Chilean Chronicles, Part 104: Returning Home to Chicago

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 65: An Extraordinary September in Chile

Yesterday marked the end of an extraordinary month that began with memory and ended in transparency, with a hefty dose of celebration in between. MEMORIES OF THE COUP AND AFTER

For people in the United States, the the date September 11 has, since 2001, had a special meaning and obligation to those who were killed in the terrorist attacks in which separate planes wiped out the twin towers of the World Trade Center, smashed into the Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

But here in Chile, the date has been significant for the past four decades.

That’s because it was on that day in 1973 that a military junta headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, overthrew democratically-elected Socialist leader Salvador Allende and ushered in a 17-year reign of disappearances, torture, murder and, for some, economic prosperity.

The coup and its bloody aftermath constitute an open wound from which many Chileans are still seeking to heal.

The early part of September saw an unprecedented outpouring of memory-related activity.

Plays.

Poetry readings.

Book launches.

Memorial events at former torture centers like Villa Grimaldi.

Scholarly conferences.

Documentary films about topics ranging from murdered members of Allende’s inner circle to a punk band formed in the waning days of Pinochet regime.

There have been observances of the coup in years past.

But the volume and the source of this year’s eruption of memory distinguished it from the ones in earlier years and decades, according to Ricardo Brodsky, director of the national Museum of Memory and Human Rights.

Whereas in previous years the commemorations were more based in the state and emotionally muted, this time they came from all sectors of civil society.

Matias Torres, the sponsor of fellow Fulbrighter and friend Deb Westin at the University of Chile, also made the point that the language of memory has started to change, too.

What as recently as five years ago was called a “military regime” was now openly labeled “a dictatorship,” he said.

Starting on September 2, Dunreith and I worked to attend at least one event per day.

We largely achieved our goal, and we only attended a smidgen of what was available here in Santiago, let alone throughout the planet’s longest country.

We saw and heard things we are not likely soon to forget.

Like the hundreds of relatives of disappeared sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, nieces and nephews who gathered at Villa Grimaldi, the former restaurant turned torture center turned peace park, stood and held black and white photographs of their loved ones aloft while a sturdy woman near the front of the pavilion took what amounted to a roll call.

Female comrades who have been disappeared and detained, she called.

Presente.

Present.

Former president, current presidential candidate and Villa Grimaldi survivor Michelle Bachelet was there in the front row, standing alongside her mother, Angela Jeria, who was also detained and tortured there.

People weeping at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights during the readings of the stories of their loved ones.

The lighting of candles at a vigil held by the Communist Party at the National Stadium.

This disgorging of memory has had the effect of what many said the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did in Sotuh Africa. It broke through the layers of ignorance and denial.

The emotional aftermath from this information is still settling in for many Chileans

Just last week, Don Roberto, a lifetime resident of Melipilla and a longtime government employee there, explained that many people in the area worked on farms and got their information from the patron.

We saw things on the television that we didn’t know were happening at the time, he said.

The ability to know what is taking place depends on accurate and full information that was all too short supply during the dictatorship, especially from many organs of the press. The powerful film El Diario of Augustin tells the story of El Mercurio´s being funded by the United States government and actively collaborating with the dictatorship.

TRANSPARENCY

In order to boost citizen’s ability to know what is going in the country, elected leaders passed a landmark Transparency Law that then-President Michelle Bachelet signed iin 2009.

This is the subject of my research investigation that I began in earnest this path month.

In many ways, it is an impressive piece of legislation that also has the accompanying infrastructure of a council.

More than 1,000 data sets are available on the nation´s data portal, for instance, and transparency gure Moises Sanchez said the framework is among the best in the continent.

But, as with just about anything significant in life, the proverbial devil is in the details.

Thus far, they don’t tell a very promising story.

Few media outlets appear to be using the law to gather material for hard-hitting stories. (Non-profit outfit CIPER is a notable exception.)

Waldo Carrasso, who now heads the libraries in the municipality of Providencia, worked in Public Information when the law came into effect.

He expected a flood of requests from journalists.

That didn´t happen.

I also learned that the government refused to release emails about public business written on public accounts when requested to do so by Melipilla Mayor Mario Gebauer and lawyer Carlo Gutierrez.

They engaged in a fight that eventually went to the Supreme Court, but lost.

So, too, did Ciudadano Inteligente, a pro-transparency group that issued a similar request.

And President Sebastian Pinera tried to replace the members of the Transparency Council who supported the release of such material.

The struggle for public information continues, and is also being waged by a small, but growing, community of hackers who write code as a means to more quickly and on an ongoing basis secure large volumes of public data.

CELEBRATING FIESTAS PATRIAS AT THE FONDAS

The public turned out in great numbers during the week of September 18, the official day of Chilean Independence.

The celebrations last far more than a day.

Everything shut down for the Wednesday and Thursday of that week.

People either go home to celebrate with family and/or to attend the many fondas, or festivals.

These are not events that I would normally frequent in the U.S., however, because we are here, I went to four of them. To four of them.

Each had its own flavor.

Rodeo was the dominant feature of the fonda at Parque Alberto Hurtado, while the sneaky strong terremoto drink stayed with me long after I left Parque O´Higgins.

With its organic foods, higher prices and vendors accepting credit cards, the Providencia event felt like the Whole Foods of fondas, and the Nunoa event featured a hustling anticucho cook named Patricio who asked me to purchase a couple of beers for him in exchange for my getting a skewer of grilled beef and sausage.

Together, the fondas gave me a collective impression of the importance of those days to Chileans as well as of the staggering volume of kitsch that is sold at such events around the world.

Many anticuchos, parties, piscos and a terremoto later, I returned to the university, and life started to resume what has already become a normal rhythm.

I first applied to the Fulbright program in 2000.

I was rejected that time, as well as in two subsequent attempts.

Realizing that success is a dream come true.

It´s even more so because we sold our house and put ourselves out into the world.

The events of September confirm the wisdom of our decision.

I can’t wait to see what October brings.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 62: Our Community Gathers at Bar Liguria

The sausage sandwich I shared with Eduardo was an artery clogger. I really didn’t need the last pisco sour.

Or, for that matter, the white chocolate I shared with Dunreith.

But, man, what a night.

I wrote about two weeks ago about the community Dunreith and I had formed in the first two months here in Santiago.

Last night, at Bar Liguria, large swaths of the tapestry we’ve quilted came together at the Bar Liguria near Manuel Montt to eat, drink and enjoy each other’s company.

It was a combination of the old show, “This is Your Life,” with the Chinese food meals I used to organize in high school when I’d call up just about everybody I knew and invite them to join me at lunch. (In a dignity-saving measure, I’ve learned in the ensuing three decades that it’s not necessary for the event convener to stand and deliver an off-tune rendition of “C is for Cookie.”)

There were fellow Fulbrighters-this included Larry Geri and his lovely wife Rachel, who had just returned from Buenos Aires, and cyber-security expert Greg Gogolin and his daughter Erin, who’s made quantum leaps in her Spanish-speaking ability-as well as Matias Torres, the Chilean sponsor of Deb Westin, a third colleague and friend.

Sebastian Perez-Canto, who works with Miguel Paz and whom we met at the Data School event at the University of Diego Portales where my MacBookPro was stolen, drove in on his motorcyle for a brief chat.

Augmented reality ace Eduardo Riveros came.

So did Irene Helmke, a willowy Chilean-born journalist who speaks English, German and Spanish and whom I met at the conference for Latin American journalists at the old Chilean congress.

And Maca Rodriguez and Miguel Huerta, friends whom we met in Chicago at the home of Mark Hallett and Carmen Vidal-Hallett, were there, too.

Since we’ve arrived, Maca and Miguel have picked us up at the airport, lent us bicycles, taken us to dinner and connected Dunreith with a tutoring job that has been one of the highlights of her time here thus far.

Maca spoke to my students on the first day of class and helped several of them with their requests under the 2009 Transparency Law. She’s helped me craft my request, too. Miguel will be speaking to the students on one of the final classes.

In short, it was a group that included many, but not all, of the folks and groups we’ve met.

I’ve written before about Bar Liguria, a popular and relatively pricey watering hole that features waiters dressed in black pants and vests, potent drinks and a rumbling din that only grows louder as the evening progresses.

We assembled outside, then moved upstairs to the second floor, where the waiters combined about six smaller tables to form a long space where we all piled in, sat down, and started talking.

We covered a dizzying range of topics.

Larry and Rachel told us about their adventures in Buenos Aires, their struggles with mastering the tango during a class taught by an Argentine man and an exacting, female Romanian assistant.

Buenos Aires is enormous-it makes Santiago look like a small town, Rachel said- and pulsing with energy at all times of the day. The metro is as jammed at midday as it is during rush hour, they said.

Sebastian and I recounted the story of my computer theft, which was recorded by the University of Diego Portales’ security cameras.

The thief swiped the computer belonging to Miguel Paz, too.

He responded by posting the video on the web site of El Mostrador, a local news outlet.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSv66NyY6SY&w=420&h=315] The video elicited a torrent of commentary, which divided evenly between those people who excoriated the robber as a series of unprintable words and those who used those same words for us for leaving the computers out to be taken.

Fortunately, our insurance policy covered the vast majority of the damage, so I ultimately lost a couple hundred dollars, some pictures and some writing that I hadn’t backed up in the cloud.

Eduardo, who has family roots in Venezuela and who lived there for a decade, returning only to Chile last year, was in the clouds about his recent presentation at an international digital journalism conference that took place the week before the anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

I didn’t attend that session because we were in a memory-related seminar, and Eduardo gave Dunreith and me a book about the coup.

He also shared how his father, a doctor who was educated in the Soviet Union, was nearly killed by the Pinochet regime.

At the end of the table, Matias, Miguel and Macarena talked about the impact of living under that kind of terror for years has had on the Chilean people.

Many Chileans coped by focusing only on their own immediate situation.

"If I have work, I’m all right," was a common attitude, they said.

Matias made the point that the Pinochet overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende was only the most recent in a series of coups the country has seen.

We also had a humorous conversation about what Dunreith and I have experienced thus far of many Chilean’s attitude toward service.

It’s fair to say that the idea that the customer is always right has not taken hold.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

If you go to a restaurant here and ask for something that is listed on the menu, but has run out, in many cases, it’s too bad for you.

You should have gotten there sooner.

Want to divide a bill in three and pay with separate credit cards?

Forget about it.

And so on.

Miguel, Maca and Matias said that attitude of taking whatever is given to you is also a legacy of the dictatorship.

They explained that there’s an expression that means, “The old lady has already left.”

If you decide you want to change your order, it’s too late.

If you think about a new topic for a conversation on an ongoing project, the fact that you didn’t mention it the first time means that it’s out of bounds for consideration.

The legacy of the coup has been so profound that it made the recent eruption of memory building up to the fortieth anniversary of the coup so significant.

Matias said that even five years ago not everyone used the word “dictatorship” to describe the Pinochet regime.

Instead, many people said “military regime.”

For the first time in the nation’s history, people are sharing much more openly about what happened, he said.

We talked and talked and talked, and, eventually, it was time to leave.

We settled the bill, hugged everyone goodbye and rushed to Santa Isabel for Dunreith to buy her treasured white chocolate bar.

We floated up Providencia Avenue.

Dunreith persuaded the red-coated gentleman at the front door to let us into the shop, which was in the final stages of closing.

He relented when she said she would only get one item.

We bought the chocolate and a big plastic jug of water, and walked back to our home.

My head buzzed with all that had gone into it.

My heart was nearly bursting, too.

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.