Cartography of the Chilean exile in Baden-Württemberg: the story of the solidarity network

Abstract

ABSTRACT The horror of the military coup in Chile motivated a massive international solidarity network. One of them was composed of self-organized citizens, NGOs, and Chilean exiles in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This movement was a response to affected individuals facing the lack of immediate measures and policies of the FRG’s government towards exile and human rights violation victims in Chile. This article offers a cartography that traces key locations of such solidarity network: places where solidarity events took place, where the subjects involved reside, and their transits; with a special but not exclusive focus on the state of Baden-Württemberg, in the federal south. Considering the historical moment when this took place – Cold War scenario: Germany divided between the two ruling blocks – the cartography shows how this movement was a way of subverting that geopolitical order. This work, therefore, is a new contribution to the studies of solidarity and, at the same time, it links those studies with the field of STS, by presenting a cartography as a visual dispositif that documents the imbrications of solidarity, affections, politics, culture, Germans, and Chileans on a given territory.