Remembering Argentina’s 9/11 With A Little Help from An Agency Friend

Advertising that attempts to appeal to the lowest common denominator is often nothing more than mental pollution. It’s also the most common type of advertising in the world and the central reason that the industry has a bad name.

Far away, on the other end of the scale, there’s important work being done to inform and to move people to a higher place. Take, for instance, the work Wolf BCPP delivered for The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago after the museum was attacked by right-wing activists who accused the museum of being founded to portray a false version of history.

Last September 11th, Chile commemorated 45 years since the 1973 coup d’état, a defining moment in the history of the country. According to Cuban newspaper Periodico 26, 45 years after the bloody coup that marked a deep breakage in Chilean society, Pinochet’s supporters, perhaps in a smaller number, still exist and many of them hold high political posts.

Today’s history deniers claim that the events of 1973–wherein 130,000 Argentine citizens were detained and tortured by the regime over a three-year period–apparently happened differently, without violence, or did not occur in the first place.

In a brilliant response to such feeble-minded claims, and to shed light on the events for those who were not there to experience it first hand, Wolf BCPP recovered, edited and organized in chronological order more than 550 audio files from different radios that transmitted what was happening on that day. The agency then made a minute-by-minute timeline by which to relive, through audio, the first terrifying day of Pinochet’s 17 years as the nation’s dictator.

All this audio material was broadcast live during the 11th of September 2018 commemoration in Santiago on AM radio stations that were shut down by Pinochet in 1973. The transmission began at 8:00 a.m. to match exactly what was happening when the historic events first occurred.

You Can’t Remember What You Don’t Know Or Refuse To Learn

It’s difficult for me to understand the need to reframe and distort history. I understand the impulse to control the narrative, but facts are facts. Of course, it’s also completely unnerving to see the American government’s need to reframe and distort the present. What we can learn from Chile and others is straigtforward: When you set out to hurt people, they remember, and so do their sons and daughters.