Fogo e asfalto: insubmissões, persecuções e fantasmagorias

Abstract

This work starts from a risky question: why, even after three decades, are some deaths still remembered? This question puts us on the side of phantasmagoria-and politics. Street and Fire is an invitation to explore Chilean recent history by following the traces of encapuchados, masked enigmatic figures that haunt the streets of Santiago since the 1980s. These figures appear especially in ephemera that recall anti-capitalist protesters killed during the Pinochet dictatorship and in the post-dictatorship period. Because of their anonymity and drive to destroy objects, places, and bodies that symbolize Capital and the State, these dissents are rejected and pushed beyond the margins of politics. In this way, instead of reducing them to the spheres of turmoil and criminality, I am interested in observing the total state response that their actions generate. I investigate law arrangements, policing tactics, knowledges and technologies, and penitentiary regimes dedicated to the problem of this violence-which is called by the Chilean police and National Prosecutor's office as anti-system, insurrectional anarchism, or even terrorism. I thus intend to examine the excesses and anxieties of the State in its attempt to fight those who see it as their main enemy and openly and spectacularly attack the State's dominant symbols. This thesis, which results from more than 4 years of ethnographic research, is organized in three chapters. In "Persecutions in Transition," I analyze the political and affective endeavor undertaken in redemocratization. I discuss redemocratization as a project driven by the idea of national reconciliation that placed the leftist terrorist as the main enemy of the nation-referring to those who continued to believe in violence as a resource in the struggle against capitalism and against the impunity that protected the perpetrators of state terrorism during the dictatorship. In "Dead, Streets, and the Hooded Ones," I focus on the spatiotemporal compositions of bodies, artifacts, and phantasmagoria that support these minor insurgencies, proposing an aesthetic analysis of the kinetic exercises of present remembrance of young fighters killed in the past. Along with the analysis of the aesthetic changes in the clashes between the masked and the police, I examine the genealogy of the dead constructed by both the militants and the police, investigating the plots between those who refuse to embrace peacefulness and civic forms of political participation today and those who have done so in the past. In the last chapter, "Free all Political Prisoners," I explore the prison experience of young people accused of perpetrating attacks against symbols of Capital and the State. Drawing on court hearings and documents, I analyze the materialities and technologies mobilized as evidence in proving the suspects' ideology: DNA, confiscated books, and online and offline police infiltration, which I call mimetic police.