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 48: A Day of Memory in Three Parts

Part I: Parroquia la Anunciacion

A humble room with red brick and a largely bare white wall.

A large wooden cross with a chip on one side and a portrait of a bearded Jesus beneath it.

A warm feeling of reunion filling the cold air and dark room, of people hugging each other hard and long.

Percival Cowley, a pastor radiating with the goodness that comes from having been part of the tradition of church leaders who fight for justice, of Niemoller and Romero and Tutu and Lapsley. A man who donned a white scarf with red crosses and and who spoke, in an even, deep voice about remembering the coup that took place 40 years ago today.

But a man who also spoke about the ordinary violence and abuse that continues today, the failures to give poor people their just dignity and respect, and the economic, moral and social violence that endures and that keeps Chile from being a just country.

Josefa Errazuriz, the newly elected mayor of Providencia, the section of Santiago where we live. A woman with short brown hair and fierce determination who defeated the incumbent, a man who used to work for Pinochet’s secret police and said his qualifications were that he was an effective project manager.

A leader who included many sectors of the community in the ceremony of memory and welcomed all types of people into the room.

A group of three Communists who stood on one side of the room holding a flag that honored a slain comrade.

The old.

The young.

The women.

And the Mapuche, the indigenous people who came forward in their traditional dress and spoke in Mapudungun, their own language, and in Spanish, expressing their gratitude for being included in the ceremony and the community.

The kiss on the cheek between Maria Jesus Alenir, one of the Mapuche women, and Cowley.

The resolve in the room that the atrocities of the past should never happen again.

Cowley after the ceremony ended as he told me about having heard about the coup the night before it happened and walking the streets in the early morning of September 11 40 years ago.

Silence.

Realizing the next day that everything was changing.

Having to stay inside for three days, and then, when he and so many others, were allowed to go out, seeing the brutality of the regime instantly being visited on people in the southern part of Santiago.

We thought the military was different from other soldiers in Latin America, he said.

We were right.

They were more brutal.

The words of Emilio, a young Communist whose mother fled the country to Holland and whose grandfather was detained and tortured, along with so many others, in the National Stadium.

It’s important for us to learn about the past, he said, because we need to know about this era of total unconstitutionality.

Part II: Museum of Memory and Human Rights

The giant shattered half spectacle of Salvador Allende greeting you as you walked down the smooth surface toward the open ampitheater.

A circle of chairs arranged in pairs.

An actor dressed as Allende, with his beard and three piece suit coated in parts with dust, walking stiffly to the middle of the circle, and starting to read in a calm, yet emotion-filled voice on the people’s radio station his final address to the nation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC8UirZLCZQ&w=420&h=315]

I will not resign, he said before going on to thank all the groups of people who had put their trust in him as a servant of the constitution.

I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life, he said.

Viva Chile! He declared at the end of his speech.

Viva Chile! The group of people, actors themselves, one of whom had herself been tortured, standing outside the circle in a line traced by roses placed and ashes on the ground, holding white handkerchiefs aloft in the air, answered.

Viva Chile! The people responded, including Ana Gonzalez, a sturdy woman with long, lush red nails, a thick red necklace, a cane and a warm, open face whose husband, two sons and daughter-in-law were all disappeared during the dictatorship.

Viva Chile! Senora Ana yelled, cupping her hands so that her voice would project farther.

Senora Ana, who sat because walking is difficult and who was treated as royalty by women and men who sought her out or wanted a hug or did her long, grey hair.

Senora Ana, who wrote down her number and motioned for me to call her so that I would stop asking her questions and she could listen to the testimonies that were projected from the center of the circle to the open space.

The actors walking into the space after the man playing Allende walked out, sitting in the chairs and reading the testimonies they had been given to each other as a horde of photographers and videographers and radio reporters, myself included, crept ever closer.

A woman with the picture of a relative weeping and being comforted by another woman who enveloped her in her arms and did not let her go.

The large Chilean flag flanked by two black flags billowing in the gentle breeze in the mid-afternoon sun.

The rows of colorful pictures drawn by children of the disappeared titled “Aqui estan.”

Here they are.

The answer to the question that primarily mothers and sisters and aunts and grandmothers of incalculable courage asked in Chile and Argentina, the neighboring countries where tens of thousands of people were disappeared, sometimes during the night, almost always never to be seen again.

The pictures that were drawn by children as young as three and as old as 17, but whichever age the children were the images were filled with love for, and connection to, the mother or father who had been taken from them.

A two-sided exhibit of photographs taken by Edward Shaw on the streets of Buenos Aires in the early 80s. Pictures of outlined bodies in subway stations and on advertisements with the family member’s name, date of birth and, sometimes, a question mark.

Or the words, “Aparicion con vida.”

Appearing with life.

The crowd that swelled and grew and watched and listened and cried and talked and laughed.

The sounds of the testimony and the rapt attention of friend and memory scholar Hugo Rojas as he listened while we walked back up the smooth slope to the Metro Station.

Part III: Communist and Socialist Vigil at Estadio Nacional

Being deposited by the bus in front of the stadium that was transformed by the dictatorship into a torture chamber.

The memories of Grateful Dead concerts being sparked, with the combination of commerce and common conviction and passion for the cause and peaceful mingling and a decentralized yet unified feel.

A young boy sitting on his father’s shoulders and carrying a large red flag.

Dozens and dozens of candles being lit.

Hand-written poems.

A row of shoes made of clear tape.

Pictures of Allende.

Calls for truth and justice.

The crowd gathering and growing as the sun made its way down and began to mark the end of the day.

The quiet on the city’s streets as nearly all shops closed up early for the evening in anticipation of greater violence than there’s been before.

The knowledge that Chile’s wounds will still be there tomorrow, but having to think that today made a positive difference.

Gratitude to Dunreith for joining me on our journey.

Memory.