Paper short abstract:

This paper will show how Chile's National Stadium acts as a tool for the exposure of state terror and how it has been shaping people's personal and collective memory and identity.

Paper long abstract:

Things are not always what they appear to be from the outside. Often one has to physically dig up the ground or metaphorically dig into the minds and hearts of people to get to the essence of things. A football stadium might not merely be a place hosting sport activities. During the early weeks of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, the National Stadium had been temporarily transformed into the nation's biggest detention center. Along with numerous other concentration camps that dotted the country, the National Stadium turned into a place of terror and personal and collective memory and identity. People that the military considered opponents to Pinochet's authoritarian regime were tortured and often murdered at the National Stadium. In many cases the military disposed of their bodies in unknown locations, turning the victims into Chile's 'disappeared'. In the absence of bodies, this paper is going to establish the importance of the stadium as a physical marker of the regime's cruelty. In order to do so it will explore the stadium's different usages from the time of its erection up until the present day and draw comparisons to other torture sites. It will furthermore argue that material culture, such as photographs, and archaeological traces and architectural features form significant witnesses of Chile's past. The paper will then discuss the implications on turning a former concentration site into a museum. Finally, it will study the stadium as a symbol of democracy and human rights by looking at its use during the post-dictatorship years.