches, raucous street protests, interviews, journalism, humor, cinema, and other sources, he describes the slow, imperfect, but surprisingly forceful advance of efforts to revive democratic values through public memory struggles, despite the power still wielded by the military and a conservative social base including the investor class. Over time, resourceful civil-society activists and select state actors won hard-fought, if limited, gains. As a result, Chileans were able to face the unwelcome past more honestly, launch the world’s first truth commission to examine torture, ensnare high-level perpetrators in the web of criminal justice, and build a public culture of human rights. Stern provides an important conceptualization of collective memory in the wake of national trauma in this magisterial work of history.

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