Chilean Chronicles, Part 94: Hernan's Gutierrez's Memory and Imagination

Imagine that you’re in Santiago, Chile in 1973.

Imagine that you’re 13 years old and walking to school with your father.

Imagine that there’s been a coup in your country that deposed the president and left him dead.

Imagine that your school was closed for about a week. When you returned, many, if not most, of the teachers you worked with and learned from and loved are gone.

This included Julia Del Rosario Retamales Sepulveda.

A 55-year-old Communist, she was for you the sweetest, kindest, most nurturing teacher there was.

Imagine that you learn later that she was detained at Villa Grimaldi, the largest and most notorious detention center in the network of such facilities established by the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police.

You never saw her again.

Imagine that you’re walking along the Rio Mapocho with your father on the way to school.

You see something floating downstream.

You realize that what you are seeing are dead bodies.

Your father tries to protect you and stops you from moving closer.

You can’t see everything, you see enough to realize that some of the bodies have been shot.

Others have no heads.

Imagine that you walk along the river the next day.

You see more bodies.

The day after that.

Even more.

Hernan Gutierrez does not have to imagine.

Because this happened to him in the fall of 1973.

“It was horrible,” he said, shuddering as he described the terror inflicted on the people during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Forty years later, the memories are still with him.

The trauma of what he saw has not stopped Gutierrez from marrying and raising a family or from moving forward with business endeavors.

His wife had a similar experience after the coup, so they each understand what the other experienced.

In the early 80s, the couple moved to Germany for eight years because they did not want to raise their two boys in a society that instilled such fear in its citizens.

They returned in the early 1990s, moving from Santiago’s bustle to the quiet seaside town Algarrobo, where they’ve set up a life together.

They own a chocolate shop on the main street of Carlo Alessandri.

Two doors down, she runs a clothing store.

Their sons have grown and become men. One is an artist whose work adorns the wall of the clothing store. A daughter-in-law works in the chocolate store.

Life is quiet and peaceful.

But the memories still sit uneasily beneath the surface.

When he thinks about them, they remind Hernan not only of that darker, earlier time.

They make him question those who were older and say they did not know.

If I could know this at 13, he asked, how could they not know what was happening?

After we visited Hernan, we drove to Villa Grimaldi, the former restaurant that became a detention center during the Pinochet era, a place of unspeakable evil where people were tortured and the torturers’ children played in a nearby pool.

We walked to the part of the park that honors women who were detained and disappeared there.

Each woman has a plaque that looks like a multi-colored tile lollipop planted in the ground near a rose.

The flowers are arranged in a series of circles.

In one of the circles, there is a tile and flower for Julia Del Rosario Retamales Sepulveda.

Just as Hernan remembered.

He does not have to imagine.

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting supported this story.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 71: Mario Hernandez and Los Patitos

If you work at a restaurant long enough you become part of the menu.

At least that’s what has happened to Mario Hernandez.

He first started working at Los Patitos, a seafood restaurant in sleepy oceanfront Algarrobo whose name means “the ducklings,” as a 16-year-old.

That was in 1969.

He’s worked there ever since.

Don Mario served thousands and thousands of customers as his three boys grew up and became men.

He waited on Don Pablo Neruda and his third wife Matilde Urrutia. (He said the former’s personality was “special”, while the latter was “normal.”)

He took the order of Socialist President Salvador Allende.

Don Mario served military leaders during the Pinochet dictatorship-a group that he divided in two parts.

The smaller portion consisted of “good” generals like General Oscar Bonilla, who Don Mario said tried to restrain Pinochet’s murderous excesses of Pinochet and died in a mysterious plane crash in 1975.

The larger group were “bad,” he explained, shaking his head with disgust at the memory.

The dictatorship hit Don Mario’s home community hard, he said.

People would disappear in the middle of the night and never return.

Many people.

A climate of fear pervaded.

What was it like to serve people who you knew did these terrible things, I asked?

Don Mario stared.

For a minute, rather than an empty patio, it seemed as if he could see the leaders of the junta who had inflicted such massive damage on the country.

It was work, he said, just a touch of sadness entering his voice.

He worked at Los Patitos in 1988, the year he and Chileans across the country overcame their fear, voted with their hearts and aspirations, and voted No to the dictatorship.

Five years from retirement, Mario looks younger than his 60 years. His face is youthful and unlined. His black hair is a little thin in the back and he’s carrying some extra weight, but his movements are energetic and he smiles easily.

We met on Sunday night, when Dunreith and I were the only customers under the awning outside the restaurant.

We had initially checked the menu, gone to survey other options and returned to Los Patitos when we discovered that nearby Peruvian and Italian restaurants were closed.

It was a little cool on the patio.

Mario took a little while to warm up, too.  When he did, though, the information flowed quickly and freely.

He told us about his three boys, all in their 30s now, and living and working in Santiago. He carefully pulled out the business card for the oldest from his wallet and showed it to us with reverence.

Don Mario talked about being good friends with Manuel Araya, Neruda’s chauffeur whose assertions about the great poet being poisoned have contributed to his body being exhumed.

He’s talked about that for years, Don Mario said. He told me about that for the first time in 1978. Araya said that Don Pablo got an injection in his stomach, which turned red, Don Mario said.

So you believe it? I asked.

It’s the truth, he declared.

Don Mario stood to the side of us, his head jerking regularly as he spoke.

Often he didn’t respond to what I was saying, but kept going with his train of thought.

It wasn’t out of rudeness, but rather as if he didn’t hear me.

He did connect when I mentioned our friend and Chilean guide Alejandra Matus.

Alejandra Matus, he asked, brightening. I know her.

That was a good book, he said, referring to Alejandra’s The Black Book of Chilean Justice, her powerful expose of the Chilean judiciary in the Pinochet era.

The judge’s decision the day after the book’s publication in the spring of 1999 to recall all of the copies and the possibility of her serving 5 years in jail prompted Alejandra to flee the country.

The book was banned, but that didn’t stop Don Mario from getting a copy.

My copy was photocopied in Argentina, he said, smiling. A friend from Santiago got it for him.

I’m not a Communist, but I liked that book, he said, shedding his manner of long-time employee and leaning in close when Dunreith and I stood up to go.

You’re not a Communist, but you like to know the truth, I said.

Don Mario smiled again.

Tell her I sent my greetings, he said.

We shook hands.

His grip wasn’t real firm, but contained genuine enthusiasm.

Dunreith and I exited the patio and started to walk back to Andres’ rustic cottage in the woods.

Mario Hernandez was there, standing vigil over the restaurant where he’s worked so long that his name is a part of its history.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 70: Hernan Gutierrez and the Dance of Conversation in Algarrobo

In the nine years that he lived in the south of Germany, the country where he had moved to give his son a better life than under the Pinochet dictatorship, Hernan Gutierrez could recognize fruit from his homeland by its smell.

Sometimes it was an apple.

Other times an orange.

But Gutierrez could tell where it had come from, even though there was an embargo in place against Chilean produce.

He knew.

The knowledge and the smell gave him joy.

By the time Hernan told us this nugget, we were already knee deep into a conversation that began when we surveyed the options and then bought a piece of white chocolate from one of the two stores he owns in Algarrobo, a seaside town about 90 minutes west of Santiago.

Dunreith and I are staying in a rustic cottage that’s owned in part by Andres Rolón, the lean, wild-haired Bolivian roommate of fellow Fulbrighter Larry Geri.

After our weekly yoga class at their apartment, we mentioned our desire to head out of Santiago for a few days.

Andres talked about his house.

Sixty dollars later, we had the place for the weekend.

We managed to get the lights and water on with little incident.

The gas was more problematic, and, thanks to the son of an elderly woman visiting our neighbor, we managed to get hot water and the stove working, too.

Despite our bringing shorts and swimming trunks in anticipation of taking a springtime dip in the Pacific Ocean, the weather was decidedly mid-winter. The sky was grey, overcast and cold.

Undeterred, we strolled on the beach past the world’s longest swimming pool at San Alfonso del Mar.

We purchased and ate a dozen mandarins from two immaculately maintained grocery stores.

Soon after that we entered Hernan’s chocolate store, which he was manning with his daughter-in-law.

The offerings were laid out neatly in the counter of the small space.

Hernan, who is sturdy and wore a white hat on his roundish, long head with white sideburns, greeted us and explained the flavors. (He had liqueurs filled with whiskey, among others-and everything ranging from standard choices like dark and white to slightly more unusual ones like orange.)

At just about the midway point of our time in Chile, I’m familiar with the conversational ritual we go through with vendors, people we meet in parks, or people who invite us to their homes.

We cover where we’re from, how we like Chile, and what on earth motivated us to travel to their country, let alone describe it as a place that we had dreamed of coming before seeing where things lead.

With Hernan they lead directly to the Pinochet coup and ensuing dictatorship.

He was just 13 years old and living in Santiago when Pinochet and the forces loyal to him ousted democratically-elected Salvador Allende and ushered in 17 years of terror.

Hernan remembers the dead bodies in the Rio Mapocho, the murdered people in the streets, the disappearances.

It is precisely because of those memories that he has little patience for those people who say now they didn’t know what was happening then.

I saw these things at 13 and understood what was happening, he said animatedly after we had moved outside of his store and onto Algarrobo’s main street, a peaceful two-lane road. Other people who were older than me had to realize.

People in Algarrobo were not as directly affected by the brutality, he added, but the climate of fear and disappearances happened here, too.

We need to recognize, not deny our painful past, he declared.

The conversation gained momentum as Hernan took us through his time in Germany, the poor quality of Chilean Spanish, the connections between the Pinochet government and Nazi thinking, the dim prospects for change through the political process, and the yawning gap between rich and poor in Chile.

He broke down the measures the tiny group of the most powerful Chilean families take to ensure their grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s financial futures.

High on the list: the regressive nature of the 19 percent Valued Added Tax which hits poor people hardest since they never get anything back. On other hand, wealthy store owners have the money returned back to them because they´ve been able to successfully argue that providing supplies for their workers means that they should get a tax exemption, he said.

From there he talked about the difference between Chile’s macro and micro economies and the disappointing tenure of former President Ricardo Lagos, whose election was heralded as being the end of the dictatorship, but whose presidency was characterized by making things even easier for the rich to line their pockets.

Hernan had just given us his assessment about how the movement from the current Santiago-based and controlled political system to the establishment of regions as meaningful political entities would be ideal, particularly for nearby San Antonio, a port city with one of the world’s largest tonnage movement, and was moving into a detailed discussion of the reasons why Chile has so many abandoned dogs and a local operation to spay many of them.

At this point all standard conversational moves were off.

The three of us were were just flowing and riffing and laughing and learning from each other.

The thought had entered my head that we might eventually end up at his house for dinner if this continued-a prospect that might have impacted my evening’s writing, but seemed highly enjoyable nonetheless-when Dunreith signaled that she wanted to get home before it was dark.

I’ve written before, including recently, about the good things that happen when I listen to my wife.

So I did.

I extended my hand and did my best to meet Don Hernan’s thick mitt with the same force he applied to mine.

He kissed Dunreith on the cheek. We wished him well, and he did the same.

Dunreith and I walked down the street a little bit before crossing to the side closest to the ocean and walking back to Andres’ house.

Hernan was standing in the front door of the chocolate shop.

We waved to each other.

Dunreith and I kept going.