In the context of post-dictatorship Latin America, recent memory studies have looked beyond the binary of perpetrators and victims to explore questions of complicity, collaboration and indifference among a wide variety of actors. Rooted in cultural studies, they draw primarily on fiction, testimony and documentary film. We still lack deeply researched historical accounts of complex in-between actors, perhaps none more so than the conscripted soldier. Leith Passmore provides one such account. In this richly researched, deeply ethnographic case study, Passmore reconstructs the emergence of an ex-conscript movement in Chile (2006–15) and their historical experiences inside Augusto Pinochet's military (1973–90).
On one level, the book is analytically rooted in the present. It opens by exploring the early twenty-first-century memory moment when ex-conscript demands first surfaced. Drawing on government and military records, legal cases, published and unpublished testimonies, as well as interviews and participant observation with ex-conscript groups (2011–15), Passmore documents the fashioning of a collective memory narrative centred on rupture and how that narrative of victimhood interacts with the wider memory struggles of post-transition Chile. Chapter 1 examines the myriad of reasons why conscripts chose not to speak about their experiences. Their relationship to Chile's memory struggles over accounting for human-rights violations is fraught with the possibility of falling into the categories of witness, participant, victim, or all three (p. 12). While silence is often interpreted by human-rights organisations as evidence of their complicity, Passmore argues that most conscripts were not directly involved in human-rights violations (p. 40). Chapter 2 centres on the ‘economics of victimhood’ within the ex-conscripts’ movement. In 2004 Chile's second official truth commission, the Valech Report, recognised for the first time the systematic torture and abuse of political prisoners, and provided compensation in the form of healthcare, pensions and scholarships. Its publication provided the nascent ex-conscript movement with a language of rights and a strategy for seeking recognition as victims. In post-dictatorship Chile, the definition of victimhood as a legal category has been tied to a political identity that marked individuals as targets of political violence by the state. By contrast, the ex-conscripts, both then and now, eschew any political identity or shared project beyond accessing state reparations. This ‘apolitics of memory’ posed significant challenges to the success of the movement, and, as Passmore provocatively argues, poses larger questions about ‘the potential silencing effect of the human rights framework and the inadequacy of the memory contest to make sense of the memory of military service’ (p. 160).
On a second level, Passmore makes a pioneering contribution to the historiography of military rule by rigorously documenting what transpired ‘inside Chile's barracks’. No other study has provided an in-depth assessment of rank-and-file soldiers in Pinochet's military. The accounts are unsettling. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chile mobilised troops along the borders with Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. While these sabre-rattling exercises never descended to war, the preparedness training and prolonged exposure to Chile's extreme climates defined many recruits’ experiences. To confront both external and internal enemies, the Chilean Armed Forces’ standard training practices subjected conscripts to physical and psychological abuse. As part of the ‘wars inside the barracks’, recruits underwent desensitisation training to turn them into hard soldiers capable of killing their families and enduring warfare, violence and suffering. Beatings, forced labour, war simulations with live ammunition, and torturing animals defined recruits’ lived experiences. Like so much in post-dictatorship Chile, Passmore highlights the continuity of military training practices that persisted well into the 1990s.
Using ex-conscripts’ own narratives of rupture and betrayal, Passmore elucidates in Chapters 3 and 4 how military service undermined two core aspects of civilian identity: patriotism and masculinity. Many recruits equated military service with patriotism rooted in nineteenth-century military heroism and inscribed in public education and annual military parades. Conscripts and their families saw the military as an opportunity for education and social mobility. Similarly, military service formed a rite of passage by which working-class boys would ‘become men’. From the early twentieth century, working-class masculinity was equated with the ability to be fathers, husbands, workers and breadwinners. The military, in turn, sought to remake working-class boys into hardened soldiers, which diverged not only from the expectation for career advancement, but also from their ability to be loving husbands and fathers capable of providing for their families.
The book effectively concludes with a final chapter on embodied memory. Here, Passmore foregrounds the voices of ex-conscripts as they narrate the lingering after-effects of military service on their bodies as evidence of their victimhood and as sites of memory. A pervading sense of precarity underwrites the testimonies and embodied memories of former recruits. It may be difficult to parse the extent to which present-day suffering results directly from military service or reflects the broader downwardly mobile society engendered by the dictatorship. While Passmore notes similarities between the testimonies of former political prisoners and former recruits, the widespread disillusionment with democracy and an economic miracle that never arrived have been well documented in studies of Chilean workers, pobladores (inhabitants of urban poor and working-class neighbourhoods), peasants and the Indigenous Mapuche people. Demographically, recruits came from the urban and rural working poor. These are the same sectors disproportionately targeted for repression under the National Security Doctrine that equated poverty with subversion and, following the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, became the hardest-hit in Chile's economic downturns. The question of economic rights, so central to the ex-conscript movement, demands a broader reckoning with Pinochet's legacy. How inclusively can victimhood be defined? Who is owed more? Passmore does not tackle these provocative moral questions head-on. Instead, he roots the memory of military service within a larger historical framework that lies outside the traditional Cold War temporalities that define Chile's memory struggles. With admirable brevity, Passmore provides a synthesis of Chilean political history and memory struggles that makes this work accessible to a wide audience. The 2020 paperback edition will ensure wide classroom adoption in modern Latin American history, human rights, comparative politics and memory studies.
