Memory Frameworks: Dictatorship and Transition in the Countries of the Southern Cone

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the countries of the Southern Cone underwent extended political conflict in which military and paramilitary forces were pitted against leftist resistance. Transnational developments linked to the Cold War generated a period of unprecedented suffering in the region in the form of clandestine detentions, persecution, torture, forced disappearance, murder, exile and other kinds of human rights violations. To better appreciate how such a ‘cinema of memory’ has flourished in the region, I will start with an overview of the military dictatorships in each country and underscore the inherently transnational character of these developments, as well as their insertion in specific national contexts. Far from being a comprehensive survey, my aim is to offer a basic understanding of the rise and consequences of the military regimes across the region before I move on to describe the various interpretative frameworks that have arisen in response to these conflicted pasts. These competing memory frameworks constitute the ideological foundation for the modes of cinematic remembering discussed in subsequent chapters.