Chilean Chronicles, Part 80: Meeting Juan Guzman

As he deliberated over what was arguably the most important decision of his professional life, Juan Guzman did not talk to any of his fellow judges.

To do so, he thought, would involve entering a world with all kinds of unequal levels of power and could contaminate his choice about whether to indict Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Instead he spoke with one of his daughters.

And he talked with his wife Ines Watine.

It was 2004.

The choice about whether the aging dictator, then nearly 90 years old, was fit to stand trial was a difficult one for Guzman for two primary reasons.

The first was that he had a report from a psychiatrist that stated Pinochet had performed well enough on 15 criteria of mental acuity to be categorized as mentally intact, and therefore able to stand trial.

But the report from a neurologist said exactly the opposite, stating that Pinochet had suffered too much mental deterioration to be involved in legal proceedings.

The other level was more personal and more complicated for Guzman.

He felt compassion for Pinochet.

In him, he did not see the brutal military leader who had led the overthrow of the country’s democratically-elected government and overseen 17 years of torture, terror, disappearances and murder.

Instead he saw an elderly man nearing death whose physical and mental failings reminded him of his father.

Guzman spoke with his wife, the daughter of a World War II French resistance fighter.

She asked him two critical questions.

Would you have had compassion for Hitler during World War II?

Of course not, he answered about Germany’s genocidal leader.

Would you have had compassion for Stalin during World War II?

Even more I would not, he said, thinking about the 20 million people Stalin had been responsible for killing.

Guzman’s conflict receded.

He knew what he had to do.

Guzman told Dunreith and me this story toward the end of an interview in the law office near presidential palace La Moneda where he is working.

I had first seen the judge, who is tall and bearded and soft-spoken and gentle and respectful and impressively energetic for a man of 74 years of age, in Patricio Lanfranco’s film, The Judge and The General, shortly before we traveled to Chile.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPnJu1PNTD8&w=420&h=315]

The movie traces Guzman’s odyssey as he moved from a sheltered, right-wing cocoon to becoming an powerful instrument of justice.

I had seen him at a showing in the basement of the Providencia Library at Cafe of Los Muertos No Callan, or The Dead Are Not Silent.

It's a German documentary film about the Pinochet regime’s torture and murder of former high-ranking Allende officials like Jose Toha and Orlando Letelier.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MdYxPkx50k&w=420&h=315]

Letelier’s widow Isabel was in the room that evening.

Guzman paid elegant homage to the courage she, the other widows in the film and so many women had displayed during and after the dictatorship.

After that session I had approached the judge and asked for his contact information.

A half-dozen emails and about a month later, Dunreith and I were sitting across a long, wooden table from him in the late afternoon.

The son of Juan Guzman, a diplomat and famed poet, Guzman told us about how he grew up in an unreflecting conservative environment. He attended tony St. George’s College and the Catholic Unveristy before beginning his legal career.

In those times, he was mostly concerned with his professional advancement-an orientation that he said revealed his right-wing oriented.

Infused with the political ideals of his family, he saw the Pinochet coup as necessary, but did not anticipate the barbarity the leader and his minions would inflict on the people.

Guzman made it clear that never attended a political demonstration, as to do so would violate his code as a judge.

Then the notice of his assignment to the Pinochet case came.

Judge Guzman didn’t describe the room or the date in great detail.

But he did say he understood immediately what It meant, how it would become totally consuming.

He couldn’t hear anything else his superior said.

Lanfranco’s film shows what he did, how he ventured from the seclusion and went around the country.

But it doesn’t show everything.

It doesn’t show all of the death threats and the political pressure he endured during the years he made his lonely journey.

He didn’t feel fear in a personal sense, he told us, because he thought of himself like a soldier in a cause.

But he did worry about his family.

Of course, the film does not depict doesn’t show what he’s done since the case.

It doesn’t inform the viewer that the one-time unreflecting right winger has gone on to defend Mapuche people accused of terrorism.

Guzman’s decision to indict Pinochet did not ultimately land the dictator in prison.

Not even for a single day.

It did not narrow the chasm between the classes or end the racism and prejudice here in Chile that he said are the cause of so much indignation.

Nor did it heal all of the wounds caused by the dicatorship’s bloody reign.

But he did, in the moment that he had been called, respond in a way far greater than anyone had expected.

He allowed himself to leave his comfortable cocoon and to confront the fact that systematic atrocities took place.

He did find within himself the courage and the strength to defy the expectations of those who had appointed him to the task, to defy the political pressure and threats, and to not only go after the generals, but to go after the leader himself.

The judge said he could talk for days-a signal that indeed it was time for us to go.

I said I’d be willing to listen.

Before we left, I told him that I had also learned to listen to my wife, and that good things happened when I did.

We all laughed.

And as we departed, we had a sense that had shared something special.

Journalistic legend and Chilean trailblazer John Dinges had told me about the film based on Guzman’s life and evolution before we came here in mid-July

When Dunreith watched it, I didn’t dream that I would ever meet, let alone interview, the man.

But now I have.

The Metro was packed to the gills on the way home.

The light had not descended from the sky.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 59: Looking into Transparency in Chile

Our time in Chile has already been filled with extraordinary experiences, and we’re not even at the halfway mark.

We´ve spent a magical day at the home of Alejandra Matus and her family.

We´ve been witness to what amounted to a smidgen of the available activities through the build up to, and commemoration of, the 40th anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

We´ve atended a bunch of fondas, eating anticuchos and drinking terremotos, during the weeklong celebration of Fiestas Patrias.

I´ve also had the great pleasure of teaching and learning from my Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales.  They´ve finished their first of three projects.  Their work and grasp of the concepts impressed me, while the work they´ve produced has made me feel proud.

Beyond that, we’ve all kinds of red wine, empanadas, pisco sours and cazuelas.

Of course, I’m not just here to teach a class, meet incredibly generous and interesting people, improve my Spanish and eat delicious food.

I´m also doing research into the impact the 2009 Transparency Law has had on investigative journalism in the country.

Passed during the administration of former President and current leading presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet, the law was hailed as a landmark piece of legislation that would move the former dictatorship state in a far more open direction.

Exactly how far it’s gone is what I intend to find out during the next three months.

The structure is in place, according to open government guru Moises Sanchez.

We met over Skype in 2008, the first year I applied for the Fulbright in Chile, and in person over coffee about a month agao.

Moises said that Chile and Mexico have the strongest laws and best supporting infrastructure in Latin America.

He ought to know.

His “region” is the entire continent, and he spends much of his time traveling from country to country monitoring the state of public access to information.

That’s helpful background information, and I will say that I my original research plan was to emulate the noteworthy example set by James Painter, a BBC journalist turned Oxford academic who did a fascinating content analysis of climate change denial.

My adaptation would be to look at a year´s worth of coverage by El Mercurio, the nation´s largest paper, before the law changed, and a year´s worth of coverage after its passage to evaluate what, if any, impact it had had.

There were one small, all right, major, problem with this idea.

El Mercurio doesn´t really do investigative reporting.

At all.

Beyond that, as I later learned from watching Patricio Lanfranco and Elizabeth Farnsworth´s outstanding documentary, El Diario de Agustín, the paper was not only complicit with the Pinochet regime, it was actually funded by the United States government and worked hand-in-hand with the dictatorship in its fight against what the paper´s leaders perceived as the Communist menace.

Learning that caused me to scrap my original approach.

Digging deeper, I’ve found that investigative reporting is in very scarce supply here in Chile.

This is with the major exception of CIPER, an investigative non-profit outfit headed by the indefatigable Monica Gonzalez.

Time and again CIPER, which has a small staff, has brought official misconduct to light.

One of their most recent exclusives broke the news about the comprehensive failure of the 2012 Census.

Their investigation and follow up coverage sparked a chain of events which culminated in the Census being declared invalid and needing to be redone in 2015.

CIPER has also participated in hard-hitting international collaborations with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about key issues like the offshore bank accounts of elites in countries around the world.

I’m excited to meet the dedicated folks at CIPER, and have come to understand that beyond them, the list of investigative reporters is a very short one.

We met Waldo Carrasco, the head of libraries for the Providencia community where we live, at one of the events leading up to the September 11 anniversary.

He was working in public information at the time the law was passed.

“We had an expectation that there would be an avalanche of request, especially from the press,” he told me.  “It didn’t happen.”

I’ve also heard from some very high-level journalists that the Transparency Council is slow, picky and unresponsive.

The combined effect of this information has been that I´ve readjusted my approach froma primarily quantitative one  to a more qualitative method.

This means that rather than mostly crunching data, I’ll be talking with people.

A lot of them.

I’m shooting to talk with a range of media executives and reporters at major publications and news outlets to get their take on what the impact of the law has been.

I’m going to talk with lawyers who helped shaped the legislation to understand their sense of what the legislation has and has not done.

I plan to download and analyze data from the Transparency portal to assess how many and which people have been asking for public information as well as what the results of those requests have been.

But I also intend to connect with people in smaller outlet like Miguel Paz, whose Poderopedia, a site that details relationships between Chile’s elite, has already been exported to several other Latin American countries.

I’m also going to reach out to people in the burgeoning coding community who are using their coding skills to access and built applications that both have a greater volume and flow of data than their non-coding counterparts.

My goal is to be able to say something specific about the degree to which the promise of a more open society has been met by the reporters who have asked for information and the government which has it.

I also want to be able to paint some kind of picture of how other forces like technology and globalization are acting on the nation that University of Vina del Mar Sociology Chairman Luis “Tito” Tricot memorably called a small nation in the southern part of the world with a view of the sea.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll learn.

But I do know both that I’ll have fun along the way and that our remarkable set of experiences is only going to get richer.

Especially if red wine and pisco sour are involved.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXXII: The Week of Memory Begins

Something extraordinary is happening in Chile this week. All across the country, from Arica to Punta Arenas, and in 30 of the 32 comunas, or districts, within Santiago, public discussion is happening about the coup on September 11, 1973 that was headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet that ousted democratically-elected President Salvador Allende and ushered in 17 years of military rule.

Tonight kicked off the nation's first Week of Memory. Occurring against the backdrop of the November presidential election, the next seven days will feature previously hidden or unknown testimony, pictures, films and texts.

Four key notions of memory underpin the programs.

The first is memory as an antidote to future such tyranny and oppression happening again in the country-a thought that’s captured in the statement that was said and projected on the screen in the front of the room, “Nunca mas.”

Never again.

The second conception of memory is a spur to greater levels of fulfillment of democratic principles, of the appreciation both of democracy’s fragility and of the importance of working ceaselessly to protect and advance its flow.

The third notion, according to Ricardo Brodsky, the director of the national Museum of Human Rights and Memory, is of memory as an restorative and reparative act that confers dignity that was previously stripped and violated to the victims.

And the fourth is the idea that the lessons of history and the suffering of the past must be taught to the next generation.

In his opening comments, Brodsky, who’s a childhood friend of poet, academic and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin, noted that this is not the first time that a round number of the coup’s anniversary has been commemorated.

However, as opposed to 20 years ago, when it was marked by a state ceremony, this year the conversations are happening in civil forums.

Places like universities and conference halls and libraries.

The latter is where Dunreith and I went to the kickoff event in Providencia, the neighborhood in the city where we live.

Originally slated to take place outside under a white tent set up next to the branch of the public library that sits in Parque Bustamante, the gathering was moved inside to the library’s basement because of a light drizzle.

The room was largely filled to capacity by close to 100 people of various ages who sat in the stiff red chairs.

Recently elected Providencia Mayor Josefa Errazuriz talked about the comuna’s decision, taken after fierce debate, to reverse the name that had been given to one of Providencia’s major streets in 1980 as Ave. 11 September to its original name of New Providencia Avenue.

She led the fight, she said, because she didn’t want young people to receive any shred of a message that the date was one to be honored.

It’s inconceivable that homage would be given to that name, Errazuriz said.

She added that the street’s renaming was a significant step in an ongoing process of helping to convert the sorrow, hurt and anger from the coup and the Pinochet years and dictatorship into future projects and plans.

We need to put the new generation in touch with how we lived and suffered, she said. The pain has to give place to proposals for the future.

We have to do it, she told me later, during a short break in which various types of cheese garnished with nuts and fruit juices, soft drinks and wine were all available.

The program’s feature event was a showing of 1978 German documentary film. Los Muertos No Callan, or The Dead Are Not Silent.

The crowd watched with a fierce and silent attention that was broken occasionally by a sigh or gasp.

Filmed in grainy black and white images, the movie told the story of the assassinations of top Allende political figures like Vice President Carlos Prats, Defense Secretary Jose Toha and Ambassador to the United States Orlando Letelier.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MdYxPkx50k&w=420&h=315]

But if the murdered politicians were silent, their widows gave voice to what happened.

In the movie Moy de Toha and Isabel Letelier narrate their horrific experience with almost unthinkable calm and composure and remarkable detail, even as their faces bear the toll that their husbands’ murders and the recounting of their deaths takes on them.

The deaths happened after forces loyal to Pinochet, who had repeatedly declared his loyalty to Allende, bombed La Moneda, the President’s palace. Fire and plumes of smoke billow on the screen for what feels like agonizing minutes, each successive flame further destroying the democratic ideals on which the nation had been based for nearly half a century.

The coup marked the beginning of Pinochet’s ruthless reign in which Toha, Letelier and many other leaders who were loyal to Allende were imprisoned at Isla Dawson, an island about 100 kilometers south of Punta Arenas.

Toha‘s death came after months of torture-the Pinochet government told Moy that he had committed suicide-and after his wife had confronted the dictator.

I am not talking to the head of the military junta, she said. I am talking to the man who we hosted at our house many times.

Pinochet had done more than visit.

One of the film’s most biting segments comes when the general’s words of effusive praise for the Tohas, which he wrote by hand in a letter and had engraved on a plate, are shown repeatedly on the screen.

Moy de Toha also shows a card signed by 39 of her husband’s former inmates who, like him had been incarcerated on Isla Dawson.

Orlando Letelier was among the signatories.

Letelier moved to Washington after political pressure led to his release from prison and his eventual reunion with his family in Venzuela. He became one of the major voices of the Chilean resistance.

On Sept. 10, 1976, he was deprived of his Chilean citizenship. During a solidarity concert that evening that was headlined by Joan Baez, he declared, “I was born Chilean, I am Chilean and I will die Chilean.”

Letelier then took square aim at the dictator.

Pinochet was born a traitor and fascist. He is a traitor and fascist. He will die as a traitor and fascist, Letelier said.

He was murdered in Washington by DINA agents in a car bombing 11 days later.

The bomb also claimed the life of his assistant Ronni Moffitt.

The Dead Are Not Silent ends after Isabel Letelier describes her fight to get to see her murdered husband.

His eyes were still open.

In his eyes, she said, she saw all of the regime’s horror.

But she also saw the strength necessary to carry on and continue fighting.

Isabel Letelier was in the front row of the audience.

She walked unsteadily, the product of having recently lost the use of a use of one of her eyes.

But her diminished physical state did not mean that her contribution went unrecognized.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

During his comments in the panel after the film, Juan Guzman, the former right-wing judge who indicted Pinochet shortly before his death, paid tribute to the courage, valor and strength of both widows.

The crowd applauded for a long time, and again as Isabel Letelier left the room shortly before the panel ended.

I told Guzman that I admired his transformation through allowing himself to be exposed to the regime’s atrocities from his isolation to his later role as arbiter of justice for the nation.

It was very good, he said about The Judge and the General, the film by Patricio Lanfranco and Elizabeth Farnsworth that traced his journey.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPnJu1PNTD8&w=420&h=315]

I also asked the judge about the people who had chanted, “They never got him” after Pinochet´s death, referring to the fact that the former dictator eluded prison time during his lifetime.

Guzman had said these people hadn´t learned anything as of the time of Pinochet's passing.

Had these people still not learned the lessons of history, I asked?

Many of them had not, he said.

Providencia councilman Jaime Parada, who is openly gay, addressed the same issue in response to a question I asked about why so many people we had met asserted that life was better under Pinochet.

I come from a right wing family, and I remember my mother and father crying when Pinochet lost the plebicisite vote, he said.

Forty three percent of the country supported Pinochet during that vote.

Many of them still do, he said.

This happened because of a confluence of factors, according to Parada. He cited the neo-liberal ideology that encouraged people to think only about themselves, and not to concern themselves with the pain of others.

Parada also said that the country was in an extreme anti-Marxist position during the Cold War.

At the same time, he also made the point that human rights violations abuse did not only occur during the dictatorship, but continue today in Chile and nations throughout the world.

These abuses occur to women, to people with disabilities, and to gay, lesbian and transsexual people, among others, Parada said.

The unfinished work that memory calls us to do hung in the room as the session wrapped up at 10:00 p.m. and the group started to disperse into the warm evening.

Practically bursting with all that we had seen and heard, Dunreith and I walked back to our apartment faster than usual.

The conversations about Chile's past would continue throughout the country the next day.

Chilean Chronicles, Part X: Senora Carmen and Chileans' View of the Nation's Past

If there was one idea I had firmly committed in my mind before arriving in Chile, it was this: the people in the country agreed that the Pinochet dictatorship was bad. Based on wrenching accounts of disappeared, tortured and murdered people, buttressed by a diet of books, poems, films and new programs, I had a picture of an unspeakably repressive military regime that controlled its people by sheer force. The United States government saw in Gen. Augusto Pinochet, as it did with the Somoza family in Nicaragua and Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran, an anticommunist bulwark and ally, however unsavory.

A couple of weeks into my stay here, the picture is becoming more complex.

The loosening of my viewpoint first came through watching The Judge and the General, Elizabeth Farnsworth and Patricio Lanfranco’s award-winning documentary film about how Judge Juan Guzman, after leaving the insular right-wing world in which he had allowed himself to live, immerses himself in the gruesome details of the Pinochet regime, and ultimately indicted the man who had been largely responsible for his professional ascent.

The film opens and closes with footage of Pinochet’s coffin being carried onto the street after the dictator died without having been prosecuted or convicted of the crimes that impacted so many Chilean families.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPnJu1PNTD8&w=420&h=315]

Then-President Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture survivor, exile and the first female president in the nation’s history, refused to make Pincohet’s death cause for a national day of mourning.

Her decision prompted an outpouring of venomous yelling and epithet throwing from hundreds, if not thousands, of Pinochet supporters who cursed their newly elected leader and changed, “They never got him!” (This footage starts at 10:39 of the movie clip.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhLwpt3LT5E&w=420&h=315]

A dismayed Guzman speaks while watching footage of the protests about the division that clearly existed within the country.

It’s still there.

That is the conclusion I drew after talking Tuesday with Senora Carmen, an energetic and friendly retired elementary school teacher who taught for 17 years in one of Santiago’s most impoverished neighborhoods . Dunreith and I met her Wednesday on the way to registering our visas within the required 30-day period.

Dressed smartly in a black jacket and orange scarf, Senora Carmen was manning the city’s Biblioplaza right near the National Fine Arts Museum. Established about 10 years, the facility has books and newspapers available for residents to take out and return.

We talked for a bit about her teaching career, which included 17 years at one school and two additional years at another one. Carmen, who is energetic and friendly, explained that she would teach the same students for four consecutive years from first to fourth grades. That continuity was important, she said, because many of the students grew up in a drug-filled environment in a poor neighborhood in Santiago.

You must have been like a mother to many of those students, I said.

She agreed.

I told her about Dunreith having been an educator for many years as well as about my late mother-in-law Helen, who taught and was an elementary school principal during her 34 years in education.

I also told her about my experience of working as an apprentice for two years in former fourth grade teacher Paul Tamburello’s class, the same classroom I had been a student a dozen years earlier. He felt that was the ultimate example of impact, I said, adding that last year I published a book called On My Teacher’s Shoulders about learning from Paul at three different points in my life.

Que buena, Senora Carmen answered, a smile filling her face as her eyes danced with delight.

I imagine that you hear from former students, I said.

She said that she did.

How are they doing? I asked.

Some are doing well; others are not doing well, she replied, a shadow of sadness crossing her face.

It’s gotten worse in the past 10 years, she said.

Worse? I asked.

She repeated her answer.

It was better during the dictatorship.

Things were more controlled, she added. There was respect.

I explained that we had always heard in the United States that things were worse during the Pinochet era.

Senora Carmen’s face started to harden in resistance.

But you are telling me that you think it was better then.

It was better, she said again with conviction.

You have taught me something, I said. Thank you.

We started to leave, but Senora Carmen asked me to write down my name.

Dunreith asked if I had a business card. I started to open my backpack and look for one. But Senora Carmen said she only wanted my name to remember the conversation, which she had enjoyed.

I took one of the book receipts and wrote my name is capital letters as neatly as I could.

I told her that, as opposed to Chile, where people carry both their mother and father’s name, but go by their paternal lineage, our last name was Kelly Lowenstein.

I had been Lowenstein.

She had been Kelly.

Together we were Kelly Lowenstein.

We also have two names, Senora Carmen said.

We thanked her again, shook hands and took one more picture before heading on our way to the police department where we were required to register our visas, my understanding of Chilean people's attitude toward their country's past slightly muddier than before Senora Carmen and I began to talk.