The Oscar nomination of the short film “Bestia” (2021. Hugo Covarrubias) once again brought into the public eye the Political Sexual Violence carried out in the context of political prison and torture during the Dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Beyond the awards, in Chile there is a movement sustained over time that has been in charge of installing the concept of Sexual Political Violence (VPS) .

Currently there are two partner organizations of Fondo Alquimia that work collectively and daily to make visible the experience of thousands of women. The Collective of Surviving Women Always Resistant is an emblematic organization in terms of making visible Human Rights and Political Sexual Violence. Since the beginning of the post-dictatorship they have developed a feminist activism that has coined and defined the concept of Political Sexual Violence and have positioned it as an issue still in impunity, denouncing that it continues to be in force as a form of repression by the State, especially in context of social mobilization such as the Outbreak that began on October 18, 2019. They also managed to have the detention and torture center known as Venda Sexy declared a historical monument in 2016.

During September 2021, the comrades of the Always Resistant Survivor Women's Collective together with Memories of Feminist Rebellions published the book "Sexual Political Violence is state terrorism: Approaches from experience and memory against impunity in Chile." In it they go through the memory and history of those who "have fought, resisted, survived, denounced and made visible Political Sexual Violence, in its deployment in the Chilean reality" through two chapters that review the history and struggle of their organization. You can find it for free download by clicking here.

For its part, in March of this year, the Urdiendo Memorias de Concepción Collective launched its book Mujeres. Memories. resistors. Making visible Political Sexual Violence during the civic-military dictatorship in Chile . “It was necessary to write down the experience lived by women in the time of the Dictatorship so that it would not remain as something that was only told. It had to be rescued so that we would never be silenced again. There are many women that we know who are still silent and that is why we wanted to take this step from the private, from the intimate to the public”, explains Ester Hernández Cid, one of the compilers of the book and activist of the collective.

For Ester and other former political prisoners to speak openly about VPS was a difficult road to travel. She admits that at first they were all shy and ashamed to recount the sexual harassment they experienced and that, in that sense, understanding that they had gone through another category of crime against humanity helped them tell their story. “This transition began 40 years after the coup and it occurs when the compañeras of the Always Resistant Surviving Women visit us in the feminist march of 2016 and Beatriz Bataszew explains to us that what we experienced was Political Sexual Violence because it was carried out by state agents who had committed a violence that the concept of sexual torture did not fully cover, because it left out the importance of gender, that is, the violence against women was very different from that applied to men”, she adds.

Regarding this recent publication of Urdiendo Memorias, we talked with Ester Hernández about feminist activism and the intergenerational struggle to address and install VPS in current memory.

How was the process to reconstruct your own memory and put it in writing?

– At first we were between 10 and 12 former political prisoners and many left because the space was very strong because they were experiences without repair. When we began to work on the reconstruction of memory, we used the workshop technique, through which we would talk and do the exercise of capturing together what had happened to us and was happening to us at the time. We went from the present to the past and we made the stories within the collective workshops together with young people who helped us with the work of painful memory, that is, not only telling a story, but also taking part in our emotions. It was very healing to talk about it among ourselves because almost no one had done it, neither with their families nor close friends. That allowed us to make a framework and write it.

When the "reparation" began at PRAIS they tried to work on the issue but without speaking about it clearly. There was no talk of Political Sexual Violence, but of "illegitimate pressure." Not giving it the name is not recognizing a super complex issue for us. It was a path that was completed in two years and that was achieved thanks to containment. We would start having breakfast together and finish late. It was very heavy, we all cried, it was very exciting and enriching for us.

You mention that during the workshops to reconstruct what happened, you had the participation of young feminists who helped you in the process. In what sense has working with colleagues of different ages and generations meant progress in the visibility of Political Sexual Violence?

– It has meant progress because they have a much broader feminist and interdisciplinary perspective than ours, added to the tenderness they gave us made this progress much easier to achieve. We work with them collectively. They gave us proposals and materials, documents, photos so that we were all included. The most important thing they did for us was to get us out of victimization. They told us “you have resistance, strength. Let's work on that! Look at the story but seeing the strength that they had at that moment and that they did not realize” It was fantastic because we were no longer women who were left in grief but that we had come out in some way. We were powerful women.

Working memory of the VPS is very strong. Everything we have done has been based on pain, but from there something beautiful comes out: the intergenerational community, establishing a connection with the public, having instances to say that we are here, that we are survivors of the Dictatorship and that we can continue on this path to that the memory is not forgotten.