Political sexual violence and memory in Chile

Digital drawing by @PazConNadie for Ojalá.

Opinion • Andrea Sato • November 7, 2024 • Leer en castellano

A nondescript house on Iran Street in a residential neighborhood in Santiago once served as a base of operations for Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate, which systematically used political sexual torture against young women militants. Informally the house is known as “Venda sexy,” which means sexy blindfold, or “discotheque,” because of the loud music played all day to mask the sounds of torture.

Officials operated the house as a clandestine extermination and torture center between 1974 and 1977. Most of the women tortured inside were members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a radical-left organization that promoted armed struggle. It was the most heavily persecuted political organization during the first period of the civilian-military dictatorship. The government often killed or disappeared detainees after torturing them.

Authorities kept detainees blindfolded in the bedrooms at all times. They were taken out only to use the bathroom and for torture sessions, which consisted of beatings, mock executions, drowning, and the application of electroshock. All of this took place during office hours. After office hours, sexual torture was common.

The sexual torture occurred mainly in the basement. That was where Ingrid Olderock, a former police officer, trained her dog to rape prisoners. Systematic sexual violence harmed the prisoners profoundly—especially in relation to their own sexuality—but also led to a deep sense of intimacy and trust among them. These links allowed many of them to survive and to seek justice for those who did not.

Women survivors, ongoing resistance

Over the past 10 years, the Collective of Women Survivors in Resistance Forever (MSSR, in its Spanish acronym) has played a leading role in making sexual political violence visible. The collective of elderly women survivors of clandestine torture centers has worked to cultivate a living memory for the present and the future. They have asserted the idea of political sexual violence in a range of spheres: in the street, in public debate and also in the courts. The state completely omitted this concept in its investigations of the systematic violation of human rights that occurred during the civilian-military dictatorship. 

“Political sexual violence is what happens when cops grope students,” explains Beatríz Bataszew, who is now seventy and who was once was a MIR militant and survived political sexual torture in the Venda Sexy. “All kinds of stuff happens in police stations.” Bataszew highlights the long filaments of horror that run from the dictatorship to the present. 

The MSSR comrades succeeded in having the Venda Sexy declared a historical monument in 2016. The process that the clandestine torture center has undergone has been complex. 

Bataszew recognizes that the recovery of the Venda Sexy was something that survivors wanted, but she insists that this should happen on their terms and not those of the state or whoever is in government.

The recovery of memory 

The MSSR comrades initially sought to expropriate the property so that a social and human rights organization could own and operate it as a memorial. But the house was privately owned and its owners wanted the state to pay an exorbitant sum to purchase of the former torture center. 

After reflecting on this, they decided against expropriation, since they did not want to enrich the property owners. The family living in the Venda Sexy had ties to Chilean police and harassed those who came to pay their respects to victims outside the house. They destroyed memorials, dumped water on people and called the police when they felt that too many people had gathered.

The compañeras opted to do commemorative work outside of the house. They sought to occupy public space and not enclose memory behind closed walls. They set up a memorial in a nearby plaza, which is periodically vandalized and then rebuilt. Well attended public activities have occurred there over the last five years. While the MSSR focussed on social activities, Gabriel Boric’s government pushed ahead with the expropriation of the house. 

On September 1, 2023, ten days before the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état in Chile, the official gazette published a decree expropriating the house. The Metropolitan Housing and Urbanization Service acquired the property. 

Those who lived in the former torture center in the post-dictatorship period had gutted and renovated the building. The Ministry of National Assets holds it today and it remains as they had left it. The MSSR highlighted the building’s significant architectural alterations early on. This was another reason why they decided not to insist on expropriation. 

Bataszew said the MSSR wanted to avoid a media spectacle linked to the expropriation and the construction of the memorial site. She sees the fact that today the site is called “Iran 3037” as an attempt to sanitize memory, which becomes denialism, as it seeks to hide all that the name “Venda sexy” evokes. 

The activist warns that these kinds of spaces can become centers of cultural activity managed by memory “entrepreneurs,” who build careers in human rights in a way that is too cosy with the state. Today, she says, official memorial sites are structured as companies with boards of directors under corporate management. Bataszew sees these practices, which attempt to reconcile and appropriate memory, as a response to capitalist markets under social democratic government.

Healing in the midst of denialism

The state’s denialism and erasure indicates its reluctance to reveal ongoing state violence against feminized bodies. Subversive memory is uncomfortable because it is a militant memory that reveals the continuous filaments of terror that run through to the present. To bury the memory of the dictatorship is to bury the fact that the entire political, social and economic system is an inheritance of the military regime. This is an inheritance built on the bodies of countless comrades.

When we spoke on the phone, Bataszew was uncertain about the future of the building, but the strength with which she continues to fight is impressive. Days before we spoke, she had undergone an operation and kindly took my call while waiting for her friends to pick her up to take her to the coast. Seeing the Pacific Ocean is always good medicine. 

Bataszew and her MSSR comrades are still active doing education in the streets. The state can keep their empty house, in her view. “Let them keep the walls, we have the streets,” Bataszew said with a laugh. “Autonomous feminism is outside and institutionalism is inside.” 

She ended our conversation by reflecting about how the street is the place of popular education and how we heal through the construction of memory. We heal together, we do not need their vulgar reconciliation policies. Our justice comes through building a better future.