Since 2001, the date “Sept. 11” has usually conjured up memories of the terrorist attacks on New York’s twin towers. However, Sept. 11 also has great significance in Latin American history because Chilean President Salvador Allende was assassinated in a military coup on that date 30 years ago.
In remembrance of that Sept. 11 in 1973, the University is hosting a Latin American Studies Symposium on democracy and human rights in Latin America. The symposium began on Wednesday with the opening of an art exhibit about victims of state terror and human rights violations. The exhibit appears in the EMU Adell McMillan Gallery.
The symposium will continue until Friday and features various panels and speeches. Author Peter Kornbluh will give the keynote speech in the Knight Browsing Room at 7:30 p.m. today. Kornbluh’s speech on the “Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability,” includes declassified information on the U.S. Role in the Chilean military coup. A full schedule of the symposium’s events is available on http://babel.uoregon.edu/las/news.htm.
“The symposium is meant to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the military coup in Chile that happened on September 11,” History Professor Carlos Aguirre said.
Aguirre said the symposium was also an opportunity to discuss current issues on terrorism, human rights and democracy in Latin America.
In the present day, millions of people live in Latin America under poverty and are treated as second class citizens, Aguirre said.
“That is one the main challenges of democracy,” he said. “Even if today most of Latin American countries have democratically elected governments, we still feel democracy is a project we need to work on and realize.”
He added that human rights are an integral part of the democratic process and that the mainstream media is not paying enough attention to issues in Latin America.
“We thought it was an opportunity to bring these issues to the forefront,” Aguirre said. He said the conference would also deal with the human rights of immigrants in the United States.
Spanish Instructor Bryan Moore, who helped organize the art exhibit, said the symposium is an opportunity to reflect on the U.S. role in Latin America. Moore said U.S. foreign policy in the area had often been “militaristic, interventionist and sometimes of great abuse to human rights.” Moore said hundreds of people were tortured or killed in different Latin American countries for various political reasons.
“Our foreign policy was a great part of that tragedy,” he said. “We must reflect on that.”
He added that he hopes the reflection on the last thirty years since Sept. 11, 1973, would help teach lessons on how people can work for human rights.
Director Caroline Forell — the director of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, one of the event’s sponsors — said she liked the conference because of its interdisciplinary scope that uses everything from art to poetry to comment on relevant issues.
“There has been so much focus on the Middle East and terrorism that other things get ignored here in this hemisphere,” she said.