Paper short abstract:

Through archival research and interviews with the workers of the Chilean NGOs that assisted victims of State terrorism I analyze the device of registration and denunciation of political violence in the case of people’s force detention and disappearance

Paper long abstract:

The Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990) deployed a policy of systematic violation of human rights of thousand of people allegedly enemies or threat to the newly established regime. To confront State terrorism part of the civil society formed organizations like the Committee for Peace, the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Defence Committee for the Rights of the People or the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees.

Without previous expertise on this kind of atrocities, these organizations set in place an interdisciplinary system of attention, assistance and denunciation lead by social workers, attorneys, physicians and psychologists. A series of infrastructural technologies and instruments support their work: judicial actions; psychological, forensic and social protocols and procedures; classifications and taxonomies; individual folders, forms, statistics, databases and reports. These NGOs records have not only had an indisputable role in the figuration of political violence and its resistance during the dictatorship, but have been a key source of information for Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and judicial processes until this day.

This paper addresses these technologies in the arrangement of disputing discourses, forms of expertise, and games of knowledge, power and truth, in which they are inscribed. In short, and following Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben it examines devices of registration and denunciation of political violence. Based on documentary research on these NGOs archives and individual and collective interviews with their workers, it analyses the role of the devices of a particular repressive strategy: people's force detention and disappearance. Issues of objectivity, existence restoration, subjectification and truth are discussed.