Dictators and the Disappeared : Democracy Lost and Restored

 “Dictators and the Disappeared is a book that should be found in every library and bookstore of democratic nations, particularly in the U.S., whose   foreign policy has been instrumental in supporting dictatorships in Latin America and beyond. The featured essays are magnificently written, intertwining personal and historical memory in a way that makes this book among the most important published in the last decade. Most significantly, the ultimate mission of Dictators and the Disappeared is to not let the lives lost during these horrific eras be forgotten. It also reminds us that the pursuit of democracy must be maintained—much like the art that allows us to remember, democracy is never truly lost.”—Marjorie Agosin, Human Rights Quarterly

The rise and imposition of military dictatorships in South America in the late twentieth century holds particular relevance today as the world has experienced a broad resurgence of authoritarianism. Chile’s reign of terror under military dictatorship reflected through the continent’s “southern cone” countries, which included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay as democracy fell to military dictatorial rule. In time, citizens across the continent and abroad bonded in their fight against authoritarianism. Rising against oppression, they were supported by local, regional, hemispheric, and international organizations, solidarity groups, and persons in exile. By 1990, when Chile began its return to democracy, all the region’s countries had—in varying degrees—repudiated the military-authoritarian model. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of Chile’s coup d’état—which was led by Augusto Pinochet and ushered in seventeen years of repression, Dictators and the Disappeared is a timely look at a tumultuous period in Latin American history. Essays by Maryam Ahranjani, Francisco Letelier, Nancy Morris, Michael Nutkiewicz, Alicia Partnoy, and Natasha Zaretsky represent a range of topics and perspectives considering political events and what it means to live and struggle today with the legacies of past dictatorships. Two of the contributors relate their personal and harrowing experiences: Alicia Partnoy was kidnapped and imprisoned by the Argentinian army, and Francisco Letelier’s father was assassinated in Washington, DC following the overthrow of the democratic Allende government. Drawing largely from the University of New Mexico’s Southwest Research Center’s Sam L. Slick Collection, the publication is illustrated with political posters, textiles, and other ephemera created as a form of political expression documenting the horrors experienced over several decades from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Russ Davidson is a professor and curator emeritus at the University of New Mexico. He is a co-curator of the Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum and is the former curator of Latin American and Iberian Collections at the University of New Mexico from 1979 to 2004. Leslie Blaugrund Kim is a co-curator of the Dictators and the Disappeared: Democracy Lost and Restored exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum. She was previously history curator at the Albuquerque Museum.