Chilean Chronicles, Part 51: Like South Africans, Chileans ask, "What Have We Done?"

Hugo Rojas, left, and Christian Viera, right. Eighteen years ago I had the honor and privilege of living in South Africa during a pivotal time in that nation’s history. Just a year removed from the first free and democratic election in its history, the country was starting to publicly delve into the darkest aspects of the apartheid era through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu’s pain at hearing what author Antjie Krog called the “indefinable wail that burst from Nomomde Calata’s lips” prompted the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner to sing Senzenina after the break on the second day of hearings in East London.

A staple at anti-apartheid demonstrations and funerals, the song asks a basic and profound question: “What have we done?”

(Hear Calata's expression of grief and the song from 1:17 to 2:12 of the trailer to the Bill Moyers film, "Facing the Truth.")

This is the question that Chileans throughout the country have asked themselves with increasing intensity these past weeks and months, culminating in Tuesday’s outpouring of all types of commemoration events.

It´s a different question than the country asked one or two decades ago, and is likely to ask in 10 years time, according to scholar and friend Hugo Rojas.

Dunreith and I attended a presentation he gave at the University of Vina del Mar, where Hugo was presenting in conjunction with the launch of the latest issue of the university's Revista de Derechos Fundamentales, or Journal of Fundamental Rights.

Edited by Hugo´s former roommate, law professor and close friend Christian Viera, the publication contains four essays and a series of primary source documents about the 1973 coup,

It begins with a moving, lyrically written introduction that Christian co-authored with Sociology professor and torture survivor Luis “Tito” Tricot.

Christian, who is lean with a short beard and longish hair that curls around his head, read the piece in an even tone before Hugo gave his presentation.

The mustachioed Tito, who has long, black, straight hair, sat in one of the front rows listening with an attentive expression that held a hint of surprise.

Christian Viera, left, and Luis "Tito" Tricot, right,  on Monday, September 9.

The book’s opening pages evoked an earlier, more innocent and peaceful time in which Chile was just a small country in the south of the world with a view of the sea.

That country was changed profoundly the day of the coup and in the months and years that followed, they wrote. Pinochet and his minions changed children’s hymns to the screams of the tortured, the murals to the ferocity of the night, the northern desert to the anguish of the murdered.

These changes altered, but did not destroy the dreams of the people, many of whom still dream of Chile returning to that earlier Edenic state.

The public reckoning with the damage wrought during the dictatorship was the focus of Hugo’s presentation.

He explained that in 1993, the twentieth anniversary of the coup, Chile’s democracy was far more fragile. Although he was no longer the political leader of the country, Pinochet still headed the military and was a Senator for Life.

This meant that commemorations of the coup were held much more at the state level.

A decade later, in 2003, the theme of Obstinate Memory ascended, Hugo said. By this he meant the persistence of memory and some within the nation beginning to enter into some of the grittier aspects of what had happened during the dictatorship. He pointed to Patricia Verdugo’s De La Tortura No Se Habla, or One Doesn't Talk About Torture, an edited collection that examined the case of Catholic University professor Felipe Aguero’s assertion that he had been tortured by fellow academic Emilio Meneses.

This year, the observances were far more wide-ranging, probing and conducted at the level of civil society, Hugo explained.

I wrote throughout the buildup to September 11 about the explosion of memory observances that took all kinds of forms, from vigils to poetry readings to book launches to academic conferences to the showing of documentary films to marches for the disappeared to translations of Greek plays.

Whereas 20 years ago the question was, “What did you do?”, now the refrain underneath these commemorations was the same as in the Xhosa song Tutu and so many others have sung, he said.

In another decade the emphasis is likely to shift again, as, a half century after the coup, the nation will think about issues of intergenerational transmission, of how to convey in a visceral what life under the dictatorship was like to those children who have no direct tie to Allende’s overthrow and the suffocating terror that ensued.

Pinochet was never arrested in Chile for his deeds, and thus never served a day in a Chilean prison.

Tito and Christian address the theme of impunity in their text, writing, “Because in this piece an impunity has been enthroned that, without doubt, constitutes a profound violation of human rights.”

Over the past decade Francesca Lessa, a friend and colleague of Hugo’s who earned her doctorate at the London School of Economics, has immersed herself in the issue of post-dictatorship impunity laws and, more recently, efforts to overturn them.

Francesca Lessa after her lecture about amnesty laws and legal impunity at the University Alberto Hurtado

On Wednesday, at Hugo’s invitation, Francesca delivered a riveting a presentation at the University of Alberto Hurtado about the work she and the other members of the team with which she collaborates at Oxford University have done.

Their project was essentially to build an international database that tallied the number of countries that had passed laws that granted amnesty as part of the transition to a post-conflict society. From there, the group worked to identify those countries in which attempts were made to undo that legislation and the results of those campaigns.

Much of this activity has happened in Latin America, according to Francesca.

She provided examples within the continent of a complete overturn, a partial reduction of the protections of the amnesty law and a pair of countries where the campaign failed, and her analysis of the factors that contributed to each result.

Argentina was the place which had the most successful outcome in undoing the amnesty law passed during the Carlos Menem era of the late 80s and early 90s that pardoned the generals who had led the “dirty war” that saw about 30,000 Argentines killed and many others disappeared.

Francesca attributed the success to an active and continuously insistent civil sector, a judicial branch that was supportive of the cause, international pressure and the involvement of the executive branch in the form of former President Nestor Kirchner.

Since the laws have been reversed, more than 400 people have been tried for the human rights crimes they committed, with at least another 100 people whose cases are on the docket, she said.

Chile has had a less comprehensive reversal-a result Francesca attributed in part to the persistence of a large sector of the population who still sees Pinochet and his leadership in a positive light. This sentiment, Francesa said, allowed those in the country opposed to change to resist the substantial international pressure they faced.

In Brazil, however, there has been no change.

Even though civil society groups are highly involved in issues like violence against women, they have not taken on the conduct of the dictatorship to the same degree. The judicial branch has been similarly unsupportive, Francesca said.

The result in Brazil is more representative of what has happened in countries throughout the world, but the possibility of a constellation of sectors within society advocating in a concerted manner and achieving the change they sought was both provocative and inspiring.

When asked by a student during the question and answer part of her presentation, Francesca said clearly that she believes the abuses of the past need to be reckoned with before a society can move fully into a democratic era.

In that way, she affirmed the importance not only of the question South Africans asked before and Chileans are confronting now, but of rendering some judgment on those responsible for the atrocities committed whose wounds in so many places remain unhealed.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 50: September 18 Celebrations Start in Providencia

A group of Chileans enjoying early Independence Day celebrations. Even though September 18 isn’t for five more days, you don’t have to work to find an Independence Day celebration here in Chile right now. You just have to follow the music.

Dunreith and I had just returned from picking up our visa to go to Brazil in October when we heard the loud thumping music, full of accordions, pulsing from the ground up to our thirteenth floor balcony.

Bound by journalistic duty, I told my beloved wife I would be back soon.

I took the elevator down to the first floor, walked right, walked left and then right again on Padre Mariano.

The music drew me like a piece of metal to a magnet.

Louder as I went one street north to La Concepcion.

More accordions and singing.

I turned around the corner of a multi-story office building and saw the fence to the backyard slightly ajar.

Inside were dozens of Chileans at varying levels of sobriety bebiendo, bailando, comiendo y disfrutando.

Drinking.

Dancing.

Eating.

Partying.

The smoke from the grill that was cooking rows of anticucho, barbequed meat on a skewer, hit me as I passed through the opening in the gate.

Red white and blue steamers, balloons and Chilean flags lined the walls.

In the center were men and women in traditional dress and garb dancing with skill and abandon.

They finished one song.

The crowd that formed in a ring around them applauded, then started chanting, “Cue-ca, cue-ca, cue-ca,” for the national dance.

The dancers obliged with a flurry of handkerchiefs, drawing men and women from the group to join them.

Dancing the cueca.

They consented gratefully.

Next to the dancing stretched the end of a line of people waiting their turn to try to throw three hoops around the necks of bottles of alcohol that stuck out from a bed of straw.

One man won a bottle of red and white wine in his three throws.

The other people in the line eyed him with admiration and a tinge of jealousy.

I was shooting pictures with abandon while trying to heed the words of a Chilean photographer at one of the September 11 events who had politely encouraged me to not block people’s views when one of the dancers approached.

Where are you from? asked the man, who was probably in his 50s, was wearing a black hat and had a kind face.

I told him that I was from the United States.

This is the first time I’ve been here in Chile for dieciocho, for the 18th, I told him.

Do you want to take a picture with us, he wondered, motioning to the rest of the dancers.

Of course, I replied, starting to walk toward the eight of them.

No, my new friend said. With your camera.

Right.

I gave him my Lumix with just a hint of trepidation-many people looked like they had not waited for noon to start celebrating-and he snapped a shot of me with the group.

We shook hands as the group dispersed for the moment.

A woman near the wall on the side of the parking lot waved to the woman who was working the grill.

The grill lady smiled.

A couple of minutes later, she thrust my first anticucho in my hand.

I'm sideways with my first anticucho. It’s a national treat of skewered beef and sausage stuck firmly on top of each other.

Salty and cooked right through.

I could see my trajectory if I chose to stay, so started to walk back through the gate.

“Don’t forget to have more anticucho and, of course, terremotos,” a disembodied voice urged the revelers.

Dunreith and I learned last week from the adult students in our English conversation class that terremoto is a deceptively potent drink that consists of white wine, pisco, ice cream and sugar.

You have to try it, they told us.

I wasn’t quite ready for the earth to rumble, so maintained my focus and kept walking home.

The sounds of the music grew fainter as our apartment approached.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 49: We Have a Community

Francesca Lessa after her lecture about amnesty laws and legal impunity at the University Alberto Hurtado 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.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 47: Memory Ceremony with Michelle Bachelet at Villa Grimaldi

Cecilia Hernandez has not seen her brother, who was detained at Villa Grimaldi, since 1976 The fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup that removed democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende from power has been met with a blizzard of activity. Dunreith and I have attended a lot, but far from all, of the events.

Documentary films.

Academic conferences.

A translated of Eurpides' play The Supplicants.

Round table discussions on the importance of memory.

Nothing moved like seeing the relatives of the disappeared today at Villa Grimaldi, the former restaurant turned torture center turned peace park.

I was part of a pack of about 50 photographers, videographers and radio reporters that took pictures from every possible angle of Michelle Bachelet, the former president and current presidential front runner who, along with her mother Angela Jeria, was detained and tortured during the military dictatorship.

Michelle Bachelet hugs her mother Angela Jeria at the Villa Grimaldi compound where they both were detained during the Pinochet dictatorship.

But what got me the deepest was meeting people like Cecilia Hernandez, who was wearing a picture of her mustachioed brother Juan pinned to her purple jacket.

Cecilia was 13 years old when the coup happened.

She remembers the terror she felt.

She remembers being threatened, with her 3-year-old sister, by the authorities, who along with their dignity and sense of safety robbed their home of many of its most valuable items.

They also took Juan, her older brother.

Two years after the coup, in 1975, Juan, who was politically active against the regime, left for Mendoza, Argentina.

The authorities went there, brought him back, and detained him in Villa Grimaldi.

In June 1976 Juan was disappeared.

He hasn't returned to this day, Cecilia said, a cloud of sadness and grief hanging over her face.

She was one of hundreds of people who sat in the white chairs underneath a large outdoor tent.

Every other chair had a black and white pictures of someone who had been murdered at Villa Grimaldi.

Each photograph had the person's name underneath and a red rose laid across the chair.

At the event organized by a coalition of human rights groups, the families stood and raised the pictures during a song that paid tribute to their loved ones.

Through their comments, event organizers made it clear that the day was not just about honoring and remembering the dead, but about demanding complete truth and full justice.

Lorena Pizarro has been president of the Group of Families of Detained and Disappeared People since 2003.

She issued a fiery speech, but she also made the point that for her the day was one of happiness.

The loved ones of the have not been forgotten, said Pizarro, whose father was disappeared, they have been with us every day of the past 40 years.

P1030005

They were there in the full-throated call issued by a woman near the front of the tent after singer Isabel Aldunate finished her final song.

Companeras, detained and disappeared? the woman yelled before the applause for the song had stopped.

Presente, the crowd answered as one.

Present.

Companeros, detained and disappeared? She asked, louder and slower, lingering over every syllable.

Presente.

Louder. More united.

Companeras, executed for political reasons?

Presente.

Companeros, executed for political reasons.

Presente.

Louder still.

The call and response concluded with a salute to Salvador Allende's ideals, now and forever, before family members placed the pictures and the rose at the wall that honors Villa Grimaldi's victims.

Dunreith and I started to move away from the pack that continued to follow every inch of Bachelet's slow walk out of the compound.

We walked past Jeria, who had linked her arm with a young man wearing a dark suit and, unlike her daughter, was attracting no attention.

We crossed the street, caught a bus and rode quietly to the Metro station on our way back to the University of Diego Portales.

The swelling in my heart and the lump in my throat remained.