Chilean Chronicles, Part 100: The Joy and Honor of Working with Jon Lowenstein

Our time in Chile has been an extraordinary and expansive time for many reasons.

Dunreith and I have been animated by a sense of adventure that’s been heightened by having sold our house the day before we flew to Santiago.

We’ve been treated with enormous and continuous generosity by colleagues, students, taxi drivers, and Chileans of all stripes, ages, classes and political backgrounds.

We’ve had the chance to travel within and outside the country to places that in some cases we had dream of going for years, even decades.

We’ve also had a heavy dose of family.

We flew to Buenos Aires to meet Dad and his partner Lee for five days before their two-week cruise in Argentina and Chile.

We’re about three weeks into a more than month-long stay with Aidan, who’s fresh off a fantastic semester of study and travel in New Zealand.

We also had my brother Jon here for two work-filled weeks.

Jon likely would have come here to visit us anyway, and having a professional purpose clinched his decision.

That came in the form of our successful application to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. We put in a proposal that said we would do a three-part series for the The New Yorker’s Photo Blog, a similar project for Vivelohoy, and a number of blog posts for a combination of the Huffington Post, the Ochberg Society, Hoy and my personal blog.

Jon and I have collaborated before.

We’ve covered police brutality on Chicago’s South Side.

We participated in a fellowship where we did a project about the experience of undocumented Latino migrants who become disabled on the job. (This was the one for which I taught myself Spanish.)

We’ve traveled to the far reaches of Northern South Africa to cover life in a rural community there and the efforts of Evanston resident Ann Covode to bring a library and other educational support to the children in the community.

It was during this project that, after a formal ceremony and introduction, one of the teachers told us in front of the staff that they had prepared a delicacy for us to eat: a cow’s hoof.

Last year we flew to Dad’s hometown to photograph and write about his return there for the first time in 73 years.

These have all been remarkable experiences, and the work we did in Chile was our most ambitious yet.

Over the course of a series of conversations, we defined our scope.

We would look at Chile’s past, present and future 40 years after the Pinochet coup.

The past would involve going to memory sites like the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and Villa Grimaldi, interviewing survivors and activists who had lived through the time like Ana Gonzalez, a feisty 87-year-old with bright red fingernails whose husband, two of her sons and a pregnant daughter-in-law were murdered by the government during the dictatorship, and talking with memory scholars like friend Hugo Rojas.

The present consisted of covering the first round of elections that pitted nine presidential candidates against each other, including frontrunner and former president Michelle Bachelet of the Nueva Mayoria, or New Majority, and childhood friend Evelyn Matthi of the conservative Independent Democratic Union.

And the future including talking with young, digitally-savvy Chileans who grew up during and after the dictatorship and who are working to improve the country.

People like Jaime Parada, the son of Pinochetistas whose parents joined neighbors on the street in weeping the night in October 1988 that Pinochet lost the plebiscite that would have kept him in power.

Last year Jaime became the first openly gay public official in Chilean history when he won a Councilman position in the wealthy, politically conservative Providencia neighborhood. Since his election he’s worked with reform Mayor Josefa Errazuriz to push for, and win, a battle to change the name of one of the community’s major streets from Avenida 11 de Septiembre, a name that honored the Pinochet coup, to Nueva Providencia, or New Providencia.

People like the light-blue shirted volunteers of TECHO, a non-profit group founded in 1997 by Father Felipe Berrios and some young Chileans to help individuals and communities fight poverty. Since its inception TECHO has evolved from doing construction work to a more ongoing and holistic approach in which they work with community members to diagnose, and then set a plan to meet, the community’s needs.

Together we went to a campamento, or shantytown, in the La Florida neighborhood that cropped up after powerful floods devastated the area in 1997. The volunteers there were in the process of setting up a community center; other campamentos with a TECHO presence have tutoring programs, a library and micro-enterprise stores.

Being able to do work that you love is a tremendous gift.

Doing that work with one of your brothers for one of the world’s top magazines is even greater.

Indeed, many of the day that Jon was here, before I left the apartment, I’d say to Dunreith, “I’m going over to Jon’s apartment. We’re on assignment for The New Yorker.”

And a riveting assignment it was.

Together Jon and I went to Algarrobo to interview Hernan Gutierrez, who was 13 years old when he witnessed decapitated bodies floating down the Mapocho River shortly after the coup.

We spoke with Mario Hernandez, who told us about waiting on Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda as well as serving high-ranking members of the dictatorship.

We went to Villa Grimaldi and spoke with Carlos Contreras, who still had the chess board he made out of cardboard to play with fellow inmates when they were detained in 1974.

We attended the end of campaign event for presidential frontrunner Michelle Bachelet, listened to her race through her speech and met former President Ricardo Lagos.

I shook his hand and told him that I had seen his finger years earlier. (His finger-wagging calling out of Pinochet was seen by many as a critical moment in the “No” campaign.)

We went together to the Open Mind Fest that was sponsored by MOVILH, one of the nation’s leading gay and lesbian activist groups, that stretched across four city blocks. Jon shot picture after picture of the drag queens who were the unofficial stars of the event, of young lesbian couples holding hands and of the youth dancing and swaying and vibing at the four stages set up along Paseo Bulnes.

Jaime Parada told us that MOVILH held the event near the presidential palace and congressional offices to remind politicians of the community’s clout.

The message appeared to be heeded, as five of the nine presidential candidates attended the event.

Beyond all that we did, the project was a chance to learn from Jon, who is one of the planet’s top photographers.

He shoots and shoots and shoots, getting closer and closer to the action, swerving as he identifies an opportunity to make a picture, letting the place speak to him, always thinking about how he can be do better.

Jon’s been shooting seriously for more than 20 years, and continues to expand his skill and scope. His passion for photography, storytelling and documenting what’s happening in the world remains undimmed. If anything, it’s only grown stronger with the passage of time, clarity of vision and commitment to his craft.

We didn't only work.

Together with Dunreith, Dad and Lee, we'd have lengthy dinners topped off by nightly servings of ice cream. We'd carve out space to laugh about family stories and discuss the latest developments in the NBA.

I don't want to suggest that the collaboration was easy at every moment.

It never is with two strong-willed people, let alone two brothers with more than four decades of history.

And there’s no doubt in my heart and head that working with Jon was a joy and an honor, and something I’ll remember for as long as I can remember.

Living in Chile has been magnificent, and the project with my brother is a big part of it.

I can’t wait for the next one.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 51: Like South Africans, Chileans ask, "What Have We Done?"

Eighteen years ago I had the honor and privilege of living in South Africa during a pivotal time in that nation’s history. Just a year removed from the first free and democratic election in its history, the country was starting to publicly delve into the darkest aspects of the apartheid era through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu’s pain at hearing what author Antjie Krog called the “indefinable wail that burst from Nomomde Calata’s lips” prompted the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner to sing Senzenina after the break on the second day of hearings in East London.

A staple at anti-apartheid demonstrations and funerals, the song asks a basic and profound question: “What have we done?”

(Hear Calata's expression of grief and the song from 1:17 to 2:12 of the trailer to the Bill Moyers film, "Facing the Truth.")

This is the question that Chileans throughout the country have asked themselves with increasing intensity these past weeks and months, culminating in Tuesday’s outpouring of all types of commemoration events.

It´s a different question than the country asked one or two decades ago, and is likely to ask in 10 years time, according to scholar and friend Hugo Rojas.

Dunreith and I attended a presentation he gave at the University of Vina del Mar, where Hugo was presenting in conjunction with the launch of the latest issue of the university's Revista de Derechos Fundamentales, or Journal of Fundamental Rights.

Edited by Hugo´s former roommate, law professor and close friend Christian Viera, the publication contains four essays and a series of primary source documents about the 1973 coup,

It begins with a moving, lyrically written introduction that Christian co-authored with Sociology professor and torture survivor Luis “Tito” Tricot.

Christian, who is lean with a short beard and longish hair that curls around his head, read the piece in an even tone before Hugo gave his presentation.

The mustachioed Tito, who has long, black, straight hair, sat in one of the front rows listening with an attentive expression that held a hint of surprise.

The book’s opening pages evoked an earlier, more innocent and peaceful time in which Chile was just a small country in the south of the world with a view of the sea.

That country was changed profoundly the day of the coup and in the months and years that followed, they wrote. Pinochet and his minions changed children’s hymns to the screams of the tortured, the murals to the ferocity of the night, the northern desert to the anguish of the murdered.

These changes altered, but did not destroy the dreams of the people, many of whom still dream of Chile returning to that earlier Edenic state.

The public reckoning with the damage wrought during the dictatorship was the focus of Hugo’s presentation.

He explained that in 1993, the twentieth anniversary of the coup, Chile’s democracy was far more fragile. Although he was no longer the political leader of the country, Pinochet still headed the military and was a Senator for Life.

This meant that commemorations of the coup were held much more at the state level.

A decade later, in 2003, the theme of Obstinate Memory ascended, Hugo said. By this he meant the persistence of memory and some within the nation beginning to enter into some of the grittier aspects of what had happened during the dictatorship. He pointed to Patricia Verdugo’s De La Tortura No Se Habla, or One Doesn't Talk About Torture, an edited collection that examined the case of Catholic University professor Felipe Aguero’s assertion that he had been tortured by fellow academic Emilio Meneses.

This year, the observances were far more wide-ranging, probing and conducted at the level of civil society, Hugo explained.

I wrote throughout the buildup to September 11 about the explosion of memory observances that took all kinds of forms, from vigils to poetry readings to book launches to academic conferences to the showing of documentary films to marches for the disappeared to translations of Greek plays.

Whereas 20 years ago the question was, “What did you do?”, now the refrain underneath these commemorations was the same as in the Xhosa song Tutu and so many others have sung, he said.

In another decade the emphasis is likely to shift again, as, a half century after the coup, the nation will think about issues of intergenerational transmission, of how to convey in a visceral what life under the dictatorship was like to those children who have no direct tie to Allende’s overthrow and the suffocating terror that ensued.

Pinochet was never arrested in Chile for his deeds, and thus never served a day in a Chilean prison.

Tito and Christian address the theme of impunity in their text, writing, “Because in this piece an impunity has been enthroned that, without doubt, constitutes a profound violation of human rights.”

Over the past decade Francesca Lessa, a friend and colleague of Hugo’s who earned her doctorate at the London School of Economics, has immersed herself in the issue of post-dictatorship impunity laws and, more recently, efforts to overturn them.

On Wednesday, at Hugo’s invitation, Francesca delivered a riveting a presentation at the University of Alberto Hurtado about the work she and the other members of the team with which she collaborates at Oxford University have done.

Their project was essentially to build an international database that tallied the number of countries that had passed laws that granted amnesty as part of the transition to a post-conflict society. From there, the group worked to identify those countries in which attempts were made to undo that legislation and the results of those campaigns.

Much of this activity has happened in Latin America, according to Francesca.

She provided examples within the continent of a complete overturn, a partial reduction of the protections of the amnesty law and a pair of countries where the campaign failed, and her analysis of the factors that contributed to each result.

Argentina was the place which had the most successful outcome in undoing the amnesty law passed during the Carlos Menem era of the late 80s and early 90s that pardoned the generals who had led the “dirty war” that saw about 30,000 Argentines killed and many others disappeared.

Francesca attributed the success to an active and continuously insistent civil sector, a judicial branch that was supportive of the cause, international pressure and the involvement of the executive branch in the form of former President Nestor Kirchner.

Since the laws have been reversed, more than 400 people have been tried for the human rights crimes they committed, with at least another 100 people whose cases are on the docket, she said.

Chile has had a less comprehensive reversal-a result Francesca attributed in part to the persistence of a large sector of the population who still sees Pinochet and his leadership in a positive light. This sentiment, Francesa said, allowed those in the country opposed to change to resist the substantial international pressure they faced.

In Brazil, however, there has been no change.

Even though civil society groups are highly involved in issues like violence against women, they have not taken on the conduct of the dictatorship to the same degree. The judicial branch has been similarly unsupportive, Francesca said.

The result in Brazil is more representative of what has happened in countries throughout the world, but the possibility of a constellation of sectors within society advocating in a concerted manner and achieving the change they sought was both provocative and inspiring.

When asked by a student during the question and answer part of her presentation, Francesca said clearly that she believes the abuses of the past need to be reckoned with before a society can move fully into a democratic era.

In that way, she affirmed the importance not only of the question South Africans asked before and Chileans are confronting now, but of rendering some judgment on those responsible for the atrocities committed whose wounds in so many places remain unhealed.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 49: We Have a Community

In one of my favorite scenes of one of my favorite shows, Detective Bunk Moreland confronts Omar Little, about, among other things, how young children have started to glorify the shotgun-toting rippper and runner. His trademark cigar in between his index and middle fingers, his right hand pointing at the seated vigilante, Bunk declares about the area where they both grew up several years apart, “Rough as that neighborhood could, we had us a community.”

Bunk’s words came to me early this afternoon as I sat next to Macarena Rodriguez in the front row of a lecture by Francesca Lessa at the University of Alberto Hurtado about legal impunity in Latin America.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA&w=420&h=315]

(Start watching around 3:00 to see the build up to Bunk's statement.)

Maca, whom we had met with her husband Miguel in Chicago, picked us up at the airport when we landed in Santiago on July 12.

Our friend and Maca’s colleague Hugo Rojas sat next to Francesca at the table.

Outside of the room was an exhibit of long maps of Chile that showed the concentration camps, the Caravan of Death, and the women, militants and communists who were disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Hugo had shown me the display on Monday that two Geography professors at the university had created after drawing on data from a national report about torture and a list of disappeared people.

I had brought the students from my data journalism class to see and critique it on Tuesday.

I had given Hugo, a true gourmand, the white chocolate Dunreith had selected for him this morning on our way to the university.

He undid the staple at the top of the brown paper bag.

His eyes lit with reverence as he saw the contents.

“Es sagrado,” he said as he placed the bag in one of his coat pockets.

This is sacred.

Francesca delivered a riveting presentation about the global investigation into amnesty laws and national efforts to negate or undo them. (Some of the most successful were in Latin America.)

After the lecture I saw Dunreith, who introduced me to Ignacio, Hugo’s ayundatia, or teaching assistant. Dunreith’s been tutoring him in English to prepare him for the trip he’s taking at the end of the month to Chicago.

Ignacio, who is lean and bearded and has a hoop-shaped earring in his left ear, told us about the beauty of Uruguay, about the mural in Chicago that he wants to visit and the neighborhood in Santiago he wants to show us.

I hugged him, kissed Dunreith nand walked back to join the journalism department’s celebration of the nation’s impending Independence Day on September 18.

My colleagues were not waiting for the day to arrive to start enjoying themselves.

I grabbed a hot empanada and started talking with Literature Department Chair Rodrigo Rojas about the two years he lived in apartheid-era Pretoria, South Africa as a teenager in the mid-80s.

I thanked Arly and Jorge from Gloo, the online, digitally-oriented publication, for the special September 11 coverage they had sent me that the students had done.

Unofficial, but self-appointed guide Alejandra Matus, her face glowing with pleasure at the shared company of her colleagues and friends, made sure that I was all set to join the Independence Day party she and her husand Alberto are hosting at their home on Saturday.

I spoke with Rafael, a bearded professor with wild black hair who was exiled in France and teaches courses on interviewing and humor, about wanting to connect with presidential candidate Marco Enríquez-Ominami.

He’s a cousin and a friend, Rafael said. Whenever you want.

I chatted with Andrea Insunza, one of the nation’s top investigative reporters and the co-author of a biography about presumptive presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet. The granddaughter of the former head of Chile’s Communist Party, Insunza has a chapter in a new book in which 17 people who grew up during the dictatorship relate their experiences.

Andrea wrote about traveling in 1986 to the then-Soviet Union to see her grandfather, only to learn shortly after arriving that he had been living in Chile clandestinely since 1983.

The party wound down. I started to help Ingrid, one of the department’s administrative assistants, clean up the plates and utensils and half-eaten empanadas

She told me to stop.

I’m used to it, she said.

I’m used to it, too, I answered, citing my years of marriage and my training in our childhoold home at Griggs Terrace in Brookline.

I explained the system of middle management that Mom and Dad design involved rotating the position of General on a weekly basis.

The General had powers of delegation, but not enforcement, powers for tasks like setting and clearing the table, cleaning the dishes and washing the laundry.

Any work the other two did not do fell to the general.

In theory, we all got experience in leadership.

In practice, it meant that the general ended up doing all the work each week.

That was a good system, Ingrid said.

We laughed.

Dunreith returned from tutoring Ignacio and I went to teach my class.

The students listened via Skype to friend and Tribune colleague Alex Richards and applauded when they saw absent classmate Hernan Araya’s name listed in an email distributed to the listserv for the organization where Alex used to work and where he cut his teeth in data analysis.

I referred repeatedly to Alex’s presentation as the students presented about the projects, the first about data, on which they’ve worked for several weeks.

Before they left for the vacation, I reviewed all of the work we have done and the skills they have begun to acquire since we met in early August.

The last step after finishing a project, I said, is to celebrate.

The students applauded before filing out of the room.

Two months ago today, we landed in Chile, turning a long-held dream into a reality.

In just eight short weeks we’ve not only been the recipient of extraordinary hospitality, we’ve seen and heard and visited people and places that had previously seemed utterly unattainable.

This has been a remarkable gift.

But what is even more meaningful, perhaps, is how the people’s generosity has allowed us weave a web of connection that’s flowed from our relationships in Chicago and Massachusetts and Washington.

As the inimitable Bunk would say, we have a community.

Santiago is not our home.

But, sooner than I had anticipated, it’s starting to feel that way.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXVII: On Hugo Rojas' Longing for Pisco Sour and Ceviche

After two years in England, new friend Hugo Rojas started hallucinating about ceviche and pisco sour from his beloved Chilean homeland. The professor of the sociology of law shared the details of his hallucinations several hours into a thoroughly enjoyable Saturday evening with Dunreith and his lovely wife Angelica in their living room that has a comfortable couch on one side of the room and a neatly ordered bookshelf lined with English and Spanish volumes on the other.

Hugo’s revelation came after we had met his nine-year-old daughter Victoria, an avid reader who brought out three hefty, English-language tomes she is working her way through at the moment. Two of the works are by Arthur Ransome, an author who published in the 1940s and whose books Victoria is consuming because she wants to learn about the “old England.” Victoria´s third book was The Diary of Anne Frank.

It came after we had learned about new evidence in court case being argued in the Chilean Supreme Court at the moment by a friend of his who is arguing that former Chilean Salvador Allende did not, as has been commonly understood, actually commit suicide with a machine gun given to him by Cuban leader and revolutionary comrade Fidel Castro.

Rather, he was murdered, Hugo’s friend is asserting.

It arrived after Hugo’s telling us about his childhood in Sewell, an American mining town about two hours from Santiago that was nationalized during the Allende era.

His sharing came after he had talked us through the inner workings of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, about Pinochet’s middle-class background, insecurity and craving for recognition, and his only being made aware of the coup that had been planned since November of 1972 on September 9, 1973. Hugo told us about Pinochet’s taking a full 30 minutes to sign the document that came just before the coup that signaled he was committed to the plan, yet only did so after signing the document with his own pen and personal seal.

Before Hugo told us about his tantalizing visions, the four of us had consumed most, but not all, of the elegantly garnished seafood –Angelica and Hugo brought out shrimp and salmon and, of course, the ceviche-that we had dished out into individual bowls.

We had moved through drinking a tangy, cold pisco sour to a crispy white wine and a rich red.

The raw emotion of Hugo’s statement was in stark contrast with the reserved demeanor he exhibited the first time we met in person several weeks ago for lunch with Dunreith and our mutual friends Miguel Huerta and Macarena Rodriguez, one of Hugo’s law school colleagues at the University of Alberto Hurtado.

We had initially connected in 2008, thanks to dear friend Stacey Platt. After we had exchanged emails and spoken via Skype, Hugo had written a letter of invitation for me to spend a semester at Alberto Hurtado as a Fulbright scholar.

My application was not successful, and we had maintained contact in the ensuing five years.

During our meal together he had talked to me about his dissertation on memory in Chilea-when I told him it would be a significant project, he replied, “That’s what I keep telling my wife”-his experience of having met Ariel Dorfman in the United States, and his thoughts about why Dorfman is less known and less popular in Chile than fellow émigré author Isabel Allende.

Tall and sturdy, dressed in a sweater and a tweed jacket, his short black hair neatly combed, he exuded intelligence, perspective and reserve.

His statement about his food-based hallucinations contained humor and just a trace of anguish at the memory.

Of course, Hugo is not the first of my foreign-born friends to be driven to intense longing for their native countries.

Ntuthuko Bhengu, a doctor, businessman, and entrepreneur was part of a crew of exchange partner Vukani Cele’s friend who hosted me with unstinting generosity throughout my time in Tongaat, South Africa from August 1995 to July 1996.

Like Hugo, Ntuthuko started shuddering as he recalled the bitter winter cold in England that penetrated the core of his being and nearly made him weep with desire for the fierce humidity and heat of South Africa.

I had empathy for Hugo, too.

In August 1978, shortly before I was about to join the ranks of Pierce School eighth graders I had wanted to belong since entering kindergarten eight years earlier, Dad had come home and told us that we were moving to Oxford, England for the year.

Academically, it was the hardest of my life, with 12 subjects, school until 12:55 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, and a tracking system that meant, like the English class system, that top marks were allocated for the students in the highest set, teachers who openly mocked our being American and a minister who said that the Jews had had an easy go of things throughout history.

The lowest point for me, the equivalent of Hugo’s culinary deprivation and Ntuthuko’s winter, was my first midterm report.

In it I received five gammas, the mark that meant I was in the lowest quarter of the class.

I kept my composure during school, and burst into a near inconsolable flood of tears when I got home.

I understand what England can do to outsiders.

Angelica, who had arranged for me to speak to students about Dr. King´s life and legacy at the St. George´s school where she teaches, explained after Hugo spoke that she hates to cook-an announcement that sparked an enthusiastic, sisterly high five from Dunreith.

Nevertheless, she reached within herself to try again and again, perhaps 10 times, to prepare a ceviche that would meet her husband's exacting standards.

Nothing worked.

Angelica was a key figure in a story Hugo told us about a fellow Chilean graduate student also studying in Oxford.

A group of the students would gather at each other’s homes and share food with each other.

This gentleman brought a bottle of pisco sour, but only shared a dollop with each member of the group.

When it was time to leave, he looked to take whatever remained in his bottle with him.

You have to leave it here, Hugo and the others told him.

No, Angelica told me I could take it, he answered.

She just told you that because she’s a very kind person, the group replied.

The man maintained his insistence on relying on Angelica’s kindness, and, eventually left with his bottle.

Decades may pass, but the stain on the man’s reputation will remain intact among his fellow Chileans.

This March, Hugo, Angelica and their daughters returned to Chile.

His mother greeted them when they stepped off the plane.

Angelica said Hugo’s first words to his mother were, Mama, did you bring the pisco sour?

I have it and the ceviche at home, his mother answered.

The son smiled at the memory of his mother’s anticipating, and then meeting, two of his most basic longings.

Hugo and his family have been home for about five months.

He’s made progress on his dissertation, and has resumed his teaching duties and other responsibilities without difficulty.

He’s not hallucinated once about shepherd’s pie.