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Almost three decades ago, on September 11, 1973, Chilean democracy was overthrown by a ruthless military coup. Since then, September 11 has been etched in the psyches of people throughout Latin America, a vivid symbol of suffering, pain, and loss (political repression). The coup launched a military dictatorship whose policies embodied what has come to be commonly accepted as the definition of terrorism, namely, “the use of force or the threat of force against civilian populations to achieve political objectives.” The Chilean military were not alone in this endeavor. From the 1960s through the 1980s, from Guatemala to Argentina, Latin America fell under the cruel domination of terrorist states that disappeared, tortured, and murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. Massive psychic trauma was suffered by citizens who lived in this persecutory environment, and it was exacerbated when the democratic governments that replaced military rule pardoned the former perpetrators for their extreme human rights abuses. Never having acknowledged their wrongdoing, the torturers walk freely among their victims/survivors in the cultures of impunity that characterize contemporary Latin American.
Today, the themes of impunity and psychic trauma associated with September 11 in Latin America resonate with another September 11. Suddenly in this country we are no longer immune from the fears and anxieties Latin Americans have lived with in an ongoing way as a result of terrorism in their countries. Their experience may by illuminating to us as we now struggle on a daily basis—with the end of life as we knew it, the loss of loved ones, the persecutory anxiety inherent in not knowing the nature of the next threat, the fears generated by living with unpredictability, the oscillation between hypervigilance and psychic numbing.
What was the nature of the experience under state terror and its insidious and ongoing traumatic impact? The global and cumulative nature of the collect