The Wars inside Chile's Barracks

From 1973 to 1990 approximately 370,000 young men in Chile—most of them from impoverished backgrounds—were conscripted to serve as soldiers in Augusto Pinochet's violent regime. Some were brutal enforcers, but many endured physical and psychological abuse, survival and torture training, arbitrary punishments, political persecution, and forced labor. Leith Passmore examines the movement of ex-conscripts who sought reparations for their hardships in the early twenty-first century. Relying on unpublished material, testimony, interviews, and field notes, Passmore locates these individuals' narratives of victimhood at the intersection of long-term histories of patriotism, masculinity, and cyclical poverty.