Justifying the Chilean Coup. The Operations of the Past in the Gonzalo Vial’s Political and Historiographical Writing
This article analyzes the political-historiographical evolution that the conservative historian Gonzalo Vial went through to justify the 1973 coup in Chile. The main milestone in this regard was his participation in the Libro Blanco del cambio de gobierno en Chile (White Book of the Change of Govern...
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Artículo revista |
| Lenguaje: | Español |
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Universidad Nacional del Litoral
2022
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| Acceso en línea: | https://bibliotecavirtual.unl.edu.ar/publicaciones/index.php/Contenciosa/article/view/11364 |
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| Sumario: | This article analyzes the political-historiographical evolution that the conservative historian Gonzalo Vial went through to justify the 1973 coup in Chile. The main milestone in this regard was his participation in the Libro Blanco del cambio de gobierno en Chile (White Book of the Change of Government in Chile), one of the most outstanding operations of historical manipulation aimed to legitimize the military dictatorship. We argue that Vial used the same interpretive matrix to justify the coup d'état and the subsequent repression both in his political interventions and in his historiographical production before and after 1973. This interpretation was based on certain constant principles throughout this entire period: the thesis of the sustained decline of the nation, the breakdown of consensus and the imminence of a civil war. This type of legitimizing discourses of the coup achieved public projection not only through his journalistic and historiographical work, but also in particularly sensitive state initiatives such as the so-called Comisión Rettig (Rettig Commission). In this way, the initial manipulation was followed by an intellectual rationalization that did not renounce to the objective of historically justifying the existence of the military dictatorship. |
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