A lost archive and a window to its access The case of the "General Archive of the President of the Republic" during Pinochet's regime and the book Chile escoge la libertad

Abstract

In 1988, the first historiographic work on the military government (1973-1990) was published: Chile escoge la libertad. La Presidencia de Augusto Pinochet Ugarte 11.IX.1973. 11.III.1990 (in English: "Chile chooses freedom. The Presidency of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte 11.IX.1973-11.III.1990"), by Gonzalo Rojas Sánchez. Although this work has been criticized by Chilean historians for being a defense of the regime and the figure of General Pinochet, the truth is that this book contains a unique work on documentary sources, made possible only because Pinochet himself, granted Rojas and his team access to the archive that has never been used by other historians or researcheres: the Archivo General de la Presidencia de la República (AGPR).

This work aims to analyze the difficulties to access the AGPR and the alternative of using Rojas’s research as a "window" to approach the contents of the archive, which contains 521,000 sheets revised by Rojas. Considering the context of the memory battles, in this political-historical dispute, Rojas appears as one of its protagonists, which may explain why his work has been called out in certain academic spaces.

To this end, this article examins how the press and academia have received these volumes, as well as the intellectual production that cites the AGPR. Overall, this research aims to clarify the context in which Rojas produced his research, the difficulties to access the archives of the dictatorship, and the subsequent debates on whether or not historians have a public role as intellectuals.