MUSEO DE LA MEMORIA Y LOS DERECHOS HUMANOS

Inaugurated in 2010, this museum retraces the 17 years of dictatorship suffered by the country between 1973 and 1990 under the Pinochet regime. Even today, the memory is still vivid, the painful presence of the past and the imprint of the dictatorship on Chilean society are still (more than ever) relevant today. In this large, modern building, social dialogue is the order of the day in a country where the dictatorship is still not discussed in schools. On the second floor, an engraving shows two hands hanging from prison bars, accompanied by an inscription: "These hands are pain, poetry and love": words written by the father of former president Michele Bachelet, an opponent of the Pinochet regime who died in prison. A tour featuring photos, videos, newspaper clippings, eyewitness accounts, interactive installations, notebooks and other relics from that era, evokes the torture and deprivation of liberty of some 40,018 victims, including 3,200 dead or missing, according to the latest report by the second Valech Commission in August 2011. This visit to the dark years of the dictatorship is very moving and instructive (even more so if you speak or read Spanish), and will enable you, turnkey, to grasp the full tragic dimension to which tens of thousands of Chileans were confronted. This is surely one of the country's must-see museums, a real civic necessity that will appeal to history buffs.