Chile, history of a memory: from the General’s shadow to remembering and justice

Abstract

This article presents an exploratory research of the history of the memory of the Chilean dictatorship and transition to democracy in the French press (1990-2003). The different aspects of remembering such as forgetting, silencing, changing, substituting, overlapping, constructing/destroying the myth of the dictator, are traced as well as the interaction between the discourses of different historical periods as events evolved. It is showed that collective memory was a principal actor among political groups during the transition. The Chilean case offers many points of comparison, although implicit in this presentation, with other dictatorships and transitions in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, especially, the case of Spain.