Sexual Political Violence and State Terrorism in Chile (Review)

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In 2018, the Feminist Tsunami prompted new research on sexual violence and human rights violations carried out under the Chilean dictatorship between 1973 and 1990. Although cases of sexual political violence, rape, and torture had been reported by political prisoners, especially women, since 1973 and were thus known to be part of the dictatorship’s repressive practices, the justice system did not deal with these issues in the first decade of the return to democracy. In 2003, 40 years on from the coup that installed the Pinochet regime, the launch of a second truth commission, known as the Valech Commission, renewed discussions on dictatorship-era crimes against humanity. In the second decade of the 21st Century, the latest research and studies on sexual political violence appeared as part of the new wave of Feminist studies.

Jocelyn Maldonado Garay’s new book, Violencia política sexual y terrorismo de Estado en la dictadura civil-militar en Chile. La genealogía oscura del neoliberalismo argues that beneath state terrorism and sexual violence imposed upon people’s bodies lies the neoliberal logic of dispossession. In colonial times and during the construction of the capitalist nation-state, state violence took the form of wars, rape, sexual abuse, and sometimes Indigenous genocides. While state terrorism mobilized memories and practices of these previous eras of violence, the neoliberal governance embraced by the Chilean dictatorship also installed a sophisticated model of dispossession that exerted both material and symbolic violence on individual bodies, collective social groups, and society. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship, as dynamics of repression became more complex, the sexualization of violence reflected just how profound punishment and the imposition of authority could get.

Sexual political violence, therefore, is a very specific form of physical violence, inflicted on individual bodies as a way of materializing through torture the rules, discipline, and norms imposed on the entire society. This is the author’s most provocative argument because it suggests a meaningful connection between sexual torture and the authoritarian system that supported and enabled Chilean neoliberalism.

Maldonado Garay develops the argument in three chapters. Chapter 1 explains the structural nature of sexual political violence and its relationship with different systems of domination, rooted in the gendered and racialized violence of colonialism. Maldonado Garay analyzes cases of rape and systematic sexual violence within the context of armed conflicts in racialized societies, such as the Chinese-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century and the Vietnam War. Surprisingly, the author does not analyze Latin American cases such as those of Guatemala and Peru, where instances of racialized sexual violence in armed conflict are well-documented.

Chapter 2 deals with Chile’s contemporary history, detailing how the popular masses historically rose up and their relationship with the state and its repressive system. This period of social construction of popular politics from below came to a shocking end in 1973 with the coup, led by General Augusto Pinochet, that ousted the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende. Maldonado Garay also explains in this chapter how paramilitary and police institutions worked together to politically persecute and surveil opponents of Pinochet’s dictatorship.

In Chapter 3, Maldonado Garay argues that, in the post-dictatorship period, liberty and equality are based on individuals' positions and possibilities in the market economy. In the first two decades of democracy, this redefinition of basic political concepts, combined with the continuation of the Pinochet regime’s neoliberal model, weakened and demobilized social movements that had opposed and resisted the dictatorship. In agreement with most critical perspectives on the transition to democracy, Maldonado Garay argues that the post-dictatorship governments continued Pinochet’s legacy by maintaining most of the dictatorship’s social and economic policies.

However, Maldonado Garay focused too much on the neoliberal model without adequately analyzing the relations between neoliberalism and human rights issues. She does not show how transitional justice reinforced the nature of human rights as political rights and does not deal with human rights violations under neoliberalism or how this economic model produced social rights violations. The book could have benefited from a discussion of extreme poverty, for example, or how a weak and almost inexistent social security system fosters social and political instability that, in the end, could also violate social and human rights by endangering people’s existence and material forms of survival.

Furthermore, the author does not connect these points about neoliberalism with the issue of sexual political violence. I think Maldonado Garay is still working with frameworks of rights that separate human rights, which are understood as civil and political rights, from social, economic, cultural, environmental, and gender rights.

The final two chapters, Chapters 4 and 5, display most of the empirical background of this book, primarily drawing from testimonies collected by the author through interviews and testimonies published in the Valech report or independent publications. Maldonado Garay describes the experiences of both women and men who survived sexual political violence. She stresses the disciplinary nature of torture as a disarticulation of the self through the humiliation and exposure of the body. These subordinated and dominated bodies were subjected to sexual violence as an extension of the authoritarian context of the dictatorship and as an extension of the patriarchal and colonial power expressed in their feminization and racialization.

The book’s conclusions trace the occurrence of political sexual violence in the present through examples from the mobilizations led by high school students between 2011 and 2019. Maldonado Garay emphasizes the need to theorize state violence against civilians in the last two decades of democracy in relation to the long-term process of the development of neoliberalism. Making these connections, she argues, will help us to understand how these continuities inform current forms of violence and sexual political violence, carried out by police forces from the dictatorship to the present day.

In terms of gender and the analysis of sexual political violence, Maldonado Garay mainly focuses on women, although she also narrates male experiences of sexual torture. She states that she considers LGBTQIA+ people’s experiences with state terrorism but does not analyze them under the concept of sexual political violence. I think she missed an excellent opportunity to make a complex analysis of a different trend of sexual violence under the dictatorship that could have illuminated the diverse levels of gender discourses, norms, and disciplinary violence in sexualized and feminized queer bodies. In this way, Maldonado Garay works under binary concepts of bodies and sex, and her research essentially reiterates what has been said on these issues.

The long-term continuities she constructs regarding colonial and capitalist violence are also problematic because these continuities are broad, long, and empirically weak, based on an outdated and insufficient bibliography. The linkage to contemporary forms of neoliberal violence and sexual political violence is theoretically suggestive but could be better developed empirically. Methodologically, the author largely relies on published interviews and other information collected in the Valech report; she could have developed a more vital methodological reflection on how cautious we need to be when using secondary sources.

Nonetheless, this book contributes to current debates about sexual violence during the dictatorship that need to be addressed from different approaches and disciplinary backgrounds.

New research paths on the implications of sexual violence under the dictatorship are deconstructing binary conceptions of violence, considering that it was not just imposed on female and male bodies but also queer ones. By expanding the framework of analysis of sexual and political violence from binary and cis-hetero bodies, we can also extend the model of state violence during Pinochet’s years by placing sexual political violence in public space and not just in the clandestine detention centers. The sexual, political, state violence against queer people was displayed in public places in the name of police controlling transgressions of public morality and order.

Thus, we can expand the concept of what is considered political violence beyond the repression of leftist partisans. This approach destabilizes the whole model of what constitutes “the political” under dictatorship, the extension of state repression, and the most established concepts of victims. Today, LGBTQIA+ social movements are demanding that their experiences and memories of sexual and political violence during and after the dictatorship be remembered as part of the history of human rights violations in Chile. This book fails to participate in this narrative-transforming debate. Regardless of that, and since we are still trying to understand the contextual and structural meaning of state sexual political violence, this volume is a notable addition to those ongoing conversations.

Claudio Javier Barrientos is associate professor of History and Director of the Observatory of Recent History of Chile and Latin America at Diego Portales University in Chile.

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