Escrever o passado, pensar o presente: historiadores e a batalha pela memória da ditadura militar chilena

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the main works written by Chilean historians about the period of the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990) and to identify how the elaboration of these narratives on trauma, memory and forgetting left marks in the writing of the country's history. For this, we think the Chilean historiographic production delimited in four stages, in which we seek to highlight the main authors of each proposed cut, as well as their places of production. In the first one we offer a contextualization with our reading of the events that led to the coup, in order to make a clearer picture about events mentioned by the analyzed historians and try to demonstrate that the cross-linking of the context with the narratives produced are not immune to the past memory disputes narrated. In this way, we will present three events that we consider to be decisive for some methodological changes in Chilean historiography: the military coup and its extension, the victory of the Concertación and its balanced version of the coup and the arrest of Pinochet in London. The axis of analysis, therefore, is to present as the urgency of the "memory duty" on the Chilean traumatic past echoed in the works of Chilean historians, especially with regard to the structural approach, the focus on truth, the social function of history and justice.