Lectures: 168
This Thursday the exhibition “Ship Lebu, Floating Jail” was inaugurated in the Valparaíso Municipality Building, an initiative of former political prisoners of the Ship Lebu that reconstructs, through testimonies and archives, an experience of political prison of the dictatorship in the port city of Valparaíso.
The project was managed in a pandemic by survivors of political imprisonment and torture who set up the Lebu Project Committee, with technical support from the Department of Heritage, Memories and Human Rights of the Valparaíso Cultural Park – Former Prison.
In this regard, Antonio Oyarzo, Coordinator of the Lebu Project Committee; who appreciated the possibility of “meeting here, it is nothing more than the work cycle, which has a start time and no end time. We hope that future generations can use this educational tool to contribute to memory.
The meaning is that we believe we have a huge response from people who do appreciate and give us the drive and strength to continue doing things”.
For his part, Ricardo Aravena, another member of the Committee and former minor prisoner on the ship; he referred to the diverse public that attended the ceremony: “we see that there are several different ages here and that is also significant for its durability.
The beginning was very expensive, in the sense that we were in a pandemic, we had to start working on the model of the ship in memory of our memories, because we did not have photos of the ship, we had no plan for anything. So, it’s something handmade.
It is important, because the ship was here in Valparaíso, it was detained with us. The idea is that young people are nourished by this experience so that what happened to us does not happen again.”
The executive director (i) of the Cultural Park of Valparaíso – Former Prison, Erick Fuentes, pointed out at the opening ceremony that “50 years after the coup, making memories from the communities and territories is essential. So I recognize this initiative of the Committee, which in the midst of a pandemic, began to push this effort on our site to improve us from a very serious disease in this country and that is related to oblivion and impunity.
So I salute these actions of the communities of former political prisoners, of memory, and of human rights in the city, who actually do work ‘from memory’: they remember together, give testimonies, build community archives and, with these projects, make visible an experience of the floating prisons in the bay of our city-port.
Then they reflect with new communities and places in the country in their itinerary, sharing an experience of popular construction of collective memories, really appropriate and updated, where dreams, critiques and collective projects are mobilized.
As a former Public Prison in the Valparaíso region, main detention and interrogation center during the civil-military dictatorship, memory site, public space and current Valparaíso Cultural Park, we are committed, so we will continue promoting cultural participation and human rights , for the construction and formation of critical citizenships in the present”.
The inauguration was attended by the Culture Manager of the Municipality of Valparaíso and president of the Board of Directors of the Valparaíso Cultural Park Association- Former Prison, Sebastián Redolés, who highlighted the arrival of this exhibition within the framework of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup civic-military.
“It does enough justice to what public institutions must do today in a context like this, where we are commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of that fateful coup, which deployed various mechanisms of persecution, arrest and torture against those who had ideas of social transformation, of social justice and that today, fundamentally, due to the push of these very communities that were violated, memories are emerging and we have the opportunity to welcome them in institutional spaces, such as the Municipality of Valparaíso”.
This first stop on the 2023 tour of “Buque Lebu, Cárcel Flotante”, was not without controversy, since its inauguration coincided with the meeting of the Municipal Council, which, after a request by Mayor Jorge Sharp and the approval of the majority of councilors He suspended his session to be able to be part of this tribute to those who were imprisoned in the aforementioned floating jail.
In this regard, Fuentes added that “it is striking that, 50 years after the civic-military coup, there are still people who relativize or deny the events that occurred in the country, even more so in institutional and public spaces from which they promote denial.” , once again violating communities of survivors and different groups of our society that today, more than ever, seek to form and promote a democratic and human rights culture in the present.”
The exhibition has been present in various cultural spaces in the region, such as the La Ligua Museum and the Estación Vieja de Petorca Museum, as well as the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago.
The Lebu ship was one of the floating prisons used during the dictatorship as a detention and interrogation center, ceded to the Navy by the South American Steamship Company (CSV) and, according to the Rettig Report, as of September 1973 it was occupied by agents of the dictatorship to detain people after the coup d’état.
