Chilean Chronicles, Part 93: On Albie Sachs and Giving Thanks

I’ve learned a lot from Albie Sachs over the years.

The South African freedom fighter and classical music lover whose taking the other as a Supreme Court Justice elicited a tear from then-President Nelson Mandela endured solitary confinement and a car bomb in Mozambique that cost him much of his right arm and part of his vision.

I first saw him at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut that Marc Skvirsky and I attended with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. Among many important things he said that day was that although Mandela had near-perfect pitch with the people he led, one should not mistake the leader for the source of the victory he and so many others had dedicated their lives to winning.

Speaking in his mellifluous baritone voice, his left arm moving animatedly, Sachs also cautioned against moral relativism.

Apartheid was evil, he said. We were better. And we won.

A few years later, he spoke at a community event for Facing History and Ourselves around his book, The Free Diary of Albie Sachs, a work that chronicled his six-week journey with then-partner, now wife, Vanessa September, to London and other European capitals.

In his opening comments Sachs talked about the dreams that he had had as a younger man of living as a free man in a country that was being transformed from a site of intense evil to a thoroughgoing democracy with many official languages, one of the world’s most far-reaching and inclusive constitutions and open debate of the questions of the day.

He also talked about living with a woman with whom he wanted to spend his life.

These dreams, he explained, had all come true.

Although I understood the meaning of Sachs’ words, I didn’t feel them the way he seemed to.

Now, I do.

There are moments, and I’ve been blessed to have a number of them recently, where I literally cannot believe the abundance of gifts and love I’m privileged to experience.

Where I wake up wondering not so much what I’m going to do, but which delicious set of options we’re going to explore together.

The past few weeks, which have seen Jon come here for a couple of weeks so that we can work on a project about Chile’s past, present and future.

A week later, Dad and Lee, whom we had seen in Argentina and Uruguay, were in for a week after their glorious two weeks plus tour that took through Argentina and down to the southernmost part of the continent before heading to the spectacular views of Torres del Paine, up into Chiloe and meeting us again in Santiago.

There are the gains that the students in my Data Journalism class have made, the pair of conversations in the next couple of weeks sponsored by the Fulbright Commission in which I’ll share preliminary results about my research into the nation’s 2009 Transparency Law, the news we’ve heard about the memorial event in Essen led by the indefatigable Gabriele Thimm that she told us was the best ever and the plans we’re formulating to advance the project, the events that we are planning in Wellesley and Cambridge and Arica or Punta Arenas.

All that is beautiful, and one of the most meaningful parts for me and for us is that Aidan got here on Sunday for what will be a month together in Santiago, in Northern and Southern Chile and in Peru’s fabled Incan ruins of Machu Picchu.

He’s just returned from a semester in which he traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and the United States before he set foot here. It’s a treat to spend any time with him, let alone such a concentrated dose, and, in parts at least, Internet-free zone.

Underneath all of these experiences is a sense of possibility and flow, of the great fortune of being in a space it feels deeply possible to successfully integrate family and friends and language and investigation and teaching and writing and networking and traveling and food and drink and discussion and applying for new opportunities and converting those that arise and working more and more to do what we all need to do in life, which is to steer the ship of our lives.

This is not to say that we live in a perfect world.

Far from it.

Indeed, some initial discussions with Aidan have only reminded us how deeply flawed the world is that we will leave to his generation.

Nor is it to say that I’ve always felt this way.

That, too, has not been the case.

Indeed, my appreciation of this moment is deepened not only because I am more aware than before of life’s finitude, but because this more profound sense of possibility and authority comes after years of having a different gut-level conviction.

So, as Hannukah begins, after we’ve had one Thanksgiving meal and before we’ve had another, with a series of Chilean adventures behind us and more ahead, with family having departed and our son here, the sun shining in a cloudless sky, the breeze rustling the curtains of the room where Dunreith and I are next to each other, I am immensely grateful for my life’s abundant gifts.

I imagine that wherever he is, Albie Sachs is giving thanks, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 46: The Incomplete Victory of Villa Grimaldi

Of all the many disturbing details at Villa Grimaldi, the former restaurant turned torture center turned peace park, perhaps the most unnerving was learning about the sounds of children playing at a pool. By itself, of course, the noises of children joyfully splashing around in water with their parents need not be a cause for distress.

But Villa Grimaldi during the Pinochet years was no normal place.

The people hearing the children's pleasure were prisoners being held, blindfolded and beaten, in a red tower just yards away from the pool.

Some of the parents were those who had tortured the prisoners, who were men and women, opponents real and imagined, old and young.

They made their victims stand in excruciating positions, shocked them with devastating volts of electricity, violated them in nearly every way imaginable before taking their children with them to relax and enjoy a weekend afternoon.

In Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote about the festive atmosphere and energy many Nazis brought to their assigned tasks of murdering Jews during the Holocaust.

We've also learned about the families of high-ranking Nazis who lived near death camps.

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Rian Malaan's book My Traitor's Heart revealed tales of apartheid-era guards killing a black South African and having a barbecue while the man's fleshed burned nearby.

But never before have I heard about this integration, this immersion, this utter lack of self-consciousness that all standards of decency and self-respect have been eroded.

I am not suggesting that there was virtue in the other examples of barbarity, but rather that for me this marked a new low.

It is important to note that we do not know that this happened because the DINA guards have told us that it occurred.

They and those responsible for the place destroyed everything that they could, trying, as oppressors and torturers and abusers often do, committing not only the first crime of violation, but attempting the second crime of denial.

Rather we know that it was constructed from the memories of the survivors.

So, too, was the small wooden shack built on the other side of the villa. Inside the shack are black and white sketches drawn by former detainees. One shows an inmate leaning down to comfort another who is prostate on the ground after having been tortured.

In this way, and in many others, Villa Grimaldi represents the triumph of memory over forgetting.

Set in a residential neighborhood in the neighborhood of La Reina, the compound, like its country, appears hermetically sealed from the world.

Passing through the red brick gate, one enters a green space whose air is filled with the cacophony of light green birds that look like parrots.

The reminders of the place's bloody past are everywhere.

They're in the gallery of black and white photographs that a pair of women with red shirts studied solemnly.

The sentence, "We cannot nor do we want to forget," stands in large black letters underneath the images.

They're in an enormous metal cube that stands on one of its corners. Opening the door and entering the dark interior, one sees the rusted pieces or railway tracks that were used to weigh down the bodies of murdered victims before they were thrown from helicopters by Pinochet's minions into the ocean.

The tactic worked for many, but not all, of the victims.

The body of Marta Ugarte, a revolutionary opponent of the dictatorship, washed up in 1976.

The Chilean newspaper of record, El Mercurio, reported the death as a love affair gone wrong, but a crack had appeared in the facade of the wall of silence Pinochet had erected.

A picture of Ugarte, along with a handwritten letter, appears in one of the few rooms that still stood after the facility was destroyed. The room also contains photographs and articles and personal items of many others of the thousands killed during the murderous regime.

The names of the people killed are listed on a memorial wall in chronological order in a corner of the park.

The oppression went in phases, with the regime focused at different times on the communists, the MIRistas, or violent revolutionaries, and labor organizers. The early years of the regime, 1974 to 1976, saw the highest level of killing.

The peace park, which opened in 1997, has a rose garden dedicated to the women who were tortured and killed there.

Small mosaic plaques that each have a rose placed on their side dot the park.

Political parties like the communists have created memorials for those who suffered the same fate.

The door through which prisoners used to be brought is locked.

On the ground near the door is another plaque which states the door's former purpose and declared that it will never be opened again.

A mosaic-covered stone in the shape of many leaves extends from the door instead.

Each of the elements in the park-aspects that include an international conference preceded by an adaptation of Euripedes’ The Supplicants and a poem by Oscar Hahn that concludes with the line, “The bone is a hero of resistance”-embody Chile’s effort to honor the victims and remember that deadly era in its history so that it never happens again.

Indeed, each name, each age recorded, each painstaking detail noted also represents a small victory for memory over oblivion.

Yet they are also incomplete.

This is so for several reasons.

The first and most basic is that, as Martha Minow wrote in the introduction to her book, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, any attempt at memory after coming together after mass violence is both necessary yet inevitably insufficient because it cannot undo the trauma that has already occurred.

The second is that, as Patricio Guzman shows us in Nostalgia for the Light, the record is incomplete.

There are still women combing the Atacama Desert and looking in the Andes Mountains for the remains of their loved ones.

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There are still disappeared who have not reappeared, whose precise fates are not known.

Beyond that, there are many in Chile who do not want to allow themselves to know about their country’s past.

Dunreith and I asked the guard at Plaza Egana, the Metro station which lies a couple of miles away from the compound, how to get to Villa Grimaldi.

He said he didn’t know.

Neither did the woman who sold tickets at the station.

Or our taxi driver, a young man with a beard and ponytail, who drove us up and down the street on which Villa Grimaldi is located.

Barbara Azurraga, a guide at the villa and a Master’s student in history who is doing memory-related projects at Catholic University and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, said many Chileans do not know about the Villa.

The subject is taboo, she said.

She also explained that many policemen live a few blocks away from the villa and don’t like its presence or mission.

The retired military people who live near the policemen feel the same way.

And yet Manuel Contreras, the former DINA head who oversaw its brutal operations, is incarcerated nearby.

Chile lives in this state of incomplete victory, of half the country saying in a national poll that they want to turn the page on the nation’s past while 80 percent say they want their children to learn about the past.

Hugo Rojas and others have noted, serious questions remain about what the third generation will learn about the 1973 coup a half-century after it occurred.

But what is clear from going to Villa Grimaldi is that there is a cadre of folks in the country who have committed themselves to confronting what happened there, to documenting it and honoring those who were abused and killed, and to striving with all that they have to ensure that such torture does not happen again in this once and now again peaceful nation.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXIX: Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light

As a child in Chile, Patricio Guzman stared at the stars and reveled in the untroubled quiet of a peaceful country, childhood and world.

Chile, as he explains in the introduction to his intricate, thought provoking and haunting documentary film, Nostalgia for the Light, was disconnected from the rest of the world.

The presidents walked the streets unprotected.

But the country began to become integrated with the world as the Atacama Desert, a 600-mile stretch of land that is commonly considered to be the driest place in the world, became the site of some of the largest, most sophisticated telescopes on the planet.

The only brown patch of earth that is visible from the moon, Atacama is sparsely populated. But you can often see women walking and digging up the terrain in a ceaseless, yet often unrewarded, search for the remains of their loved ones.

They are the mothers and wives of the country’s disappeared.

Chile’s Edenic period was disrupted first by the revolutionary ferment of Salvador Allende, and then, far more brutally, on Sept. 11, 1973. That was the day that Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government and ushered in a 17-year reign of terror, death and destruction.

The barbarity of Pinochet’s regime appeared to know no limits.

Not only did the dictatorship “disappear” thousands of people, taking them in the middle of the night, holding them in concentration camps, then torturing and raping them before killing them.

They also deliberately buried the bones in different locations than they had killed their victims so that the loved ones would not find them.

In many cases they dumped them in the sea.

In the film, Guzman brings together the common threads between his childhood memories, the country’s premier location for astronomers, the quest of archaeologists to understand the nation’s pre-Colombian past, and the unhealed wounds so many Chileans suffered during the Pinochet era.

The work starts slowly, as a massive telescope being unfurled iis the only character in the film for close to the first five minutes.

The pace continues in a similar vein throughout the work.

The first third or so of the work is dedicated to astronomers and archaeologists, both of whom make the point that we are always living in, and they are always studying, the past.

One astronomer points out that even the perception of the present is in the very recent past because of the minute delay in thoughts moving to being consciously understood.

Guzman moves from this metaphysical premise to pointing out the irony in Chile being such an ideal place to study the past for these two disciplines because it has yet to fully confront its own most recent history. (He also makes the point in the film that atrocities against indigenous people occurred in the 19th century as well.)

More characters enter Nostalgia at this point, and the film, like a boa constrictor, starts to take deeper hold of the viewer’s attention and emotions.

Guzman introduces us to an imprisoned architect who memorized every detail of the dimensions of the concentration camp in which he was imprisoned once he was in exile in Denmark. Guzman notes that in a way the man, who is driven to remember, and his wife, who is losing her memory as she falls into the grip of Alzheimer’s, are a metaphor.

We meet another former concentration camp survivor who was part of a group of about two dozen prisoners who did their own stargazing while incarcerated. Led by a doctor who knew a lot about astronomy, the group was eventually stopped by the authorities who feared they would seek to escape.

The gentleman explains that he did not escape, but did feel at those moments very free.

Guzman also introduces us to the women and their ceaseless searches, explaining that cities all over the nation have people conducting similar searches.

Sometimes, having “success” is not enough.

In one of the movie’s most moving scenes, a woman explains that receiving just a part of her child’s body does not quiet the ache inside of her.

He was whole when they took him, she says, tears coming to her eyes as she sits in the desert where she has spent countless hours. I don’t want just a piece of him.

Nostalgia has moments of light, too.

One of these comes in the form of an astronomer who was raised by her grandparents after her parents were detained and killed.

She explains that her grandparents, who sit wordlessly on a couch, were pressured relentlessly by the government to reveal their children’s location lest their granddaughter be killed.

Eventually, they relented.

Despite living with this unthinkable burden, they managed to raise her in a joyful environment. Though she thinks of herself as having a manufacturing defect, she sees that the son she is raising does not, nor does her husband. This knowledge is a source of solace.

But so too is her study of astronomy and the way she has used her understanding of the natural world to formulate an attitude toward her parents’ death as part of the natural course of events.

Seeing this way, she says, allows her to diminish some of the pain she still feels over their death and absence from her life.

In the end, Guzman returns to the purity of his childhood-a period that he represents through the marbles he carried around as a boy-and the lights and stars twinkling over Santiago, the nation’s capital.

As the man-made lights start to go out and just the sounds remain, continuing as the credits roll, we are left with a deeper sense of the thread of seeking to answer questions from the past that connect so many in this injured, blood-soaked land.

Guzman is a Chilean who is seeking both to share and better understand his own experience as well as to help his countrymen confront what they together have not had the courage to completely face.

Yet, in this very effort, we are also left with the unsettling realization that, as Martha Minow wrote in the introduction to her work Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, there can be no final closure.

But we must do something.

Guzman has given us that in his film.