Guest Argentinian Professor

In today's social discourse, whenever the phrase "September 11^th" is spoken, images of the terrorist attacks spur up in people's memory. Yet, as it happened, before 2001, September 11th was just a regular day for some, and for others, say Chilean-Americans, September 11th carried different meaning for an important date in their nation's history.

In 1973, the Chilean army, lead by General Augusto Pinochet, carried out a coup, installing a military dictatorship and effectively ending the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Pinochet was in power for 17 years, throughout which his government's hard line against opponents tortured and killed thousands of Chileans.

Today, Pinochet is seen as a highly controversial figure, still causing tension within Chilean society. This, according to Elizabeth Jelin, is an indication of the way communities that have been exposed to conflict choose, or may be forced, to remember the past. Last week, Jelin, who is a professor of sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, came to Georgia State to give a guest lecture sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Latino/a Studies.

The lecture, titled "The Place of Memories in Historical Processes: Contemporary Experiences in South America," also discussed troubled history in other nations, such as the military violence in Argentina, Brazil, as well as Nazi Germany. "Past conflicts have new salience in today's world," said Jelin, "and there tends to be a notion of normalcy in how history is told."

Whenever a society looks back at social and political struggles in the past, she explained, certain aspects are forgotten or remembered in a different way. An example is what happened in Argentina, a country with troubled military history, and in which in recent years, there have been numerous reports about the "victims" and the oppressors. "    "In the case of Argentina, the reports strengthen the tendency to depoliticize the situation, stressing the innocence and lack of agency of the victims," she said. "It was more a report calling for the humanitarian than the political side."

To understand how the process of memory can stir controversy, one only needs to look at the recent events around the construction of the 9/11 memorial in New York. Initially, there was a plan to build an International Freedom Center, aimed at highlighting the historic human struggle in search for freedom. Yet Governor George Pataki evicted the proposed museum from the World Trade Center site before construction ever began.

"I strongly believe in this nation's core principle of freedom and I personally believe that the celebration of freedom is not inconsistent with the goals of memorializing our nearly 3,000 lost heroes. The creation of an institution that would show the world our unity and our resolve to preserve freedom in the wake of the horrific attacks is a noble pursuit," he said in a statement. "But freedom should unify us. This Center has not."

In a statement released by the IFC, it lamented the governor's decision and saw it as a "significant blow to the idea of a living memorial that emerged from a comprehensive public process; the loss of a museum of freedom at the place where freedom was so brutally challenged; the failure to accept the offer of nine great universities to offer cultural programming on freedom issues in the heart of Lower Manhattan; and this setback to one of the most ambitious and promising service and civic engagement programs in this country."

As of now, the museum declared itself out of business and said it did not intend to pursue another location.

The issue of memory in conflict is closely related to human rights and according to Jelin, during the eighties, the introduction of the "human rights paradigm" into the process of remembering events such as the violence during military governments in countries like Chile and Argentina, assigned perceivable rights to human beings, but also, assigned the institutional responsibility of respecting and guaranteeing these rights to the state. "Which means, this in a sense, it is a foundation for the possibility of building a democratic state. It's an ideological foundation, whether it happens or not is a different matter," she said.

The paradigm of human rights, as applied to the way people remember events in the past, depoliticizes these events. What happens, she explained, is a trade off. The larger the scope of conceived basic rights, the less space there is for political debate. Except when the human rights struggle is seen as a political one, she said.

 During the nineties, the notion of history in South American countries with a troubled past, started to reappear as a matter that still caused tension and controversy.

"Things started to boil again, and I would say, the most important thing was the emergence of a second generation," she said. When the new generation that did not live through the violent period of the past starts asking questions, much like the U.S. movement in 1968, "when kids born after the war, who were in their twenties and in universities and were asking questions that the older generation didn't know how to answer because the older generation were silencing or telling a narrative that the young didn't accept.

"This is something that was happening in our countries [in South America] during the nineties, and this is the young people asking new questions," she said. This constitutes a challenge to the notion of human rights and during the nineties; the concept itself was being transformed to include the gay factions, the indigenous factions, and other marginalized factions of society.