UCLA Center for the Study of Women

On Dec 10, 2006, General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s notorious dictator from 1974 to 1990 and commander of the military until 1998, died. On the streets of Santiago, two counterposing groups assembled: Pinochet supporters on the one side who cheered his memory as the savior of the Chilean economy, and on the other, those who celebrated the real possibility that Chile would finally break through its culture of silence, liberate buried memories of Pinochet’s reign of violence and repression, and reinvent Chilean culture with human rights at its core.