ABSTRACT
Paine is a small agricultural community located 40 km south of Santiago, Chile's capital city. At the time of a military coup that overthrew the elected government and imposed a lasting dictatorial regime in September 1973, one thousand people lived here. Violent repression against supporters of the overthrown government was unleashed across the country. When it reached Paine, it resulted in the selective arrest and subsequent execution or disapperance of 70 local men. They were the husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons, and brothers of those who remained and those who were still to come. A survey was conducted by the Association of Relatives of Disappeared and Executed Political Detainees of Paine in order to find out how many and who they were; the survey found that there were 1,400 relatives of victims across the generations. Built in 2004 to commemorate the 1973 victims, the Memorial de Paine is found on a narrow stretch of land located next to the highway that connects Paine with Santiago. One thousand wooden posts of various heights stand forming a topography that suggests the diverse nature of the area's landscape and people. Among the one thousand, 70 posts are missing. In the empty spaces, the widows, children, grandchildren and other relatives of the victims have created personal mosaics as part of a project of collective memory. 1 Sara Ramírez, one of the memorial's guides, had not been born when her father, Pedro Luis Ramirez Torres, was murdered by the military. This visual essay is constructed from still images and fragments of an interview with Sara Ramírez conducted in Paine in 2010. 2 The essay's images and text seek to elicit a reflexive and aesthetic response in the reader, calling their attention to the traumatic experience of the relatives and communities of political detainees who became victims of selective kidnapping, torture, summary execution, and disappearance. The visual-textual arrangement particularly focuses on the complex tension between no memory and re-constructed memory in the second and third generations of victims, who have grown up in a disfigured social landscape fatally marked by loss, silence, lack, fear and guilt. Of special significance for debates regarding 'postmemory' is the category 'unborn children', which emerged in the course of the interview, as used by Ramírez to refer to children of executed or missing political detainees born after their parent's death or disappearance. 3
