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 45: Miguel Huerta, Michael Patrick MacDonald and Fiskales Ad-Hok

We were about an hour into our picnic at Bicentennial Park with friends Miguel Huerta, Macarena Rodriguez and their lively and delightful boys Martin and Domingo when talk turned to the events leading up to the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

You never knew when something could happen to you, Miguel said.

That fear, he said, led many Chileans to turn away from what they knew and to not involve themselves in what happened to others.

Friend and author Michael Patrick MacDonald described that same feeling of suffocation in his review of Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. As he sat in the theater, he wrote that he experienced ”the same suffocation that I felt as a kid growing up in a blood-soaked neighborhood, controlled by lies, deceit, and betrayal emanating as much from the halls of power as from Whitey Bulger.

“Watching`The Departed,' my mind’s eye still focused on the exit sign, I relived the panic attacks of my youth, in the aftermath of my brothers ‘ deaths, at a time when we all knew that no one was allowed to talk. We all had to suck it up and move on.”

MacDonald’s solution was to cross the Broadway Bridge, get out of Southie and head to Kenmore Square, where a punk scene pulsing with anger, noise and rebellion was raging. (Indeed, MacDonald’s second book, Easter Rising: An Irish-American Coming Up From Under chronicles how he used music to get through the pain he suffered from murdered and disabled siblings and growing up in a neighborhood where hundreds of young people were killed, but residents kept asserting that such violence only occurred in black neighborhoods and that Southie was the best place in the world.)

Thousands of miles away, in the waning days of the Pinochet regime, a similar scene sprung up.

Fiskales Ad-Hok was at the center of it.

Malditos la Historia de los Fiskales Ad-Hok, Pablo Insunza’s documentary film, tells the story of the band’s early years, its gradual rise to prominence and its place in Chilean musical history.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GhpvVNrI3o&w=560&h=315]

Dunreith and I attended a screening of the film tonight at Parque Bustamante during the final installment of documentaries played at Parque Bustamante as part of Providencia’s commemoration of The Week of Memory here in Chile.

Told largely through interviews with original band members Alvaro Espana and Roli Urzua, the 2004 film takes the viewer through the band’s origins until what was then the present.

Formed in response to the dictatorship, Fiskales drew its name by tweaking the title of military prosecutor, or fiscal ad hoc-a position that was filled at the time by General Fernando Torres Silva.

The band’s earlobe-shattering, headbanging, mosh-pit inducing music also reflected its staunch opposition to the regime. Vulgar and profane, the group’s songs take direct aim at the police and the violence in Santiago, among other topics.

More basically, though, Fiskales’ very presence was a direct confrontation to the imposed order and that was a defining characteristic of the country under Pinochet, who is shown calling for those promulgating disorder to be dealt with a “mano dura”, or hard hand.

Malditos takes the viewer through the ban and the country’s development in the 90s. The group opened for punk legends The Ramones in Santiago in 1992-a gig that boosted their profile-and went on to record a series of albums and eventually tour in Europe.

Even though they journeyed away from home, they always returned and kept commenting on the change, or lack thereof, in the country.

After the exuberance invoked in the country by the triumph of the “No” vote in the 1988 plebiscite, Chileans found that Pinochet’s continuing to head the military and serve as as Senator for Life meant that the words and promise of democracy had not been kept.

We had been lied to, one of the band members declares, looking straight at the camera.

The anger from that betrayal fueled the band’s offerings, even as at times their sound mellowed from the late 80s frenzy. Insunza is clearly a fan of Fiskales, and, as such, the tributes to the band from young fans to people associated with them from the beginning at moments verge close to promotional material, rather than a serious assessment of the band’s contribution to Chilean musical history. (To be fair, I have to confess that it has been difficult to watch any music documentary with a completely serious attitude since first seeing Rob Reiner’s classic rockumentary, Spinal Tap, in 1983.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrVCjnRdB_k&w=560&h=315]

Drinking beers and laughing giddily as they pose against a wall, the 2004 vintage Fiskales members certainly have lived hard and have more than their share of the proverbial tread on the tire.

In the end, though, Insunza’s attitude toward the band and the abuse they have visited on their bodies matter much less than the fact that the band formed at the time that it did, and, having come together, it ripped apart the silence that Pinochet and his minions sought to impose and that Miguel described in our afternoon picnic-the same silence that Whitey Bulger and Boston’s powerful enforced in the South Boston of Michael MacDonald’s childhood a decade earlier and thousands of miles away.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XX: Zorba the Greek and My Data Journalism Class

I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek when I was a sophomore in college, and many of the book’s moments are with me still.

I remember an old man reprimanding the narrator, also known as the bookworm, character when he asks what dish was his favorite, telling him it is a great sin to say this dish is good and this dish is bad because there are people in the world who are hungry.

I think about the description of Zorba reaching out his huge hand closing his mistress Boubalina’s eyes with “indescribable tenderness” after she died.

I remember Zorba’s seizing of life at every possible instant, his not taking offense when Boubalina’s parrot calls him by a different name, and, of course, his love of dance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6K7OC-IKnA&w=420&h=315] Yet one of the strongest memories of the book are when Zorba comes across an old man who is planting an almond tree. When Zorba expresses skepticism that the man will live to ever see a single almond, he tells Zorba that he acts as if he will live forever-a statement that elicits Zorba’s retort that he lives every day as if it is his last.

“Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak,” Kazantzakis writes.

I thought of the Greek legend’s words on Thursday, when friend, lawyer and professor Macarena Rodriguez and cognitive science doctoral student Alvaro Graves came and presented to the students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

We're just two classes into the semester at the University of Diego Portales, and I can already tell we're going to have a lot of fun.

Now, I will be honest and say that I’m not exactly sure how many students are in the class at this point.

The class list I received from the department says I've got 16.

Six students attended the first session, two others wrote me explaining why they won't be there for the first two weeks, and eight students, including four who weren't there the first time, went to the second class.

By my reckoning, that makes 12, and I won't know for sure until August 14.

That's the date when the students have to make their final decisions about what they actually are taking for the semester.

Whatever the total we ultimately will have, I can tell we’re in for some lively exchanges and some learning from each other.

In the first class I explained that working with data entails acquiring, cleaning, analyzing, incorporating them into your reporting and displaying them.

There are four major ways to acquire data: writing a freedom of information request; scraping data from websites by writing code and transferring them into a format that can easily be analyzed; downloading existing data; and building a dataset.

Macarena and Alvaro came to talk about the first two options.

Maca spoke first, explaining to the students the origin and key elements of the country’s landmark 2009 transparency legislation.

“There’s no greater disinfectant than sunlight,” one of the slides said.

Macarena proceeded to explain why.

She put Chile’s law in the context of the move by governments around the world over the last 62 year years to institute similar legislation. Finland and Sweden were first in 1951, the United States followed in 1966. Maca also showed a slide of a 2011 world map of the world that indicated by country the states of national transparency laws. (Northern and Central Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia had the biggest holes.)

Although 11 Latin American nations have freedom of information legislation, she talked the students through the history of secrecy that has shrouded many of the countries before going on to talk about key features of the Chilean law like the transparency council that decides on individual requests.

The students peppered her with questions about the council’s composition and the types of records that are subject to the law.

Although the volume of questions meant did not have time to see the sample of a successful information request that Maca had, she has agreed to look at their letters to help refine and make them as precise as possible.

Precision is a critical part of scraping, and Alvaro talked the students through what he and other members of the winning team in a recent Scrapeathon here in Santiago. (For those who don’t know, a scrapeathon is when teams compete in a specific amount of time to pull data from a publicly available site, organize them into an analyzable file and then build some sort of visualization from it.)

Alvaro and his team were interested in looking at school quality in Santiago.

They used the SIMCE, a single number published by the Chilean government that ranges from 200 at the lowest to 300 at the highest.

After pulling the data, the team then merged that information with geographic location and plotted the points on a map using a free tool from Google.

That was just the first phase for the team.

They then moved to show the amount of distance students would have to travel and money parents would have to pay by neighborhood to go to schools of varying quality levels.

The point, unsurprisingly, was that parents in poor neighborhoods would have to pay more and have their children travel farther to have their students attend high-quality schools than their wealthier counterparts.

Again, the students lobbed a series of probing questions at Alvaro.

How did you know where in the neighborhood people live, one student wanted to know.

Alvaro explained that he and the team had scraped the data, joined it and built the site in eight hours, adding that the code they used was open source and available on their Github repository.

The team plans to refine the project, he said.

Time was running very short.

I reminded the students that while we were going to hear from many American journalists during the course, we were starting with Chilean professionals who had studied in Chile and the United States, were available to them as resources and who are in different ways committed to bring the truth about their society to light.

I also repeated that the students’ assignment was to write a 500-word analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each method of data acquisition.

One of the students who had taken notes for the class said they were about 500 words and asked if he could be exempt from the essay.

No.

I took a few pictures of the speakers and students.

Maca zipped out of the door and onto her next task. Alvaro lingered for a while.

Several students asked again to clarify the homework.

Writing freedom of information requests and scraping data may not be the stuff of life and death that Kazantzakis wrote about in his epic novel, but they are different paths to reach the same goal.

On Tuesday we'll see where the students land.

We'll tally their arguments into a list in a Google Spreadsheet, thereby showing them how to build a database.

I can’t wait.