ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the inclusion of site in any exploration of trauma and its alleviation, for responsibility towards those involved beyond the survivors themselves, and for the centrality of the political milieu which follows the apparent overthrow of evil. It is concerned with the correspondence between the profound trauma experienced by Chileans, and sites of imprisonment, interrogation, torture, disappearance and execution since Pinochet's seizure of power in 1973. A trauma site may be made brutal, or serene, or, as we shall see, both of the things. But at every site lies conflict, and the possibility of further violence. Indonesian Hindus had powerful rituals to cleanse the places of traumatic public death from which souls who died in the Bali bombing might be released. No such ambiguity troubles the political organisations whose members were tortured and killed in the 1970s. For most of the twentieth century the United States heritage industry suffered from slavery-amnesia.
