Educational Media Reviews Online

After the elected Marxist government in Chile, led by Salvador Allende, was overthrown by the military on Sept. 11, 1973, there was a mass round-up in the country of persons who were considered to be leftists or otherwise supportive of the Allende government. The Estadio Nacional in Santiago was used to detain those who had been taken by the authorities. For two months, the stadium functioned as the largest prison in Chile, where brutal interrogations, tortures, and executions were carried out on the estimated 12,000 political prisoners who came through there.

The video Estadio Nacional (National Stadium) consists of interviews with survivors of the stadium incarcerations, family members of the former prisoners, and even a few of the soldiers who served as guards. It combines these 2001 interviews with footage taken in 1973 at the stadium. A note on the back of the video box (printed in hard-to-read white text on a yellow background), says this documentary is “the first in-depth investigation into the chilling events that took place at the stadium.”

The opening credits bear the names of two Chilean government agencies as sponsors, as well as the Ford Foundation, and it’s Chileans who will get the most from this video, as they recall a dark time in their nation’s history. Most viewers in the U.S. will not have the personal connection to the material Chileans do, and, because there is no larger context provided by the video, will watch it at a distance. Yet there is a strong American connection to the story, as it’s generally acknowledged the U.S. government helped Chile’s military carry out the coup against Allende, although this is not mentioned in the video.

Another thing that detracts for English-speaking viewers is the sloppy subtitling. All the interviews (there is no narration) are done in Spanish, and the subtitles supplied are reminiscent of the slap-dash ones done for many Hong Kong movies. Typos and missing letters in words abound.

The video does have value, however, for the testimony of the ex-prisoners. They talk of how up to 150 men were put in one room, and the complex orchestration that was required for each prisoner to have a space to lie on the floor to sleep, with shoes functioning as pillows. They speak of the terror of being told to go to the “disco negro,” the sign in the stadium with a black circle on it, which was used as the gathering point for those prisoners who would be taken to interrogation and torture sessions. And a soldier who served as a prison guard then makes an interesting point about how those guarding the prisoners could be seen as prisoners themselves, since most of the soldiers used as guards were teenage conscripts from the Chilean provinces.

The video may be more of a marginal purchase for those libraries that don’t have significant Latin American collections, but it is recommended for those that have a focus in this area.