Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored ed. by Russ Davidson and Leslie Blaugrund Kim (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored ed. by Russ Davidson and Leslie Blaugrund Kim
• Marjorie Agosin (bio)

Russ Davidson & Leslie Blaugrund Kim eds., Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored (Museum of New Mexico Press 2023), ISBN 9780890136751, 240 pages.

Sometimes, one encounters a book that is both extraordinary in its physical beauty and in its poignant content. I have been fortunate to receive such a gift and be given the opportunity to review it for Human Rights Quarterly. Carefully edited by Russ Davidson and Leslie Blaugrund Kim, Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored is a pictorial essay collection that serves as a companion to an accompanying art exhibition curated by New Mexico’s Albuquerque Museum.

The book’s release corresponds with a historic anniversary—July 2023 marks fifty years since the 1973 Chilean coup d’état in which General Augusto Pinochet deposed the freely-elected President Salvador Allende. The subsequent seventeen-year-long regime of Pinochet turned Chile, once an exemplary democratic nation, into a brutal dictatorship ruled by fear and censorship. Dictators and the Disappeared addresses the military junta of Chile as well as that of other countries in the Southern Cone such as Argentina and Uruguay.

The introductory essay by Andrew Connors, director of the Albuquerque Museum, is a profound gateway into the collection. Connors poses vital questions about the nature of authoritarian regimes and offers reflections on dictators contemporary to those in Latin America, particularly Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Connors’ piece explores the nature of evil and the willingness of civil society to engage in obedience towards totalitarian regimes.

The writings of Alicia Partnoy, a poet and human rights activist, are compelling in a myriad of ways. Partnoy was herself a survivor of the Argentine military dictatorship, kidnapped and imprisoned for years until her exile in 1979. Reading Partnoy’s piece, one can hear her voice as she intimately describes her time as a desaparecida—hidden from the world, blindfolded, and identified only by a number. Partnoy’s lyrical essay describes not only the brutality of political oppression but also presents paths towards potential recovery. She discusses the importance of community-building as a form of restoring justice and how activism can be a collective expression of nations.

The second essay in this collection, penned by Nancy Morris, shares Partnoy’s persistence as it characterizes activism as a way of being in the world. Morris describes the social spaces that emerged in Chile to subvert and resist Pinochet’s rule and provide environments for free and creative living. Artistic expression has often been a means of both dissent and healing for the victims of political persecution. Such was the case with the mothers of the disappeared in Chile, who sewed arpilleras out of the clothing of their missing children, creating anonymous patchworks that shared Pinochet’s crimes with the world. Rising to prominence during the Allende government, musical groups of the Nueva Canción movement also had to grapple with the [End Page 162] political and artistic repression brought on by the 1973 coup d’état. Musicians like Víctor Jara and bands like Barroco Andino and Quilapayún were forced to create new, defiant strategies that would allow others to listen to their music despite strict government censorship.

The prose of Francisco Letelier, the son of late Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, has touched me deeply. Letelier’s father Orlando was brutally murdered in a car bombing attack in Washington, D.C. in 1976, carried out by Pinochet’s secret police. Letelier speaks with tenderness and sorrow about his adolescence, family life, and present work as a muralist in Los Angeles. Letelier also works as a teacher, devoting his time to hosting workshops in Los Angeles and throughout the country. His murals have a raw innocence and speak truth to the fate of bereft children who have lost their parents. The personal voice as well as the public voice of Letelier’s essay are a testimony to historical memory and its relentless pursuit of justice.

Michael Nutkiewicz’s essay confronts the historic complicity of United States (U.S.) government officials in supporting dictatorships abroad while also maintaining torture...