Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
With your next book, Steve Stern’s Battling for Heart and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, is there this idea that people’s memories at the time were manipulated?
Absolutely. This is an extraordinarily moving book. It tells the story of people who, in the most appalling circumstances, tried to defend liberty. Not people who were necessarily very much on the left, but just ordinary decent democrats. And what he does very well is to say that both sides are trying to construct a memory. So you have these two ideologies in conflict and people remember what’s appropriate to their set of ideas rather than having an objective view of what was going on.
He focuses on key episodes, like the assassination attempt on Pinochet in 1986 and what that meant. There is a great deal on the church. Although the church in Chile is a very conservative institution now, it had a strong line on human rights, and the opposition in Chile for ten years was the church. They were very important, not just because they protected individuals but also because they stood up and said what Pinochet did could not be justified. Stern writes about the church lawyers who struggled to keep the human rights issues central and became the core of what the opposition stood for in the Pinochet regime.
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Alan Angell is Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and was formerly University Lecturer in Latin American Politics and Director of the Latin American Centre. His first published work was a study of the union movement in Chile published during the Allende government. He was made a Gran Oficial of the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins in 2007 for academic work on the country and for support for human rights during the Pinochet dictatorship. He has published widely, not only on Chilean politics but on the left in Latin America and aspects of social policy.
