Culture and Politics in Allende’s Chile

In the early 1990s, neoliberal ideologues declared a complete break of the present from the past, proclaiming the “end of history” in Chile and the end of projects outside the margins of the neoliberal market logic. The military coup of 1973 in Chile, which overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende, violently restructured the Chilean social body through massive detentions, tortures, and disappearances of political actors. With reason, emergent scholarship on General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship grappled with issues of political violence and its gendered dimensions, the economic consequences of neoliberal reform for workers and trade unions, in addition to the manner in which such reforms restructured the forms of political participation and citizenship, and issues of individual and collective trauma and memory. However, many such studies often posited the military dictatorship as a radical rupture from Chile’s long, democratic traditions and, by extension, presented the...